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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

#21

Post by kazinator »

ericmcer wrote: post #10
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…

They are only good in the context of the engineer guiding them. I really can’t imagine what would happen if I didn’t manually intervene sometimes and just kept prompting it for the new behavior I wanted.

The engineer guiding them only scales to a certain amount of output, complexity and churn.

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

#22

Post by grey-area »

chermi wrote: post #17

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…

Certainly this is the impression true believers have had for at least a year. Nobody seems to have been left in the dust yet though. How odd.

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

#23

Post by [deleted] »

dannyw wrote: post #9
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 agree, and I think what you’re describing is only scratching the surface of what’s possible today. It’s even more powerful with large data and knowledge sources connected. Takes a lot of work to set up effectively, but when connected to Slack _properly_ (not their MCP; but API which is more powerful), a database of your repo’s PRs/comments, data warehouses including analytics/telemetry and logs; and in a strong har…

[deleted]

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

#24

Post by daishi55 »

grey-area wrote: post #22
chermi wrote: post #17

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…

Certainly this is the impression true believers have had for at least a year. Nobody seems to have been left in the dust yet though. How odd.

Sure they have. Massive layoffs throughout the industry.

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

#25

Post by sashank_1509 »

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…

It hasn’t climbed the complexity bar for hard software engineering yet, fable still can’t build a fully functioning C Compiler, I think in the long horizon eval it can sometimes build a C pre-processor (not deterministic) given all the tests and a spec. And given the tests is a big deal, humans actually write the tests on their own while developing btw. Anthropics marketing stunt C compiler doesn’t count (that one didn’t even type check).

Now the thing to claim “a better coder than humans”, is you can’t just stop at making a production grade C Compiler, you then also need to make the leap to make something new that is a definite improvement over everything that existed before it. This is an also a question of taste not just implementation chops. Think Zigs cross platform C Compiler, Rusts memory safety opinionated compiler and more.

The day AI can do both, implement a complex production grade project, and make a conceptual actual improvement upon SOTA is the day I’ll agree AI has become better than humans at coding. I’ve underestimated AI in the past, maybe with 10T of compute they’ll get there, maybe they won’t , we’ll know in the coming years

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

#26

Post by KaiserPro »

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…

> AI is already better than most developers.

My experience, no its not. It just doesn't fight back as much when you tell it that its wrong.

My sister team is vibecoding the shit out of a couple of product PoCs. There is only one person on that team that appears to understand how to vibe code properly. the rest are just producing shite and breaking the service everytime they deploy. However, the code it creates is fine enough, just the architecture is bad, or the prompter is bad.

_however_ the problem with the post is that its using tangential metrics to prove the point. The opensource maintainer bit doesn't always mean that the output is bad, it means that either:

1) the maintainers hate AI

2) the shit they are getting is huge and takes too long to review

3) The shite they are getting solves a specific problem for one user at the expense of everyone else

4) the PR is nonsense.

only one of those options area signal for code quality from LLMs. the rest are about the skill of the creator, or attitude/time budget of the maintainer.

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

#27

Post by joduplessis »

I think, if the bubble pops, LLM assisted coding is here to stay. It's novel & useful enough to offer a real advantage, but can also be misused easily by folks who think software is now "solved" obviously. Either way - the middle ground is the sweet spot, and I think you're probably just looking at the disappearance of the bottom layer: grunt work, templates, straightforward SaaS apps, tooling, utils, etc. Job-wise though, I think juniors & interns are the ones who's caught in the storm unfortunately.

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

#28

Post by woodruffw »

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 generally agree with this. One of the strangest things about LLM driven engineering is holding two seemingly contradictory positions in your head: they’re both better than the median developer, and they’re also much worse at producing artifacts that are comprehensible to humans.

I often find myself throwing away large amounts of LLM driven code not because it’s bad, but because it doesn’t fit within my attention span. The code itself looks very reasonable, passes tests, benchmarks well, etc. But I throw it away because the models don’t yet “explain” their decisions in ways that elicit psychological safety. Humans are still very good at that, even when their engineering is worse.

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

#29

Post by red75prime »

lowsong wrote: post #12
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 comp…

> you've failed to recognise the limitations as the article points out

Fixed weights don't preclude in-context learning and out-of-the-loop weight updates. And that's the only principled limitation mentioned in the post.

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

#30

Post by 31ah8 »

woodruffw wrote: post #28
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 generally agree with this. One of the strangest things about LLM driven engineering is holding two seemingly contradictory positions in your head: they’re both better than the median developer, and they’re also much worse at producing artifacts that are comprehensible to humans. I often find myself throwing away large amounts of LLM driven code not because it’s bad, but because it doesn’t fit within my attention sp…

Yes, we know that Astral has been bought by OpenAI.

Don't use Astral, they want to make you unemployed!

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