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

jacob.gold

151–160 of 183 posts

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

#151
post #43
post #3

I'm a 1 person dev team who wrote frontend code that outperforms React. Is was successful because I didn't use any sort of LLM assistance.

That's pretty impressive. I always like bespoke web utilities tailored for specific dev purposes. What approach are you taking? I'm about to start a mithril.js project, was always under the impression it was the most efficient approach. Are you doing something similar or different or are you referring to WASM?

I use web components with a render function to generate HTML and templates to provide fine-grained reactivity. Targeted re-rendering of items with relevant state changes makes performance significantly faster and also makes forms easier to write.

Here is an example of a template used to render a list of events.

const EventItem = () => {

  EventItem.eventTime = (eventData) =>{
    if(eventData.isRecurring){
     return `${eventData.dayOfWeek}s at ${eventData.nextEventTime}`;
    }
    return `${eventData.nextEventDate} at ${eventData.nextEventTime}`
  }

  EventItem.url = (eventData) => {
    return `/html/groups/event.html?id=${eventData.eventId}&groupId=${eventData.groupId}`
  }

  EventItem.location = (eventData)=>{
    return  `${convertLocationDataForDisplay(eventData.eventLocation)}`
  }
    
  return `
    
      
       
       
       
       
        
      
   `;
 }

 BaseDynamicComponent.defineTemplate(EventItem,"EventItem");
This is how the template is used in a component.

  

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you must have heard the wrong thing. Oh well. You can't communicate with everyone.

Then please help me understand, it is entirely possible that I misunderstood you, but you are not clarifying your point.

You were happy with your interpretation before. Perhaps that's sufficient?

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

#153
post #108

I hope people don't call automations as "teams". If you are calling it a team just because it "does" work, then CPU cores and threads are also a team, though not so probabilistic (intelligent). They do get the work done.

I want to agree with the sentiment. Then again, OpenMP has in fact used the term "team" in the this kind of sense for a long time.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

The models got good at this seven months ago.

Your hypothesis that your job is secure because the models hit a ceiling is based on seven months of observational history.

We've been watching the models get progressively better for years now. It's not going to stop in place.

In some amount of time from now, these models will absolutely require less hand holding.

It's as though everyone with your perspective isn't looking at the overall trend line. You're laser focused on just these last few months.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think this is actually true, though. In fact, I believe the opposite. My experience with LLM assisted coding is that I need a technical hand on the steering wheel to get something workable out it. Otherwise, what comes out is a brittle, non-functional mess that only in the most tenuous way resembles what I had in mind. The job was never to type the code out. The job was always to take a problem in the real wo…

> Software engineers know system design

And the models won't ever learn distributed systems?

You're basing your assumptions on the current status quo. The models only started getting useful in December, and so we just assume that's where progress ends?

The models are coming for all aspects of software. Schema design, distributed systems, SRE, ... They're not going to stop getting better. Especially when so much value creation and cost cutting is possible.

You assume the contraction of software engineering has peaked. I'm saying it's only getting started.

The skills we have aren't special or particularly hard. They're just boring and mundane enough that they're only attractive to a certain subset of the population. Most people would die if they sat in front of a computer for as long as we do. The demand for our skills has outstripped the labor pool. That's why we've been highly compensated, not because what we do is difficult.

The march of progress will continue, and it's a good thing. It might hurt us to no longer have in demand skills, but the world will be better off as a whole.

The important thing will be knowing what to build and how to market it. That's a totally different skill.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they're really good at adding more code to reduce complexity. In particular Claude is absolutely bonkers at the moment. I am having trouble taking this seriously especially because you mentioned Claude. Have you looked at anything it's done?

I use Claude model=fable effort=high to write most of my initial plans, especially the hard things like re-architecture. I recommend putting time into figuring out the "soft infrastructure" of your projects, usually things you've never been arsed to do in your life (like me until this year). Start with a docs/*.md folder that you link to from AGENTS.md where you can document things that would be important for you, an…

Great advice and PoV. One nit: I recommend against the filename "DESIGN.md" for architectural invariants, in light of the emerging use of that filename for UI / design system / CSS tokens (colors, fonts, typography, etc).

See https://designmd.ai/ for examples.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

The models got good at this seven months ago. Your hypothesis that your job is secure because the models hit a ceiling is based on seven months of observational history. We've been watching the models get progressively better for years now. It's not going to stop in place. In some amount of time from now, these models will absolutely require less hand holding. It's as though everyone with your perspective isn't looki…

And if it comes, it comes. I have no doubt a model can be as good or better than humans. I don't think humans are the peak of possibly. I just don't think the current crop of models will get there. And I do not think fast takeoff will happen. In the meantime, I keel hearing psychotic chants of "don't even read the code anymore, bro!" While the code these things output is severely lacking. At this point, it _is_ cool-aid.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, AI is good at following invariants and adversarially policing the system to pay back debt. The latter is too expensive for humans as a project grows. Right now you can open Claude Code in your project and prompt it "start a workflow that fans out subagents, each with a narrow scope, to look for {simplifications, correctness by construction opportunities, } ranked by impact vs confidence, and then c…

Are they? Because my experience is they’re really, really bad at following them and as context grows they get worse at following them.

I think probably something like 90% of developers are web developers doing some kind of web app that uses some remote API provided by someone else.

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

#159
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who is it reducing qol for? I get that SWE get far higher benefit than maybe everyone else, but who is it actively reducing QoL for?

additional to the great examples already given, anyone in residential proximity to a compute centre is recieving noise + environment pollution. resultant destruction of sleep and air/water quality is massively detrimental to qol. the joes who net benefit from ai detriments seem to live far away from the consequences. I shall ask another way, how do the average joe's ai benefits outweigh his ai detriments?

Data center complaints existed long before AI. The stories you read about neighborhood issues are by and large for pre-existing data centers. This is not an AI issue

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

#160
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who is it reducing qol for? I get that SWE get far higher benefit than maybe everyone else, but who is it actively reducing QoL for?

As a software engineer I don't think my quality of life has been improved - I now get gigantic patches to review (and I know the people writing them haven't reviewed or tested their own patches so even worse) and my tester is now drowning in big garbage patches that are taking longer to test, so my work isn't progressing either.

Yikes. Sounds like your workflow needs a ton of work if your SWE QoL hasnt improved. that's pretty wild that youd not be optimizing
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