And yes, there is also another sane and rewarding option: write everything just by youserlf without any assistance. Let's not forget about that one, shall we?
The AI Situation in Software Development
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: The AI Situation in Software Development
#42One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…
I found it follows conventions and documentation well. So if you have a well designed core, it can easily add independent features without increasing overall complexity. Maybe it doesn't work in some very tangled domains like games, but some basic crud and saas stuff is pretty much a solved problem now with agents. They will trivially add features that humans would have pushed to a backlog forever as not worth the effort.
Re: The AI Situation in Software Development
#43One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…
I found it follows conventions and documentation well. So if you have a well designed core, it can easily add independent features without increasing overall complexity. Maybe it doesn't work in some very tangled domains like games, but some basic crud and saas stuff is pretty much a solved problem now with agents. They will trivially add features that humans would have pushed to a backlog forever as not worth the ef…
Yes, for simple "leaf level" features where there are no big architectural trade-offs to make, AI works well.
Re: The AI Situation in Software Development
#44One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…
I feel this mostly is a side effect from lack of domain knowledge. Most of the time this has happened to me, it's because I myself did not cleanly know how a problem should be solved to begin with. If you have a clear picture of what you want, approximately what syntax goes where and why, thats really when LLMs shine in my experience.
Re: The AI Situation in Software Development
#45One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…
If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. Recently I asked Claude (Fable) to use multiple threads to speed up a computation that could take several seconds to run while the user was waiting. Instead, it found a way to start the computation earlier in the background while the user was doing other thin…
Yes, at the tactical level, AI is able to find better alternatives.
Re: The AI Situation in Software Development
#46About "implementing by words bit": I don't believe English is a great language to program. It's not type-safe, not object oriented, not functional. Has poor tools to highlight syntax or navigate through "wordbase", doesn't fail fast. It has no tests and has too large room for machine or other humans to interpret it. Very often it's easier for me to express my thoughts in Java, which is ironically known to be a "wordy…
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Re: The AI Situation in Software Development
#47One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…
I found it follows conventions and documentation well. So if you have a well designed core, it can easily add independent features without increasing overall complexity. Maybe it doesn't work in some very tangled domains like games, but some basic crud and saas stuff is pretty much a solved problem now with agents. They will trivially add features that humans would have pushed to a backlog forever as not worth the ef…
> They will trivially add features that humans would have pushed to a backlog forever as not worth the effort.
More features is always good, right? Let's build dropbox+gmail+netlify+spotify+youtube+hackernews+... \s
Re: The AI Situation in Software Development
#48It's kind of like folks wielding gen ai and calling themselves artists. Questionable output, generally shunned by artisans. But possibly good enough for some.
Artists are biased when evaluating AI art (same with programmers evaluating AI code).
Re: The AI Situation in Software Development
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no such thing as "junior level algorithm". And one does not memorize algorithms.
bubblesort has entered the chat
Better example, leetcode interviews became so popular because people were memorizing FizzBuzz and they needed an alternative (but said interviewers didn't fully understand the purpose of FizzBuzz and though "harder means better, right?").
Re: The AI Situation in Software Development
#50It's kind of like folks wielding gen ai and calling themselves artists. Questionable output, generally shunned by artisans. But possibly good enough for some.
Artists are biased when evaluating AI art (same with programmers evaluating AI code).
I'm not so sure. I think it's fair to say that only people who can output good art / code are qualified to evaluate the output of ai.
It's like how product people / C levels have absolutely no understanding of what makes for good code or a good engineering shop (aside from perceived costs.)