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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

#321

Post by dent9 »

hansmayer wrote: post #224
CuriouslyC wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias by people who should know better (if you think 100% of LLM outputs are "slop" with no quality consideration factored in, you're hopelessly biased). The commercialized seems like an arbitrary and pointless bar, I've seen some hot garbage that's "commercia…

> I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias Please just for fun - reach out to for example Klarna support via their website and tell me how much of your experience can be attributed to an anti-AI bias and how much to the fact that the LLMs are a complete shit for any important production use cas…

My man here is reaching out to Klarna Support, this tells a LOT about his life decision making skills which clearly shine through as well in his comments on the topic of AI

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#322

Post by dent9 »

hansmayer wrote: post #216
matthewmacleod wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect it’s your “I’m an expert and everyone else is merely an idiot child” attitude that’s probably making it hard to take you seriously. And don’t get me wrong - I totally understand this personality. There are a similar few I’ve worked with recently who are broadly quite skeptical of what seems to be an obvious fact to me - their roles will need to change and their skillsets will have to develop to take advantag…

I am a bit tired of explaining, but I run my own company, so its not like I have to fear my "roles and responsibilities" changing - I am designing them myself. I also am not a general skeptic of the "YAGNI" type - my company and myself have been early adopters on many trends. Those that made sense of course. We also tried to be early adopters of LLMs, all the way since 2021. And I am sorry if that sounds arrogant to…

95% of companies fail. Yours will too, don't worry. Amazon themselves have already been using in-house versions of this to build AWS for over a year https://kiro.dev/ you can either continue adopting AI in your company or you can start filing your company bankruptcy papers

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#323

Post by dent9 »

bccdee wrote: post #91
aspenmartin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, you read their code, ask them to summarize changes to guide your reading, ask it why it made certain decisions you don’t understand and if you don’t like their explanations you change it (with the agent!). Own and be responsible for the code you commit. I am the “most senior”, and at large tech companies that track, higher level IC corresponds to more AI usage, hmm almost like it’s a useful tool.

Ok but you understand that the fundamental nature of LLMs amplifies errors, right? A hallucination is, by definition, a series of tokens which is plausible enough to be indistinguishable from fact to the model. If you ask an LLM to explain its own hallucinations to you, it will gladly do so, and do it in a way that makes them seem utterly natural. If you ask an LLM to explain its motivations for having done something…

So your argument is that if people don't use the tool correctly they might get incorrect results? How is that relevant? If you Google search for the wrong query you'll similarly get incorrect results

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#324

Post by EagnaIonat »

bloppe wrote: post #150
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…

Luddism arose in response to weaving machines, not garment-making machines. The machines could weave a piece of cloth that still had to be cut and sewn by hand into a garment. Weaving the cloth was by far the most time consuming part of making the clothing. Writing code is not at all the most time consuming part of software development.

> Luddism arose in response to weaving machines, not garment-making machines.

It started there, yes.

> Writing code is not at all the most time consuming part of software development.

The current Vibe coding systems can do the full pipeline.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#325

Post by mkozlows »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #307
mkozlows wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, even this isn't really true anymore. With Opus 4.5 and 5.2 Codex in tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex CLI, "just do the thing" is a viable strategy for a shockingly large category of tasks.

Just do the thing can produce functional code, but even with Opus4.5/Codex5.2, there are still plenty of moments where the way it decides to do something is cringe.

Agree. But it's increasingly the case, IME, that for a a lot of tasks, you can start with that. If it does it well, great. If it does something stupid, it's easy enough to ask it to completely rework the stupid thing in a better way, and it can do it quickly. That's still a huge shift compared to the olden days (three months ago) where you needed to really break things down into small chunks for it to get to a success state.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#326

Post by CuriouslyC »

leptons wrote: post #172
CuriouslyC wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of code smells matter more for humans than LLMs (and LLMs have their own unique code smells). For example, nested ternary operators are a great source of bugs in human code, but agents could care less, but humans handle multiple files with the same variable names and lots of duplicated code well, whereas this stuff confuses agents.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#327

Post by claytongulick »

dent9 wrote: post #297
63stack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make. Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.

This is completely wrong. Codex 5.2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 don't have any of these issues. They will regularly tell you that you're wrong if you bother to ask them and they will explain why and what a better solution is. They don't make up anything. The code they produce is noticeably more efficient in LoC than previous models. And yes they really will do research, they will search the Internet for docs and articles a…

With apologies, and not GP, but this has been the same feedback I've personally seen on every single model release.

Whenever I discuss the problems that my peers and I have using these things, it's always something along the lines of "but model X.Y solves all that!", so I obediently try again, waste a huge amount of time, and come back to the conclusion that these things aren't great at generation, but they are fantastic at summarization and classification.

When I use them for those tasks, they have real value. For creation? Not so much.

I've stopped getting excited about the "but model X.Y!!" thing. Maybe they are improving? I just personally haven't seen it.

But according to the AI hypers, just like with every other tech hype that's died over the past 30 years, "I must just be doing it wrong".

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#328

Post by dent9 »

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…

We are way beyond this. Now you use your plain text prompt to generate a requirements spec that the AI will follow when implementing your project

https://kiro.dev/

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#329

Post by dent9 »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #116
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.

Try Claude. And partner with it on building something complex.

Yes you want Kiro which uses Claude models under the hood

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#330

Post by dent9 »

to11mtm wrote: post #45
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,…

It's definitely scary in a way. However I'm still finding a trend even in my org; better non-AI developers tend to be better at using AI to develop. AI still forgets requirements. I'm currently running an experiment where I try to get a design and then execute on an enterprise 'SAAS-replacement' application [0]. AI can spit forth a completely convincing looking overall project plan [1] that has gaps if anyone, even t…

AI does not forget requirements when you use a spec driven AI tool like Kiro
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