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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

#151

Post by yetihehe »

charcircuit wrote: post #140
pfannkuchen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>at least in the sense that your abstractions are novel and the shape of the abstraction set is different from the standard things that exist People shouldn't be doing this in the first place. Existing abstractions are sufficient for building any software you want.

> Existing abstractions are sufficient for building any software you want.

Software that doesn't need new abstractions is also already existing. Everything you would need already exists and can be bought much more cheaply than you could do it yourself. Accounting software exists, unreal engine exists and many games use it, why would you ever write something new?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#152

Post by baq »

belter wrote: post #26
joefourier wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used an LLM specifically trained for tool calling, in Claude Code, Cursor or Aider? They’re capable of looking up documentation, correcting their errors by compiling and running tests, and when coupled with a linter, hallucinations are a non issue. I don’t really think it’s possible to dismiss a model that’s been trained with reinforcement learning for both reasoning and tool usage as only doing pattern matc…

Ask a model to "Write a chess engine where pawns move backward and kings can jump like nights" It will keep slipping back into real chess rules. It learned chess, it did not understand the concept of "rules" Or Ask it to reverse a made up word like "Reverse the string 'glorbix'" It will get it wrong on the first try. You would not fail. Or even better ask it to... "Use the dxastgraphx library to build a DAG scheduler…

You’re trying to interrogate a machine as you would a human and presenting this as evidence that machines aren’t humans. Yes, you’re absolutely right! And also completely missing the point.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#153

Post by laszlojamf »

The way I see it, the problem with LLMs is the same as with self-driving cars: trust. You can ask an LLM to implement a feature, but unless you're pretty technical yourself, how will you know that it actually did what you wanted? How will you know that it didn't catastrophically misunderstand what you wanted, making something that works for your manual test cases, but then doesn't generalize to what you _actually_ want to do? People have been saying we'll have self-driving cars in five years for fifteen years now. And even if it looks like it might be finally happening now, it's going glacially slow, and it's one run-over baby away from being pushed back another ten years.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#154

Post by bloppe »

photios wrote: post #144
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.

Ok, let's say the 20 devs claim is false [1]. What if it's 2? I'd still learn and use the tech. Wouldn't you? [1] I actually think it might be true for certain kinds of jobs.

It's not 20 and it's not 2. It's not a person. It's a tool. It can make a person 100x more effective at certain specific things. It can make them 50% less effective at other things. I think, for most people and most things, it might be like a 25% performance boost, amortized over all (impactful) projects and time, but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#155

Post by baq »

hansmayer wrote: post #78
d_silin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the frustration, but factually it is not true. Engines are reliable to about 1 anomaly per million flight hours or so, current flight software is more reliable, on order of 1 fault per billion hours. In-flight engine shutdowns are fairly common, while major software anomalies are much rarer. I used LLMs for coding and troubleshooting, and while they can definitely "hit" and "miss", they don't only "miss"…

I was actually comparing aviation HW+SW vs. consumer software...and making the point that an old C++ invoices processing application, while being way less reliable than aviation HW or SW, is still orders of magnitude more reliable than LLMs. The LLMs don't always miss, true...but they miss far too often for the "hit" part to be relevant at all.

They miss but can self correct, this is the paradigm shift. You need a harness to unlock the potential and the harness is usually very buildable by LLMs, too.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#156

Post by sh4rks »

63stack wrote: post #19
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,…

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.

Post model

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#157

Post by bckr »

charcircuit wrote: post #140
pfannkuchen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>at least in the sense that your abstractions are novel and the shape of the abstraction set is different from the standard things that exist People shouldn't be doing this in the first place. Existing abstractions are sufficient for building any software you want.

The new abstraction is “this corporation owns this IP and has engineers who can fix and extend it at will”. You can’t git clone that.

But if there is something off the shelf that you can use for the task at hand? Great! The stakeholders want it to do these other 3000 things before next summer.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#158

Post by lynx97 »

laszlojamf wrote: post #153

The way I see it, the problem with LLMs is the same as with self-driving cars: trust. You can ask an LLM to implement a feature, but unless you're pretty technical yourself, how will you know that it actually did what you wanted? How will you know that it didn't catastrophically misunderstand what you wanted, making something that works for your manual test cases, but then doesn't generalize to what you _actually_ wa…

People used to brush away this argument with plain statistics. Supposedly, if the death statistics is below the average human, you are supposed to lean back and relax. I never bought this one. Its like saying LLMs write better texts then the average huamn can, so you are supposed to use it, no matter how much you bring to the table.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#159

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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,…

AI is absolutely rock-bottom shit at all that.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#160

Post by leptons »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #113
hansmayer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m an expert in what I do. A professional, and few people can do what I do. I have to say you are wrong. AI is changing the game. What you’ve written here might’ve been more relevant about 9 months ago, but everything has changed.

This is a typical no-proof "AI"-boosting response, and from an account created only 35 days ago.
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