Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

They lied to you. Building software is hard

blog.nordcraft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 119 posts

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#41

Post by jtolmar »

dijit wrote: post #22
citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

I'm not sure. Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them. Same is true for websites. Sure, the websites were dingy with poor UX and oodles of bugs... but the size of the team required to make them was absolutely tiny compared to today. Thin…

Modern AAA games take tons of people because of ballooning scope and graphical fidelity expectations. Games like Super Mario World have went from highly technical team efforts to something a person with no training can accomplish solo. (However, 3D tools have lagged behind dramatically. Solo dev Mario 64 is possible but needs way more specialized knowledge.)

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#43

Post by vbezhenar »

citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

Modern Java is vastly more complicated than early Java. So I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Programming nowadays is absurdly complicated. I have 20 years of experience and I can't imagine how new developer could learn it all.

I don't really know if AI makes programming easier or harder. At one side, you can explore any topic with AI. This is super powerful ability when it comes to learning. At another side, the temptation to offload your work to AI is big and if you do that, you'll learn nothing. So it comes down to a person type, I guess. Some people will use AI to learn and some people will use AI to avoid learning, both behaviours are empowered.

I have simple and useless answer how to solve that. Throw it all out. Start from the scratch. Start with simple CPU. Start with simple OS. Start with simple protocols. Do not write frameworks. Make the number of layers between your code and hardware as small as possible. So it's actually possible to understand it all. Right now the number of abstraction layers is too big. Of course nobody's going to do that, people will put more abstraction layers and it'll work, it always works. But that sucks. Software stack was much simpler 20-30 years ago. We didn't even had source control, I was the young developer who introduced subversion into our company, but we still delivered useful software.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#44

Post by Jensson »

anonymous344 wrote: post #40
dijit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them. Same is true for websites. Sure, the websites were dingy with poor UX and oodles of bugs... but the size of the team required to make them was absolutely tiny compared to today. Thin…

it's not the making part, it's the making a competitive end-result. in 2000 only needed to make something and it was good enough. now you need marketing budget of 10 000$ and skills for that also

> in 2000 only needed to make something and it was good enough. now you need marketing budget of 10 000$ and skills for that also

You needed much more marketing budget in 2000 than today, I think you have that reversed. There is a reason indie basically wasn't a thing until steam could do marketing for you.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#45

Post by dfabulich »

This article includes a graph with a negative slope, claiming that AI tools are useful for beginners, but less and less useful the more coding expertise you develop.

That doesn't match my experience. I think AI tools have their own skill curve, independent of the skill curve of "reading/writing good code." If you figure out how to use the AI tools well, you'll get even more value out of them with expertise.

Use AI to solve problems you know how to solve, not problems that are beyond your understanding. (In that case, use the AI to increase your understanding instead.)

Use the very newest/best LLM models. Make the AI use automated tests (preferring languages with strict type checks). Give it access to logs. Manage context tokens effectively (they all get dumber the more tokens in context). Write the right stuff and not the wrong stuff in AGENTS.md.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#46

Post by pmichaud »

citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

I think as many other people who replied to you have said, it's a mixed bag. It's better in some sense, with abstractions and frameworks that sand down sharp edges, and libraries that can do everything. But it's also crushingly more complex. Back in the day you had to know and care about memory allocation and ASM, but all the knowledge you needed was in a manual or two that you owned and could actually know the contents of.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#48

Post by gdubs »

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project.

I think the reality is that to really understand these tools, you need to open your mind to a different way of working than we've all become accustomed to. I say this as someone who's made a lot of software, for a long time now. (Quite successfully too!)

In someways, while the ladder may be getting pulled up on Junior developers, I think they're also poised to be able to really utilize these tools in a way that those of us with older, more rigid ways of thinking about software development might miss.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#49

Post by hibikir »

dijit wrote: post #22
citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

I'm not sure. Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them. Same is true for websites. Sure, the websites were dingy with poor UX and oodles of bugs... but the size of the team required to make them was absolutely tiny compared to today. Thin…

Copying a game from the 90s is easier than ever. We see small teams making 90s level games all the time. It just happens that in the market, those are now just indies.

The market demands not just better, more complicated games, but mostly much higher art budgets. Go look at, say, Super Metroid, and compare it to Team Cherry's games in the same genre, made mostly by three people. Compare Harvest Moon from the 90s with Stardew Valley, made one person. Compare old school Japanese RPGs with Undertale, again with a tiny team. Lead developer who is also the lead music composer. And it's not like those games didn't sell: Every game I mentioned destroyed the old games in revenue, even though the per-unit price was tiny. Silksong managed to overload Steam on release!

And it's not just games. I was a professional programmer in the 90s. My team's job involved mostly work that today nobody would ever write, because libraries just do it for you. We just have higher demands than we ever did.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#50

Post by PaulRobinson »

dfabulich wrote: post #45

This article includes a graph with a negative slope, claiming that AI tools are useful for beginners, but less and less useful the more coding expertise you develop. That doesn't match my experience. I think AI tools have their own skill curve, independent of the skill curve of "reading/writing good code." If you figure out how to use the AI tools well, you'll get even more value out of them with expertise. Use AI to…

That sounds exhausting.

I'd rather spend my time thinking about the problem and solving it, than thinking about how to get some software to stochasticaly select language that appears like it is thinking about the problem to then implement a solution I'm going to have to check carefully.

Much of the LLM hype cycle breaks down into "anyone can create software now", which TFA makes a convincing argument for being a lie, and "experts are now going to be so much more productive", which TFA - and several studies posted here in recent months - show is not actually the case.

Your walk-through is the reason why. You've not got magic for free, you've got something kinda cool that needs operational management and constant verification.

Post reply on HN