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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#461

Post by sanderjd »

knollimar wrote: post #448
sanderjd wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is tons of stuff to do. Lots of technologies out there that need to be invented and commercialized. Tons of inefficient processes in business, government, and academia to improve.

None of this means that it will be the kinds of professional specialized software development teams that we're used to doing any of this work, but I have some amount of optimism that this is actually going to be a golden age for "doing useful things with computers" work.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#462

Post by SftwrSvior81 »

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…

> The recurring dream of replacing developers > 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.

It's basically this:

"I'm hungry. I want to eat."

"Ok. What do you want?"

"I don't know. Read my mind and give me the food I will love."

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#463

Post by cadamsdotcom »

There’s another reason developers will never be replaced.

Expectations always go up. People expect more. Whoever can give it to them will reap the rewards. And that is whoever works out how to do better than the baseline of capability available to all, eg. AI code tools or no-code. Human expertise adds value above a baseline of capability that’s universally available, even if that baseline is rising all the time.

You need better experts than the next mob to even have a chance. And with near-zero distribution costs even marginally better software will trend toward winner take all.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#464

Post by satvikpendem »

psychoslave wrote: post #359
satvikpendem wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markets always exists as long as people want to exchange one thing for another, by definition.

Concepts such as person or property are required premises for such a market system to happen, be it by formal laws or tacit consensual behaviors.

Yes, and throughout human history, there has always been the concept of owned property.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#465

Post by satvikpendem »

shimman wrote: post #283
satvikpendem wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markets always exists as long as people want to exchange one thing for another, by definition.

Yes and you're allowed to regulate markets into things that actively benefit society and not just sucking blood from people willy nilly.

No one said you couldn't.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#466

Post by funkyfiddler69 »

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…

how much new software do we really use? and how much can old software become qualitatively better without just becoming new software in different times with a much bigger and younger customer base?

I misunderstood two things for a very long time:

a) standards are not lower or higher, people are happy that they can do stuff at all or a little to a lot faster using software. standards then grow with the people, as does the software.

b) of course software is always opinionated and there are always constraints and devs can't get stuck in a recursive loop of optimization but what's way more important: they don't have to because of a).

Quality is, often enough, a matter of how much time you spent on nitpicking even though you absolutely could get the job done. Software is part of a pipeline, a supply chain, and someone is somehow aware why it should be "this" and not better or that other version the devs have prepared knowing well enough it won't see the light of day.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#467

Post by lelanthran »

layer8 wrote: post #458
lelanthran wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when hitting the limits of what works out of the box, hiring or commissioning developers to add more complex functions and integrations. You aren't going to going to do that to AI systems. If, after a couple of weeks you hit the limit of what the AI could do in a million+ LoC, you aren't going to be able to hire a human dev to modify or replace that system for you, because: 1. Humans are going to be needing a ramp…

So, what do you propose non-developers in that situation will be doing then?

> So, what do you propose non-developers in that situation will be doing then?

Look, I dunno what they will do, but these options are certainly off the table:

1. Get a temp dev/team in to patch a 1m SloC mess

2. Do it cost-effectively.

If the tech has improved by the time this happens (I mean, we're nowhere near this scenario yet, and it has already plateaued) then perhaps they can get the LLM itself to simply rewrite it instead of spending all those valuable tokens reading it in and trying to patch it.

If the tech is not up to it, then their options are effectively:

1. Use it as is till the end of time

2. Throw it out, and start again

3. Pray

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#468

Post by groundzeros2015 »

Retric wrote: post #455
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Efficiency is why things continue to work as fewer people work. Yes, but it’s not why there are fewer adults in the workforce.

Yes it is, if we still needed 90+% of the population to work or people starved that’s a self correcting system. Less than that work and you have less people.

> if we still needed 90+% of the population to work or people starved

I actually didn’t say that. And the twisting of words is the source of confusing

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#469

Post by groundzeros2015 »

Retric wrote: post #454
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only the relatively tiny homeless population is poor by historic standards. The cost to participate in society is much greater. Yeah we do have more cars. But you also need to buy one to go to work. We have education, but you need 22 years to be employable. It’s probably not with continuing the discussion if you don’t believe poverty exists as a concept.

Millions of working Americans don’t have cars. Also, you can make the median wage in the US without any collage education. Poverty still exists, but vast inflation of what is considered’a basic standard of living’ hides a great deal of progress. People want to redefine illiteracy to mean being unable to use the internet not by the standards of the past.

> Millions of working Americans don’t have cars.

How would you describe the level of wealth of those Americans outside of metro areas?

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#470

Post by [deleted] »

lotu wrote: post #106
enos_feedler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that is true. The nuance here is that software isn’t just getting cheaper but the activity to build it is changing. Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. That shifts who can do the job. The customer might be able to do it themselves. This removes a market, not grows one. I am not saying the market will collapse just be careful applying a blunt theory to such a profound technological…

You say that like someone that has been coding for so long you have forgotten what it's like to not know how to code. The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. AI is amazing at producing answers you previously would have looked up on stack overflow, which is very useful. It often can type faster that than I can which is also useful. Ho…

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