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AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

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Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#91

Post by tonyedgecombe »

staticassertion wrote: post #11

> Code Was Never the Hard Part I can't believe this has to be said, but yeah. Code took time, but it was never the hard part. I also think that it is radically understated how much developers contribute to UX and product decisions. We are constantly having to ask "Would users really do that?" because it directly impacts how we design. Product people obviously do this more , but engineers do it as a natural part of th…

>I can't believe this has to be said, but yeah. Code took time, but it was never the hard part.

For you and others here but you only need to look at the number of people who can’t code FizzBuzz to realise there are many who struggle with it.

It’s easy to take your own knowledge for granted. I’ve met a lot of people who know their business inside out but couldn’t translate that knowledge into code.

Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#92

Post by staticassertion »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #91
staticassertion wrote: post #11

> Code Was Never the Hard Part I can't believe this has to be said, but yeah. Code took time, but it was never the hard part. I also think that it is radically understated how much developers contribute to UX and product decisions. We are constantly having to ask "Would users really do that?" because it directly impacts how we design. Product people obviously do this more , but engineers do it as a natural part of th…

>I can't believe this has to be said, but yeah. Code took time, but it was never the hard part. For you and others here but you only need to look at the number of people who can’t code FizzBuzz to realise there are many who struggle with it. It’s easy to take your own knowledge for granted. I’ve met a lot of people who know their business inside out but couldn’t translate that knowledge into code.

I mean, of course not everyone can code. I'm not saying that programming is trivial, or anyone can just naturally write code. What I'm saying is that if you're a full time engineer then some part of your day is spent programming but the difficult work is not encompassed by "how do I write the code to do this?" - sometimes it is, but mostly you think about lots of other things surrounding the code.

Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#93

Post by bensyverson »

RobRivera wrote: post #50
bensyverson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In corporate app development, I would see tests to check that the mocks return the expected values. Like, what are we even doing here?

I'm trying to wrap my head around here. So there are tests that leverage mocks. Those mocks help validate software is performing as desired by enabling tests to see the software behaves as desired in varying contexts. If the software fails, it is because the mocks exposed that under certain inputs, undesired behavior occurs, an assert fails, and a red line flags the test output. Validating that the mocks return the d…

Yeah, seems plausible, or it was just "belt and suspenders." Sure made a lot of pretty green checkmarks.

Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#94

Post by archagon »

tyleo wrote: post #21

I 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.

Except vibe coding is not "engineering," but more akin to project management. Engineering presupposes a deep and thorough understanding of your code. If you ship code that you’ve never even looked at, you are no longer an engineer.

Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#95

Post by staticassertion »

staticassertion wrote: post #88
carlosjobim wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helpful to me and millions of others. Soon to be billions even. You are employed because somewhere in the pipeline there are paying customers. They don't care about unit tests, they care about having their problems solved. Beware of AI.

Right... I mean, no engineer is going to tell you that customers care about unit tests, so I think you're arguing against a straw man here. What engineers will tell you is that bugs cost money, support costs money, etc, and that unit tests are one of the ways we cheaply reduce those costs in order to solve problems, which is what we're in the business of doing. We are all very aware of the fact that customers pay us.…

Yeeesh. Looking at other posts from that user, they seem to have a serious grudge against software devs, presumably for not responding to their emails. "You should starve" - words taken from another post.

Look, no one wanted to write code for you idk what to tell you. Now you can have AI do that for you. Congrats, best of luck. Whatever weird personal issue you have, I doubt anyone was not working for you out of some whatever this perceived snobbery is and it's just like... we all have jobs?

Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#96

Post by carlosjobim »

staticassertion wrote: post #88
carlosjobim wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helpful to me and millions of others. Soon to be billions even. You are employed because somewhere in the pipeline there are paying customers. They don't care about unit tests, they care about having their problems solved. Beware of AI.

Right... I mean, no engineer is going to tell you that customers care about unit tests, so I think you're arguing against a straw man here. What engineers will tell you is that bugs cost money, support costs money, etc, and that unit tests are one of the ways we cheaply reduce those costs in order to solve problems, which is what we're in the business of doing. We are all very aware of the fact that customers pay us.…

What I'm saying is that it's a non-issue for customers if software has good engineering or not, if it fulfills their needs at a price they can pay.

With AI code we might get software that is an ugly mess underneath, but at least we have it. While human programmers are unwilling to provide this software for even a high price.

I could argue that people are better off having nothing to eat rather than having high quality food. But in reality something is better than nothing.

There is a gigantic market and a gigantic need of software in the field between hobbyist and enterprise. And AI code will serve that field. Software engineers like you are the people who can best exploit this market segment, probably by leveraging these new AI tools.

Otherwise more and more people will do like me and have AI make their own bespoke solutions.

Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#97

Post by carlosjobim »

staticassertion wrote: post #95
staticassertion wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right... I mean, no engineer is going to tell you that customers care about unit tests, so I think you're arguing against a straw man here. What engineers will tell you is that bugs cost money, support costs money, etc, and that unit tests are one of the ways we cheaply reduce those costs in order to solve problems, which is what we're in the business of doing. We are all very aware of the fact that customers pay us.…

Yeeesh. Looking at other posts from that user, they seem to have a serious grudge against software devs, presumably for not responding to their emails. "You should starve" - words taken from another post. Look, no one wanted to write code for you idk what to tell you. Now you can have AI do that for you. Congrats, best of luck. Whatever weird personal issue you have, I doubt anyone was not working for you out of some…

I don't have a grudge, but there needs to be some balance. Software devs are incredibly well paid compared to other professionals. It is their responsibility to use their talents to benefit themselves, and if they are out-competed then they should work with something else. They don't have a right to a fantastic career.

All other workers have had to go through this when their fields became more automated and efficient. A cargo ship used to have hundreds of crew, now it's a dozen and the amount of cargo on a ship is ten times more.

So I will absolutely not cry for a software dev who has to make changes in the face of AI competition. If they're too precious to adapt or take a different job, then starve.

> Look, no one wanted to write code for you idk what to tell you. Now you can have AI do that for you. Congrats, best of luck.

Me and hundreds of thousands of other organizations who have software needs that were under served by the market. Now we will have AI write that code for us - or more realistically, now we will purchase this software from any of the thousands of boutique software development shops that will emerge, which use AI + talented human developers to serve us.

I have the strong impression that programmers in many cases have a good deal of snobbery regarding what tasks they are willing to work on. If it's not giant enterprise software, then it's usually just filed under "hobbyist" or open source. Hopefully many programmers will find a well paying career serving less glamorous customers with software that solves real world problems. But many will have to change their attitude if they want to do that.

Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#98

Post by ffsm8 »

retrodaredevil wrote: post #85
ffsm8 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Adding null checks where they aren't needed means adding branching complexity. It means handling cases that may never need to be handled. Doing all that makes it harder to understand "could this variable ever be null?" If you can't answer that question, it is now harder to write code in the future, often leading to even more unnecessary null checks. I've seen legacy code bases during code review where someone will as…

No, the branching complexity exists anyway. You've just made it clearly visible by adding a null check or accept that the computational may fail if violated.

You never know what changes are being done in the future, while today the variable may not be nullable in the scenario you're up-to-date on, that doesn't necessarily mean it'll stay like that in the future.

Ultimately, there is a cost associated with null checks everywhere and another by omitting them. The person I responded to just insinuated that people which introduce copious amounts of null checks are inept and lazy.

In response to that I pointed out that that's literally one of the core tenets of defensive programming, and people that make such sweeping statements about other people's capabilities in this way are very often juniors. I stand by this opinion. You can disagree on specific places were a null check may have been placed unnecessary, but that's always a discussion about a specific field and cannot be generalized like he did there.

Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#99

Post by staticassertion »

carlosjobim wrote: post #97
staticassertion wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeeesh. Looking at other posts from that user, they seem to have a serious grudge against software devs, presumably for not responding to their emails. "You should starve" - words taken from another post. Look, no one wanted to write code for you idk what to tell you. Now you can have AI do that for you. Congrats, best of luck. Whatever weird personal issue you have, I doubt anyone was not working for you out of some…

I don't have a grudge, but there needs to be some balance. Software devs are incredibly well paid compared to other professionals. It is their responsibility to use their talents to benefit themselves, and if they are out-competed then they should work with something else. They don't have a right to a fantastic career. All other workers have had to go through this when their fields became more automated and efficient…

> If they're too precious to adapt or take a different job, then starve.

Yeah I mean I think everyone is with you except for the "then starve", this is just weirdly combative and lacking in empathy, I find it totally strange.

> Me and hundreds of thousands of other organizations who have software needs that were under served by the market.

And... you blame software developers for that? You blame software devs for a lack of capacity in the field? So weird.

> Now we will have AI write that code for us - or more realistically, now we will purchase this software from any of the thousands of boutique software development shops that will emerge, which use AI + talented human developers to serve us.

Okay, I mean, this has always been an option. I guess it will be more of an option now. There have been consulting agencies or "WYSIWYG" editors like Wix or other "low code/ no code" platforms for ages. No one is going to be upset that you're using them. This hostility is totally one sided lol

> I have the strong impression that programmers in many cases have a good deal of snobbery regarding what tasks they are willing to work on.

We like to work on interesting projects... is that surprising? Is that snobbery? I don't get it.

> If it's not giant enterprise software, then it's usually just filed under "hobbyist" or open source.

I find this funny because hobbyist/ open source projects are by far the ones that are glamorized by the field, not enterprise software.

> Hopefully many programmers will find a well paying career serving less glamorous customers with software that solves real world problems. But many will have to change their attitude if they want to do that.

I have no idea where you get this impression from. Most software devs I've worked with are motivated heavily by solving real world problems. I think you have very, very little insight into what software development actually looks like or what software engineers are motivated by. Frankly, this comes off as very much "I was snubbed and now I'm happy that the people who I perceive as having snubbed me will be replaced by AI", which I think is quite lame. You definitely seem to have a resentful tone to your posts that I find weird.

Re: AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier

#100

Post by staticassertion »

carlosjobim wrote: post #96
staticassertion wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right... I mean, no engineer is going to tell you that customers care about unit tests, so I think you're arguing against a straw man here. What engineers will tell you is that bugs cost money, support costs money, etc, and that unit tests are one of the ways we cheaply reduce those costs in order to solve problems, which is what we're in the business of doing. We are all very aware of the fact that customers pay us.…

What I'm saying is that it's a non-issue for customers if software has good engineering or not, if it fulfills their needs at a price they can pay. With AI code we might get software that is an ugly mess underneath, but at least we have it. While human programmers are unwilling to provide this software for even a high price. I could argue that people are better off having nothing to eat rather than having high qualit…

> What I'm saying is that it's a non-issue for customers if software has good engineering or not, if it fulfills their needs at a price they can pay.

You think that good engineering is unrelated to fulfilling needs at a price they pay? I think you're confused. Software engineers are tasked with exactly this problem - determining how to deliver utility at a price point. That's... the whole job. We consider how much it costs to run a database, how to target hardware constraints, how to build software that will scale accordingly as new features are added or new users onboard, etc. That's the job...

That's sort of the whole point of the article. The job isn't "write code", which is what AI does. The job is "understand the customer, understand technology, figure out how to match customer expectations, business constraints, and technologies together in a way that can be maintained at-cost".

> While human programmers are unwilling to provide this software for even a high price.

Sorry, but this is just you whining that people didn't want to work for you. Software engineers obviously are willing to provide software in exchange for money, hence... idk, everyone's jobs.

> And AI code will serve that field.

That may be true, just as no-code solutions have done in the past.

> Software engineers like you are the people who can best exploit this market segment, probably by leveraging these new AI tools.

Yes, I agree.

> Otherwise more and more people will do like me and have AI make their own bespoke solutions.

I'm a bit skeptical of this broadly in the long term but it's certainly the case that some portion of the market will be served by this approach.

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