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Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

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Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#281

Post by opsnooperfax »

baalimago wrote: post #6

It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…

I would be more worried about the viability of these business cases. If I see someone crowing about how they vibe coded some service in a weekend and now they expect $X,000,000 in ARR, I just think these type of people are not going to make it. At some point, the customer will realize that there is nothing preventing them from replacing your offering with a few dollars in API fees. Software vendors need to focus on support quality, provide some unique insight, guard proprietary data, or have some economy of scale on the hardware side. Being the first person to write that particular prompt is not a business plan.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#282

Post by borski »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #276
borski wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand art. If art were solely about the outcome, we’d all be staring at photographs instead, as no art will ever have as high fidelity. Art is about the journey of the artist; the meaning with which that art is impregnated is the point. What you cynically refer to as “human-level BS,” others refer to as “the human condition” because we can relate to other humans, and empathy is a thing. It’s okay not to l…

I'm doing no such thing. By invalidating the Monet piece if it is described as AI-generated, art becomes entirely about the creation story. So that moves the bar to telling a convincing story. And LLMs can absolutely do that at the level of those museum placards next to each painting. So if you add an actor to pose as the artist, the art is the performance now. What makes you think I don't like art? Spent 3 hours at…

> I'm doing no such thing. By invalidating the Monet piece if it is described as AI-generated, art becomes entirely about the creation story. So that moves the bar to telling a convincing story.

No. Art isn’t about the “origin story,” but about what it makes you feel. In part, what it makes you feel is due to the fact that it was made by a human, with human emotion and intent, to communicate an idea to the world. AI has no such emotional backing.

> And LLMs can absolutely do that at the level of those museum placards next to each painting. So if you add an actor to pose as the artist, the art is the performance now.

Museum placards are not what make art interesting.

> But I no longer believe people care about empathy. The US wouldn't have elected a grifting performance artist president twice if they valued empathy.

Irrelevant; two things can be true at once. Also, not everyone has empathy, and not everyone likes art.

That’s why most people don’t have art on their walls, but random prints from IKEA.

> We're much more hindbrain-driven than I suspect you think we are.

Many people are! But “people who like art” is a relatively small subset of people, and I maintain that nearly everyone who likes art likes it because it makes them feel something.

Otherwise, there would be no difference between a Picasso and a print from EBay.

People who like art don’t buy NFTs. They buy art made by humans.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#283

Post by logicchains »

kypro wrote: post #97
logicchains wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> orgs of today still trust people and hold people to account >Neither of these are strong moats Having accountable people in key positions is a very important part of running a successful organization. Anthropic and OpenAI are never going to let you sue them when an AI employee makes a mistake; accountability is a strong moat.

You sue bad employees? Most companies just hire someone else? In the future if you can't trust your AI system to perform a function well, you can switch to another. The accountability will be different – instead of an employee being accountable because their income depends on it, a corporation deploying the AI system be accountable because their success depends on it. We already see this today with coding. If you're…

>In the future if you can't trust your AI system to perform a function well, you can switch to another.

All will perform roughly at the same level, just like today. It doesn't matter what provider you switch to, they'll all going to make mistakes because performing at a high human level requires far more business context and domain knowledge than is going to fit in even a few million tokens. Humans have incentive to learn and improve, LLMs lack even the ability to improve, as there's been pretty much zero progress on live learning and it's theoretically impossible for a fully-trained (saturated weights) LLM to learn new things without forgetting old things.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#284

Post by cloverich »

avgDev wrote: post #229
Brendinooo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>e.g. front-end web development It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want. I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more ge…

Codex has been great for me for backend wiring, mapping and creating boiler plate code in C#. However, it seems when I go in to fix things its 60% front-end. Idk, I like AI when it works, but it drives me insane when it keeps making errors. I've had a few errors which I figured out from documentation fairly quickly, provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.

> provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.

The AI is not intelligent. Its really hard to grasp cleanly. But it can't do anything logically like we do. Its pattern matching. It has to be a pattern its seen; then it can assemble them. If there are competing patterns - it'll trip up being consistent. Long established libraries and languages that change the least, it'll be best at. Anything newer it'll be bad at - even with documentation. The only way out is to give it tests, then it can loop over several simpler problems, where the errors (failed tests) match well onto the more basic primitives that don't really change (wrong string, wrong type, wrong structure, etc)

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#285

Post by mbrumlow »

euwuw wrote: post #165
aurareturn wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s already happening. Top tier devs have two ways of earning way more than before: 1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own. 2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more. I…

[flagged]

Your company might fail then. Because I won’t be fighting to work at your company, I’ll just compete with your company and get paid what I deserve.

We already have CEOs is vendors trying to scare people away from vibe coding their contract away, while I diligently vibe code their contract away.

Not much new here as my entire career has been coding away 3rd party contracts, and it’s now easier than ever.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#286

Post by logicchains »

sophiabits wrote: post #222
logicchains wrote: post #22

AI won't be put in important positions of responsibility within an organization because AI providers will never accept liability for bad decisions. You can't fire Claude if it fucks up, and it's got very limited ability to learn from its mistakes. It's also incapable of making good decisions where doing so requires synthesizing more than a few hundred thousand tokens worth of domain knowledge/experience in something…

> You can't fire Claude if it fucks up What's the difference between "firing" Claude vs moving to a model from a different provider? The latter seems very analogous to firing an employee for performance and backfilling with someone new. Re the rest, it's just not my experience that models become incapable of making good decisions in cases where input token count > the context window, but ymmv based on domain. A very…

>What's the difference between "firing" Claude vs moving to a model from a different provider? The latter seems very analogous to firing an employee for performance and backfilling with someone new.

A human may learn and improve to avoid being fired, while Claude is incapable of that.

>Re the rest, it's just not my experience that models become incapable of making good decisions in cases where input token count > the context window, but ymmv based on domain.

If they've been trained a lot on your domain (maths, coding) then they can make good decisions. But I've just started using Mythos and even it makes some awful decisions in domains it's not trained on. Of course the majority of decisions are good, but it only takes a couple bad ones to sink a project.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#287

Post by empath75 »

JimDabell wrote: post #65

We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we becom…

> We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry.

I used to work at an overnight NOC many years ago, and I literally learned bash and python just to save time so I could spend more time watching netflix or whatever instead of working. Instead, my scripts handled so many alerts that they laid off someone and gave me a promotion to being a sys admin :(

I've been chasing the dream of automating my job away and collecting a paycheck for doing nothing for decades now, and I keep getting promoted...

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#288

Post by rambojohnson »

altern8 wrote: post #158
vitally3643 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious. The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized soft…

> I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI People can't be bothered to cook for themselves, and often order crappy, unhealthy food that costs 10 times as much just so they don't have to cook. Now they're going to build their own software every time they think the…

the thing is they won't need to "cook" anymore to get it done. they can just... describe what they want to eat.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#289

Post by rco8786 »

vitally3643 wrote: post #92
JimDabell wrote: post #65

We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we becom…

I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious. The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized soft…

> We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants

You'll need to qualify that statement...

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#290

Post by _diyar »

JimDabell wrote: post #65

We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we becom…

Your argument holds across the supply-curve of software-engineering-skills. However, there must be some threshold where a previously employed dev is now sol because AI+Human outcompetes him (ie the supply curve has shifted, and the point they used to occupy is not unprofitable)
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