"No you see I'm a special SWE, I'm not one of the 80% that will get automated!"
Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
291–300 of 386 posts
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess since we're not talking about art anymore, and are instead talking about the veracity of information, we can safely agree. If I read a news story, I do value that information higher to the extent I am convinced it is actually true information. If I read someone's autobiography, I do value that to the extent that I trust them and that it is coming from them. A piece of fiction, however, or music, or visual art…
But I am not just taking about factual information. You still don't get it. I was just using that example to show if you take out key components of what makes something what is it, it is no longer the same thing. I am saying the an intrinsic component of art is the human context of it. You can call AI generated "art" by another name if you want, and enjoy it for what it is, but the reasons why you might enjoy it are…
Why is it that we still enjoy music despite not knowing how it was created? Why is it that we still enjoy visual art despite not knowing how it was created?
We can keep throwing counterexamples at each other forever. You can find an endless number of examples wherein the provenance of an activity or piece of work is important to the enjoyment of it, and I can find endless examples where the provenance is unnecessary. What will this prove?
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious. The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized soft…
> I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI People can't be bothered to cook for themselves, and often order crappy, unhealthy food that costs 10 times as much just so they don't have to cook. Now they're going to build their own software every time they think the…
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Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#294I work at a dev agency, most of our clients are start ups that need to go into the market quickly. We've used agentic development for about a year and a half now and our roles have changed drastically during that time. I can't speak to the volume of projects flowing in (as I do not know the exact numbers) but from what I can see all that has changed is the expectations for what can be delivered. And instead of 5 peop…
> Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually. Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain. Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#295The most wide-eyed AI believers I've met are tinkerers. And that tracks; the speed at which we can tinker has become so marvelous thanks to LLM-assisted coding. Tinkering is a process; people get a lot of joy out of the act of building and tweaking things. Outcomes are a secondary or tertiary considerations. AI has massively expanded our ability to act (and therefore tinker) but it can't generate meaningful impact (e…
tinkers often what engineering looks like before the org has invented a process around it. Prototyping, debugging, testing, etc are not fake work because they happen quickly.
Compilers do not generate impact by themselves either. Neither do CI, IDEs, frameworks, or cloud infra. They increase the leverage of the person using them.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#296We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we becom…
>e.g. front-end web development It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want. I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more ge…
I'll second this, with the caveat that I've not yet tried to build anything with Fable.
Every engineer can now produce things in the front end that doesn't look like complete and utter garbage, sure, but everyone is also producing the new-era of Twitter Bootstrap pages. It all has the same touched-by-AI look and it might as well be customer kryptonite from everything I've experienced at my workplace with customer surveys and collaboration. It has raised the floor substantially for internal tools and admin pages though.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#297The most wide-eyed AI believers I've met are tinkerers. And that tracks; the speed at which we can tinker has become so marvelous thanks to LLM-assisted coding. Tinkering is a process; people get a lot of joy out of the act of building and tweaking things. Outcomes are a secondary or tertiary considerations. AI has massively expanded our ability to act (and therefore tinker) but it can't generate meaningful impact (e…
tinkers often what engineering looks like before the org has invented a process around it. Prototyping, debugging, testing, etc are not fake work because they happen quickly. Compilers do not generate impact by themselves either. Neither do CI, IDEs, frameworks, or cloud infra. They increase the leverage of the person using them.
> Compilers do not generate impact by themselves either
I did not mean to give the impression that Compilers and other key infrastructure are not impactful. I believe these are deeply impactful.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm doing no such thing. By invalidating the Monet piece if it is described as AI-generated, art becomes entirely about the creation story. So that moves the bar to telling a convincing story. And LLMs can absolutely do that at the level of those museum placards next to each painting. So if you add an actor to pose as the artist, the art is the performance now. What makes you think I don't like art? Spent 3 hours at…
> I'm doing no such thing. By invalidating the Monet piece if it is described as AI-generated, art becomes entirely about the creation story. So that moves the bar to telling a convincing story. No. Art isn’t about the “origin story,” but about what it makes you feel. In part, what it makes you feel is due to the fact that it was made by a human, with human emotion and intent, to communicate an idea to the world. AI…
I am reminded of The Doctor Who episode where the original Mona Lisa was destroyed and only one of many copies clearly marked "THIS IS A FAKE" underneath the pigments survived.
https://youtu.be/9iCBN5V2x18?si=TUF5kFbQGeQ927io&t=5798
But also, crypto and anything crypto-adjacent is planet-killing garbage in my book.
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#299I work at a dev agency, most of our clients are start ups that need to go into the market quickly. We've used agentic development for about a year and a half now and our roles have changed drastically during that time. I can't speak to the volume of projects flowing in (as I do not know the exact numbers) but from what I can see all that has changed is the expectations for what can be delivered. And instead of 5 peop…
> Now everybody has superpowers. I think that it's very odd how AI enthusiasts misinterpret the situation. If it turns out to be good enough to produce greenfield projects with agentic coding, then it will not only affect developers, but also whole companies and whole business sectors. The whole dev agency business model is only there because less technical companies don't know how to deal with software, others are j…
its not a misinterpretation but an observation. your moat as software dev is disappearing. i know several companies that reduced their 20+ full stack dev team to just 4, in some cases they got rid of them all together and it is now the CTO/CEO + contractors who are paid hourly and working less than 20 hours a week on average.
We are only getting started, this trend is not going to revert, we are going to get cheaper tokens and more Fable 5 exceeding models that are going to be faster and easier to use.
We had a recession before personal computing took off and another one after the dot com bubble, this didn't put any hinderance on adaoption of the new tech it increased it
Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you're telling me that as long as you believe a human struggled and went through a process, the nature of the outcome is irrelevant. Hence a Monet piece is instantly slop if one believes an AI created it. That rings true. But it also explains the perception that Piss Christ was art instead of rubbish. We just disagree as to whether an AI can write a script for a human to portray a struggle that never happened and…
Not sure what you are claiming here: That authentically human communication and experiences can be artificially generated? But that is a contradiction in terms. The outcome is not independent of the process. It will always show through.
And I don't draw such lines in the sand. I am saying an experience that would be perceived as authentic human communication can be artificially generated until proven otherwise. Good luck with that.
I really wonder if humanity will be able to process alien life when it finally encounters it. Because it's likely to have a very different origin story, nature, and outlook.