The post developer era will be the post white collar era.
Surely the level of intellectual difficulty in software engineering is similar to practicing law, medicine, banking… ?
The Post-Developer Era
41–50 of 71 posts
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#42This whole post-developer idea is a red herring fueled by investor optics. The reality is AI will change how software is built, but it's still just a tool that requires the same type of precise thinking that software developers do. You can remove all need to understand syntax, but the need for translating vague desires from laypeople into a precise specification will remain—there's nothing on the AI horizon that will…
> The reality is AI will change how software is built Yup, now instead of blindly using tab to autocomplete I have to check the "AI" is not fucking up before pressing the key.
You can set a hotkey to disable completions, it's very useful for the 'no my little AI friend, I don't think you quite get it' situations that would lead you to spending more brain cycles discarding broken suggestions than actually coding.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its actually amazing news, worse software quality means more oportunities for hackers and better tools
Or people just become satisfied with lower quality. Hand-crafted chairs from a woodworker used to be the only way to get a chair. You'd get an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws. Now that chairs are cheaply made in factories, we can have multiple different chairs with many flaws. And just toss them out and go on to the next one when needed. But... those sturdy beautiful fine-wordworker-made chairs are still being…
Yeah that's where I think it's going. Quality software will have no space but a niche, and so your customers will be the top 1% that can afford it.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its actually amazing news, worse software quality means more oportunities for hackers and better tools
Or people just become satisfied with lower quality. Hand-crafted chairs from a woodworker used to be the only way to get a chair. You'd get an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws. Now that chairs are cheaply made in factories, we can have multiple different chairs with many flaws. And just toss them out and go on to the next one when needed. But... those sturdy beautiful fine-wordworker-made chairs are still being…
You actually believe that not a single woodworker said to himself, there are only so many wealthy people, I might do better if I make some chairs from cheap wood in a hurry, not doing so much polishing or ornamentaion, and I can make twice as many and sell to the not-so-rich people? You really don't think that existed?
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#45I thought we were supposed to reach AGI since like, the 1970s. Every time there's an advancement in AI, there's always speculations that "robot gonna take our jobs in 10 years".
That said, at least we have reached the phase where AI tools are commercialized, so that's another +1 I guess.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#46This whole post-developer idea is a red herring fueled by investor optics. The reality is AI will change how software is built, but it's still just a tool that requires the same type of precise thinking that software developers do. You can remove all need to understand syntax, but the need for translating vague desires from laypeople into a precise specification will remain—there's nothing on the AI horizon that will…
> the need for translating vague desires from laypeople into a precise specification will remain—there's nothing on the AI horizon that will solve for this
LLMs are very good at exactly that. What they aren't good at (I'll add the yet as an opinion) is larger systems thinking, having the context of multiple teams, multiple systems, infra, business priorities, security, etc.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or people just become satisfied with lower quality. Hand-crafted chairs from a woodworker used to be the only way to get a chair. You'd get an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws. Now that chairs are cheaply made in factories, we can have multiple different chairs with many flaws. And just toss them out and go on to the next one when needed. But... those sturdy beautiful fine-wordworker-made chairs are still being…
You actually believe that not a single woodworker said to himself, there are only so many wealthy people, I might do better if I make some chairs from cheap wood in a hurry, not doing so much polishing or ornamentaion, and I can make twice as many and sell to the not-so-rich people? You really don't think that existed?
One of the reasons of the downfall of Florence was that they didn't enter the low quality textile market and remained on the high end stuff.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny how we'd like to chop off the head of that junior developer who's behind that pull request of a perfectly working but not enough clean code, but we happily welcome spaghetti and buggy LLM code because sisterhood and brotherhood claim it's trendy. Herd mentality.
There's an uncomfortable truth backing this, at least for me: revising the code of a LLM and changing my cursorrules is easier than fixing up a junior's code and teaching them _why_ I'd want to do something a particular way. After all, it's a tool, not a person, and you can be much rougher with your tools.
In my experience, you kinda get used to other people's mindset and after a while it becomes second nature to look for their mistakes or to understand their approaches.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#49Big part of coding is understanding the code and making decisions on what needs to be added/removed/changed. LLMs can code, even if they generate perfect code every single time, someone still needs to read the code and make decisions. Others speak about understanding business logic, interfacing with clients and stakeholders,etc... I get that, but even without that, someone will always need to decide how things should…
> LLMs are not going to benchmark your code If I may focus on this particular line without invalidating the rest of the content -- why aren't they going to benchmark the code?
You hardly need more than a simple script to just run a generic benchmark tool. But to measure performance of your code and figure out what needs to be tuned, I don't think LLMs are there, am I wrong? They can't understand the code they generated well enough to make small adjustments and improve the benchmark score. For a dev to do that on LLM generated code, it would have to understand the codebase as intended by the LLM at least.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reality is AI will change how software is built Yup, now instead of blindly using tab to autocomplete I have to check the "AI" is not fucking up before pressing the key.
You can set a hotkey to disable completions, it's very useful for the 'no my little AI friend, I don't think you quite get it' situations that would lead you to spending more brain cycles discarding broken suggestions than actually coding.
I disable AI autocomplete entirely and map it to ctrl-; so I can call it up intentionally.