[flagged]
AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
71–80 of 119 posts
Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
#72I disagree with the premise. It made all engineering easier. Bad and good. I believe vibe coding has always existed. I've known people at every company who add copious null checks rather than understanding things and fixing them properly. All we see now is copious null checks at scale. On the other hand, I've also seen excellent engineering amplified and features built by experts in days which would have taken weeks.
> Ive known people at every company who add copious null checks rather than understanding things and fixing them properly.
ynow "defensive programming" is a thing, yeah? Sorry mate, but that statement I'd expect from juniors, which are also often the one's claiming their own technical superiority over others
Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
#73100%. There are cases where a unit test or a hundred aren’t sufficient to demonstrate a piece of code is correct. Most software developers don’t seem to know what is sufficient. Those heavily using vibe coding even get the machine to write their tests. Then you get to systems design. What global safety and temporal invariants are necessary to ensure the design is correct? Most developers can’t do more than draw boxes…
I don't have any idea of what a unit test is, but with AI I can make programs that help me immensely in my real world job.
Snobby programmers would never even return an email offering money for their services.
Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
#74"AI" (and calling it that is a stretch) is nothing more than a nail gun. If you gave an experienced house framer a hammer, hand saw and box of nails and a random person off the street a nail gun and powered saw who is going to produce the better house? A confident AI and an unskilled human are just a Dunning-Kruger multiplier.
Nicely put. There's this mistake Engineers make when using LLMs and loudly proclaiming its coming for their jobs / is magic... you have a lot of knowledge, experience and skill implicitly that allows for you to get the LLM to produce what you want. Without it... you produce crappy stuff that is inevitably going to get mangled and crushed. As we are seeing with Vibe code projects created by people with no exposure to…
> As we are seeing with Vibe code projects created by people with no exposure to proper Software Engineering.
And I keep seeing products and projects banning AI: "My new house fell down because of the nail gun used, therefore I'm banning nail guns going forward." I understand and sympathize with maintainers and owners and the pressure they are under, but the limitation is going to look ridiculous as we see more progress with the tools.
There are whole categories of problems that were creating that we have no solutions for at present: it isn't a crisis it's an opportunity.
Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
#75100%. There are cases where a unit test or a hundred aren’t sufficient to demonstrate a piece of code is correct. Most software developers don’t seem to know what is sufficient. Those heavily using vibe coding even get the machine to write their tests. Then you get to systems design. What global safety and temporal invariants are necessary to ensure the design is correct? Most developers can’t do more than draw boxes…
I don't have any idea of what a unit test is, but with AI I can make programs that help me immensely in my real world job. Snobby programmers would never even return an email offering money for their services.
It's unclear what point you're even trying to make, other than that AI has been helpful to you. But surely you understand that if you don't know what a unit test is you're probably not in a position to comment on the value of unit testing.
> Snobby programmers would never even return an email offering money for their services.
Why the would they? I don't respond to the vast majority of emails, and I'm already employed.
Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
#76> and ensuring that the system remains understandable as it grows in complexity. Feel like only people like this guy, with 4 decades of experience, understand the importance of this.
Understandable as always a proxy for predictable.
Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
#77"Coding was never the hard part. Typing syntax into a machine has always been the least interesting part of building a system." and I think these people are benefitting from it the most, people with expertise, who know their way around and knew what and how to build but did not want to do the grunt work
Hm. People that know what they are doing prefer to do it themselves. This is not a new thing, not because of llms, but it is how it was always. People that knows more, have heavier opinions. Given the option of accepting new code and new functionality, often, people that knows what they are doing would reject code that functions fine, but fails expectations.
I think who's benefiting the most are people that said that syntax was the least interesting parts but could not program for shit.
Typing into a machine is not the least interesting part. It is the only interesting part. Everything else is a fairy tale
Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
#78[flagged]
Exactly, a large portion of software development was rejecting code from a intellectually functional human being.
AGI is not sufficient to achieve minimum quality code because intelligence was never sufficient
Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
#79> Every few years a new tool appears and someone declares that the difficult parts of software engineering have finally been solved, or eliminated. To some it looks convincing. Productivity spikes. Demos look impressive. The industry congratulates itself on a breakthrough. Staff reductions kick in in the hopes that the market will respond positively. As a software engineer, I'd love if the industry had an actual brea…
You can work with something else if there's no longer any demand for your current skills. If you refuse you should starve.
Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the article exaggerates to make a point. Yes, good engineering can also be assisted with LLM-based agents, but there is a delta. Good engineering requires that you still pay attention to the result produced by the agent(s). Bad engineering might skip over that part. Therefore, via Amdahl's law, LLM-based agents overall provide more acceleration to bad engineering than they do to good engineering.
The connection to Amdahl's law is totally on point. If you're just using LLMs as a faster way to get _your_ ideas down, but still want to ensure you validate and understand the output, you won't get the mythical 10x improvement so many seem to claim they're getting. And if you do want that 10x speedup, you have to forego the validation and understanding.
I do agree with you, but don't underestimate the projects where you can actually apply this 10x. For example, I wanted to get some analytics out of my database. What would have been a full weekend project was now done in an hour. So for such things there is a huge speed boost.
But once software becomes bigger and more complex, the LLM starts messing up, and the expert has to come in. That basicaly means your months project cannot be done in a week.
My personal prediction: plugins and systems that support plugins will become important. Because a plugin can be written at 10x speed. The system itself, not so much.