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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#361

Post by _pdp_ »

shimman wrote: post #284
_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…

If these agent are so great was isn't ChatBotKit a highly successfully public company worth hundreds of billions and not just a glorified chatgpt wrapper? If you're able to do so much with so little why isn't that actually bearing out in becoming a profitable company? What's the excuse? Do people really need to know that a bunch of code at a company that won't exist in 10 years is something worth caring about?

Because we are not hyping to lure investors to give us hundreds of millions dollars. We took the more honest route and work with actual customers. If we are to accept hundreds of millions at some point perhaps we are going to reach hundreds of billions in valuation ... on paper.

As for the chatgpt wrapper comment - honestly this take is getting old. So what? You are going to train your own LLM and run it at huge loss for awhile?

And yes perhaps all of this effort is for nothing as it may be even possible to reacted everything we have done from scratch in a week assuming that we are static and do nothing about it. In 10 years the solution would have billions of lines of code. Not that lines of code is any kind of metric for success but you wont be able to recreate it without significant cost and upfront effort ... even with LLMs.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#362

Post by rednafi »

Every abstraction simplifies a bunch of real-world phenomena. The real world is messy, our understanding keeps shifting, and we’re unreliable narrators in the sense that we’re often not even aware of the gaps in our own understanding, let alone good at expressing it.

No matter how much progress we make, as long as reasoning about complex systems is unavoidable, this doesn’t change. We don’t always know what we want, and we can’t always articulate it clearly.

So people building software end up dealing with two problems at once. One is grappling with the intrinsic, irreducible complexity of the system. The other is trying to read the minds of unreliable narrators, including leadership and themselves.

Tools help with the mechanical parts of the job, but they don’t remove the thinking and understanding bottleneck. And since the incentives of leadership, investors, and the people doing the actual work don’t line up, a tug-of-war is the most predictable outcome.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#363

Post by acron0 »

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…

To put an economic spin on this (that no one asked for), this is also the capitalist nirvana. I don't have an immediate citation but from my experience software engineer salary is usually one of the biggest items on a P&L which prevents the capitalist approaching the singularity: limitless profit margin. Obviously this is unachievable but one of the major obstacles to this is in the process of being destablised and disrupted.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#364

Post by azan_ »

AstroBen wrote: post #236
azan_ wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and maintain it as requirements evolve I think you are basing your reasoning on the current generation of models. But if future generation will be able to do everything you've listed above, what work will be there left for developers? I'm not saying that we will ever get such…

And your entire argument is based around the possibility of it turning into a magic genie that can do anything

We are actually already at the level of magic genie or some sci-fi level device. It can't do anything obviously but what it can is mind blowing. And the basis of argument is obviously right - potential possibility is really low bar to pass and AGI is clearly possible.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#365

Post by azan_ »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #240
azan_ wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and maintain it as requirements evolve I think you are basing your reasoning on the current generation of models. But if future generation will be able to do everything you've listed above, what work will be there left for developers? I'm not saying that we will ever get such…

Yes, if we assume that AI can do the job of developers then tautologically it can do the job of developers.

It's not obvious at all. Some people believe that once AI can do the things I've listed, the role of developers will change instead of getting replaced (because advances always led to more jobs, not less).

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#366

Post by popalchemist »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #274
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…

Counterpoint: perhaps it's not about escaping all the details, just the irrelevant ones, and the need to have them figured out up front. Making the process more iterative, an exploration of medium under supervision or assistance of domain expert, turns it more into a journey of creation and discovery, in which you learn what you need (and learn what you need to learn) just-in-time. I see no reason why this wouldn't b…

Fully agree with this. Not all labor is equally worth doing.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#367

Post by ceejayoz »

yk09123 wrote: post #226
enos_feedler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that is true. The nuance here is that software isn’t just getting cheaper but the activity to build it is changing. Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. That shifts who can do the job. The customer might be able to do it themselves. This removes a market, not grows one. I am not saying the market will collapse just be careful applying a blunt theory to such a profound technological…

The nuance here is that AI cant do what you think it can. AI can code because the user of AI can code. Debbie from accounting doesn't have a clue what an int is

I sure hope accounting knows what an integer is.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#368

Post by bryanrasmussen »

bandrami wrote: post #330
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…

It's a cliché that the first 90% of a software project takes 90% of the time and the last 10% also takes 90% of the time, but it's cliché because it's true. So we've managed to invent a giant plausibility engine that automates the 90% of the process people enjoy leaving just the 90% that people universally hate.

>So we've managed to invent a giant plausibility engine that automates the 90% of the process people enjoy leaving just the 90% that people universally hate.

OK, for me it is the last 10% that is of any interest whatsoever. And I think that has been the case with any developer I've ever worked with I consider to be a good developer.

OK the first 90% can have spots of enjoyment, like a nice gentle Sunday drive stopping off at Dairy Queen, but it's not normally what one would call "interesting".

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#369

Post by bryanrasmussen »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #265
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…

Is the surprising amount of detail an indicator that we do not live in a simulation, or is it instead that we have to be living inside a simulation because it doesn't need all this detail for Reality, indicating an algorithmic function run amuck?
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