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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#201

Post by cjbgkagh »

imbnwa wrote: post #127
Towaway69 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a developer, I heartily agree with you. Being a human, I realise that I as a developer have put a lot of people out of a job. Those folks have had to adapt to that change. I guess now it's our time to adapt to change. At least it keeps me on my feet!

The catch is that those people could, barring the AI advances we seem to be seeing, could retrain for an SWE labor market that lagged demand; that wont even be possible for devs put out of work in the future.

Those people who did retrain are the same devs being put out of work - which means they got hit with the setback twice and are worse off than people who started off as devs and thus only got hit once.

Like the allied bomber pilots in WWII looking down below at the firestorm knowing that there is a good chance (~45%) that they too will join their fate only later.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#202

Post by cynicalsecurity »

There is one fundamental flaw with the AI generated code: unmaintainability and unpredictability.

An attempt to modify the already generated specific piece of code or the program in general will produce an unexpected result. Saving some money on programmers but then losing millions in lawsuits or losing customers and eventually the whole business due to an expected behaviour of the app or a data leak might not be a good idea after all.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#203

Post by Toutouxc »

kossTKR wrote: post #85
Toutouxc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my cope mantra so far. I don't mind if my job changes a lot (and ideally loses the part I dislike the most — writing the actual code), and if I find myself in a position where my entire skillset doesn't matter at all, then well a LOT of people are in trouble.

If you dislike writing code were you pushed into this field by family, education or because of money? Because not liking code and being a dev is absolutely bizarre to me. One of the most amazing things about being able to "develop" in my view is exactly in those rare moments where you just code away, time flies, you fix things, iterate, organise your project completely in the zone - just like when i design, paint or…

I enjoy the part where I'm putting the solution together in my head, working out the algorithms and the architecture, communicating with the client or the rest of the team, gaining understanding.

I do not enjoy the next part, where I have to type out words and weird symbols in non-human languages, deal with possibly broken tooling and having to remember if the method is called "include" or "includes" in this language, or whether the lambda syntax is () => {} or -> () {}. I can do this second part just fine, but it's definitely not what I enjoy about being a developer.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#204

Post by lazide »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #202

There is one fundamental flaw with the AI generated code: unmaintainability and unpredictability. An attempt to modify the already generated specific piece of code or the program in general will produce an unexpected result. Saving some money on programmers but then losing millions in lawsuits or losing customers and eventually the whole business due to an expected behaviour of the app or a data leak might not be a g…

Retorts from the business side:

* sounds like next quarters problem

* since everyone is doing it, sounds like it will be society who has to figure out an answer, not me. (too big to fail)

Not joking, I think those are the current defacto strategies being employed.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#205

Post by withinboredom »

lazide wrote: post #204
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #202

There is one fundamental flaw with the AI generated code: unmaintainability and unpredictability. An attempt to modify the already generated specific piece of code or the program in general will produce an unexpected result. Saving some money on programmers but then losing millions in lawsuits or losing customers and eventually the whole business due to an expected behaviour of the app or a data leak might not be a g…

Retorts from the business side: * sounds like next quarters problem * since everyone is doing it, sounds like it will be society who has to figure out an answer, not me. (too big to fail) Not joking, I think those are the current defacto strategies being employed.

Really get them going when you mention that "too big to fail" is a logical fallacy.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#206

Post by rzzzt »

JohnFen wrote: post #83

> In summary, I believe there would still be a market for Software Developers in the foreseeable future, though the nature of work will change This is precisely what I dread. When it comes to software development specifically, the parts that the AI cheerleaders are excited about AI doing are exactly the parts of the job that I find appealing. If I wanted to be a glorified systems integrator, I would have been doing t…

Ryan D. Anderson's "We Wanna Do the Fun Stuff" captures this very concisely: https://www.instagram.com/itsryandanderson/p/BrY0N-lH31p/

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#207

Post by airstrike »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #202

There is one fundamental flaw with the AI generated code: unmaintainability and unpredictability. An attempt to modify the already generated specific piece of code or the program in general will produce an unexpected result. Saving some money on programmers but then losing millions in lawsuits or losing customers and eventually the whole business due to an expected behaviour of the app or a data leak might not be a g…

Playing devil's advocate, between compilers and tests, is it really less predictable than some junior developer writing the code?

If you're pushing unreviewed, untested code to production, that's a bigger problem than the quality of the original code

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#208

Post by snoman »

airstrike wrote: post #207
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #202

There is one fundamental flaw with the AI generated code: unmaintainability and unpredictability. An attempt to modify the already generated specific piece of code or the program in general will produce an unexpected result. Saving some money on programmers but then losing millions in lawsuits or losing customers and eventually the whole business due to an expected behaviour of the app or a data leak might not be a g…

Playing devil's advocate, between compilers and tests, is it really less predictable than some junior developer writing the code? If you're pushing unreviewed, untested code to production, that's a bigger problem than the quality of the original code

Who reviews and tests the code?

And how do they build the knowledge and skill needed to review and test without being practiced?

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#209

Post by bsder »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #202

There is one fundamental flaw with the AI generated code: unmaintainability and unpredictability. An attempt to modify the already generated specific piece of code or the program in general will produce an unexpected result. Saving some money on programmers but then losing millions in lawsuits or losing customers and eventually the whole business due to an expected behaviour of the app or a data leak might not be a g…

You're assuming that AI-based code is even that minimally good.

Here's a nice litmus test: Can your AI take your code and make it comply with accessibility guidelines?

That's a task that has relatively straightforward subtasks (make sure that labels are consistent on your widgets) yet is still painful (going through all of them to make sure they are correct is a nightmare). A great job to throw at an AI.

And, yet, throwing any of the current "AI" bots at that task would simply be laughable.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#210

Post by withinboredom »

vczf wrote: post #170
falcor84 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. We gradually remove technical constraints and move to a higher level of abstraction, much closer to the level of the user and the business rather than the individual machine. But what's the endpoint of this? There will probably always be a need for expert-level troubleshooters and optimizers who understand all the layers, but for the rest of us, I'm wondering if the job would…

The endpoint is that being a programmer becomes as obsolete as being a human "calculator" for a career. Millions, perhaps billions of times more lines of code will be written, and automated programming will be taken for granted as just how computers work. Painstakingly writing static source code will be seen the same way as we see doing hundreds of pages of tedious calculations using paper, pencil, and a slide rule.…

Yet, we still have programmers writing assembly code and hand-optimizing it. I believe that for most software engineers, this will be the future. However, experts and hobbyists will still experiment with different ways of doing things, just like people experiment with different ways of creating chairs.

An AI can only do what it is taught to do. Sure, it can offer unique insights from time to time, but I doubt it will get to the point where it can craft entirely new paradigms and ways of building software.

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