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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

#231

Post by goatlover »

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 It’s now outdated.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.

Right, the Singularity will be here any day now. We can all just sit back and collect our UBI while plugging into the Matrix. /s

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#232

Post by wiether »

chii wrote: post #192
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’m basically just the conductor of all those processes. a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)? Perhaps autodriving would in the near future, but there still needs to be someone making decisions on how best to utilize that car - surely, it isn't deciding to go to destination A without someone…

And parent is scared of being made redundant by AI because they need their job to pay for their car, insurance, gas and repairs.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#233

Post by mekoka »

user34283 wrote: post #201
llmslave2 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you know whether he is an expert on the topic of software engineering or not? Because of their views on the effectiveness of AI agents for generating code.

Considering those views are shared by a number of high profile, skilled engineers, this is obviously no basis for doubting someone's expertise.

I think it's worth framing things back to what we're reacting to. The top poster said:

> 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.

The rest of the post is basically their human declaration of obsolescence to the programming field. To which someone reacted by saying that this sounds like shilling. And indeed it does for many professional developers, including those that supplement their craft with LLMs. Declaring that you feel inadequate because of LLMs only reveals something about you. Defending this position is a tell that puts anyone sharing that perspective in the same boat: you didn't know what you were doing in the first place. It's like when someone who couldn't solve the "invert a binary tree" problem gets offended because they believed they were tricked into an impossible task. No, you may be a smart person that understands enough of the rudiment of programming to hack some interesting scripts, but that's actually a pretty easy problem and failing to solve it indeed signals that you lack some fundamentals.

> Considering those views are shared by a number of high profile, skilled engineers, this is obviously no basis for doubting someone's expertise.

I've read Antirez, Simon Willison, Bryan Cantrill, and Armin Ronacher on how they work or want to work with AI. From none I've got this attitude that they're no longer needed as part of the process.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#234

Post by constantcrying »

Totally delusional. The article does not even try to figure out why any of this happened.

In all of the cases the main prediction that was made came true. The cost, especially the human cost, of developing some piece of software dramatically decreased. The only reason why the amount of programmers needed still rose was because the amount of software needed rose faster.

Clearly that trend will not hold forever.

>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.

And there is exactly one single technology which has ever been able to do this task, which is LLMs. Not addressing the elephant in the room, which is that an LLM can actually take such instructions and produce something meaningful with it, just makes the whole article worthless.

Everything in this article is just inverse special pleading. Since the last N times, the most enthusiastic predictions did not come true, this time only minor changes can happen. If LLMs are only a revolution on the scale of fast interpreted languages (which have significantly impacted what a small team is capable of delivering in terms of complexity), then they will drastically impact most of the software industry.

If these changes happen, and simultaneously the rate at which software is demanded does not also increase (why would it?), then the implications will be extremely serious. Especially if you are not a developer in an established position.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#235

Post by constantcrying »

snickerer wrote: post #198

After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming. They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions. LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably. For every problem I need to turn my brain to ON MODE and wake up, the…

>After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming.

>They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions.

>LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably.

This is true for most developers as well. The mean software developer, especially if you outsource, has failure modes worse than any LLM and round-trip time is not seconds but days.

The promise of LLMs is not that they solve the single most difficult tasks for you instantly, but that they do the easy stuff well enough that they replace offshore teams.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#236

Post by shafyy »

constantcrying wrote: post #235
snickerer wrote: post #198

After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming. They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions. LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably. For every problem I need to turn my brain to ON MODE and wake up, the…

>After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming. >They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions. >LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably. This is true for most developers as well. The mean software develo…

> The promise of LLMs is not that they solve the single most difficult tasks for you instantly, but that they do the easy stuff well enough that they replace offshore teams.

But that's exactly the *promise* of LLMs by the hypepeople behind it.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#237

Post by constantcrying »

shafyy wrote: post #236
constantcrying wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming. >They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions. >LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably. This is true for most developers as well. The mean software develo…

> The promise of LLMs is not that they solve the single most difficult tasks for you instantly, but that they do the easy stuff well enough that they replace offshore teams. But that's exactly the *promise* of LLMs by the hypepeople behind it.

>But that's exactly the promise of LLMs by the hypepeople behind it.

I do not know and do not care what the "hypepeople" say. I can tell you that, by pure logic alone, LLMs will be superior at simple and routine tasks sooner, which means they will compete with outsourced labor first.

LLMs need to be measured against their competition and their competition right now is outsourced labor. If an LLM can outperform an offshore team at a fraction of the cost, why would any company choose the offshore team? Especially when the LLM eliminates some of the biggest problems with offshore teams (communication barriers, round trip times).

If LLMs take any programmer jobs they will at the very beginning make those outsourced jobs obsolete, so the only relevant question is whether they have done that or are in the process of doing so. If they don't, then their impact will be minimal, if they do, then their impact will be massive. I think that this line of thinking is a far better benchmark then asking whether an LLM gets X or Y question wrong Z% of the time.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#238

Post by victorbjorklund »

goatlover wrote: post #227
chii wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't actually understand how but if it empirically works, does it matter if the "intelligence" doesn't "understand" it? Does a chess engine "understand" the moves it makes?

It matters if AGI is the goal. If it remains a tool to make workers more productive, then it doesn't need to truly understand, since the humans using the tools understand. I'm of the opinion AI should have stood for Augmented (Human) Intelligence outside of science fiction. I believe that's what early pioneers like Douglas Engalbert thought. Clearly that's what Steve Jobs and Alan Kay thought computing was for.

AGI is such a meaningless concept. We can’t even fully design what human intelligence is (and when a human fails it meaning they lack human intelligence). It’s just philosophy.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#239

Post by bborud »

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,…

Notice who makes these predictions that programmers will become irrelevant.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#240

Post by victorbjorklund »

llmslave2 wrote: post #214
user34283 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering those views are shared by a number of high profile, skilled engineers, this is obviously no basis for doubting someone's expertise.

I've yet to see it from someone who isn't directly or indirectly affiliated with an organisation that would benefit from increased AI tool adoption. Not saying it's impossible, but... Whereas there are what feels like endless examples of high profile, skilled engineers who are calling BS on the whole thing.

You can say the same about people saying the opposite. I haven’t heard from a single person who says AI can’t write code that does not a financially interest directly or indirectly in humans writing code.
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