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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

#31

Post by 31ah8 »

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 golden era that hasn't produced anything of note yet. More pro-AI advertisements from someone who needs AI crutches.

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

#32

Post by huijzer »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #16
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…

> but a swarm of cowboy coder agents will get you to a legacy codebase very very quickly.

You mean “a codebase of high technical debt” I think

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

#33

Post by ma2kx »

I really want to agree but the arguments he brings up make that extremely hard

> Also, it seems that many don’t want to learn but instead expect to have all understanding outsourced to LLMs. Many seniors have noticed this and have stopped teaching juniors as the seniors don’t like the feeling of having their time wasted by teaching people who don’t want to learn.

Or may be it is because now a junior dev is expected to deliver to output of a senior?

> Also stop saying “please” to an LLM. It does not have any feelings.

Yes, but I still prefer a nice tone. Like why should I change my manners just because it has no feelings? If anything the statistic predicts a friendlier answer when I say "please".

> Again, I recommend people try running small LLMs locally where temperature and other settings are fully exposed and configurable to see this themselves. It is a good antidote to falling for the illusion that LLMs would actually be intelligent.

It's like recommending someone to buy the cheapest Lenovo Thinkpad to prove that Lenovo sucks.

> However, the best models still have a pass rate of only about 50% on the Humanity’s Last Exam.

Haha, as if he (or really most people) even would understand 50% of those questions. I find it rather mind blowing that it's possible to put such diverse knowledge into a couple of TB. Or may be I'm just an idiot and it's common knowledge, "how many paired tendons are supported by the sesamoid bone of hummingbirds within Apodiformes".

> LLMs are not a scam, but a useful tool and technology that has its uses. But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true

He's not wrong that LLMs are just useful tools but isn't it the purpose of a tool to surpass human capabilities and efficiency? Like even a bicycle makes traveling more efficient than just walking and a car has the capability to transport more items than any human. And its know more than two decades since computer surpassed human capabilities in chess. If a tool is neither more capable nor efficient, it's just a useless tool.

I mean I get his point that GenAI is to some degree over hyped but his arguments just dont hold in my opinion.

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

#34

Post by budman1 »

preommr wrote: post #8

This conversation again? They go nowhere because people are using wildly different definitions and contexts. There's one already in here about how ai is better than humans at coding. - Yes llms are better at the mechanics of coding - no they're not good enough for overall software dev. - yes, this stuff should've been automated years ago in frameworks and in libs, or through sane programming langs that dealt with mem…

"this stuff should've been automated years ago in frameworks and in libs, or through sane programming langs that dealt with memory and logic flow better."

70 years of working on the 'how do I reuse code?'. And the solution just takes all the electricity in the world.

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

#35

Post by ma2kx »

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.

A tool can only be as good as the person who use it.

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

#36

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> Leverage your knowledge of systems, software engineering and product design and you can be living in a golden era for software development.

For a short while, maybe. If an LLM can keep track of a 500KSLoC codebase, it's gonna easily replace systems knowledge workers, software designers and product designers.

None of systems knowledge, software engineering and product design is a moat against this.

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

#37

Post by david-gpu »

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…

My experience is the same. That is why I write technical specifications for the LLM to follow, and treat the actual code they generate in the same way I treat the assembly produced by a compiler: a black box I rarely peek into.

If the code passes the (extensive) tests, I don't need to read or understand it. That said, I retired before LLMs became popular, so my experience is limited to vibe coding at home.

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

#38

Post by dcanelhas »

On the "Stop saying please" part. I personally like to use polite language, as an exercise. According to this one paper on arxiv, toxic behavior gets better accuracy

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950

It was published a while ago. But I wonder if it still holds true today.

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

#39

Post by ma2kx »

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…

It's the same with any tool. You can buy the most expensive drill but if its used by an inexperienced worker, the only result will be more wrong drilled holes.

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

#40

Post by cryzinger »

preommr wrote: post #8

This conversation again? They go nowhere because people are using wildly different definitions and contexts. There's one already in here about how ai is better than humans at coding. - Yes llms are better at the mechanics of coding - no they're not good enough for overall software dev. - yes, this stuff should've been automated years ago in frameworks and in libs, or through sane programming langs that dealt with mem…

I'm biased, being a software technical writer and not a dev, but at least from my side of the fence I think LLMs are no better at generating docs than they are at generating code, and might actually be way worse :)

My devs keep throwing Claude-generated writeups at me that look okay at first glance but fall apart when you actually try to follow the instructions they lay out (which makes them useless for anyone who's not already familiar with the product or feature they're describing), and/or have major structural and logical gaps, and/or gloss over messy details in a way that makes the product or feature sound better but doesn't reflect the reality of what we actually built.

Which turns into an ironic ouroboros where I then have to punch my own queries into an LLM and ask it to read our codebase, compare those details against the original writeup, try to decipher what the hell it was trying to say, etc. And even that turns into an extended back-and-forth where my LLM is like "The original writeup is inaccurate; it should say X" and I'm like "Are you sure? That contradicts what I know about related concept Y", and then the LLM is like "Good point, I dug into it more and the real answer is Z." (And even then, god only knows if Z is correct. I still have to get real developer eyeballs on anything before it goes live.)

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