The biggest threat to American software engineers is outsourcing, AI is just a distraction. I am an immigrant, I work at a prestigious financial corporation in NYC. Pretty much 95% of the staff were born and did undergraduate degree in other countries. We hire a few grads but they usually quit or get laid off after a few years - most new hires are H1Bs or contractors on H1Bs. Just about to open another big office in a developing country.
The future of software development is software developers
251–260 of 588 posts
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#252Earlier 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…
Why would I ask the model to reverse the string 'glorbix,' especially in the context of software engineering?
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#253The biggest threat to American software engineers is outsourcing, AI is just a distraction. I am an immigrant, I work at a prestigious financial corporation in NYC. Pretty much 95% of the staff were born and did undergraduate degree in other countries. We hire a few grads but they usually quit or get laid off after a few years - most new hires are H1Bs or contractors on H1Bs. Just about to open another big office in…
Perhaps, but that's been going on for decades.
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#254I have been programming professionally (i.e., getting paid for it) for a much more modest 13 years, but unlike a quite large portion of my peers, I am actually interested in the history of our field.
So, yeah, I agree.
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Go with Laravel and some admin packages and you generate CRUD pages in minutes. And I think with Django, that is builtin.
But I don’t think I’ve seen pure CRUD on anything other than prototype. Add an Identity and Access Management subsystem and the complexity of requirements will explode. Then you add integration to external services and legacy systems, and that’s where the bulk of the work is. And there’s the scalability issue that is always looming.
Creating CRUD app is barely a level over starting a new project with the IDE wizard.
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#256Earlier 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?
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).
Those are 2024-era criticisms of LLMs for code.
Late 2025 models very rarely hallucinate nonexistent core library functionality - and they run inside coding agent harnesses so if they DO they notice that the code doesn't work and fix it.
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#257I 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 t…
Plus I think I've almost never see so little competition for what I think are the real prizes! Everyone's off making copies of copies of copies of the same crappy infrastructure we already have. They're busy building small inconsequential side projects so they can say they built something using an LLM.
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#258Earlier 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.
> I’m an expert in what I do. A professional, and few people can do what I do
Are you an astronaut?
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#259Just like the pro-AI articles, it reads to me like a sales pitch. And the ending only adds to it: the author invites to hire companies to contract him for training. I would only be happy if in the end the author turns out to be right. But as the things stand right now, I can see a significant boost to my own productivity, which leads me to believe that fewer people are going to be needed.
I agree with you on this feeling like a sales pitch, probably because ultimately it is. I've done a software training course led by this guy. It was fine, and his style and his lessons are all pretty decent and I found/find myself agreeing with his "takes". But it's nothing ground breaking, and he's not really adding anything to the debate that I've not read before.
I don't know how active he is as a developer, I assumed that he was more of a teacher of established practices than being on the cutting edge of development. That's not an insult, but it stands out to me in this article.
Ironically, like an LLM, this article feels like more like an amalgamation of plenty of other opinions on the growth of AI in the workplace rather than any original thoughts. There's not really anything "new" here, just putting together a load of existing opinions.
(I am not suggesting that Jason got an AI to write this article, though that would be funny).
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#260I don’t recall seeing entire economies betting on 4GLs.
Not even a nitpick because the scale is indeed orders of magnitude different, but…
There was a lot of chatter, government attention, and both public and private money chasing 4GL’s in the 1980’s, due to what turned out to be (for the US, at least) a phantom “software crisis”. It was mostly for naught?
Same in Japan, where you can argue about the motivations of MITI’s “Fourth Generation Project”, but at its software core was a primeval 4GL in the form of Prolog. Their perceptions of a Japanese software crisis were ultimately more well-founded.