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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

#161

Post by goodpoint »

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,…

> 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, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me

ChatGPT, is that you?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#162

Post by germandiago »

9dev wrote: post #16
btbuildem wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do all those things you've mentioned more efficiently than most of us, but they fall woefully short as soon as novelty is required. Creativity is not in their repertoire. So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce. But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the c…

I think your image of LLMs is a bit outdated. Claude Code with well-configured agents will get entirely novel stuff done pretty well, and that’s only going to get better over time. I wouldn’t want to bet my career on that anyway.

I am all ears. What is your setup?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#163

Post by germandiago »

belter wrote: post #6
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,…

>> From where I’m standing, it’s scary. You are being fooled by randomness [1] Not because the models are random, but because you are mistaking a massive combinatorial search over seen patterns for genuine reasoning. Taleb point was about confusing luck for skill. Dont confuse interpolation for understanding. You can read a Rust book after years of Java, then go build software for an industry that did not exist when…

This is exactly what happened to me: novel or uncommon = hallucinate or invent wrong.

It is ok for getting snippets for example and saying (I did it). Please make this MVVM style. It is not perfect, but saves time.

For very broad or novel reasoning, as of today... forget it.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#164

Post by leptons »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #115
hansmayer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What you wrote here was relevant about 9 months ago. It’s now outdated. The pace and velocity of improvement of Ai can only be described as violent. It is so fast that there are many people like you who don’t get it.

The last big release from OpenAI was a big giant billion-dollar flop. Its lackluster update was written about far and wide, even here on HN. But maybe you're living in an alternate reality?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#166

Post by leptons »

baq wrote: post #146
hansmayer wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure buddy :)

Disrespect the trend line and get rolled over by the steamroller. Labs are cooking and what is available commercially is lobotomized for safety and alignment. If your baseline of current max capability is sonnet 4.5 released just this summer you’re going to be very surprised in the next few months.

meh. I'll believe it when I see it. We've been promised so many things in this space, over and over, that never seem to materialize.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#167

Post by gentooflux »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #147
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,…

> 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, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me. That is just not true, assuming you have a modicum of competence (which I assume you do). AIs suck at all these tasks; they are not even as good as an inexperienced hum…

LLMs generate the most likely code given the problem they're presented and everything they've been trained on, they don't actually understand how (or even if) it works. I only ever get away with that when I'm writing a parser.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#168

Post by omnicognate »

simonw wrote: post #2

I nodded furiously at this bit: > The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language. > That was the hard part when program…

> claim to have been trained for single-digit millions of dollars

Weren't these smaller models trained by distillation from larger ones, which therefore have to exist in order to do it? Are there examples of near state of the art foundation models being trained from scratch in low millions of dollars? (This is a genuine question, not arguing. I'm not knowledgeable in this area.)

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#169

Post by leptons »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #24
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 was a chef in Michelin-starred restaurants for 11 years. One of my favorite positions was washing dishes. The goal was always to keep the machine running on its 5-minute cycle. It was about getting the dishes into racks, rinsing them, and having them ready and waiting for the previous cycle to end—so you could push them into the machine immediately—then getting them dried and put away after the cycle, making sure t…

> humans are still needed... for now

"AI" doesn't have a clue what to do on its own. Humans will always be in the loop, because they have goals, while the AI is designed to placate and not create.

The amount of "AI" garbage I have to sift through to find one single gem is about the same or more work than if I had just coded it myself. Add to that the frustration of dealing with a compulsive liar, and it's just a fucking awful experience for anyone that actually can code.

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