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The future of software development is software developers

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Re: The future of software development is software developers

#451

Post by doxeddaily »

embedding-shape wrote: post #319
solumunus wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s crazy how different my experience is. I think perhaps it’s incredibly important what programming language you are using, what your project and architecture is like. Agents are making an extraordinary contribution to my productivity. If they jacked my Claude Code subscription up to $500/month I would be upset but almost certainly would keep paying it, that’s how much value it brings. I’m in enterprise ERP.

Even more important than those things, is how well you can write and communicate your ideas. If you cannot communicate your ideas so a human could implement it as you wanted it to without asking extra questions, a LLM isn't gonna be able to.

As someone who has managed engineers for many years I find those skills immediately applicable to the LLM domain. If you aren't used to communicating what you are trying to build to other engineers I think using the AI is harder as you need to develop those skills.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#452

Post by badcryptobitch »

One thing that many of these kinds of articles don't really talk about but that also emphasizes their point is that there will be an increase in interfaces/languages for software developers to do increasingly specialized for work. As such, there will be more compilers, vms, dsls, etc which means that there will be more of a demand for developers who have this skillset. Ideally, this should lead to more folks becoming developers or at least acquiring skills that professional developers have in order to make effective use of these tools.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#453

Post by bitwize »

The future of software development is systems analysts.

It was discovered in the 1970s (at the latest) that the hard part of software is figuring out WHAT to build not HOW to build it—and the two should be separate responsibilities with separate personnel bearing separate talents. (Do NOT let your programmers do systems analysis!)

Furthermore, it was discovered that without a clear, precise description of what to build, even the most talented programmers will happily use industry best practice to build the wrong thing, and that is worse than useless: it's a net cost to the business. This is something that programmers have in common with LLMs. So it turns out, in order to build software correctly and cost-effectively, you need to perform lots of systems analysis up front, then through a stepwise refinement process design and document your solution, yielding a detailed spec. It also turns out that LLMs, like human programmers, do just fine if you give them a detailed spec and hold them accountable to that spec!

So much of the "grunt work" of programming can be handed to the LLM—IF you perform the necessary systems analysis up front to determine what needs to be built! (Bryce's Law: Programming is a translation function, taking human-readable requirements to machine-executable instructions.)

As the AI era matures we are either going to see a revival of PRIDE—the original and still most complete software development methodology, but minus the programmers Milt and Tim Bryce loathed so much—or the entire collapse of software as a field.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#454

Post by anthonypasq »

solaire_oa wrote: post #356

Most people in this thread are quibbling about the exact degree of utility LLMs provide, which a tedious argument. What's more interesting to me is, per the article, the concern regarding everyone who is leaning into LLMs without realizing (or downplaying) the exorbitant, externalized cost. Our current LLM usage is being subsidized to the point of being free by outside investment. One day when the well runs dry, you…

if you wrote this comment 70 years ago when computers were the size of rooms, it would make a lot of sense, and yet we know how history played out where everyone has a super computer in their pocket.

for some reason it feels like people are under the assumption that hardware isnt going to improve or something?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#455

Post by XenophileJKO »

dawnerd wrote: post #438
Mongoose wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always liken it to using Uber in ~2012. It was fun to get around major metro areas for dirt cheap. But then prices rose dramatically over the next decade+ as the company was forced to wean itself off of VC subsidies.

Same with Airbnb. Oh and Moviepass. Those were the days.

Except none of those cost structures are based primarily on a resource that gets cheaper over time.. a.k.a. compute.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#456

Post by merlincorey »

solumunus wrote: post #288
snickerer wrote: post #198

After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming. They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions. LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably. For every problem I need to turn my brain to ON MODE and wake up, the…

It’s crazy how different my experience is. I think perhaps it’s incredibly important what programming language you are using, what your project and architecture is like. Agents are making an extraordinary contribution to my productivity. If they jacked my Claude Code subscription up to $500/month I would be upset but almost certainly would keep paying it, that’s how much value it brings. I’m in enterprise ERP.

It sounds like you use your personal Claude Code subscription for work of your employer, but that is not something I would ever consider doing personally so I imagine I must be mistaken.

Can you elaborate slightly on what you pay for personally and what your employer pays for with regards to using LLMs for Enterprise ERP?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#457

Post by jollyllama »

The bit about drag-and-drop and Visual Studio hides a key insight: insofar as those tools allowed non-software engineers to build applications that were key to certain business processes, they were tech-debt accelerators. It is true to a very large degree; there are still businesses out there depending on shoddy VB applications that were built by someone that didn't know what they were doing, and they are hobbled by it. LLM-generated applications are the turbocharged equivalent of this, and I anticipate that giant spagehetti codebases will be made out of them, the likes of which have never been seen before, and the workflows that are wedded to them will be doomed.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#458

Post by XenophileJKO »

badcryptobitch wrote: post #452

One thing that many of these kinds of articles don't really talk about but that also emphasizes their point is that there will be an increase in interfaces/languages for software developers to do increasingly specialized for work. As such, there will be more compilers, vms, dsls, etc which means that there will be more of a demand for developers who have this skillset. Ideally, this should lead to more folks becoming…

I would agrue as LLMs increase in capability, the demand for new languages will collapse.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#459

Post by alex_young » 

  Edgar Dijkstra called it nearly 50 years ago: we will never be programming in English, or French, or Spanish. Natural languages have not evolved to be precise enough and unambiguous enough. Semantic ambiguity and language entropy will always defeat this ambition.
I don’t think that’s actually what Dijkstra was saying, nor do I think it stands to reason.

Assuming that product designers articulate their designs in English to software engineers, who subsequently turn those ideas into products, doesn’t it stand to reason that this process is to some degree approachable?

I’m not saying that we are at that point or that we will be soon, but it just seems like flawed reasoning.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#460

Post by andrekandre »

mywittyname wrote: post #63
heliumtera wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop freaking out. Seriously. You're afraid of something completely ridiculous. It is certainly more eloquent than you regarding software architecture (which was a scam all along, but conversation for another time). It will find SOME bugs better than you, that's a given. Review code better than you? Seriously? What you're using and what you consider code review? Assume I could identify one change broke production and…

We use code rabbit and it's better than practically any human I've worked with at a number of code review tasks, such as finding vulnerabilities, highlighting configuration issues, bad practices, etc. It's not the greatest at "does this make sense here" type questions, but I'd be the one answering those questions anyway. Yeah, maybe the people I've worked with suck at code reviews, but that's pretty normal. Not to sa…

  > We use code rabbit and it's better than practically any human
code rabbit does find things occasionally, but it also calls things 'critical' that arent and flags issues that dont actually exist and even lies in replies sometimes...

it also is extremely verbose to the point of being slog to go through... and the haikus: they are so cringe and infantilizing...

maybe its our config, but code rabbit has been underwhelming...

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