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

The recurring dream of replacing developers

caimito.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 535 posts

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#441

Post by ripe »

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…

Thanks for the information about Tim Bryce and the relationship with Adams's obsessions.

Regarding your assertion:

> as AI becomes a critical component of software development, business thinking will become more necessary and technical thinking, much less so.

That remains to be seen. This is the story that AI evangelists are peddling and that employes are salivating over, for sure.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#442

Post by brabel »

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…

> Conversely, for the most successful companies the opposite is true.

While I agree with this, I think that it’s important to acknowledge that even if you did everything well and thought of everything in detail, you can still fail for reasons that are outside of your control. For example, a big company buying from your competitor who didn’t do a better job than you simply because they were mates with the people making the decision… that influences everyone else and they start, with good reason, to choose your competitor just because it’s now the “standard” solution, which itself has value and changes the picture for potential buyers.

In other words, being the best is not guarantee for success.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#443

Post by godelski »

ranit wrote: post #419
godelski wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail Every time we make progress complexity increases and it becomes more difficult to make progress. I'm not sure why this is surprising to many. We always do things to "good enough", not to perfection. Not that perfection even exists... "Good enough" means we tabled some things and triaged, addressing the most important things. But now to improve those little things now need t…

> As engineers, scientists, researchers, etc our literal job is to break down problems into many smaller problems and then solve them one at a time. Our literal job is also to look for and find patterns in these problems, so we can solve them as a more common problem, if possible, instead of solving them one at a time all the time .

Very true. But I didn't want to discuss elegance and abstraction as people seem to misunderstand abstraction in programming. I mean all programming is abstraction... abstraction isn't to be avoided, but things can become too abstract

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#444

Post by yunohn »

godelski wrote: post #328
yunohn wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you understand? That’s why all these AI companies are praying for humanoid robots to /just work/ - so we can replace humans mentally and physically ASAP!

I'm sure those will help. But that doesn't solve the problem the parent stated. Those robots can't solve those real world problems until they can reason, till they can hypothesize, till they can experiment, till they can abstract all on their own. The problem is you can't replace the humans (unilaterally) until you can create AGI. But that has problem of its own, as you now have to contend with previously creating a…

I completely agree - my comment was sarcastic and in jest.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#445

Post by godelski »

CPLX wrote: post #421
immibis wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LLMs are good at writing software, then there's lots of good software around written by LLMs. Where is that software? I don't see it. Logical conclusion: LLMs aren't good at writing software.

Presumably they are writing the same quality software faster, the market having decided what quality it will accept. Once that trend maxes out it’s entirely plausible that the level of quality demanded will rise quickly. That’s basically what happened in the first dot com era.

I'm not convinced. Honestly it seems like we're in a market of lemons and I don't know how we escape the kind of environment that is ripe for lemons. To get out requires customers to be well informed at the time of purchase. This is always difficult with software as we usually need to try it first and frankly, the average person is woefully tech illiterate.

But these days? We are selling products based on promises, not actual capabilities. I can't think of a more fertile environment for a lemon market than that. No one can be informed and bigger and bigger promises need to be made every year.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#447

Post by godelski »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #396
echelon wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're all coping a bit here. This time, it really is different. The fact is, one developer with Claude code can now do the work of at least two developers. If that developer doesn't have ADHD, maybe that number is even higher. I don't think the amount of work to do increases. I think the number of developers or the salary of developers decreases. In any case, we'll see this in salaries over the next year or t…

Alternate take: what agents can spit out becomes table stakes for all software. Making it cohesive, focused on business needs, and stemming complexity are now requirements for all devs. By the same token (couldn’t resist), I also would argue we should be seeing the quality of average software products notch up by now with how long LLMs have been available. I’m not seeing it. I’m not sure it’s a function of model qual…

Honestly, in many ways it feels like quality is decreasing.

I'm also not convinced it's a function of model quality. The model isn't going to do something if the prompter doesn't even know. It does what the programmer asked.

I'll give a basic example. Most people suck at writing bash scripts. It's also a common claim as to LLMs utility. Yet they never write functions unless I explicitly ask. Here try this command

  curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | less
(You don't need to pipe into less but it helps for reading) Can you spot a fatal error in the code where when running curl-pipe-bash the program might cause major issues? Funny enough I asked Claude and it asked me this

  Is this script currently in production? If so, I’d strongly recommend adding the function wrapper before anyone uses it via curl-pipe-bash.
The errors made here are quite common in curl-pipe-bash scripts. I'm pretty certain Claude would write a program with the same mistakes despite being able to tell you about the problems and their trivial corrections.

The problem with vibe coding is you get code that is close. But close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades. You get a bunch of unknown unknowns. The classic problem of programming still exists: the computer does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. LLMs just might also do things you don't tell it to...

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#448

Post by knollimar »

sanderjd wrote: post #429
echelon wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're all coping a bit here. This time, it really is different. The fact is, one developer with Claude code can now do the work of at least two developers. If that developer doesn't have ADHD, maybe that number is even higher. I don't think the amount of work to do increases. I think the number of developers or the salary of developers decreases. In any case, we'll see this in salaries over the next year or t…

Why wouldn't we find new things to do with all that new productivity? Anecdotally, this is what I see happening in the small in my own work - we say yes to more ideas, more projects, because we know we can unblock things more quickly now - and I don't see why that wouldn't extend. I do expect to see smaller teams - maybe a lot more one-person "teams" - and perhaps smaller companies. But I expect to see more work bein…

What new things would we do? I do contracting so maybe I'm lowest-bidder-pilled but I feel like drops in price in lean organizations sre going to eat the lunch of shops trying to make more quality software in most software disciplines.

How much software is really required to be extensible?

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#449

Post by knollimar »

gtowey wrote: post #311
fragmede wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your kitchen contractor an unthinking robot with no opinions or thoughts of their own that has never used a kitchen? Obviously if you want a specific cabinet to go in a specific place in the room, you're going to have to give the kitchen contractor specifics. But assuming your kitchen contractor isn't an utter moron, they can come up with something reasonable if they know it's supposed to be the kitchen. A sink, a…

You kitchen contractor will never cook in your kitchen. If you leave the decisions to them, you'll get something that's quick and easy to build, but it for sure won't have all the details that make a great kitchen. It will be average. Which seems like an apt analogy for software. I see people all the time who build systems and they don't care about the details. The results are always mediocre.

Especially if you get quotes and bid it out, you'll self select for people who care less

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#450

Post by Izkata »

nullorempty wrote: post #79
tbrownaw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you do this honestly, by negotiating reduced hours for the same pay or by negotiating piecework rather than time-based pay. Right?

What does the term mean? I think the answer to your question is obvious.

Unless something has changed, "quiet quitting" means "do only what the job requires". Arrive at 9, leave at 5, no out-of-hours work functions, etc. It's more a return to normalcy, but with a bad name because it comes from a generation who has always been told they have to go above and beyond to succeed alongside a corporate culture that tries to lure people into work by making it more of a social experience.
Post reply on HN