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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#251

Post by aibot923 »

samatman wrote: post #133
imbnwa wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering as an occupation grew because of static analysis and GCs (literally why the labor market is the size that it is as we speak); the opposite appears to be the outcome of AI advances.

I'll take the other side of that bet. It's reasonable to expect that sometime relatively soon, AI will be a clear-cut aid to developer productivity. At the moment, I consider it a wash. Chatbots don't clearly save me time, but they clearly save me effort, which is a more important resource to conserve. Software is still heavily rate-limited by how much of it developers can write. Making it possible for them to write…

> Software is still heavily rate-limited by how much of it developers can write

Hmm. We have very different experiences here. IME, the vast majority of industry work is understanding, tweaking, and integrating existing software. There is very little "software writing" as a percentage of the total time developers spend doing their jobs across industry. That is the collective myth the industry uses to make the job seem more appealing and creative than it is.

At least, this is my experience in the large FAANG type companies. We already have so much code. Just figuring out what that code does and what else to do with it constitutes the majority of the work. There is a huge legibility issue where relatively simple things are obstructed by the morass of complexity many layers deep. A huge additional fraction of time is spent on deployments and monitoring. A very small fraction of the work is creatively developing new software. For example, one person will creatively develop the interface and overall design for a new cloud service. The vast majority of work after that point is spent on integration, monitoring, testing, releases, and so on.

The largest task of AI here would be understanding what is going on at both the technical layer and the fuzzy human layer on top. If it can only do #1, then knowledge workers will still spend a lot of effort doing #2 and figuring out how to turn insights from #1 into cashflow.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#252

Post by iteratethis »

In the late 90s I was in an introduction class to programming in C. I kept making memory allocation mistakes that crashed the machine.

My mentor: "Don't worry, by the time you graduate, you don't have to program, the world will soon be modeling software".

We'd go from 3G languages to 4G and beyond.

That never happened. Three decades have passed and we still develop at an obscenely low abstraction level. If anything, complexity has increased.

At the end of the day though, the point of computing is that the machine does what we want. Expressing this via a programming language where very expensive humans write text files is not necessarily to last forever.

To me the much more interesting threat is regarding purpose. As AI becomes ever more capable, an increasing amount of things become pointless.

If using AI I have the power of 50 programmers at my fingertips, how could one possibly develop anything sustainable and unique? Anybody else can trivially make the same thing.

What would set something apart if effort no longer is a major factor? Creativity? Easy to just replicate/steal.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#253

Post by bornAgin »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #114
ActionHank wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if there are fewer humans involved in the code production there is a lot of room for producing code that "works", but is not cohesive or maintainable. Invariably there will be a point at which something is broken and someone will need to wade through the mess to find why it's broken and try to fix it.

This is the future imagined by A Fire Upon the Deep and its sequel. While less focused on the code being generated by ai, it features seemingly endless amounts of code and programs that can do almost anything but the difficulty is finding the program that works for you and is safe to use. To some extent... This is already the world we live in. A lot of code is unreadable without a lot of effort or expertise. If all c…

[dead]

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#254

Post by JohnFen »

barfbagginus wrote: post #124
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…

You will be able to speak what human needs must be fulfilled. Then the code will appear and you'll be able to meet those human needs. You, not a boss, will own the code. And if you have any needs, you will be able to speak the word and those needs will be met. You will no longer need to work at all. Whatever you want to build, you will be able to build it. What about that frightens you?

None of that frightens me, but I also think that none of that is in the realm of reasonable possibility.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#255

Post by int_19h »

dt3ft wrote: post #33
alatriste wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when people used to say similar things about using ASM, and then about the craft of writing things in C instead of managed languages like Java. At the end of the day most people will only care about how the tool is solving the problem and how cheaply. A cheap, slow, dirty solution today tends to win over a expensive, quick, elegant one next year. Now there are still some people writing ASM, and a lot of th…

Writing code by typing on a keyboard will be just a hobby? Sure, and who is supposed to understand the code written by AI when we retire? Since writing code by typing on a keyboard will apparently cease to exist, who will write prompts for an AI and put the code together? Person: Hey AI, build me a website that does a, b and c. AI: Here you go. Person: Looks like magic to me, what do I do with all this text? AI: Push…

Don't worry, it'll spin up a git repo and an instance for you, as well.

How stable and secure all of this will be though is another question. A rhetorical one.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#256

Post by JohnFen »

brabel wrote: post #175
JohnFen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything better to gauge creativity by than perceived surprise? I think there has to be, since such surprise can be generated through purely random mechanisms, and I don't think anyone would call a purely random mechanism "creative".

If it were purely random it would generate rubbish.

Not necessarily, but even in the cases where that's true, there will be the occasional result that surprises (in a good way).

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#257

Post by ToucanLoucan »

dartos wrote: post #222
Oioioioiio wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not about what AI can do today but what we assume AI will be able to do tomorrow. All of what you wrote in your second paragraph will become something AI will be doing better and faster than you. We never had technology which can write code like this. I prompted ChatGPT to write a very basic java tool which renders an image from an url and makes it bigger on a click. It just did it. Its not hard to th…

> We never had technology which can write code like this. I prompted ChatGPT to write a very basic java tool which renders an image from an url and makes it bigger on a click. It just did it. It's worth noting, that it can do things like that because of the large amount of "how to do simple things in java" tutorials there are on the internet. Ask an AI to _make_ java, and it won't (and will continue to not) be able t…

> It's worth noting, that it can do things like that because of the large amount of "how to do simple things in java" tutorials there are on the internet.

Much like the same points made elsewhere with regard to AI art: It cannot invent. It can remix, recombine, etc. but no AI model we have now is anywhere close to where it could create something entirely new that's not been seen before.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#258

Post by CyberDildonics »

iteratethis wrote: post #252

In the late 90s I was in an introduction class to programming in C. I kept making memory allocation mistakes that crashed the machine. My mentor: "Don't worry, by the time you graduate, you don't have to program, the world will soon be modeling software". We'd go from 3G languages to 4G and beyond. That never happened. Three decades have passed and we still develop at an obscenely low abstraction level. If anything,…

So even though there has been small incremental progress at most in the last 30 years and your mentor's predictions were wildly wrong about how much easier anything would become, you still think "AI" will give you the power of 50 programmers?

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#259

Post by aggieNick02 »

ozten wrote: post #184
aggieNick02 wrote: post #103

The "Framework: Outsourced Software Development" image confuses me. What do the green/yellow/lavender circles represent in each 6x6 grid of circles?

This is how I interpreted it: Green - non engineers employed by the "the company" Yellow - In house engineers, or engineers employed by the the company Lavender - Vendor engineering external to the company

Ah, that makes sense, thanks. A legend or even sentence explaining that somewhere in the article would've been great.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#260

Post by aibot923 »

barfbagginus wrote: post #124
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…

You will be able to speak what human needs must be fulfilled. Then the code will appear and you'll be able to meet those human needs. You, not a boss, will own the code. And if you have any needs, you will be able to speak the word and those needs will be met. You will no longer need to work at all. Whatever you want to build, you will be able to build it. What about that frightens you?

> You, not a boss, will own the code.

Developers can already deploy code on massive infrastructure today, and what do we see? Huge centralization. Why? Because software is free-to-copy winner-takes-most game, where massive economies of scale mean a few players who can afford to spend big money on marginal improvements win the whole market. I don't think AI will change this. Someone will own the physical infrastructure for economies-of-scale style services, and they will capture the market.

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