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There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

jacob.gold

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Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#101

Post by lelanthran »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #53
gentooflux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The agents are like ants, and ants build like crazy until the resources run out in winter. AI winter is going to be interesting, to say the least.

There will, at some point, be a capex winter. Companies are splurging on a huge buildout and aren't going to buy GPUs at this rate forever. That does not mean we're all going back to artisanally hand-crafting software. That's never going to happen.

Not sure what they are doing with the GPUs anyway, nvidia is on track to produce more GPUs than can be physically used, because the DCs don't exist, and won't for another 18 months, and the power plants needed likewise don't exist.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#102

Post by lelanthran »

jatora wrote: post #32
gentooflux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The agents are like ants, and ants build like crazy until the resources run out in winter. AI winter is going to be interesting, to say the least.

Continual gains that have not stopped and there is clearly much gain to be had even if model intelligence stopped scaling. I find it borderline nasty how so many people are positively hoping for a bubble to pop or an AI winter to come so that they can feel like they can cope with the evolving world...despite all evidence to the contrary that any of these things will happen very soon at all.

Speak to young folk. My numerous nieces and nephews use ChatGPT all the time and yet they still hate it.

They are contemplating a lifetime of devalued skills, because they can see that prompting a model is an unskilled task.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#103

Post by lucianbr »

layoric wrote: post #57

> If you have a large monolithic service where every change has to be coordinated carefully.. Microservices are WAY harder to coordinate for deployments. You end up with feature service dependencies, and you are back to the same coordination, but now harder to discover down stream dependencies..

I think microservices are supposed to be easier to deploy independently, that's the whole point. And if they are not, it means you're just doing it wrong.

But in truth, all the projects with microservices I have seen in real life had deployment coordination problems, and looked to me like distributed monoliths. So maybe it's a 'no true scotsman' thing. Maybe they are always, or at least most of the time, harder.

Makes it harder to justify using them.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#104

Post by tokioyoyo »

whatever1 wrote: post #62

Wait two years until we have sufficient churn of senior talent in the teams. Then all of the services will have outages daily. Only the seniors who know their systems are keeping the lights on today by keeping bs commits out. Once they burnout and quit, nobody will have a freaking clue what the LLMs have done and why services are down.

This argument comes up during every big layoff season. A good chunk of people pronounced Twitter dead when it got bought out. But software nowadays is pretty stable, despite its perceived jankiness.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#105

Post by RealityVoid »

anonzzzies wrote: post #98
thothless wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're living in a corporate bubble, drowning in the kool-aid, along with half this forum.

You are saying programming IS going to go back to what it was? If yes, great! But how exactly? Why would anyone do that and why would companies want that?

I think Op did not claime that "programming is going back to what it was" because even the point we should be going back to is not agreed where it should be. It's a profession always in flux.

On the other hand, "you're a prompt engineer or you're fired" just reeks of psychosis. Things will change, they will never be the same, perhaps the profession will contract. But there sure as hell will still be people thinking deeply about their code and crafting it.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#106

Post by d--b »

kstenerud wrote: post #13

Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product. Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been repl…

It doesnt sound good at all!

10 people generating 800 commits a day is completely stupid.

I mean at this stage people don’t even know what they’re building anymore. They’ll burn through their backlog faster than the backlog can be filled.

Or maybe they spend 700 commits fixing the issues generated by the first 100?

This doesn’t make any sense to me

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#107

Post by brabel »

thothless wrote: post #94
echelon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not going to get your old job back. You're a prompt engineer or you're fired. Programming will never go back to what it was before 2026.

You're living in a corporate bubble, drowning in the kool-aid, along with half this forum.

[dead]

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#109

Post by mitjam »

lelanthran wrote: post #101
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will, at some point, be a capex winter. Companies are splurging on a huge buildout and aren't going to buy GPUs at this rate forever. That does not mean we're all going back to artisanally hand-crafting software. That's never going to happen.

Not sure what they are doing with the GPUs anyway, nvidia is on track to produce more GPUs than can be physically used, because the DCs don't exist, and won't for another 18 months, and the power plants needed likewise don't exist.

It’s like De Beers: control supply to control the price.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#110

Post by eloisius »

echelon wrote: post #63
zx8080 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but programming is never going back to normal. Are you telling it's shit now? I'm just curious.

You're not going to get your old job back. You're a prompt engineer or you're fired. Programming will never go back to what it was before 2026.

If the job is now being a promoter, how can you not see that it’s a low skill, low pay job anyway? There are a billion capable promoters in LCOL countries that can prompt as good as someone in the Bay. Might not be worth stressing so hard to be a promptmaxxer. Could just become a bus driver or some other skilled profession if you want to keep earning a living.
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