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Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

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191–200 of 269 posts

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#191
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Hallucinations are becoming less, significantly by now. Yes? What is the mega-solid technique that is used for it? Armies of people using curated data and reviewing it by hand? That is exactly one of my points: shifting the work elsewhere for specialized tasks. More replicable, improved, but, it scales infinitely and is autonomous? Can you assert that? I am not denying there is some use (a lot of uses!) for thi…

> shifting the work elsewhere for specialized tasks. More replicable, improved, but, it scales infinitely and is autonomous? Can you assert that? I would say yes and it will scale. It will either happen through central LLM just paying for it and scaling it up to everyone on the planet (literaly) OR by the agentic layer every big business is building into their systems. You needed some human to use your tool optimized…

> I would say yes and it will scale

So you mean AI will be useful for any general job without lots of training for those jobs? How about new tasks? Tasks it has not been tweaked for. When I deviated from the average, and not really weird things, when programming, the output was way worse than average stuff. And this is an explicit target of AIs nowadays.

I think you are missing a lot of details here, honestly.

> Exactly. Right? There is no ceiling if its clear that we don't even have the hrdware. But the hardware is a bottleneck not a ceiling.

No, the hardware is a bottleneck, the paradigm as we know it is a ceiling unless you massively and continuously feed this system with average tasks (which is useful). Which is exactly the opposite of what singularity and AGI have been promising.

The systems we have now (unless the paradigm changes) will keep doing, essentially, fitting. No concept of truth and limited inference. That inference is based on already existing data, not on future data. In fact, there have been experiments about feeding output back to the input of LLMs and the degradation of the quality is very visible. If they are supposed to be so "intelligent", why it happens?

> It doesn't need to be perfect

I can agree that for lots of tasks it does not. But for others it is just not a tool good enough.

> Yeah for now. Grill me skill made it a lot easier. Harness engineering is also being worked on, agentic layer, ai factories etc.

I will not deny there could be progress, but nothing similar to "autonomous", "reliable", "super intelligence" or "singularity" with this paradigm.

In fact, often in my experience, this is a waste of tokens for subpar results that shift the technical debt elsewhere. I mean if you try to develop full systems by "vibe-code like" techniques. If you use them judiciously, you can accelerate your workflow, maybe 2x, but not much beyond that if you want to have something worth to be used. Note that here I am talking about the full thing: with testing, quality, maintenance concerns and everything together.

If you want to ship a sub-par thing that will go to the rubbish in a couple of months, then yes, you can do that. But that will fail commercially any way. Unless your job is convincing enough people that you can go 10x faster every time, deliver some sub-par thing, and find another customer, which, to me, would equal a scam.

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

It's a very silly point to make to AI researchers specifically. If they don't work on those projects, the AI won't advance and won't magically be able to replicate the work in "one to three years".

Can you imagine scenarios that would make it less silly? I will give an example:

- The AI researcher might be working for a lab or company with much less funds than the top dogs. Are they likely to discover something that is worth it before a bigger model becomes more capable?

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your PM can write the ticket, and your QA can test the output.

>> How are you going to prompt the LLM or validate its output if you don't understand the requirements? > Your PM can write the ticket, and your QA can test the output. If your PM can write the ticket and your QA can test the output, why not cut out the middleman by having the PM write the coding agent prompt(s)? And if your PM can write the coding agent prompt(s), why not cut out the QA group by having the PM write…

And finally: Why bother making new software at all when AI can just do the thing you wanted done, directly?

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

The AI researchers are not the ones making the marketing, much less believing in it.

I agree. But this is not what you see on the headlines and what money-incentivized stakeholders are saying.

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…”

Mind sharing some names or something else we can learn about?

https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2026/04/07/harness-en...

https://loiane.com/2026/04/harness-engineering-missing-layer...

https://devarch.ai/

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#198
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we don't know your 'points' The Hallucinations are becoming less, significantly by now. It also might be already were it is cheaper for one of the big few companies to spend millions and billions to teach the LLM / creating the training data necessary for an LLM to do something which it is not yet good enough due to the fact, that they sell this capability then to everyone who wants to use this capabilitiy. We hav…

Hallucinations were low hanging fruit in some ways. As someone working on a large-ish complex-ish distributed system that has to be maintained and support customers, it's still very high value to have Claude in the mix, but the core problem of needing to monitor, advise, course correct, and make sure you don't end up with more code and complexity than you need is, at least in my experience, still roughly the same. Th…

I'm waiting for the agentic ai platform layer.

We see AI factories going in this direction but there is no real 'the open source ai platform' thingy.

It needs connectors to integrate with k8s, hyperscalers etc. it needs to be able to have a basic router, a way of configuring expert agents and interaction options for the human in the loop.

There is for sure things we need to build or change, but it def feels like to me that it would immediadly fix a few things today.

I'm not disappointed that it doesn't advance as fast as it feels

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#199

>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…

Sorry where in the article does it make this point? I cannot find the text "On my visits to the Bay Area" anywhere in the original article.

It doesn't, GP was responding to the Gwern story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174900 but posted in the wrong place.

Re: Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

#200
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Cl…

Goodness, how is that being tolerated? I guess it can’t be stopped without a lot of political capital; but 16k lines of code is HUGE, and I cannot imagine that it’s actually 16k lines of value - I’ve written whole new subsystems of a product in fewer lines. Are these all written in an exceptionally verbose language like Go or Java? Are they VERY well documented? Are they doing things they shouldn’t be doing???

Brother at my startup one person shipped 75k lines in two weeks. We’re living in the golden age of slop
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