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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

#341

Post by CuriouslyC »

dent9 wrote: post #328
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…

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/

Kiro is just trying to build a product around exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not a fan, because it's simultaneously too heavyweight and agents don't respect all the details of the specs it creates enough to make the time investment in super-detailed specs worthwhile.

I have a spec driven development tool I've been working on that generates structured specs that can be used to do automatic code generation. This is both faster and more robust.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#342

Post by embedding-shape »

mrwrong wrote: post #274
embedding-shape wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all we know, you both could comparing using a Nokia 3310 and a workstation PC based on the hardware, but you both just say "this computer is better than that computer". There are a ton of models out there, ran in a ton of different ways, that can be used in different ways with different harnesses, and people use different workflows. There is just so many variables involved, that I don't think it's neither fair no…

> The variance is great this strikes me as a very important thing to reflect on. when the automobile was invented, was the apparent benefit so incredibly variable?

> was the apparent benefit so incredibly variable?

Yes, lots of people were very vocally against horseless-carriages, as they were called at the time. Safety and public nuisance concerns were widespread, the cars were very noisy, fast, smoky and unreliable. Old newspapers are filled with opinions about this, from people being afraid of horseless-carriages spooking other's horses and so on. The UK restricted the adoption of cars at one point, and some Canton in Switzerland even banned cars for a couple of decades.

Horseless-carriages was commonly ridiculed for being just for "reckless rich hobbyists" and similar.

I think the major difference is that cars produced immediate, visible externalities, so it was easy for opposition to focus on public safety in public spaces. In contrast, AI has less physically visible externalities, although they are as important, or maybe even more important, than the ones cars introduced.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#343

Post by theshrike79 »

re_chief wrote: post #303
perhapsAnLLM wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they are completely useless for real programming" You and I must have completely different definitions of "real programming". In this very comment, you described a problem that the model solved. The solution may not have involved low-level programming, or discovering a tricky bug entrenched in years-worth of legacy code, but still a legitimate task that you, as a programmer, would've needed to solve otherwise. How i…

I wouldn't describe the LLM's actions in the example as "solving a problem" so much as "following a well-established routine". If I were to, for instance, make a PB&J sandwich, I wouldn't say that what I'm doing is "real cooking" even if it might technically fit the definition. If an LLM controlling a pair of robot hands was able to make a passable PB&J sandwich on my behalf, I _guess_ that could be useful to me (how…

In this analogy you're clearly a private chef with clients who have very specific wishes and allergies.

The rest of us are just pumping out CRUD-burgers off the API assembly line. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff.

LLMs are really good with burgers, but not so much being a private chef.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#344

Post by elktown »

dent9 wrote: post #317
threethirtytwo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously not troll, I know I’m bragging. But I have to emphasize that it is not some stupid oh “only domain experts know AI is shit. Everyone else is too stupid to understand how bad it is” That is patently wrong. Few people can do what I do and as a result I likely make more money than you. But now with AI… everyone can do what I do. It has leveled the playing field… what I was before now matters fuck all. Understa…

You are wrong. People like yourself will likely be smart enough to stay well employed into the future. It's the folks who are arguing with you trying to say that AI is useless who will quickly lose their jobs. And they'll be all shocked Pikachu face when they get a pink slip while their role gets reassigned to an AI agent

> It's the folks who are arguing with you trying to say that AI is useless who will quickly lose their jobs.

Why is it that in every hype there are always the guys like you that want to punish the non-believers? It's not enough to be potentially proven correct, your anger requires the demise of the heretics. It was the same story for cryptocurrencies.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#345

Post by qweiopqweiop »

techblueberry wrote: post #243
qweiopqweiop wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

Fair. Well personally they didn't work well for me (on a huge, complex codebase) until the latest batch. Now they do.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#346

Post by baq »

dent9 wrote: post #290
underdeserver wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been using Codex and Claude Sonnet for many months now for personal (Codex) and work (Sonnet) and I agree. Three months ago these tools were highly usable, now with Codex 5.2 and Sonnet 4.5 I think we're at the point where you can confidently rely on them to analyze your repo codebase and solve, at the very least, small scoped problems and apply any required refactor back throughout the codebase. 6-12+ months ag…

Sonnet is dumb as a bag of bricks compared to Opus, perhaps you meant Opus? I never use sonnet for anything anymore, it’s either too verbose or just can’t handle tasks which Opus one shots.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#347

Post by theshrike79 »

mattmanser wrote: post #173
jmogly wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why you dont use LLMs as a knowledge source without giving them tools.

"Agents use tools in a loop to achieve a goal."

If you don't give any tools, you get hallucinations and half-truths.

But you give one a tool to do, say, web searches and it's going to be a lot smarter. That's where 90% of the innovation with "AI" today is coming from. The raw models aren't gettin that much smarter anymore, but the scaffolding and frameworks around them are.

Tools are the main reason Claude Code is as good as it is compared to the competition.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#348

Post by baq »

constantcrying wrote: post #237
shafyy wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 off…

Outsourced devs wielding smart models are even cheaper than onshore and the models lift all boats wrt capability.

The bottleneck will soon be ideas for the things to build.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#349

Post by theshrike79 »

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 about as well defined as "full self-driving" :D

It's an useless philosophical discussion.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#350

Post by theshrike79 »

gentooflux wrote: post #244
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?

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).

This sounds like you're copy-pasting code from ChatGPT's web interface, which is very 2024.

Agentic LLMs will notice if something is crap and won't compile and will retry, use the tools they have available to figure out what's the correct way, edit and retry again.

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