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

The future of software development is software developers

codemanship.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 588 posts

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#191

Post by charcircuit »

yetihehe wrote: post #151
charcircuit wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at least in the sense that your abstractions are novel and the shape of the abstraction set is different from the standard things that exist People shouldn't be doing this in the first place. Existing abstractions are sufficient for building any software you want.

> Existing abstractions are sufficient for building any software you want. Software that doesn't need new abstractions is also already existing. Everything you would need already exists and can be bought much more cheaply than you could do it yourself. Accounting software exists, unreal engine exists and many games use it, why would you ever write something new?

>Software that doesn't need new abstractions is also already existing

This isn't true due to the exponential growth of how many ways you can compose existing abstractions. The chance that a specific permutation will have existing software is small.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#192

Post by chii »

mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

> I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes.

a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)? Perhaps autodriving would in the near future, but there still needs to be someone making decisions on how best to utilize that car - surely, it isn't deciding to go to destination A without someone telling them.

> I feel like I’m doing the work of an entire org that used to need twenty engineers.

and this is great. A combine harvester does the work of what used to be an entire village for a week in a day. More output for less people/resources expended means more wealth produced.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#193

Post by chii »

gentooflux wrote: post #167
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me. That is just not true, assuming you have a modicum of competence (which I assume you do). AIs suck at all these tasks; they are not even as good as an inexperienced hum…

LLMs generate the most likely code given the problem they're presented and everything they've been trained on, they don't actually understand how (or even if) it works. I only ever get away with that when I'm writing a parser.

> they don't actually understand how

but if it empirically works, does it matter if the "intelligence" doesn't "understand" it?

Does a chess engine "understand" the moves it makes?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#194

Post by sokoloff »

frankie_t wrote: post #186

Just like the pro-AI articles, it reads to me like a sales pitch. And the ending only adds to it: the author invites to hire companies to contract him for training. I would only be happy if in the end the author turns out to be right. But as the things stand right now, I can see a significant boost to my own productivity, which leads me to believe that fewer people are going to be needed.

When coal powered engines became more efficient, demand for coal went UP. It went up because vastly more things could now be cost effectively be coal-powered.

I can see a future where software development goes the same way. My wife works in science and I see all kinds of things in a casual observation of her work that could be made more efficient with good software support. But not by enough to pay six-figures per year for multiple devs to create it. So it doesn’t get done and her work and the work of tens of thousands like her around the world is less efficient as a result.

In a world where development is even half as expensive, many such tasks become approachable. If it becomes a third or quarter as expensive, even more applications are now profitable.

I think far more people will be doing something that creates the outcomes that are today created by SWEs manually coding. I doubt it will be quite as lucrative for the median person doing it, but I think it will still be well above the median wage and there will be a lot of it.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#195

Post by tatjam »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #174
mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

>> Coding AIs design software better than me Absolutely flat out not true. I'm extremely pro-faster-keyboard, i use the faster keyboards in almost every opportunity i can, i've been amazed by debugging skills (in fairness, i've also been very disappointed many times), i've been bowled over by my faster keyboard's ability to whip out HTML UI's in record time, i've been genuinely impressed by my faster keyboard's abili…

Exactly, for the thing that has been done in Github 10000x times over, LLMs are pretty awesome and they speed up your job significantly (it's arguable if you would be better off using some abstraction already built if that's the case).

But try to do something novel and... they become nearly useless. Not like anything particularly difficult, just something that's so niche it's never been done before. It will most likely hallucinate some methods and call it a day.

As a personal anecdote, I was doing some LTSpice simulations and tried to get Claude Sonnet to write a plot expression to convert reactance to apparent capacitance in an AC sweep. It hallucinated pretty much the entire thing, and got the equation wrong (assumed the source was unit intensity, while LTSpice models AC circuits with unit voltage. This surely is on the internet, but apparently has never been written alongside the need to convert an impedance to capacitance!).

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#196

Post by chii »

potamic wrote: post #179
dataviz1000 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a chef in Michelin-starred restaurants for 11 years. One of my favorite positions was washing dishes. The goal was always to keep the machine running on its 5-minute cycle. It was about getting the dishes into racks, rinsing them, and having them ready and waiting for the previous cycle to end—so you could push them into the machine immediately—then getting them dried and put away after the cycle, making sure t…

Humans are still needed, but they just got down-skilled.

> got down-skilled.

who's to say that it's a down?

Orchestrating and doing higher level strategic planning, such that the sub-tasks can be AI produced, is a skill that might be higher than programming.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#197

Post by notpachet »

to11mtm wrote: post #60
63stack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make. Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.

I'd be willing to give you access to the experiment I mentioned in a separate reply (have a github repo), as far as the output that you can get for a complex app buildout. Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) but it definitely has throughput despite my absolute lack of caring that much [0]. Once I get past a certain stage I am thinking of doing an A-B test where I take an earlier commit and try again wh…

> Will admit It's not great (probably not even good)

You lost me here. Come back when you're proud of it.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#198

Post by snickerer »

After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming.

They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions.

LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably.

For every problem I need to turn my brain to ON MODE and wake up, the LLM doesn't wake up.

It surprised me how well it solved another task: I told it to set up a website with some SQL database and scripts behind it. When you click here, show some filtered list there. Worked like a charm. A very solved problem and very simple logic, done a zillion times before. But this saved me a day of writing boilerplate.

I agree that there is no indication that LLMs will ever cross the border from simple-boilerplate-land to understanding-complex-problems-land.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#199

Post by embedding-shape »

chii wrote: post #192
mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

> I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes. a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)? Perhaps autodriving would in the near future, but there still needs to be someone making decisions on how best to utilize that car - surely, it isn't deciding to go to destination A without someone…

> a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)?

People whose life were based around using horses for transportation were very scared of cars replacing them though, and correctly so, because horses for transportation is something people do for leisure today, not necessity. I feel like that's a more apt analogy than comparing cars to any human.

> More output for less people/resources expended means more wealth produced.

This is true, but it probably also means that this "more wealth produced" will be more concentrated, because it's easier to convince one person using AI that you should have half of the wealth they produce, rather than convincing 100 people you should have half of what they produce. From where I'm standing, it seems to have the same effects (but not as widespread or impactful, yet) as industrialization, that induced that side-effect as well.

Post reply on HN