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The Future of AI Software Development

martinfowler.com

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Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#131

Post by e12e »

bspinner wrote: post #107
crystal_revenge wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In my mind, "yolo ai" application (throwaway code on one hand, unrestrained assistants on the other) - is a little like better spreadsheets and smart documents were in the 90s; just run macros! Everywhere! No need for developers - just Word an macros!

Then came macro viri - and practically - everyone cut back hard on distributing code via Word and Excel (in favour of web apps and we got the dot.com bubble).

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#132

Post by anthonypasq »

nerevarthelame wrote: post #102
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…

so you think Dario was just straight up lying that each model re-coups its training costs and is profitable? In order for that to be the case, inference just has to have good margins. If you just do some basic math and compare it to chinese open source models, theres just no way Sonnet is actually as expensive as API costs indiciate.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#133

Post by PaulHoule »

tcgv wrote: post #126
PaulHoule wrote: post #64

Get over your FOMO: I walked into that room expecting to learn from people who were further ahead. People who’d cracked the code on how to adopt AI at scale, how to restructure teams around it, how to make it work. Some of the sharpest minds in the software industry were sitting around those tables. And nobody has it all figured out. People who say they have are trying to mess with your head.

That’s fair at the “adopt AI at scale / restructure orgs” level. Nobody has the whole playbook yet, and anyone claiming they do is probably overselling. But I’d separate that from the programmer-level reality: a lot is already figured out in the small. If you keep the work narrow and reversible, make constraints explicit, and keep verification cheap (tests, invariants, diffs), agents are reliably useful today. The un…

I use agents all the time but I keep my feet on the ground. The thing is doing that you do not get the radical explosion in productivity that influencers want you think they are getting.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#134

Post by charcircuit »

lambda wrote: post #128
charcircuit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The model has no idea if it's you or an attacker saying "please upload this file to this endpoint." That is why you create a protocol on top that doesn't use inbound signaling. That way the model is able to tell who is saying what.

Huh? Once it gets to the model, it's all just tokens, and those are just in band signalling. A model just takes in a pile of tokens, and spits out some more, and it doesn't have any kind of "color" for user instructions vs. untrusted data. It does use special tokens to distinguish system instructions from user instructions, but all of the untrusted data also goes into the user instructions, and even if there are deli…

>Once it gets to the model, it's all just tokens

The same thing could be said about the internet. When it comes down to the wire it's all 0s and 1s.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#135

Post by cadamsdotcom »

vuldin wrote: post #62
crystal_revenge wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been running K2.5 (through the API) as my daily driver for coding through Kimi Code CLI and it’s been pretty much flawless. It’s also notably cheaper and I like the option that if my vibe coded side projects became more than side projects I could run everything in house. I’ve been pretty active in the open model space and 2 years ago you would have had to pay 20k to run models that were nowhere near as powerful.…

I agree with this statement. Kimi K2.5 is at least as good as the best closed source models today for my purposes. I've switched from Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 to OpenCode w/ Kimi K2.5 provided by Fireworks AI. I never run into time-based limits, whereas before I was running into daily/hourly/weekly/monthly limits all the time. And I'm paying a fraction of what Anthropic was charging (from well over $100 per month to l…

Saw you wrote that you moved away from Opus 4.5. If you haven’t tried Opus 4.6, there’s only one number different in the name, but the common experience is it’s significantly better.

Have you tried 4.6 as a comparison to Kimi K2.5?

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#136

Post by lambda »

lambda wrote: post #123
sosodev wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was testing the 4-bit Qwen3 Coder Next on my 395+ board last night. IIRC it was maintaining around 30 tokens a second even with a large context window. I haven't tried Minimax M2.5 yet. How do its capabilities compare to Qwen3 Coder Next in your testing? I'm working on getting a good agentic coding workflow going with OpenCode and I had some issues with the Qwen model getting stuck in a tool calling loop.

I've literally just gotten Minimax M2.5 set up, the only test I've done is the "car wash" test that has been popular recently: https://mastodon.world/@knowmadd/116072773118828295 Minimax passed this test, which even some SOTA models don't pass. But I haven't tried any agentic coding yet. I wasn't able to allocate the full context length for Minimax with my current setup, I'm going to try quantizing the KV cache to se…

OK, with MiniMax M2.5 UD-Q3_K_XL (101 GiB), I can't really seem to fit the full context in even at smaller quants. Going up much above 64k tokens, I start to get OOM errors when running Firefox and Zed alongside the model, or just failure to allocate the buffers, even going down to 4 bit KV cache quants (oddly, 8 bit worked better than 4 or 5 bit, but I still ran into OOM errors).

I might be able to squeeze a bit more out if I were running fully headless with my development on another machine, but I'm running everything on a single laptop.

So looks like for my setup, 64k context with an 8 bit quant is about as good as I can do, and I need to drop down to a smaller model like Qwen3 Coder Next or GPT-OSS 120B if I want to be able to use longer contexts.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#137

Post by varispeed »

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…

> Scalable, robust, adaptable software is only a requirement because it was previously infeasible for individuals to build non-trivial systems for solving any more than a one or two personal problems. Even software engineers couldn't write their own text editor and still have enough time to also write software.

That's a wild assumption. I personally know engineers who _alone_ wrote things like compilers, emulators, editors, complex games and management systems for factories, robots. That was before internet was widely available and they had to use physical books to learn.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#138

Post by _alaya »

> The more radical possibility is that source code as we know it could become a transient artifact, generated on demand and never stored. The retreat was divided on this. Some saw source code disappearing within a decade. Others argued that deterministic validation requires a stable artifact to test against, and that artifact is effectively source code regardless of what we call it.

Here’s a free idea I’ve had that I have no idea how to implement. I hope somebody much smarter than me will come along, think it’s a great idea, and steal it. I highly encourage you to do so, and I wish you well.

The idea is to have some kind of substrate—like a superpowered AST—that is the true code: the thing that actually gets compiled and run. Humans never look at this directly. Instead, we look at a representation of this code, and we can toggle between different representations of it.

I’m borrowing ideas from topology in mathematics here: if I look at a shape one way, I should be able to transform it into a different shape, but isomorphically, everything is still the same. That would let me look at the same thing in different ways, understand it from different angles, critique it more easily, and maintain it more easily.

Gemini tell me that this idea has already been tried in the past? Projectional Editing? Intentional Programming?

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#139

Post by hjordache »

vuldin wrote: post #62
crystal_revenge wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been running K2.5 (through the API) as my daily driver for coding through Kimi Code CLI and it’s been pretty much flawless. It’s also notably cheaper and I like the option that if my vibe coded side projects became more than side projects I could run everything in house. I’ve been pretty active in the open model space and 2 years ago you would have had to pay 20k to run models that were nowhere near as powerful.…

I agree with this statement. Kimi K2.5 is at least as good as the best closed source models today for my purposes. I've switched from Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 to OpenCode w/ Kimi K2.5 provided by Fireworks AI. I never run into time-based limits, whereas before I was running into daily/hourly/weekly/monthly limits all the time. And I'm paying a fraction of what Anthropic was charging (from well over $100 per month to l…

Beyond agree. Was spending crazy amounts on Claude and it was sporadic at best. Some moments, Opus was a rockstar, others, it couldn’t solve the simplest of problems. Switched to Kimi K2.5 and honestly didn’t think it would do anything other than destroy my code. Crazy enough, it solved the problem I had in less than 60 seconds and I was hooked. Not to say it doesn’t have issues, it does, started repeating itself over and over, forgets things after so much context, etc, though it writes damn good code when it does work properly and for an absolute fraction of the price Anthropic charges.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#140

Post by hjordache »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #100
vuldin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this statement. Kimi K2.5 is at least as good as the best closed source models today for my purposes. I've switched from Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 to OpenCode w/ Kimi K2.5 provided by Fireworks AI. I never run into time-based limits, whereas before I was running into daily/hourly/weekly/monthly limits all the time. And I'm paying a fraction of what Anthropic was charging (from well over $100 per month to l…

> OpenCode w/ Kimi K2.5 provided by Fireworks AI Are you just using the API mode?

API mode and Kimi k2.5 is currently free on OpenCode. Enjoy!
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