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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#281

Post by thfuran »

falcor84 wrote: post #131
sanity wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember back in the 80s I had friends who enjoyed coding in assembly and felt that using higher-level languages was "cheating" - isn't this just a continuation of that?

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…

>There will probably always be a need for expert-level troubleshooters and optimizers who understand all the layers

There's already so many layers that essentially no one knows them all at even a basic level, let alone expert. A few more layers and no one in the field will even know of all the layers.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#282

Post by theshackleford »

boxed wrote: post #31
throwaway_08932 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A practical definition of "creativity" is "can create interesting things." It's pretty clear that machines have become more "creative" in that sense over the last few years.

I have yet to see ChatGPT or something similar ask a followup to clarify the question. They just give you a "solution". That's equivalent of a super bad junior dev that will cause more trouble than the amount they will solve. That being said, I think we could make such a system. It just has to have training data that is competent...

> I have yet to see ChatGPT or something similar ask a followup to clarify the question.

I don’t use it for dev, but other things and I get chatgpt asking me follow up questions multiple times a day.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#283

Post by beryilma »

windowshopping wrote: post #272
beryilma wrote: post #271

Software Engineering as a professional discipline without any specialization (and writing CRUD applications or websites don't count in my opinion) never made sense to me. Software engineers producing web applications are modern day equivalent of production line workers who were mostly replaced by automation. So, AI will likely replace such software engineers. In contrast, automation and technology did not replace "re…

Gonna go ahead and strong disagree. Dismissing a huge portion of engineers as "production line workers" whose work takes no thought or creativity is incredibly reductive and makes me wonder if you've ever tried doing their job. Web applications are a category of software with just as much variance in their complexity as anything else. Are mobile apps and desktop apps also trivial? What's the difference? And if none o…

You are assuming too much about what I think of myself. I am a software engineer and have been so for a long time. And I've written my fair share of UIs and apps.

If all the things we do are so varied and creative, then we shouldn need to worry about AI replacing our jobs. But that is not what I am reading in this post. What software engineering jobs will AI replace then?

In fact, what I wrote suggests that specialization is a way to make software engineering save itself from the AI threat by making the task of the software engineer more irreplaceable. No matter what you think about its complexities, making web sites is not it.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#284

Post by vczf »

nradov wrote: post #270
vczf wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be underestimating the potential of an automated evolutionary programming system at discovering novel and surprising ways to do computation—ways that no human would ever invent. Humans may have a better distribution of entropy generation (i.e. life experience as an embodied human being), but compared to the rate at which a computer can iterate, I don't think that advantage will be maintained. (Humans will s…

Perhaps, but evolutionary results are difficult to test. They tend to fail in bizarre, unpredictable ways in production. That may be good enough for some use cases but I think it will never be very applicable to mission critical or safety critical domains. Of course, code written by human programmers on the lower end of the skill spectrum sometimes has similar problems...

It doesn't seem like a completely different thing to generate specifications and formally verified programs for those specifications (though I'm not familiar with how those are done today).

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#285

Post by windowshopping »

beryilma wrote: post #283
windowshopping wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gonna go ahead and strong disagree. Dismissing a huge portion of engineers as "production line workers" whose work takes no thought or creativity is incredibly reductive and makes me wonder if you've ever tried doing their job. Web applications are a category of software with just as much variance in their complexity as anything else. Are mobile apps and desktop apps also trivial? What's the difference? And if none o…

You are assuming too much about what I think of myself. I am a software engineer and have been so for a long time. And I've written my fair share of UIs and apps. If all the things we do are so varied and creative, then we shouldn need to worry about AI replacing our jobs. But that is not what I am reading in this post. What software engineering jobs will AI replace then? In fact, what I wrote suggests that specializ…

> If all the things we do are so varied and creative, then we shouldn need to worry about AI replacing our jobs.

Your argument is built on this flawed premise. ChatGPT can generate poetry and stories. Does that mean writing poetry and stories is neither varied or creative?

The fact that AI can do something doesn't diminish its value when it comes from the hands of a human.

Machines in factories can make all sorts of household decorative goods too, but there's a reason people still buy hand-made things.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#286

Post by bornAgin »

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…

[dead]

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#287

Post by withinboredom »

vczf wrote: post #216
withinboredom wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might be underestimating the potential of an automated evolutionary programming system at discovering novel and surprising ways to do computation—ways that no human would ever invent. Humans may have a better distribution of entropy generation (i.e. life experience as an embodied human being), but compared to the rate at which a computer can iterate, I don't think that advantage will be maintained. (Humans will s…

AI, even in its current form can provide some interesting results. I wouldn’t underestimate an AI, but I think you might be underestimating the ingenuity of a bored human.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#288

Post by chromanoid »

visarga wrote: post #91
estebank wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION" — IBM slide from 1979.

hahaha funny Let me tell you a story - a company was using AI for invoice processing, and it misread a comma for a dot, so they sent a payment 1000x larger than expected, all automated of course because they were very modern. The result? they went bankrupt. "Bankrupted by AI error" might become a thing

Of course. It is like when a company goes bankrupt because they didn't establish good fire protection in their factory. Using AI automation has its risks that have to be mitigated appropriately.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#289

Post by [deleted] »

tejohnso wrote: post #152
sanity wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember back in the 80s I had friends who enjoyed coding in assembly and felt that using higher-level languages was "cheating" - isn't this just a continuation of that?

Seems so. Those friends did have to contend with the enjoyable part of their job disappearing. Whether they called it cheating or not is doesn't diminish their loss.

[deleted]

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#290

Post by ta1243 »

withinboredom wrote: post #287
vczf wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be underestimating the potential of an automated evolutionary programming system at discovering novel and surprising ways to do computation—ways that no human would ever invent. Humans may have a better distribution of entropy generation (i.e. life experience as an embodied human being), but compared to the rate at which a computer can iterate, I don't think that advantage will be maintained. (Humans will s…

AI, even in its current form can provide some interesting results. I wouldn’t underestimate an AI, but I think you might be underestimating the ingenuity of a bored human.

Humans aren't bored any more [0]. In the past the US the US had 250 million people who were bored. Today it has far more than than scrolling through instagram and tiktok, responding to reddit and hacker news, and generally not having time to be bored

Maybe we'll start to evolve as a species to avoid that, but AI will be used to ensure we don't, optimising far faster than we can evolve to keep our attention

[0] https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/social-media-profound-boredo...

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