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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

#171

Post by user34283 »

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…

How would you know whether he is an expert on the topic of software engineering or not?

For all I know, he is more competent than you; he figured out how to utilize Claude Code in a productive way, which is a point for him.

I'd have to guess whether you are an expert working on software not well suited for AI, or just average with a stubborn attitude towards AI and potentially not having tried the latest generation of models and agentic harnesses.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#172

Post by leptons »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #100
foxygen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

>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.

So all that bullshit about "code smells" was nonsense.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#173

Post by mattmanser »

jmogly wrote: post #69
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…

I would say it varies from 0x to a modest 2x. It can help you write good code quickly, but, I only spent about 20-30% of my time writing code anyway before AI. It definitely makes debugging and research tasks much easier as well. I would confidently say my job as a senior dev has gotten a lot easier and less stressful as a result of these tools. One other thing I have seen however is the 0x case, where you have given…

Ok, if you're a senior dev, have you 'caught' it yet?

Ask it a question about something you know well, and it'll give you garbage code that it's obviously copied from an answer on SO from 10 years ago.

When you ask it for research, it's still giving you garbage out of date information it copied from SO 10 years ago, you just don't know it's garbage.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#174

Post by CraigJPerry »

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

Absolutely flat out not true.

I'm extremely pro-faster-keyboard, i use the faster keyboards in almost every opportunity i can, i've been amazed by debugging skills (in fairness, i've also been very disappointed many times), i've been bowled over by my faster keyboard's ability to whip out HTML UI's in record time, i've been genuinely impressed by my faster keyboard's ability to flag flaws in PRs i'm reviewing.

All this to say, i see lots of value in faster keyboard's but add all the prompts, skills and hooks you like, explain in as much detail as you like about modularisation, and still "agents" cannot design software as well as a human.

Whatever the underlying mechanism of an LLM (to call it a next token predictor is dismissively underselling its capabilities) it does not have a mechanism to decompose a problem into independently solvable pieces. While that remains true, and i've seen zero precursor of a coming change here - the state of the art today is equiv to having the agent employ a todo list - while this remains true, LLMs cannot design better than humans.

There are many simple CRUD line of business apps where they design well enough (well more accurately stated, the problem is small/simple enough) that it doesn't matter about this lack of design skill in LLMs or agents. But don't confuse that for being able to design software in the more general use case.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#175

Post by zsoltkacsandi »

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 have been using the most recent Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini models for coding for a bit more than a year, on a daily basis.

They are pretty good at writing code *after* I thoroughly described what to do, step by step. If you miss a small detail they get loose and the end result is a complete mess that takes hours to clean up. This still requires years of coding experience, planning ahead in head, you won't be able to spare that, or replace developers with LLMs. They are like autocomplete on steroids, that's pretty much it.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#176

Post by jgdxno »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #92

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 c…

If you used the car as an analogy instead, it would make more sense to me. There were car craftsmen in Europe that Toyota displaced almost completely. And software is more similar to cars in that it needs maintenance and if it breaks down, large consequences like death and destruction and/or financial loss follows.

If llms can churn out software like Toyota churns out cars, AND do maintenance on it, then the craftsmen (developers of today) are going to be displaced.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#178

Post by qweiopqweiop »

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.

Have you tried Opus 4.5 (or similar recent models)? With Claude code 2, it's actually harder to mess things up IMO

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#179

Post by potamic »

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, but they just got down-skilled.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#180

Post by gingersnap »

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 is not how I think about it. Me and the coding assistant is better then me or the coding assistant separately.

For me its not about me or the coding assistant, its me and the coding assistant. But I'm also not a professional coder, i dont identify as a coder. I've been fiddling with programming my whole life, but never had it as title, I've more worked from product side or from stakeholder side, but always got more involved, as I could speak with the dev team.

This also makes it natural for me to work side-by-side with the coding assistant, compared maybe to pure coders, who are used to keeping the coding side to themselves.

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