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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#351

Post by mejutoco »

omnicognate wrote: post #347
mejutoco wrote: post #345

Sometimes while on an ai thread like this I see posts with obvious and many grammatical mistakes. Many will be "typos" (although some seem conceptual). Maybe some are dictated/transcribed by busy people. Some might be incorrect on purpose, for engament. These are posted by pretty accomplished people sometimes. And I always think: any of these users could have ran a basic grammar check with an llm or even a spellcheck…

> prob I jinxed my own post and did a mistake somewhere ai -> AI didnt -> didn't obvious and many -> many obvious These are posted by ... sometimes -> Sometimes these are posted by... prob --> Prob(ably) did a mistake -> made a mistake somewhere -> somewhere.

Indeed. To be fair things like didnt and prob are on purpose, and "sometimes" and "obvious and many" are more styling than a mistake. And LLM should be uppercase. We can go on. In any case, that is exactly my point. I could have run it through an LLM, but didnt.

Here what deepseek suggests as fixed:

Sometimes, while on an AI thread like this, I see posts with many obvious grammatical mistakes. Many will be "typos" (although some seem conceptual). Maybe some are dictated or transcribed by busy people. Some might be incorrect on purpose, for engagement. These are sometimes posted by pretty accomplished people.

And I always think: any of these users could have run a basic grammar check with an LLM or even a spellchecker, but didn’t. Maybe software will be the same after all.

P.S. Probably I jinxed my own post and made a mistake somewhere.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#352

Post by geon »

bandrami wrote: post #330
davnicwil wrote: post #251

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

It's a cliché that the first 90% of a software project takes 90% of the time and the last 10% also takes 90% of the time, but it's cliché because it's true. So we've managed to invent a giant plausibility engine that automates the 90% of the process people enjoy leaving just the 90% that people universally hate.

And since the developers who have to do the last 90 % were not involved in the first 90 %, they will have no clue how to do it.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#353

Post by anonu »

AI won't replace developers. It will replace the bootcamp devs of the last decade. The average expectation is now much higher. AI tools will only elevate the expectations of what a human dev is capable of and how fast it can get done.-

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#354

Post by user34283 »

eks391 wrote: post #179
azan_ wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pattern that gets missed in these discussions: every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer. Doesn't mean it will happen this time (i.e. if AI truly becomes what was promised) and actually it's not likely it will!

I felt like the article had a good argument for why the AI hype will similarly be unsuccessful at erasing developers. > AI changes how developers work rather than eliminating the need for their judgment. The complexity remains. Someone must understand the business problem, evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and…

My argument would be that while some complexity remains, it might not require a large team of developers.

What previously needed five devs, might be doable by just two or three.

In the article, he says there are no shortcuts to this part of the job. That does not seem likely to be true. The research and thinking through the solution goes much faster using AI, compared to before where I had to look up everything.

In some cases, agentic AI tools are already able to ask the questions about architecture and edge cases, and you only need to select which option you want the agent to implement.

There are shortcuts.

Then the question becomes how large the productivity boost will be and whether the idea that demand will just scale with productivity is realistic.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#356

Post by wtetzner »

bitwize wrote: post #211

To understand how business views developers, reread Tim Bryce's Theory P: The Philosophy of Managing Programmers (which is old enough to drink in the USA today): https://web.archive.org/web/20160407111718fw_/http://phmains... Tim Bryce was kind of the anti Scott Adams: he felt that programmers were people of mediocre intelligence at best that thought they were so damn smart, when really if they were so smart, they'd…

In my experience translating requirements into a formal language (programming language) is where a lot of the important details are actually worked out. The process of taking the "squishy" thoughts/ideas and translating them into code is a forcing function for actually clarifying and correcting those ideas.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#357

Post by Jensson »

geon wrote: post #352
bandrami wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cliché that the first 90% of a software project takes 90% of the time and the last 10% also takes 90% of the time, but it's cliché because it's true. So we've managed to invent a giant plausibility engine that automates the 90% of the process people enjoy leaving just the 90% that people universally hate.

And since the developers who have to do the last 90 % were not involved in the first 90 %, they will have no clue how to do it.

So now the last 90% is the last 99%.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#358

Post by djeastm »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #299
davnicwil wrote: post #251

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

The argument is empty because it relies on a trope rather than evidence. “We’ve seen this before and it didn’t happen” is not analysis. It’s selective pattern matching used when the conclusion feels safe. History is full of technologies that tried to replace human labor and failed, and just as full of technologies that failed repeatedly and then abruptly succeeded. The existence of earlier failures proves nothing in…

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but my AI spidey sense is tingling...

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#359

Post by psychoslave »

satvikpendem wrote: post #237
psychoslave wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The pattern repeats because the market incentivizes it. Market is not universal gravity, it's just a storefront for social policy. No political order, no market, no market incentives.

Markets always exists as long as people want to exchange one thing for another, by definition.

Concepts such as person or property are required premises for such a market system to happen, be it by formal laws or tacit consensual behaviors.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#360

Post by psychoslave »

shimman wrote: post #283
satvikpendem wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markets always exists as long as people want to exchange one thing for another, by definition.

Yes and you're allowed to regulate markets into things that actively benefit society and not just sucking blood from people willy nilly.

We are allowed as in, no formal rule forbid it is one thing. But if all the rules favors oligarchic accumulation with reinforcing loop, it's unlikely that the resulting dynamics will fall into a loophole of equal redistribution of wealth where social harmony thrive.
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