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They lied to you. Building software is hard

blog.nordcraft.com

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Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#11

Post by chasd00 »

fullshark wrote: post #6
contagiousflow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the hard evidence? Edit: What I mean by this is there may be some circumstantial evidence (less hiring for juniors, more AI companies getting VC funding). We currently have no _hard_ evidence that programming has had a substantial speed increase/deskilling from LLMs yet. Any actual __science__ on this has yet to show this. But please, if you have _hard_ evidence on this topic I would love to see it.

Closest I guess is hiring of juniors is down, but it's possibly just due to a post COVID pullback being credited to AI. I definitely think a lot of junior tasks are being replaced with AI, and companies are deciding it's not worth filling junior roles at least temporarily as a result.

> I definitely think a lot of junior tasks are being replaced with AI

I think team expansion is being reduced as well. If you took a dev team of 5, armed them all with Claude Code + training on where to use it and where not to I think you could get the same productivity as hiring 2 additional FTE software devs. I'm assuming your existing 5 devs fully adopt the tool and not reject it like a bad organ transplant. Maybe an analogy could be the invention of email reducing the need for corporate typing pools and therefore fewer jr. secretaries ( typists) are hired.

/i'm just guessing that being a secretary is in the career progression path of someone in the typing pool but you get the idea.

edit: one thing i missed in my email analogy is that when email was invented it was free and available to anyone that could set up sendmail/*.MTA

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#14

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

fullshark wrote: post #6
contagiousflow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the hard evidence? Edit: What I mean by this is there may be some circumstantial evidence (less hiring for juniors, more AI companies getting VC funding). We currently have no _hard_ evidence that programming has had a substantial speed increase/deskilling from LLMs yet. Any actual __science__ on this has yet to show this. But please, if you have _hard_ evidence on this topic I would love to see it.

Closest I guess is hiring of juniors is down, but it's possibly just due to a post COVID pullback being credited to AI. I definitely think a lot of junior tasks are being replaced with AI, and companies are deciding it's not worth filling junior roles at least temporarily as a result.

I don’t think this is unique to software. Across the US over the past decades there’s been a massive contraction in companies being willing to “train-up” employees. It’s greedy, and it works for their bottom lines. But it’s a tragedy of the commons and a race to the bottom. It also explains the dearth of opportunities for getting into the trades, despite sky-high demand.

If anything, the expectations for an individual developer have never been higher, and now you’re not getting any 22-26 year olds with enough software experience to be anything but a drain on resources when the demand for profitability is yesterday.

Maybe we need to go back to ZIRP if only to get some juniors back on to the training schedule, across all industries.

For other insanely toxic and maladaptive training situations, also see: medicine in the US.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#15

Post by citelao »

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle:

> Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome.

Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game development, web development, maybe app development) is easier than ever? Compare modern languages like Go & Rust to C & C++, simply for their ease-of-compilation and execution. Compare modern C# to early C#, or modern Java to early Java, even.

I'd like to think that our tools have made things easier, even if our software has gotten commensurately more complicated. If they haven't, what's missing? How can we build better tools for ourselves?

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#16

Post by xmprt »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #3

We have hard evidence of it becoming easier every damn day. AI is taking these jobs. The models aren't perfect, but the speed tradeoff is so massive that you really can't say it's "hard" to build anything anymore. Nobody is lying.

If you think of building software as just writing the code then sure AI makes things a lot easier. But if software engineering also includes security, setting up and maintaining infrastructure, choosing the right tradeoffs, understanding how to deal with evolving requirements without ballooning code complexity, etc., then AI struggles with that at the moment.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#18

Post by fastball »

xmprt wrote: post #16
1970-01-01 wrote: post #3

We have hard evidence of it becoming easier every damn day. AI is taking these jobs. The models aren't perfect, but the speed tradeoff is so massive that you really can't say it's "hard" to build anything anymore. Nobody is lying.

If you think of building software as just writing the code then sure AI makes things a lot easier. But if software engineering also includes security, setting up and maintaining infrastructure, choosing the right tradeoffs, understanding how to deal with evolving requirements without ballooning code complexity, etc., then AI struggles with that at the moment.

With infra-as-code, an LLM can also set up and maintain infra. Security is another issue and 100% that still seems to be the biggest footgun with agentic software development, but honestly that is mostly just a prompting/context issue. You can definitely get an LLM to write secure code, it is just arguably not any model's "default".

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#19

Post by drdec »

citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

Maybe the outcome they had in mind was "it helps, but nowhere near 10x"?

Also, I'm not sure anyone was making 10x claims about the tools you cite.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#20

Post by 9rx »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #12
stronglikedan wrote: post #9

Building software is actually so easy that my 8 year old niece can do it. Shipping software is what's hard.

Shipping is easy, shipping stable functional (lets lump in scalable) software on the other hand.

Also easy. The only hard thing found around software is the people.
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