The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts • Hacker News Board

Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts

#21

Post by tectonic » Mon, Mar 31, 2025, 4:18 AM UTC

fizx wrote: post #11

AIs today basically fail because they've been trained to be aggressive editors of code. This makes the first steps feel amazing, gives you the most out of your first tokens, and helps win the evals focused on coding simple-to-moderate tasks. Once they hit some threshold of project size, they overcommit, bite off too much or don't recognize that they're missing some context. Agents help this by allowing them to see th…

I agree, soon systems of agents will be trained with good engineering practices not just locally-good code. Already when I work with current SOTA agents I find myself basically pair programming with them, providing senior guidance and cutting off directions of development that will be dead ends while they type all the actual code.

(Hey fizx!)

Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts

#22

Post by reaperman » Mon, Mar 31, 2025, 5:48 AM UTC

atodorov99 wrote: post #7

drweevil wrote: post #2

> It just needs to be able to deliver 80% of your output at 20% of your cost What tho is the actual cost? Are AI tools still loss leaders? What will happen if the AI bubble bursts and there is a severe shortage of software engineers? It is this uncertainty that people are having to deal with now.

Are u talking about incurring technical debt from the generated AI code that vastly out prices the original low cost of using AI. I cannot answer ur question on how big is one compared to the other but I have an idea that can sideline them. I don't think it will matter, AI is so exceptionally good at generating just good enough spam, so exceptionally good at delivering a shitty minimally viable product that it might…

> Are u talking about incurring technical debt from the generated AI code

I think they're talking about the marginal cost and capital cost of running all those GPU's, as well as the capital costs of training foundational models. With GPT-(n+m) projected to require new nuclear power plants dedicated to GPU usage, there's a question of what the payback time will be and whether the marginal costs will exceed that of a human.

Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts

#23

Post by namaria » Mon, Mar 31, 2025, 8:29 AM UTC

atodorov99 wrote: post #7

drweevil wrote: post #2

> It just needs to be able to deliver 80% of your output at 20% of your cost What tho is the actual cost? Are AI tools still loss leaders? What will happen if the AI bubble bursts and there is a severe shortage of software engineers? It is this uncertainty that people are having to deal with now.

Are u talking about incurring technical debt from the generated AI code that vastly out prices the original low cost of using AI. I cannot answer ur question on how big is one compared to the other but I have an idea that can sideline them. I don't think it will matter, AI is so exceptionally good at generating just good enough spam, so exceptionally good at delivering a shitty minimally viable product that it might…

What we get from the sun isn't energy. All the energy we receive has to be irradiated away, or we'd be cooked. We get low entropy energy that we dissipate to sustain our local low entropy systems going and growing.

What LLMs offer is second hand low entropy data. They feed off the low entropy human generated data and give it back. But they raise the entropy of the total body of data, inevitably. The more AI slop there is, the less useful work LLMs can extract from data.

Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts

#24

Post by frenchmajesty » Fri, Apr 04, 2025, 9:34 AM UTC

mycentstoo wrote: post #12

I’m genuinely curious on the point about reducing headcount because AI will be more efficient. I’ve seen it articulated here but other places too that a company will be able to have less engineers because each would be more productive. What if companies kept the same number of people engineers but now massively out produce what they used to? And I disagree with the example that this is like typewriters replacing typi…

You make a good point. The shrinking headcount is not necessarily tied to mass-firing. It's more likely tied to +10M newly trained engineers entering the job market every year, but only 50 positions being opened.

Over time, with each recessions, headcount will shrink at some companies, and will not grow back to pre prior levels. Over time, the line trends downwards