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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

#241

Post by llmslave2 »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #240
llmslave2 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody says AI "can't write code". It very clearly can.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#242

Post by bonesss »

stackghost wrote: post #141
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…

Absolutely this, and TFA touches on the point about natural language being insufficiently precise: AI can write you an entire CRUD app in minutes, and with some back-and-forth you can have an actually-good CRUD app in a few hours. But AI is not very good (anecdotally, based on my experience) at writing fintech-type code. It's also not very good at writing intricate security stuff like heap overflows. I've never tried…

Generating CRUD is like solving cancer in mice, we already have a dizzying array of effective solutions… Ruby on Rails, Access 97, model first ORMs with GUI mappers. SharePoint lets anyone do all the things easily.

The issue is and always has been maintenance and evolution. Early missteps cause limitations, customer volume creates momentum, and suddenly real engineering is needed.

I’d be a lot more worried about our jobs if these systems were explaining to people how to solve all their problems with a little Emacs scripting. As is they’re like hyper aggressive tech sales people, happy just to see entanglements, not thinking about the whole business cycle.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#243

Post by techblueberry »

qweiopqweiop wrote: post #178
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.

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

I remember when about a year ago people were asking the same thing about gpt-4.5, the answer is always “yes, I’ve tried them all”

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#244

Post by gentooflux »

chii wrote: post #193
gentooflux wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

If it empirically works, then sure. If instead every single solution it provides beyond a few trivial lines falls somewhere between "just a little bit off" and "relies entirely on core library functionality that doesn't actually exist" then I'd say it does matter and it's only slightly better than an opaque box that spouts random nonsense (which will soon include ads).

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#245

Post by underdeserver »

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…

People are saying Codex 5.2 fullsolved crypto challenges in 39C3 CTF last weekend.

Three months ago I would have agreed with you, but anecdotal evidence says Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5 are finally there.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#246

Post by conartist6 »

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,…

More than any other effect they have LLMs breed something called "learned helplessness". You just listed a few things it may stay better than you at, and a few things that it is not better than you at and never will be.

Planning long running projects and deciding are things only you can do well!! Humans manage costs. We look out for our future. We worry. We have excitement, and pride. It wants you to think none of these things matter of course, because it doesn't have them. It says plausible things at random, basically. It can't love, it can't care, it won't persist.

WHATEVER you do don't let it make you forget that it's a bag of words and you are someing almost infinitely more capable, not in spite of human "flaws" like caring, but because of them :)

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#247

Post by baq »

llmslave2 wrote: post #190
baq wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand this idea that non-believers will be "steamrolled" by those who are currently adopting AI into their workflows. If their claims are validated and the new AI workflows end up achieving that claimed 10x productivity speedup, or even a 2x speedup, nobody is cursed to be steamrolled - they'll simply adopt those same workflows same as everyone else. In the meantime they aren't wasting their time trying…

That's actually what I'm arguing for; use tools where they are applicable. I'm against blind contrarianism and the 'nothing ever happens' attitude since that IME is being proven more wrong each week.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#248

Post by simonw »

omnicognate wrote: post #168
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.)

The DeepSeek v3 paper claims to have trained from scratch for ~$5.5m: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437

Kimi K2 Thinking was reportedly trained for $4.6m: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/alibaba-backed-moonshot-rele...

Both of those were frontier models at the time of their release.

Another interesting number here is Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which may people (myself included) considered the best model for several months after its release and was apparently trained for "a few tens of millions of dollars": https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-new-generation-of-ais-cla...

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#249

Post by techblueberry »

sokoloff wrote: post #230
encyclopedism wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many HN users may point to Jevons paradox, I would like to point out that it may very well work up until the point that it doesn't. After all a chicken has always seen the farmer as benevolent provider of food, shelter and safety, that is until of course THAT day when he decides he doesn't.

It is certainly possible that AI is the one great disruptor that we can’t adapt to. History over millenia has me taking the other side of that bet, seeing the disruptions and adaptations from factory farming, internal combustion engines, moving assembly lines, electrification, the transistor, ICs, wired then wireless telecommunications, the internet, personal computing, and countless other major disruptions.

Have we though?

1. Fundamentals do change, Yuval Noah Harari made this point in the book Sapiens, but basically there are core beliefs (in fact the idea that things do change for the better is relatively new, “the only constant is change”. Wasn’t really true before the 19th century.

What does “the great disrupter we can’t adapt to” mean exactly? If humans annihilate themselves from climate change, the earth will adapt, the solar system will shrug it off and the universe won’t even realize it happened.

But like, I am 100% sure humans will adapt to the AI revolution. Maybe we let 7 billion people die off, and the 1% of the rest enslave the rest of us to be masseuses and prostitutes and live like kings with robot servants, but I’m not super comfortable with that definition if “adaptation”.

For most of human history and most of the world “the rest of us” don’t live all that well, is that adaptation? I think most people include a healthy large, and growing middle class in their definition of success metrics.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#250

Post by fragmede »

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.

"completely useless" and "real programming" are load bearing here. Without a definition to agree on for those terms, it's really hard not to read that as you're trying to troll us by making a controversial unprovable claim that you know will get people that disagree with you riled up. What's especially fun is that you then get to sneer at the abilities of anybody making concrete claims by saying "that's not real programming".

How tiresome.

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