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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#261

Post by nebula8804 »

dijit wrote: post #53

I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity." In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring…

Where have you worked? I have seen this mentality among the smartest most accomplished people I've come across who do things like debug kernel issues at Google Cloud. Yes, those people need to really know fundamentals.

90% of people building whatever junk their company needs does not. I learned this lesson the hard way after working at both large and tiny companies. Its the people that remain in the bubble of places like AWS, GCP or people doing hard core research or engineering that have this mentality. Everyone else eventually learns.

>Excel proves the rule. It's objectively terrible: 30% of genomics papers contain gene name errors from autocorrect, JP Morgan lost $6bn from formula errors, Public Health England lost 16,000 COVID cases hitting row limits. Yet it succeeded at democratisation by accepting catastrophic failures no proper system would tolerate.

Excel is the largest development language in the world. Nothing (not Python, VB, Java etc.) can even come close. Why? Because it literally glues the world together. Everything from the Mega Company, to every government agency to even mom & pop Bed & Breakfast operations run on Excel. The least technically competent people can fiddle around with Excel and get real stuff done that end up being critical pathways that a business relies on.

Its hard to quantify but I am putting my stake in the ground: Excel + AI will probably help fix many (but not all) of those issues you talk about.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#262

Post by tjr »

nebula8804 wrote: post #258
tjr wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: I have decades of software experience, and am comfortable both writing code myself and using AI tools. Just today, I needed a basic web application, the sort of which I can easily get off the shelf from several existing vendors. I started down the path of building my own, because, well, that's just what I do, then after about 30 minutes decided to use an existing product. I have hunch that, even with AI mak…

I've heard that SASS never really took off in China because the oversupply of STEM people have caused developer salaries to be suppressed so low that companies just hire a team of devs to build out all their needs in house. Why pay for a SASS when devs are so cheap. These are just anecdotes. Its hard for me to figure out whats really going on in China. What if AI brings the China situation to the entire world? Would…

Fair point! And I wasn't clear: my anecdote was me, personally, needing an instance of some software. Rather than me personally either write it by hand, or even write it using AI, and then host it, I just found an off-the-shelf solution that worked well enough for me. One less thing I have to think about.

I would agree that if the scenario is a business, to either buy an off-the-shelf software solution or pay a small team to develop it, and if the off-the-shelf solution was priced high enough, then having it custom built with AI (maybe still with a tiny number of developers involved) could end up being the better choice. Really all depends on the details.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#263

Post by nebula8804 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #260
nebula8804 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that SASS never really took off in China because the oversupply of STEM people have caused developer salaries to be suppressed so low that companies just hire a team of devs to build out all their needs in house. Why pay for a SASS when devs are so cheap. These are just anecdotes. Its hard for me to figure out whats really going on in China. What if AI brings the China situation to the entire world? Would…

> I've heard that SASS never really took off in China because the oversupply of STEM people have caused developer salaries to be suppressed so low that companies just hire a team of devs to build out all their needs in house. Why pay for a SASS when devs are so cheap. These are just anecdotes. Its hard for me to figure out whats really going on in China. At the high end, china pays SWEs better than South Korea, Japan…

Thank you for the insight. Those countries you listed are nowhere near US salaries. I wonder what the SASS market is like in Europe? I hear its utilized but that the problem is that there is too much reliance on American companies.

I hear those other Asian countries are just like China in terms of adoption.

>China is going big into local LLMs, not sure what that means long term, but Alibaba's Qwen is definitely competitive, and its the main story these days if you want to run a coding model locally.

It seems like the China's strategy of low cost LLM applied pragmatically to all layers of the country's "stack" is the better approach at least right now. Here in the US they are spending every last penny to try and build some sort of Skynet god. If it fails well I guess the Chinese were right after all. If it succeeds well, I don't know what will happen then.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#265

Post by libraryofbabel »

davnicwil wrote: post #251

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

This rings true and reminds me of the classic blog post “Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail”[0] that occasionally gets reposted here.

Going back and forth on the detail in requirements and mapping it to the details of technical implementation (and then dealing with the endless emergent details of actually running the thing in production on real hardware on the real internet with real messy users actually using it) is 90% of what’s hard about professional software engineering.

It’s also what separates professional engineering from things like the toy leetcode problems on a whiteboard that many of us love to hate. Those are hard in a different way, but LLMs can do them on their own better than humans now. Not so for the other stuff.

[0] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#266

Post by cwmoore »

lazypenguin wrote: post #256
davnicwil wrote: post #251

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

Yes! I love this framing and it’s spot on. The successful projects that I’ve been involved in someone either cares deeply and resolves the details in real time or we figured out the details before we started. I’ve seen it outside software as well, someone says “I want a new kitchen” but unless you know exactly where you want your outlets, counter depths, size of fridge, type of cabinets, location of lighting, etc. ad…

A kitchen is a great metaphor. Details or doom.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#267

Post by gitaarik »

_pdp_ wrote: post #119

I was skeptical until 3-4 months ago, but my recent experience has been entirely different. For context: we're the creators of ChatBotKit and have been deploying AI agents since the early days (about 2 years ago). These days, there's no doubt our systems are self-improving. I don't mean to hype this (judge for yourself from my skepticism on Reddit) but we're certainly at a stage where the code is writing the code, an…

But still the hypothesis of the article holds stance. If you want a new feature, you still have to think it through and explain the AI how to implement it, and validate the result.

You might be able to do more with less, but that is with every technological advancement.

Regarding your experience, it sounds like your codebase is such good quality that it acts as a very clear prompt to the AI for it to understand the system and improve it.

But I imagine your codebase didn't get into this state all by itself.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#268

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nebula8804 wrote: post #263
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard that SASS never really took off in China because the oversupply of STEM people have caused developer salaries to be suppressed so low that companies just hire a team of devs to build out all their needs in house. Why pay for a SASS when devs are so cheap. These are just anecdotes. Its hard for me to figure out whats really going on in China. At the high end, china pays SWEs better than South Korea, Japan…

Thank you for the insight. Those countries you listed are nowhere near US salaries. I wonder what the SASS market is like in Europe? I hear its utilized but that the problem is that there is too much reliance on American companies. I hear those other Asian countries are just like China in terms of adoption. >China is going big into local LLMs, not sure what that means long term, but Alibaba's Qwen is definitely compe…

When I worked in China for Microsoft China, I was making 60-70% what I would have made back in the US working the same job, but my living expenses actually kind of made up for that. I learned that most of my non-Chinese asian colleagues were in it for the money instead of just the experience (this was basically my dream job, now I have to settle for working in the states for Google).

> It seems like the China's strategy of low cost LLM applied pragmatically to all layers of the stack is the better approach at least right now. Here in the US they are spending every last penny to try and build some sort of Skynet god. If it fails well I guess the Chinese were right after all. If it succeeds well, I don't know what will happen then.

China lacks those big NVIDIA GPUs that were sanctioned and now export tariffed, so going with lower models that could run on hardware they could access was the best move for them. This could either work out (local LLM computing is the future, and China is ahead of the game by circumstance) or maybe it doesn't work out (big server-based LLMs are the future and China is behind the curve). I think the Chinese government would have actually preferred centralization control, and censorship, but the current situation is that the Chinese models are the most uncensored you can get these days (with some fine tuning, they are heavily used in the adult entertainment industry...haha socialist values).

I wouldn't trust the Chinese government to not do Skynet if they get the chance, but Chinese entrepreneurs are good at getting things done and avoiding government interference. Basically, the world is just getting lucky by a bunch of circumstances ATM.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#269

Post by cwmoore »

pixl97 wrote: post #176
lotu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that like someone that has been coding for so long you have forgotten what it's like to not know how to code. The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. AI is amazing at producing answers you previously would have looked up on stack overflow, which is very useful. It often can type faster that than I can which is also useful. Ho…

We talk about things like S curves for AGI, and how it's slowing down. But where is the S curves for programmers at?

Actual socialization is my bet.
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