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Software development in the time of strange new angels

davegriffith.substack.com

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Re: Software development in the time of strange new angels

#41

Post by handoflixue »

jimbokun wrote: post #29
scuff3d wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but I don't think the pricing is long term viable. We're in the burn everything to the ground to earn market share phase. Once things start to stabilize and there is no more user growth, they'll start putting the screws to the users. I said the same thing about Netflix in 2015 and Gamepass in 2020. It might have taken a while but eventually it happened. And they're gonna have to raise prices higher…

Netflix prices went up a little bit but not very much.

Netflix was initially $7/mo in 2007. Currently it goes for $18/mo in 2025.

150% increase in 18 years is about triple the rate of inflation

I'd call that more than "a little bit", but I'd agree that if LLMs go the same way it probably doesn't change the equation much at all.

Plus they do still have an $8/mo ad-supported plan. After adjusting for inflation, that's actually cheaper than the original!

Re: Software development in the time of strange new angels

#42

Post by enraged_camel »

lmm wrote: post #36
hdivider wrote: post #4

Here's what I don't understand. Developers who get excited by agentic development put out posts like this. (I get excited too.) Other developers tend to point out objections in terms of maintainability, scalability, overly complicated solutions, and so on. All of which are valid. However, this part of AI evolves very quickly. So given these are known problems, why shouldn't we expect rapid improvements in agentic AI…

> However, this part of AI evolves very quickly. So given these are known problems, why shouldn't we expect rapid improvements in agentic AI systems for software development, to the point where software developers who stick with the old paradigm will indeed be eroded in time? Because writing code has always been the easy part. A senior isn't someone who's better at writing code than a junior - they might well be wors…

I don’t know what level of experience you have with agentic AI, but the frontier models are also really good at things like product management and data modeling. You can start with a description of the problem and end up with a really solid design plan that you can then give the AI to implement.

So yeah, if you’re starting with a “write me code that does X Y Z” then you aren’t getting the most out of these tools, because you’re right, that’s not the hard part.

Re: Software development in the time of strange new angels

#43

Post by _wdfs »

scuff3d wrote: post #10

The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustai…

This is why I think the article whiffs on something important, in the section where he asks "If we can code quickly and cheaply, what is the new constraint?"

Energy. The new constraint is energy.

Re: Software development in the time of strange new angels

#44

Post by scuff3d »

handoflixue wrote: post #41
jimbokun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix prices went up a little bit but not very much.

Netflix was initially $7/mo in 2007. Currently it goes for $18/mo in 2025. 150% increase in 18 years is about triple the rate of inflation I'd call that more than "a little bit", but I'd agree that if LLMs go the same way it probably doesn't change the equation much at all. Plus they do still have an $8/mo ad-supported plan. After adjusting for inflation, that's actually cheaper than the original!

I think it's gonna be a lot worse with LLMs. Mainly because they're substantially under charging, I don't think the cost of operating is going to drop much, and the workflows are only going to get more token hungry.

The incentives here are also fucking atrocious. They aren't incentivised to make the model as good as possible. It's in their best interest to tune so it's good enough to not drive you off, but bad enough to push you to spend more.

Re: Software development in the time of strange new angels

#45

Post by scuff3d »

austin-cheney wrote: post #26
scuff3d wrote: post #10

The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustai…

I so completely want to agree with you. If this were anything other than JavaScript agreeing with your comment would be simple. I wrote JavaScript in the corporate world for 15 years. Here is the reality: * Almost nobody wants to do it. The people that get paid for it don't want to do it. They just want to get paid. The result is that everybody who does get paid for it completely sucks. Complete garbage, at least at…

That might be a problem in the frontend/JavaScript world, but I think people forget the industry is a lot bigger than web dev. I've managed to go my whole career without ever having to write a single line of JavaScript.

But to be fair your point, and the original authors, isn't a bad one. And I think someone else in this thread said it too. If you're only skill is typing out code against a very narrow spec that someone else did all the work to figure out, you're probably in trouble.

Re: Software development in the time of strange new angels

#46

Post by dwohnitmok »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #40
dwohnitmok wrote: post #34

> You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of software development.... I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Agentic AI means that anything you know [how] to code can be coded very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt o…

> skill of an all-around businessman So do you imagine that AI will reach the point that a business guy will say make me a web site to blah blah blah, and the AI will say sure boss and it will appear? Sort of what a dev/team of devs/testers/product managers/BA's would do now? the current batch is a long way from this afaik

Maybe. I have a fair amount of uncertainty about the speed of AI development but I think that that is well within the realm of possibility (and definitely a possibility developers should be considering). Note that even if AI replaces an entire dev team, it's still not apparent that the process would be as easy as you're saying (at least for a while after that), since after all even with a crack dev team products are almost never as easy "make me this product" "okay!" and then the product is created.

But that wasn't what I was trying to get at. My point is that this is what the author was predicting, and if that were to pass, that is more or less the death of software development as a profession, contrary to what the author says when he says "I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it."

Re: Software development in the time of strange new angels

#47

Post by XenophileJKO »

_wdfs wrote: post #43
scuff3d wrote: post #10

The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustai…

This is why I think the article whiffs on something important, in the section where he asks "If we can code quickly and cheaply, what is the new constraint?" Energy. The new constraint is energy.

I think the new constraint is actually decisions.

Re: Software development in the time of strange new angels

#48

Post by atleastoptimal »

scuff3d wrote: post #10

The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustai…

Open source AI is getting cheaper and cheaper. Model companies run inference at a profit, the lack of profitability from AI companies is just due to them putting all their capital into training the next generation of models.

Re: Software development in the time of strange new angels

#50

Post by ManuelKiessling »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #48
scuff3d wrote: post #10

The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustai…

Open source AI is getting cheaper and cheaper. Model companies run inference at a profit, the lack of profitability from AI companies is just due to them putting all their capital into training the next generation of models.

Model companies running inference at a profit — do you have a good source for this?
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