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The Future of AI Software Development

martinfowler.com

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Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#101

Post by 3vidence »

skydhash wrote: post #97
noelsusman wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing a lot of skeptics aren't grappling with. Software engineering as a profession is mostly about building software that can operate at scale. If you remove scale from the equation then you can remove a massive chunk of the complexity required to build useful software. There are a ton of recipe management apps out there, and all of them are more complex than I really need. They have to be, because other…

A lot of people don’t care about software other than the fact that the ones they use work well. They don’t want to create it, to maintain it, or to upgrade it. That’s what the IT department is for.

This seems like a big HN / VC bubble thing thinking that average people are interested in software at all... they really aren't.

People want to open Netflix / YT / TikTok, open instagram, scroll reddit, take pictures, order stuff online, etc. Then professionals in fields want to read / write emails, open drawings, CADs, do tax returns, etc.

If anything overall interest in software seems to be going down for the average person compared to 2010s. I feel like most of the above normal people are going to stop using in favor of LLMs. LLMs certainly do compete with Googling for regular people though and writing emails.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#102

Post by nerevarthelame »

anthonypasq wrote: post #18

What is up with all this nonsense about token subsidies? Dario in his recent interview with Dwarkesh made it abundantly clear that they have substantial inference margins, and they use that to justify the financing for the next training run. Chinese open source models are dirt cheap, you can buy $20 worth of kimi-k2.5 on opencode and spam it all week and barely make a dent. Assuming we never got bigger models, but ha…

> Dario in his recent interview with Dwarkesh made it abundantly clear that they have substantial inference margins, and they use that to justify the financing for the next training run.

You're putting way too much faith in Dario's statements. It wasn't "abundantly clear" to me. In that interview, prior to explaining how inference profits work, he said, "These are stylized facts. These numbers are not exact. I'm just trying to make a toy model," followed shortly by "[this toy model's economics] are where we're projecting forward in a year or two."

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#103

Post by tcgv »

Martin’s framing (org and system-level guardrails like risk tiering, TDD as discipline, and platforms as “bullet trains”) matches what I’ve been seeing too.

A useful complement is the programmer-level shift: agents are great at narrow, reversible work when verification is cheap. Concretely, think small refactors behind golden tests, API adapters behind contract tests, and mechanical migrations with clear invariants. They fail fast in codebases with implicit coupling, fuzzy boundaries, or weak feedback loops, and they tend to amplify whatever hygiene you already have.

So the job moves from typing to making constraints explicit and building fast verification, while humans stay accountable for semantics and risk.

If useful, I expanded this “delegation + constraints + verification” angle here: https://thomasvilhena.com/2026/02/craftsmanship-coding-five-...

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#104

Post by trashymctrash »

wseqyrku wrote: post #96

> When I began in software in the 1980s I was dismissed as an “object guy” by database folks and as a “data modeler” by object folks. I've since been dismissed as a “patterns guy”, “agile guy”, “architecture guy”, “java guy”, “ruby guy”, and “anti-architect guy”. I'm now a past-it gray-beard surviving on drinking the intellectual blood of my younger colleagues. It's tasty. I don't think you can find that level of ego…

i was initially confused because i couldn’t find it in the article, but then i found what you quoted here: https://martinfowler.com/articles/expert-generalist.html

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#105

Post by lambda »

nyrikki wrote: post #98
lambda wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is an AMD laptop integrated GPU, not a discrete NVIDIA GPU on a desktop. Also, I haven't really done much to try tweaking performance, this is just the first setup I've gotten that works.

The memory bandwidth of the Laptop CPU is better for fine tuning, but MoE really works well for inference. I won’t use a public model for my secret sauce, no reason to help the foundation models on my secret sauce. Even an old 1080ti works well for FIM for IDEs. IMHO the above setup works well for boilerplate and even the sota models fail for the domain specific portions. While I lucked out and foresaw the huge price…

Yeah, I have a lot of problems with the idea of handing our ability to write code over to a few big Silicon Valley companies, and also have privacy concerns, environmental concerns, etc, so I've refused to touch any agentic coding until I could run open weights models locally.

I'm still not sold on the idea, but this allows me to experiment with it fully locally, without paying rent to some companies I find quite questionable, and I can know exactly how much power I'm drawing and the money is already spent, I'm not spendding hundreds a month on a subscription.

And yes, the Strix Halo isn't the only way to run models locally for a relatively affordable price; it's just the one I happened to pick, mostly because I already needed a new laptop, and that 128 GiB of unified RAM is pretty nice even when I'm not using most of it for a model.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#106

Post by wseqyrku »

trashymctrash wrote: post #104
wseqyrku wrote: post #96

> When I began in software in the 1980s I was dismissed as an “object guy” by database folks and as a “data modeler” by object folks. I've since been dismissed as a “patterns guy”, “agile guy”, “architecture guy”, “java guy”, “ruby guy”, and “anti-architect guy”. I'm now a past-it gray-beard surviving on drinking the intellectual blood of my younger colleagues. It's tasty. I don't think you can find that level of ego…

i was initially confused because i couldn’t find it in the article, but then i found what you quoted here: https://martinfowler.com/articles/expert-generalist.html

Yeah, sorry my head got dizzy I didn't realize I clicked away from the linked article.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#107

Post by bspinner »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #93
varispeed wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you see as flawless. From my perspective even GPT 5.2 produces mostly garbage grade code (yes it often works, but it is not suitable for anywhere near production) and takes several iterations to get it to remotely workable state.

> not suitable for anywhere near production This is what I've been increasingly understanding is the wrong way to understand how LLMs are changing things. I fully agree that LLMs are not suitable for creating production code. But the bigger question you need to ask is 'why do we need production code?' (and to be clear, there are and always will be cases where this is true, just increasingly less of them) The entire p…

In terms of security: yes, everyone needs production code.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#108

Post by selridge »

simonw wrote: post #9

> LLMs are eating specialty skills. There will be less use of specialist front-end and back-end developers as the LLM-driving skills become more important than the details of platform usage. Will this lead to a greater recognition of the role of Expert Generalists? Or will the ability of LLMs to write lots of code mean they code around the silos rather than eliminating them? This is one of the most interesting questi…

No one will hire expert generalists at any kind of scale worth caring about. They are WAY too hard to evaluate as such and basically no pipelines exists to do so. Big software companies with cutesy riddles thought they were hiring for this, but they just got specialists with a culture fit.

Expert generalists are also almost impossible to distinguish from bullshitters. It’s why we get along so well with LLMs. ;)

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#109

Post by [deleted] »

chadash wrote: post #11

> Will LLMs be cheaper than humans once the subsidies for tokens go away? At this point we have little visibility to what the true cost of tokens is now, let alone what it will be in a few years time. It could be so cheap that we don’t care how many tokens we send to LLMs, or it could be high enough that we have to be very careful. We do have some idea. Kimi K2 is a relatively high performing open source model. Peopl…

[deleted]

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#110

Post by gjk3 »

qaq wrote: post #57
chadash wrote: post #11

> Will LLMs be cheaper than humans once the subsidies for tokens go away? At this point we have little visibility to what the true cost of tokens is now, let alone what it will be in a few years time. It could be so cheap that we don’t care how many tokens we send to LLMs, or it could be high enough that we have to be very careful. We do have some idea. Kimi K2 is a relatively high performing open source model. Peopl…

If I remember correctly Dario had claimed that AI inference gross profit margins are 40%-50%

Why do you people trust what he has to say? Like omg dude. These folks play with numbers all the time to suit their narrative. They are not independently audited. What do you think scares them about going public? Things like this. They cannot massage the numbers the same way they do in the private market.

The naivete on here is crazy tbh.

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