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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

#121

Post by germandiago »

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 am sorry to say you are not a good programmer.

I mean, AIs can drop something fast the same way you cannot beat a computer at adding or multiplying.

After that, you find mistakes, false positives, code that does not work fully, and the worse part is the last one: code that does not work fully but also, as a consequence, that you do NOT understand yet.

That is where your time shrinks: now you need to review it.

Also, they do not design systems better. Maybe partial pieces. Give them something complex and they will hallucinate worse solutions than what you already know if you have, let us say, over 10 years of experience programming in a language (or mabye 5).

Now multiply this unreliability problem as the code you "AI-generate" grows.

Now you have a system you do not know if it is reliable and that you do not understand to modify. Congrats...

I use AI moderately for the tasks is good at: generate some scripts, give me this small typical function amd I review it.

Review my code: I will discard part of your mistakes and hallucinations as a person that knows well the language and will find maybe a few valuable things.

Also, when reviewing and found problems in my code I saw that the LLMs really need to hallucinate errors that do not exist to justify their help. This is just something LLMs seem to not be accurate at.

Also, when problems go a bit more atypical or past a level of difficulty, it gets much more unreliable.

All in all: you are going to need humans. I do not know how many, I do not know how much they will improve. I just know that they are not reliable and this "generate-fast-unreliable vs now I do not know the codebase" is a fundamental obstacle that I think it is if not very difficult, impossible to workaround.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#122

Post by yellow_lead »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #97
davnicwil wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (whic…

> 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.

So the "verbose, straightforward code with clear cut test scenarios" is already written by a human?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#125

Post by IshKebab »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #88
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 think part of what is happening here is that different developers on HN have very different jobs and skill levels. If you are just writing a large volume of code over and over again to do the same sort of things, then LLMs probably could take your job. A lot of people have joined the industry over time, and it seems like the intelligence bar moved lower and lower over time, particularly for people churning out larg…

> different developers on HN have very different jobs and skill levels.

Definitely this. When I use AIs for web development they do an ok job most of the time. Definitely on par with a junior dev.

For anything outside of that they're still pretty bad. Not useless by any stretch, but it's still a fantasy to think you could replace even a good junior dev with AI in most domains.

I am slightly worried for my job... but only because AI will keep improving and there is a chance it will be as good as me one day. Today it's not a threat at all.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#126

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#127

Post by wiseowise »

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…

> So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours?

Ahaha, weren’t you the guy who wrote an opus about planes? Is this your baseline for “stuff where LLMs break and real engineering comes into the room”? There’s a harsh wake up call for you around the corner.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#128

Post by [deleted] »

bccdee wrote: post #91
aspenmartin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#129

Post by qubitcoder »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #97
davnicwil wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (whic…

Respectfully, if I may offer constructive criticism, I’d hope this isn’t how you communicate to software developers, customers, prospects, or fellow entrepreneurs.

To be direct, this reads like a fluff comment written by AI with an emphasis on probability and metrics. P(that) || that.

I’ve written software used by a local real estate company to the Mars Perseverance rover. AI is a phenomenally useful tool. But be weary of preposterous claims.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#130

Post by bob1029 »

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,…

The AI is pretty scary if you think most of software engineering is about authoring individual methods and rubber ducking about colors of paint and brands of tools.

Once you learn that it's mostly about interacting with a customer (sometimes this is yourself), you will realize the AI is pretty awful at handling even the most basic tasks.

Following a product vision, selecting an appropriate architecture and eschewing 3rd party slop are examples of critical areas where these models are either fundamentally incapable or adversely aligned. I find I have to probe ChatGPT very hard to get it to offer a direct implementation of something like a SAML service provider. This isn't a particularly difficult thing to do in a language like C# with all of the built in XML libraries, but the LLM will constantly try to push you to use 3rd party and cloud shit throughout. If you don't have strong internal convictions (vision) about what you really want, it's going to take you for a ride.

One other thing to remember is that our economies are incredibly efficient. The statistical mean of all information in sight of the LLMs likely does not represent much of an arbitrage opportunity at scale. Everyone else has access to the same information. This also means that composing these systems in recursive or agentic styles means you aren't gaining anything. You cannot increase the information content of a system by simply creating another instance of the same system and having it argue with itself. There usually exists some simple prompt that makes a multi agent Rube Goldberg contraption look silly.

> I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes.

"Basically" and "just" are doing some heroic weight lifting here. Effectively conducting all of the things an LLM is good at still requires a lot of experience. Making the constraints live together in one happy place is the hard part. This is why some of us call it "engineering".

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