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Software design is now cheap

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Re: Software design is now cheap

#31

Post by ekropotin »

RealityVoid wrote: post #29
ekropotin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs are really quite bad at designing anything interesting Let’s be honest, how many devs are actually creating something interesting/unique at their work? Most of the time, our job is just picking the right combination of well-known patterns to make the best possible trade-offs while fulfilling the requirements.

> Most of the time, our job is just picking the right combination of well-known patterns to make the best possible trade-offs while fulfilling the requirements. Right. I don't trust LLM's to pick the right pattern. It will pick _a_ pattern and it will mostly sorta fulfill the requirements.

Just pick patterns yourself and let LLM fill them in with colours :)

Re: Software design is now cheap

#32

Post by yoyohello13 »

mikert89 wrote: post #12
jascha_eng wrote: post #10

This is a great take. It applies the SaaS is dead theory at a lower level (libraries are dead) but has it a much more nuanced view. Yeh even if LLMs are 10x better than today you probably still don't want to implement cryptography from scratch, but use a library. I also like the 3d printing analogy. We will see how good LLMs get, but I will say that a lot of AI coded tools today have the same feeling as 3d printed ha…

The time might come when the ai just writes things like http request parsers and crypto libraries on the fly. And it will be somewhat normal

But why? Even if you could have an AI do that it’s, if anything, a waste of cpu cycles. If you have a battle tested library that works and has been tested for trillions of request cycles why would you even want to write a new one that needs testing and maintenance? No matter how cheap code gen gets it doesn’t make sense. For something like a UI library, sure build something specific to your needs.

Re: Software design is now cheap

#33

Post by mikert89 »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #28
mikert89 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importing a library for everything will become a dated concept. Similar to the idea that object relational mappers might go away if the ai can just write ultra complicated hyper efficient sql for every query

Why does the AI need hardware/chips? Why does the AI need the universe to exist? Why does the AI need math/logic to exist? Using these preexisting will all become outdated. You will look like primitive cavemen if your agents don't build these from scratch every time you build $NEXT_BIG_THING. Even local LLMs will be able to build these from scratch by end of 2026.

Yeah I actually think the very concept of software will see agents affect out. Agents will do what you used to code. And it will be automatic

Re: Software design is now cheap

#34

Post by mikert89 »

sixtram wrote: post #23
mikert89 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importing a library for everything will become a dated concept. Similar to the idea that object relational mappers might go away if the ai can just write ultra complicated hyper efficient sql for every query

Why does the AI need SQL queries? Who needs that? It will just write its own ACID-compliant database with its own language, and while it's at it, reinvent the operating system as well. It's turtles all the way down.

It’s actually not a ridiculous concept, but I think in some ways code will go away, and the agent itself will do what the code used to do. Software of the future will be far more dynamic and on the fly. We won’t have these rigid structures

Re: Software design is now cheap

#35

Post by heavyset_go »

mikert89 wrote: post #12
jascha_eng wrote: post #10

This is a great take. It applies the SaaS is dead theory at a lower level (libraries are dead) but has it a much more nuanced view. Yeh even if LLMs are 10x better than today you probably still don't want to implement cryptography from scratch, but use a library. I also like the 3d printing analogy. We will see how good LLMs get, but I will say that a lot of AI coded tools today have the same feeling as 3d printed ha…

The time might come when the ai just writes things like http request parsers and crypto libraries on the fly. And it will be somewhat normal

I was assured manufacturing was dead because we'd all be 3D printing everything we need in our garages.

Re: Software design is now cheap

#36

Post by mikert89 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #27
mikert89 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importing a library for everything will become a dated concept. Similar to the idea that object relational mappers might go away if the ai can just write ultra complicated hyper efficient sql for every query

If AI makes the per line cost of producing software cheaper but you still need an expensive human in the loop then the per line cost is merely cheap not free or at the cost of electricity. Given the choice between A) having one AI produce a library and having 1000 produce code using that library which comes with tests human in the loop vetting documentation and examples which drastically increase the chance of the 10…

This take is just an intermediary take until ai takes over software engineering. In the same way, eventually self driving cars will make human drivers look dangerous

I think your thought process is not taking into account what a super logical ai can do, and how effortlessly it could generate some of this code.

Re: Software design is now cheap

#37

Post by jampa »

I think the main point is that "reinventing the wheel" has become cheap, not software design itself.

For example, when a designer sends me the SVG icons he created, I no longer need to push back against just using a library. Instead, I can just give these icons to Claude Code and ask it to "Make like react-icons," and an hour later, my issue is solved with minimal input from me. The LLM can use all available data, since the problem is not new.

But many software problems challenge LLMs, especially with features lacking public training data, and creating solutions for these issues is certainly not cheap.

Re: Software design is now cheap

#38

Post by feastingonslop »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #24
mikert89 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’ll just spit the code out. I vibe coded some with cookie handling the other day that worked. Should I have done it? Nope. But the ai did it and I allowed it The concept of using a library for everything will become outdated

What is the advantage of coding something from scratch vs importing a well tested library?

If the LLM writes better code (and it will) then its code should be favored over a library.

Re: Software design is now cheap

#39

Post by jaredcwhite »

Gotta love a world in which a tool which has ingested "all the world's libraries" is now trotted out as a solution to replace those libraries.

You know what would happen if all the people who handwrote and maintained those libraries revoked their code from the training datasets and forbid their use by the models?

:clown face emoji:

This LLM-maxxing is always a myopic one-way argument. The LLMs steal logic from the humans who invent it, then people claim those humans are no longer required. Yet, in the end, it's humans all the way down. It's never not.

Re: Software design is now cheap

#40

Post by amluto »

RealityVoid wrote: post #29
ekropotin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs are really quite bad at designing anything interesting Let’s be honest, how many devs are actually creating something interesting/unique at their work? Most of the time, our job is just picking the right combination of well-known patterns to make the best possible trade-offs while fulfilling the requirements.

> Most of the time, our job is just picking the right combination of well-known patterns to make the best possible trade-offs while fulfilling the requirements. Right. I don't trust LLM's to pick the right pattern. It will pick _a_ pattern and it will mostly sorta fulfill the requirements.

Today I asked an LLM (Codex whatever-the-default-is) to implement something straightforward, and it cheerfully implemented it twice, right next to each other, in the same file, and then wrote the actual code that used it and open-coded a stupendously crappy implementation of the same thing right there. The amazing thing is that the whole mess kind of worked.
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