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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#381

Post by cudgy »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #299
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…

The argument is empty because it relies on a trope rather than evidence. “We’ve seen this before and it didn’t happen” is not analysis. It’s selective pattern matching used when the conclusion feels safe. History is full of technologies that tried to replace human labor and failed, and just as full of technologies that failed repeatedly and then abruptly succeeded. The existence of earlier failures proves nothing in…

“The existence of earlier failures proves nothing in either direction.”

This seems extreme and obviously incorrect.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#382

Post by Havoc »

rectang wrote: post #70

Can semi-technical people replace developers if those semi-technical people accept that the price of avoiding developers is a commitment to minimizing total system complexity? Of course semi-technical people can troubleshoot, it's part of nearly every job. (Some are better at it than others.) But how many semi-technical people can design a system that facilitates troubleshooting? Even among my engineering acquaintanc…

Don’t think it’ll replace the load bearing parts of IT infrastructure any time soon.

For specialized things that a specific user wants - already happening. Someone in a finance role showed me a demo this week that was reasonably sophisticated. SQL, multi user auth, integration with corporate finance software, parsing enormous excel files, dashboards, custom analytics, custom finance logic etc

In the past we’d have paid consulting devs millions for that now it’s a copilot license and a finance guy (that is reasonably tech savvy). Also cuts out the endless project planning meeting, stand ups, circling back, and scope discussions that you get when actual devs consult.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#383

Post by girvo »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #325
mkleczek wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience the issue really is, unfortunately, that it is impossible to tell if a particular detail is irrelevant until after you have analyzed and answered all of them. In other words, it all looks easy in hindsight only.

I think the the most coveted ability of a skilled senior developer, is precisely this "uncanny" ability to predict beforehand if some particular detail is important or irrelevant. This ability can only be obtained through years of experience and hubris.

Yeah, most of that intuition only comes from making those mistakes yourself originally, and getting it wrong. At least for me that was the case

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#384

Post by cudgy »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #287
1718627440 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...

The way I would approach writing specs and requirements as code would be to write a set of unit-tests against a set of abstract classes used as arguments of such unit-tests. Then let someone else maybe AI write the implementation as a set of concrete classes and then verify that those unit-tests pass. I'm not sure how well that would work in practice, nor why such an approach is not used more often than it is. But ye…

“write a set of unit-tests against a set of abstract classes used as arguments of such unit-tests.”

An exhaustive set of use cases to confirm vibe AI generated apps would be an app by itself. Experienced developers know what subsets of tests are critical, avoiding much work.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#386

Post by cudgy »

ceejayoz wrote: post #367
yk09123 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But not an int, int32, or int64

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#387

Post by ninjagoo »

Stephen Schwab has hit the nail on the head as far as the replacement pattern applies to software development.

But he missed the opportunity to recognize that the replacement pattern is, in fact, a broader principle. Or perhaps he did recognize it and decided to focus its scope on software development.

The broader replacement principle is that for a business, any (specialized) process or system or department represents an expense, and there is constant pressure to reduce expenses, or definitely once revenue/growth plateaus or decreases. ALL Businesses invariably, over time, attempt to replace every department or process or function with cheaper alternatives. Software Development is not unique here.

At the country level, this has led to the movement of manufacturing to China and other countries, the outsourcing of software development to India and other countries, and the hollowing out of middle America.

Does anyone have insight into whether this is a unique situation specific to our technological age? It feels fundamentally different from the normal cycle of conquest and colonialism?

Although to be fair there was a very very strong underpinning of corporations driving the wave of European colonialism from the 1600s to the 1900s- Hudson's Bay Company, Dutch East India and West India Companies, British East India Company, Royal African Company, French East/West India Companies, Danish West India and Guinea Company, the Spanish Royal Companies, Portuguese General Companies - a bit different from prior expansions of conquest by empires. But even these corporations were pinned upon expanding trading zones rather than cost management. In the 1900s and the 2000s there was some expansionism - getting countries to open up their economies - but that was managed through the IMF and the World Bank.

At the end of the day, the big dream is about accumulating power and wealth. For some people. It comes down to a fundamental world view through which people take action - some dream of scientific advancement, others of service to others, and so on. Exploration has much fewer opportunities in the modern age.

Software Development is just what a lot of this community happens to partake in.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#388

Post by cudgy »

BurningFrog wrote: post #234
felipeerias wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing? I’m not sure that it does. Historically, it would seem that often lowering the amount of people needed to produce a good is precisely what makes it cheaper. So it’s not hard to imagine a world where AI tools make expert software developers significantly more productive while enabling other workers to use t…

> Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing? Not automatically, no. How it affects employment depends on the shapes of the relevant supply/demand curves, and I don't think those are possible to know well for things like this. For the world as a whole, it should be a very positive thing if creating usable software becomes an order of magnitude cheap…

Given the products that the software industry is largely focused on building (predatory marketing for the attention economy and surveillance), this unfortunately may be the case.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#389

Post by ninjagoo »

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…

> 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.

Since the author was speaking to business folk, I would argue that their dream is cheaper labor, or really just managing a line item in the summary budget. As evidenced by outsourcing efforts. I don't think they really care about how it happens - whether it is manifesting things into reality without having to get into the details, or just a cheaper human. It seems to me that the corporate fever around AI is simply the prospect of a "cheaper than human" opportunity.

Although, to your point, we must await AGI, or get very close to it, to be able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details :-)

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#390

Post by cudgy »

ej88 wrote: post #289
hintymad wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jevon's Paradox does not last forever in a single sector, right? Take manufacturing business for example. We can make more and more stuff with increasingly lower price, yet we ended up outsourcing our manufacturing and the entire sector withered. Manufacturing also gets less lucrative over the years, which means there has been less and less demand of labor.

I'm quite convinced that software (and, more broadly, implementing the systems and abstractions) seems to have virtually unlimited demand. AI raises the ceiling and broadens software's reach even further as problems that previously required some level of ingenuity or intelligence can be automated now.

Why unlimited? Populations are shrinking and there is only so much debt these economies can handle.
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