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The future of software development is software developers

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Re: The future of software development is software developers

#91

Post by bccdee »

aspenmartin wrote: post #81
hansmayer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you can ask them "to check it for you". The only little problem is as you said yourself "they make mistakes", therefore : YOU CANNOT TRUST THEM. Just because you tell them to "check it" does not mean they will get it right this time. Again, however it seems "fine" to you, please, please, please / have a more senior person check that crap before you inflict serious damage somewhere.

Nope, you read their code, ask them to summarize changes to guide your reading, ask it why it made certain decisions you don’t understand and if you don’t like their explanations you change it (with the agent!). Own and be responsible for the code you commit. I am the “most senior”, and at large tech companies that track, higher level IC corresponds to more AI usage, hmm almost like it’s a useful tool.

Ok but you understand that the fundamental nature of LLMs amplifies errors, right? A hallucination is, by definition, a series of tokens which is plausible enough to be indistinguishable from fact to the model. If you ask an LLM to explain its own hallucinations to you, it will gladly do so, and do it in a way that makes them seem utterly natural. If you ask an LLM to explain its motivations for having done something, it will extemporize whichever motivation feels the most plausible in the moment you're asking it.

LLMs can be handy, but they're not trustworthy. "Own and be responsible for the code you commit" is an impossible ideal to uphold if you never actually sit down and internalize the code in your code base. No "summaries," no "explanations."

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#92

Post by EagnaIonat »

I read a book called "Blood in the machine". It's the history of the Luddites.

It really put everything into perspective to where we are now.

Pre-industrial revolution whole towns and families built clothing and had techniques to make quality clothes.

When the machines came out it wasn't overnight but it wiped out nearly all cottage industries.

The clothing it made wasn't to the same level of quality, but you could churn it out faster and cheaper. There was also the novelty of having clothes from a machine which later normalised it.

We are at the beginning of the end of the cottage industry for developers.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#93

Post by oooyay »

hansmayer wrote: post #42
aspenmartin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn’t read like shilling and advertisement, it’s tiring hearing people continually dismiss coding agents as if they have not massively improved and are driving real value despite limitations and they are only just getting started. I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, and I’ve done things where Claude made the whole effort take twice as long and 3x more of my time. It’s not l…

> I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, That's the point champ. They seem great to people when they apply them to some domain they are not competent it, that's because they cannot evaluate the issues. So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours? Good for you, but for the love of god have someone more experienced check it…

> That's the point champ.

Friendly reminder that this style of discourse is not very welcome on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#94

Post by EagnaIonat »

davnicwil wrote: post #37
63stack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make. Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.

I would say while LLMs do improve productivity sometimes, I have to say I flatly cannot believe a claim (at least without direct demonstration or evidence) that one person is doing the work of 20 with them in december 2025 at least. I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number, but those claims quickly fell out of the mainstream as people realised it's just not that b…

> I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number,

Purely anecdotal, but I've seen that level of productivity from the vibe tools we have in my workplace.

The main issue is that 1 engineer needs to have the skills of those 20 engineers so they can see where the vibe coding has gone wrong. Without that it falls apart.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#95

Post by anonzzzies »

simonw wrote: post #82
underdeserver wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they also losing money on the marginal inference job?

I think it is very unlikely that they are charging less money for tokens than it costs them to serve those tokens. If they are then they're in trouble, because the more paying customers they get the more money they lose!

I guess that depends on the user; most people are not getting most out of flat priced subscriptions. Over all they probably make a profit, and definitely on API use, but some will just spend a lot more. It'll get cheaper though; they are still acquiring as long as there is VC money.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#96

Post by bccdee »

doug_durham wrote: post #66
keyle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take food for example. We don't eat food made by computers even though they're capable of making it from start to finish. Sure we eat carrots probably assisted by machines, but we are not eating dishes like protein bars all day every day. Our food is still better enjoyed when made by a chef. Software engineering will be the same. No one will want to use software made by a machine all day every day. There are differen…

You should look at other engineering disciplines. How many highway over passes have unique “chef quality” designs? Very few. Most engineering is commodity replications of existing designs. The exact same thing applies to software engineering. Most of us engineers are replicating designs that came earlier. LLMs are good at generating the rote designs that make up the bulk of software by volume. Who benefit from an art…

> How many highway over passes have unique “chef quality” designs?

Have you ever built a highway overpass? That kind of engineering is complex and interdisciplinary. You need to carry out extensive traffic pattern analysis and soil composition testing to even know where it should go.

We're at a point where we've already automated all the simple stuff. If you want a website, you don't type out html tags. You use Squarespace or Wordpress or whatever. If you need a backend, you use Airtable. We already spend most of our time on the tricky stuff. Sure, it's nice that LLMs can smooth the rough edges of workflows that nobody's bothered to refine yet, but the software commodities of the world have already been commodified.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#97

Post by CuriouslyC »

davnicwil wrote: post #37
63stack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make. Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.

I would say while LLMs do improve productivity sometimes, I have to say I flatly cannot believe a claim (at least without direct demonstration or evidence) that one person is doing the work of 20 with them in december 2025 at least. I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number, but those claims quickly fell out of the mainstream as people realised it's just not that b…

It's entirely dependent on the type of code being written. For verbose, straightforward code with clear cut test scenarios, one agent can easily 24/7 the work of 20 FT engineers. This is a best case scenario.

Your productivity boost will depend entirely on a combination of how much you can remove yourself from the loop (basically, the cost of validation per turn) and how amenable the task/your code is to agents (which determines your P(success)).

Low P(success) isn't a problem if there's no engineer time cost to validation, the agent can just grind the problem out in the background, and obviously if P(success) is high the cost of validation isn't a big deal. The productivity killer is when P(success) is low and the cost of validation is high, these circumstances can push you into the red with agents very quickly.

Thus the key to agents being a force multiplier is to focus on reducing validation costs, increasing P(success) and developing intuition relating to when to back off on pulling the slot machine in favor of more research. This is assuming you're speccing out what you're building so the agent doesn't make poor architectural/algorithmic choices that hamstring you down the line.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#98

Post by CuriouslyC »

hansmayer wrote: post #43
jayd16 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When prices go down or product velocity goes up we'll start believing in the new 20x developer. Until then, it doesn't align with most experiences and just reads like fiction. You'll notice no one ever seems to talk about the products they're making 20x faster or cheaper.

+1 - I wish at least one of these AI boosters had shown us a real commercialised product they've built.

I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias by people who should know better (if you think 100% of LLM outputs are "slop" with no quality consideration factored in, you're hopelessly biased). The commercialized seems like an arbitrary and pointless bar, I've seen some hot garbage that's "commercialized" and some great code that's not.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#99

Post by satisfice »

hansmayer wrote: post #74
aspenmartin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right! In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative ho…

I never said "planted", that is your own assumption, albeit a wrong one. I do respect it though, as it is at least a product of a human mind. But you don't have to be "planted" to champion an idea, you are clearly championing it out of some kind of conviction, many seem to do. I was just giving you a bit of reality check. If you want to show me how to "guess where things are heading" / I am actually one of the early…

Hear hear!

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#100

Post by CuriouslyC »

foxygen wrote: post #46
mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

I think I've been using AI wrong. I can't understand testimonies like this. Most times I try to use AI for a task, it is a shitshow, and I have to rewrite everything anyway.

Do you tell AI the patterns/tools/architecture you want? Telling agents to "build me XYZ, make it gud!" is likely to precede a mess, telling it to build a modular monolith using your library/tool list, your preferred folder structure, other patterns/algorithms you use, etc will end you up with something that might have some minor style issues or not be perfectly canonical, but will be approximately correct within a reasonable margin, or is within 1-2 turns of being so.

You have to let go of the code looking exactly a certain way, but having code _work_ a certain way at a coarse level is doable and fairly easy.

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