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The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.
Until a year ago I believed as the author did. Then LLMs got to the point where they sit in meetings like I do, make notes like I do, have a memory like I do, and their context window is expanding. Only issue I saw after a month of building something complex from scratch with Opus 4.6 is poor adherence to high-level design principles and consistency. This can be solved with expert guardrails, I believe. It won’t be l…
That’s a bit… handwavy…!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers- they can now make their own tools. What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers
Terrible argument. They always could learn and DIY.
Yeah but this time it's for real. All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace. AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be ambiguous a…
A manager is not going to handle all the nitty gritty details, that an engineer knows, fine say, they can ask a LLM to make a web portal. Does he know about SQL injection? XSS? Maybe he knows slightly about security stuffs and asks the LLM to make a secure site with all the protection needed. But how the manager knows it works at all? If you figure out there's a issue with your critical part of the software, after yo…
- Software engineering is a cost center, they are middlemen between the C-level ideas and a finished product.
- Software engineering is about figuring out how to automate a problem, exploring the domain, defining context, tradeoffs, and unlocking new capabilities in the process
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This is not my experience with claude code. It does forget big picture things but if you scope your changes well it’s fine.
I would estimate that out of every 200 lines of code that Claude Code produces, I notice at least 1 issue that would cause severe problems in production. In my opinion these discussions should include MREs (minimal reproducible examples) in the form of prompts to ground the discussion. For example, take this prompt and put it into Claude Code, can you see the problematic ways it is handling transactions? --- The invo…
I'd say that the article left out Software Reuse - talked a lot more about in the late 90's early 00's than now. You could argue that coding with LLM's is a form of software reuse, that removes some of its disadvantages.
Which includes this excellent line:
> Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available per computer is shrinking so fast that most computers in the future will have to work at least in part without programmers.
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Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect. Democracy is about governance, not access. A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.
>Democracy is about governance, not access. It can be about both meanings. The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries: https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesaur... https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:tex...
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Endgame is to produce AI which will not need any supervision by the time the current generation of experienced developers will retire or even sooner. I don’t know if it will happen but many bet on this and models are still improving, flattening is not yet seen.
This implies programming is done and there will be no other advancements. And flattening is being seen, no? Recent advancements are mostly from RL’ing, which has limitations (and tradeoffs) too. Are there more tricks after that?
I mean, maybe you can just keep an eye on what people are using the tools for and then monkey patch your way to sufficiently agi. I'll believe it when we're all begging outside the data centers for bread.
[Based on other history of science and technology advancements since the stone ages, I would place agi at 200-500 years out at least. You have to wait decades after a new toy is released for everyone to realize everything they knew was wrong and then the academics get to work then everyone gets complacent then new accidental discovery produces a new toy etc.]