The future of software development is software developers • Hacker News Board

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#391

Post by newsoftheday » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

bdangubic wrote: post #311

trashb wrote: post #210

> Edgar Dijkstra called it nearly 50 years ago: we will never be programming in English, or French, or Spanish. Natural languages have not evolved to be precise enough and unambiguous enough. Semantic ambiguity and language entropy will always defeat this ambition. This is the most important quote for any AI coding discussion. Anyone that doesn't understand how the tools they use came to be is doomed to reinvent them…

> These are the same people that create applications in MS Excel. Ones that want their application to work? :) the last piece of software you should be knocking is MS Excel, in my 30+ year career the one common thread just about everywhere I worked (or contracted at) has used Excel to run some amazing sh*t

Everywhere I've worked as a software engineer the past 30 years I've seen Excel spreadsheets but rarely anything amazing, maybe once back in the 1990's at one place by an Excel guru but those are rare. 00% of the time Excel is used to make essentially table layouts of data maybe with some simple cell calculations.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#392

Post by bwfan123 » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

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…

> I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming

Can you elaborate on "real programming" ?

I am assuming you mean the simplest hard problem that is solved. The value of the work is measured in those terms. Easy problems have boilerplate solutions and have been solved numerous times in the past. LLMs excel here.

Hard problems require intricate woven layers of logic and abstraction, and LLMs still struggle since they do not have causal models. The value however is in the solution of these kinds of problems since the easy problems are assumed to be solved already.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#393

Post by FloorEgg » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:28 PM UTC

AI is like electricity.

Agentic IDEs are like power tools.

While most construction work today uses power tools, there are still lots of artisans productively using hand tools.

LLMs can be useful and developers can still be productive without them.

Things get weird when we confuse the developers with the power tools.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#394

Post by newsoftheday » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

farazbabar wrote: post #305

I am good at software. It turns out that isn’t sufficient, or alternatively stated, you have to be good at a number of other things than just churning code, even good code. So to me, the combination of being good at software, understanding complexity and ability articulate it concisely and precisely, when combined with the latest and greatest LLMs, is magic. I know people want to examples of success, I wish I could s…

> This is not to downplay folks who are having a hard time with LLMs or agents, I think, it’s a skill that you can learn, if you are already good at software and the adjacencies.

Someone on the page already quoted Dijkstra, recommend reading that, he was correct.

Prompt engineering isn't engineering at all, it's throwing words at a wall to see which ones stick then declaring success if the outcome looks at all recognizable. That isn't actually success.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#395

Post by elktown » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

threethirtytwo wrote: post #385

elktown wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, among other claims, "5x now or you're fired!" is completely ridiculous.

Bro no one said 5x now or your fired that’s your own imagination adding flavor to it. It’s obvious to anyone if your output is 5x less than everyone else you will eventually be let go. There’s no paradigm shift where the boss suddenly announced that. But the underlying unsaid expectation is obvious given what everyone is doing. What happened was this, a couple new hires and some current employees started were using A…

> they were deploying code outside their areas of expertise doing dev ops, infra, backend and frontend.

> The boss can now throw a frontend job to a backend developer and now expect completion in a day or less.

Right. So essentially vibe coding in unknown domains, sounds great. Truly professional.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#396

Post by sarchertech » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #388

__float wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're counting the cost of running the model, but what about training it? You can't count the compute and data costs at $0.

You can assume that already-published open weights models are available at $0, regardless of how much money was sunk into their original development. These models will look increasingly stale over time but most software development doesn't change quickly. If a model can generate capable and up-to-date Python, C++, Java, or Javascript code in 2025 then you can expect it to still be a useful model in 2035 (based on the…

>2025-2035

Depending on other people to maintain backward compatibility so that you can keep coding like it’s 2025 is its own problematic dependency.

You could certainly do it but it would be limiting. Imagine that you had a model trained on examples from before 2013 and your boss wants you to take over maintenance for a React app.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#397

Post by elktown » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

threethirtytwo wrote: post #389

elktown wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one shrugs off 5x like brushing one's teeth in the morning. That makes no sense.

People are sharing it. Look at this entire thread. It’s so conflicted. We have half the thread saying it’s 5x and the other half saying they’re delusional and lack critical thinking. I think it’s obvious who lacks critical thinking. If half the thread is saying on the ground AI has changed things and the other half just labels everyone as crazy without investigation… guess which one didn’t do any critical thinking? L…

> I think it’s obvious who lacks critical thinking.

My critical thinking is sharp enough to recognize that you're the recently banned ninetyninenine user [0]. Just as unbalanced and quarrelsome as before I can see. It's probably better to draw some conclusion from a ban and adjust, or just leave.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988923

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#398

Post by lelele » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:39 PM UTC

solaire_oa wrote: post #356

Most people in this thread are quibbling about the exact degree of utility LLMs provide, which a tedious argument. What's more interesting to me is, per the article, the concern regarding everyone who is leaning into LLMs without realizing (or downplaying) the exorbitant, externalized cost. Our current LLM usage is being subsidized to the point of being free by outside investment. One day when the well runs dry, you…

> One day when the well runs dry, you must be able to either pay the actual cost

What multiple of the current cost do you expect? Currently, GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT for Business cost $19/month and €29/month respectively. Even a 10×–20× increase will still be economically viable in a professional setting if the tools continue to save hours of work.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#399

Post by leptons » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #326

leptons wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>but agents could care less,

The phrase is "couldn't care less". If you "could care less" then you actually care about it. If you "couldn't care less" then there's no caring at all.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#400

Post by lelele » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

Gud wrote: post #294

spicyusername wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming And I can confirm, with similar years of experience, that they are not useless. Absolutely incredible tools that have saved hours and hours helping me understand large codebases, brainstorm features, and point out gaps in my implementation or understanding. I think the main disconnect in the discourse is that there are those pretending they can relia…

Same. I started coding before hitting puberty, and Im well into my 30s. If you know the problem space well, you can let LLMs(I use Claude and ChatGPT) flesh it out.

> I use Claude and ChatGPT

Both for code? For me, it's Claude only for code. ChatGPT is for general questions.