Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

queue.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 269 posts

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#121

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

griffiths wrote: post #99
Izkata wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or reducing meeting load. Well, I expect when you've vibed too much and lost track of the code, and can't answer questions in meetings anymore, you'll stop getting invited to them.

How often do you talk about low code details in the meetings? It is mostly about requirements and goals (IMHO) and "architecture"/design, and now I wouldn't even bother my peers with questions about the code as I can let AI tell me how things work exactly as written in the code, not some thing that someone remembers or thinks how it works (in large codebases, most developers only know in detail the things they are wo…

> It is mostly about requirements and goals and architecture/design

People vibe code because they have no clue about any of that. Not because they're slow typers.

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#122

Post by mekael »

simonw wrote: post #105
geraneum wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the code get reviewed? How do you deal with increased amount of code that may need to be looked at?

I review the code that matters - anything security adjacent or that's an API that will be used by other code in the future. I don't review code that either works or doesn't - most HTML and CSS layout code for example. There I test it on desktop and mobile and commit it if it works. Ditto for stuff that's simple. A JSON endpoint that runs a SQL query and returns some JSON? If it works and a glance at the tests looks O…

I've found that engineers on a large team do read every line, mainly due to the fact that the skill levels run the gamut from intern to lead, and only 1 or 2 people out of 12 might have knowledge of the application being modified.

It's actually getting worse due to "AI code bloat", for example I have 16k lines of code to review across 3 apps by the end of this week. Normally it would be a quarter of that, but what Claude produces is extremely verbose in some places and anemic in others, and I can't tell at a glance what's right and what looks right with that much ground to cover.

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#123

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

simonw wrote: post #103
the_af wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this falling into the "lines of code" trap TFA mentions? More code written is not a good measure of productivity. It could be garbage, or redundant code, or simply not addressing the real or more pressing needs, it could be building the wrong thing, etc. Like TFA mentions, it's been known for decades LoC is a misleading metric for productivity. It's one of the lessons of software engineering.

I'm planning an article at the moment in defense of lines of code. Saying "lines of code are a bad measurement" is too easy! It's about time someone presented an opposing argument. In my specific case, lines of code for my published open source projects is a metric that I trust, because I have high standards for those. I have plenty of other projects where I'll accept poor quality, unreviewed code (almost all of http…

> Lines of code are akshually a good metric now, because that's the only metric LLMs can optimize and I really, really, really love LLMs, they're the bee's knees.

Really now?

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#124

Post by levmiseri »

> f developers spend only about 15 percent of their time typing in the editor

I think this is missing an important detail. Lots of time was spent on non-coding stuff, because coding used to be more committal and hence expensive. With how quickly one can code up a quick prototype or even production-ready code these days, the code becomes the communication tool as well.

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#125

Post by skydhash »

simonw wrote: post #105
geraneum wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the code get reviewed? How do you deal with increased amount of code that may need to be looked at?

I review the code that matters - anything security adjacent or that's an API that will be used by other code in the future. I don't review code that either works or doesn't - most HTML and CSS layout code for example. There I test it on desktop and mobile and commit it if it works. Ditto for stuff that's simple. A JSON endpoint that runs a SQL query and returns some JSON? If it works and a glance at the tests looks O…

> Honestly, it's similar to being an engineer on a larger team. You don't review every line of code written by every one of your coworkers.

We don’t because everyone is accountable for his or her own mistakes. So everyone is incentivized for their recklessness to not be the root cause of some bug.

> An increasing number of expert programmers are moving in the direction of NOT reviewing every line. It's working out OK for a lot of them.

Have you ever asked your users? What about bug reports? Is the amount and rate decreasing?

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#127

Post by germandiago »

a_bonobo wrote: post #16

>On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them; This is such a weird point to make that doesn't become correct just because everyone makes it, all the time. Why clean the ocean if some magic future tech will clean them? Why save the world now if some benevolent AI is 'just around th…

> This is such a weird point to make

I think it is a great point to make, because if everyone really believed that AIs will do everything without human intervention in a handful of years, as the marketing repeats again and again (AGI, singularity, etc.) and have been saying for years... why then get bothered?

Because we DO know LLMs have their hallucinations, limitations, perform tasks not previously seen way worse than humans, etc. And it seems that, for now, there is not a good or magic solution to it, it is inherent limitations of the paradigm.

Yes, you can feed more and more and more (curated data) and eventually make AIs excellent at task X or Y, but then you spend your time specializing those engines. So the work does not really disappear, it just shifts and you make it more replicable for a bound set of problems.

Needless to say that at some point I prefer to learn (and combine with AIs, it is ok) than acritically getting inputs from something until I become totally useless.

Unless we have a paradigm for which a fully autonomous AI can do everything, this will just become improving our productivity in some ways, with all the in-between bottlenecks that it has.

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#128

Post by davidpapermill »

langs wrote: post #37

> Myth 2: Writing Code Is the Bottleneck Writing code is indeed the bottleneck for same resource constrained companies. Rapid code development creates more opportunities for trial and error, providing companies with more information for decision making, that previously might have been addressed by meetings. Of course, this might bring other problems, but it might not right to generally speaking that writing code is n…

I’m very suspicious of this objection, because when Claude first landed the same people now saying “code is not the bottleneck” were saying “the generated code doesn’t work.” Smacks of moving goalposts.

The only solid objection to “AI is going replace developers” is “AI is an accelerant.” It helps developers move faster. I haven’t seen anywhere it has fully replaced developers.

Whether this leads to a large number of job losses depends on whether you think we can increase software output by the same factor as the acceleration and still be profitable. I think we can, latent software demand is extremely high. I also think we’re nearing the limit of capability with current models.

Situation could change if more advanced models emerge, but some of the more foreseeable advances probably have compute requirements beyond today’s hardware.

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#129

Post by germandiago »

xprnio wrote: post #66
bigfishrunning wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still have to do quite a bit of thinking but the amount of of thinking I do per task is trending down Don't worry, I'm sure you'll hit your goal of zero thinking soon!

Trending towards the Homo Amens Mechanicus: the mechanical thoughtless human. What a goal

Only bc of this I will keep balancing what I do with my brain with what machines can do. dangerous outcome.

The IQ willl drop if we just become mechanical acritical people the same way muscles get worse if you do not exercise.

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#130

Post by ChicagoDave »

sevenzero wrote: post #115
a_bonobo wrote: post #16

>On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them; This is such a weird point to make that doesn't become correct just because everyone makes it, all the time. Why clean the ocean if some magic future tech will clean them? Why save the world now if some benevolent AI is 'just around th…

Also people tend to forget that LLMs still just work on compressed data... Where are the MAJOR breakthroughs? Where is all the "crazy" AI output going? Software seemed to degrade in quality a lot in the recent years. All "improvements" LLMs go through are simply improvements on how to burn more tokens out of my pockets given that Claude now want an actual browser extension to "visually" confirm small changes every ti…

There’s a small group of established architects talking about harness engineering, but I’m not sure anyone is actually listening to them.

And those same architects are quietly extracting real productivity from GenAI.

And even this write up skips that info by waving, “Some people…”

Post reply on HN