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The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

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Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#11

Post by pipes »

slowin wrote: post #3

I think this post (and the OSS projects that he mentions that ban AI) are very reactionary. > But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true AI is already better than most developers. I'm not sure what alternative reality people are remembering, but human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code. I think the average PR from…

I've been really struggling to get AI to write good quality c# code, or to be precise, what I see as good quality. I'm in two minds on if it matters or not.

On one hand I think, I want to be proud of it, I want to be able to explain it, if it breaks I want to be able to figure out why.

On the other hand, AI can do all of that with badly written code, so who cares.

Edit: however, it still feels like an amazing power tool, but it has taken me months to figure out how to use it.

I have the opposite experience of everyone else I follow online, I find it terrible at green field and great at brownfield. Green field it makes horrible choices as it has nothing to follow.

I'm in no way a very good programmer, or very smart, but the code I saw most of my co-workers writing was about the same quality as AI, not very good.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#12

Post by lowsong »

slowin wrote: post #3

I think this post (and the OSS projects that he mentions that ban AI) are very reactionary. > But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true AI is already better than most developers. I'm not sure what alternative reality people are remembering, but human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code. I think the average PR from…

> ... you can be living in a golden era for software development.

Let's assume for a moment that you're correct. That AI is already better than most developers, for whatever definition of "better" you like, and they will very soon be better than any person. (I think this is a total fantasy and you've failed to recognise the limitations as the article points out, but I digress.)

In that case the end goal of these companies is to replace all software engineers. Do you not see that? They've not been hiding this fact. It's a good thing for you and I that these models don't work, because if they did the "golden age" is not coming for us, it's coming for people who own compute capacity and the rest of us will become labourers.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#13

Post by polotics »

slowin wrote: post #3

I think this post (and the OSS projects that he mentions that ban AI) are very reactionary. > But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true AI is already better than most developers. I'm not sure what alternative reality people are remembering, but human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code. I think the average PR from…

I kind of agree that the post is a bit too far away from the trenches to be able to claim it will reveal "software engineering reality".

From where I snipe, I see a big divide between those...

1) that try to surrender to AI, aiming to fully replace value-added intellectual effort and often also to augment enterprise value-mask slop busywork...

...they fail, and succeed, and the collective suffers.

2) those that ride AI to get more challenged, more feedback if any kind, to tread further but with attention to the right details

...they succeed

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#14

Post by polotics »

handoflixue wrote: post #5
slowin wrote: post #3

I think this post (and the OSS projects that he mentions that ban AI) are very reactionary. > But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true AI is already better than most developers. I'm not sure what alternative reality people are remembering, but human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code. I think the average PR from…

Yeah, it's a bit absurd. There's so many empirically measured benchmarks where LLMs clearly exceed human capabilities and efficiencies!

Make your own benchmark on your own work, keep them to yourself. Try one typical not completely unambiguous spec document like you're likely to have seen. See if the AI asks the right questions, and how it navigates its unknown unknowns.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#15

Post by lowsong »

digitcatphd wrote: post #6

First, I don’t think it’s widely accepted financial markets are in an AI bubble or there is actually any evidence to support this, most market cap growth is supported by real earnings per share. It is debatable how long that will continue and if it is sustainable, but that isn’t a bubble it’s a cycle. Even the most skeptical investors to bubbles like Buffet and Burry, have large stakes in Google and Microsoft, front…

> I don’t think it’s widely accepted financial markets are in an AI bubble or there is actually any evidence to support this

It's widely reported on and discussed. You'll find plenty of people saying it isn't one, but I'm sure you can find an economist willing to take any position you like if you look hard enough. Not to mention everyone who's financially incentivised to continue to claim that there isn't a bubble.

> Even the most skeptical investors to bubbles like Buffet and Burry, have large stakes in Google and Microsoft, front line bets on AI.

Burry has been warning about an AI bubble for years.

> There is essentially nothing magical about being human. Our primitive brains were trained on logic, reasoning and processes. An LLM is simply this on less efficient hardware, but, improving at a speed faster than human evolution.

There is no basis for this claim. There is no evidence that human brains and the process of evolution that led to modern humans is at all similar to how LLMs function. If you're going to evaluate an LLM then evaluate an LLM, you can't say "Humans can do X, LLMs are like humans, therefore LLMs can/will do X" because there is no evidence to connect them.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#16

Post by datadrivenangel »

slowin wrote: post #3

I think this post (and the OSS projects that he mentions that ban AI) are very reactionary. > But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true AI is already better than most developers. I'm not sure what alternative reality people are remembering, but human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code. I think the average PR from…

The problem is that skill at coding is not exactly the same thing as skill at developing and maintaining software, and AI can help there as well, but a swarm of cowboy coder agents will get you to a legacy codebase very very quickly.

And even if the AI is better than most humans, the speed means that you get more defects and issues! If a human developer has a change failure rate of say 10%, (1 in 10 changes causes a defect or issue), and AI is twice as good and only introduces bugs 5% of the time, but submits 10x as many changes, then you go from 1 bug per unit of time to 5 bugs per unit of time, so your velocity is up 10x but your defect rate is up 5x...

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#17

Post by chermi »

Exactly the post you'd expect at this stage in the technology adoption and hype cycle. People got over hyped not understanding how technology and technology adaption works. Then they get a bunch of like 6-12 month lagging indicators further convincing them of the worse. Right when they become most certain the technology is useless is precisely when the people that have adopted it and truly understand it leave them in the dust. There's gotta be a name for it?

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#19

Post by kazinator »

slowin wrote: post #3

I think this post (and the OSS projects that he mentions that ban AI) are very reactionary. > But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true AI is already better than most developers. I'm not sure what alternative reality people are remembering, but human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code. I think the average PR from…

> human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code.

They are better when copying and pasting expert code, even when they don't understand it.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#20

Post by bsenftner »

lowsong wrote: post #15
digitcatphd wrote: post #6

First, I don’t think it’s widely accepted financial markets are in an AI bubble or there is actually any evidence to support this, most market cap growth is supported by real earnings per share. It is debatable how long that will continue and if it is sustainable, but that isn’t a bubble it’s a cycle. Even the most skeptical investors to bubbles like Buffet and Burry, have large stakes in Google and Microsoft, front…

> I don’t think it’s widely accepted financial markets are in an AI bubble or there is actually any evidence to support this It's widely reported on and discussed. You'll find plenty of people saying it isn't one, but I'm sure you can find an economist willing to take any position you like if you look hard enough. Not to mention everyone who's financially incentivised to continue to claim that there isn't a bubble. >…

> It's widely reported on and discussed. You'll find plenty of people saying it isn't one, but I'm sure you can find an economist willing to take any position you like if you look hard enough. Not to mention everyone who's financially incentivised to continue to claim that there isn't a bubble.

Our media is a weaponized crap factory. There is literally nothing but propaganda and insider knowledge. You're network is how you survive today, mass media and social media and anyone that uses these medias as guidance is weaponized against their own interests. Your own critical analysis, secondary considerations, knowledge of real factual history, and your effective communications skills are how you survive. Not by listening to others and their parrot echo of some media propaganda trying to control the narrative.

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