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Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

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Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#321

Post by aenis »

tripleee wrote: post #319
aenis wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and I generally agree with most of his thesis - but the stuff he says about AI coding is the weakest part of his spiel.

He heavily leans on developers for his points on coding, and then spices it up. > For example, major media outlets will gladly write that “AI can build software,” but said sentence suggests that you can just type “build me Slack 2” into Claude and have it fart out a fully-functional, production-ready piece of software, rather than a quasi-functional mound of code-slop that can do enough to trick a business idiot or l…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Mn-TNLwQys&t=677s

around 9:30 "this is a thing that has its use for the little things, but the moment you start expanding it"

This is just plain wrong. We deal with codebases in double digit millions LOCs with models - it takes genuine skills and instrumentation to do right, but it does work. And I know devs who take this view - that AI is dumb, useless, a gimmick - and what they have in common is they have not tried to put in the hours to learn how to tame the beast.

Anyway, I am losing interest in debating the topic, the efficient markets will deal with this objectively. I can't see how a company employing the usual high-low mix of developers can compete with a company that has a small number of elite devs equipped with those tools and unencumbered by having to manage large development teams and associated bureaucracies. Time will tell.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#322

Post by throw-the-towel »

cloverich wrote: post #284
avgDev wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Codex has been great for me for backend wiring, mapping and creating boiler plate code in C#. However, it seems when I go in to fix things its 60% front-end. Idk, I like AI when it works, but it drives me insane when it keeps making errors. I've had a few errors which I figured out from documentation fairly quickly, provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.

> provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow. The AI is not intelligent. Its really hard to grasp cleanly. But it can't do anything logically like we do. Its pattern matching. It has to be a pattern its seen; then it can assemble them. If there are competing patterns - it'll trip up being consistent. Long established libraries and languages that change the least, it'll be best at. Anything newer it'…

You know what else is pattern matching? Experience.

I think I finally have a way to describe how AI works: infinite experience, none of the smarts.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#323

Post by nec4b »

JimDabell wrote: post #253
Brendinooo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Most organisations need a high quality design system and to be able to assemble pages from it. Totally bespoke design will start with the designer using an agent. So the way I see it, the everyday stuff will be the first to go, followed by designers taking the rest of it. Front-end developers have their area eroded from the bottom then the top. As far as frontend vs backend, there’s a greater scope for fuckups when d…

The frontend feedback is much harder for AI. AI needs to be able to see the page with all the moving parts and sounds and have a bit of sense for the layout and taste in colors etc. I think it much harder for AI to recognize what feels good for the human user. Backend is devoid of that personal touch. By definition you are building for the machine. You have APIs, databases and infrastructure which is logical and easy for LLM to interact with. "All it needs" is curl and it can run in a loop the whole day improving backend software.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#324

Post by tripleee »

aenis wrote: post #321
tripleee wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He heavily leans on developers for his points on coding, and then spices it up. > For example, major media outlets will gladly write that “AI can build software,” but said sentence suggests that you can just type “build me Slack 2” into Claude and have it fart out a fully-functional, production-ready piece of software, rather than a quasi-functional mound of code-slop that can do enough to trick a business idiot or l…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Mn-TNLwQys&t=677s around 9:30 "this is a thing that has its use for the little things, but the moment you start expanding it" This is just plain wrong. We deal with codebases in double digit millions LOCs with models - it takes genuine skills and instrumentation to do right, but it does work. And I know devs who take this view - that AI is dumb, useless, a gimmick - and what they have…

You can't just take one sentence out of context. Huh?

"...you're just kicking the can. You're still going to have to read all this code to make sure it makes sense"

He's commenting on that maybe it's not a huge productivity boost once you include the reviewing- if you want to get good results you have to know what you're doing, direct it, review it. If you skip this, you get aimless slop.

How on earth is this "plain wrong"?

> the efficient markets will deal with this objectively

maybe. It's a pretty damn complex system.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#325

Post by foolserrandboy »

pzo wrote: post #249
JimDabell wrote: post #65

We 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…

> Firstly, we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software. I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far. Not all software but how many movies you can watch, books read? Similarly how many games you can play? How many ads you can…

4 day work week could help with this like weekends help sell more automobiles.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#326

Post by porridgeraisin »

hiq wrote: post #216
lelanthran wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would anyone think the same thing won't apply here? Because there's nothing to "move up into" other than "spec, optionally design". Because the jobs that had "spec, design but don't code" already existed for decades, and pay less than half what the "design + code" person earned.

Not sure what you mean by spec and design, but around me, that's always been paid more than simply coding. If you have a clean technical spec that's detailed enough, the code naturally flows and is often left to more junior engineers, with more senior folks reviewing the code but rarely writing it.

That, and it also needs to be mentioned that if an engineer is given a tool like claude, they will be given _more_ work. As an example, you might give an intern the following task:

"we have service A that receives a request, it now has a new flag in it, we need you to pass it through to in the call A makes to service B, and then add it in the where clause of the query that B makes".

and expect it to take 2 days including manual testing.

Now you would expect the same much quicker. Any weird bug of the kind "flag not showing up in B because its another weird place where the request _actually_ goes through" that would before suck up 5 hours, would now be found out by the LLM in 2 minutes. "Oh because of this feature being activated in , this new path is used, so you have to add the flag passing logic there". And the next day they get a new task.

This was an extreme example, and it's also not a silver bullet, since now you need to ensure that the intern does the task in a way that they still learn the codebase and the service structure (ideally, they learn quicker) and doesn't become completely beholden to the LLM. So that will also become a skill teams look to hone, how they use tools like this.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#327

Post by HDThoreaun »

mbrumlow wrote: post #285
euwuw wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your company might fail then. Because I won’t be fighting to work at your company, I’ll just compete with your company and get paid what I deserve. We already have CEOs is vendors trying to scare people away from vibe coding their contract away, while I diligently vibe code their contract away. Not much new here as my entire career has been coding away 3rd party contracts, and it’s now easier than ever.

The whole point is that the company doesnt need you if there is ample supply of developers

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#328

Post by LogicFailsMe »

onemoresoop wrote: post #320
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, what you're saying is true but only to the extent of simulacra AI can produce. But it's not really art if you know what I mean, it's an artefact of training on other people's art.

So what I do with AI art is start with a photo I took. I then extract its Lin Canny lines or other descriptive features algorithmically. From there, I apply various models to re-express the image in an interesting way. IMO it looks more like Digital Art out of photoshop and I would refute any claim that this isn't remotely artistic given I was the one that took the photo that is the base image. And it doesn't end up looking like obvious AI art, but rather more Andy Warholish than anything else IMO.

And sure, the model was trained on other people's art but so are we.

It may not be your cup of tea, but it's a lot more effort than typing in a prompt and calling it a day. But, ya know, Rembrandt and Hans Zimmer were the OG prompt engineers in their respective media IMO.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#329

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

vitally3643 wrote: post #92
JimDabell wrote: post #65

We 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…

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…

> 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 software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects.

I think you vastly overestimate the amount of B2C software and underestimate the amount of B2B and “internal” software. Consider also how much more complex “business” processes are than “personal” processes.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#330

Post by pesus »

prmph wrote: post #242
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is it will never be about the art itself, it's entirely about selling you on its origin story? Yeah, that sounds about right. So once it can create human-level art, it just needs to spew human-level BS script along with it for the artist to act out, got it. Reverse centaur indeed.

Wow, it's not "human-level BS" what the heck. Only someone with little appreciation of music will describe the difference between an actual performance and an AI generated one as "human-level BS". It makes a large difference in my enjoyment of the music. Have you listened to a MIDI file before? And have you listened to (or attended, preferably in person) a piano concert before? You can't compare them, AI changes noth…

> Only someone with little appreciation of music will describe the difference between an actual performance and an AI generated one as "human-level BS".

Unfortunately, this seems to apply to quite a few people on HN, and for all types of art in general. I fear this worldview (or maybe the common root cause) is what leads to the all too prevalent lack of care or outright disdain for people and society in general we're seeing from the tech industry (amongst others) these days.

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