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Uncle Bob: It's Over

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Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#51

Post by znort_ »

OldSchool wrote: post #39

More "bad news" and from the man who helped create and then promote Agile to dilute the value of software developers by forcing software development out of the control freak's nightmare where it started: seemingly esoteric, non-understandable by management, and make sure the next generation of developers knows their place. That's Agile's insidious purpose as far I am concerned. As for AI-written code, I wouldn't fly…

i had to laugh at his announcement that "otoh ai will give you the power to get all that coverage and cyclomatic complexity stats done in minutes, which you know doesn't really mean that the code is going to work".

also, his prediction assumes that ai will be able to learn from its own code going forward. will it also create its new programming languages and tools?

but it's a funny rant.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#52

Post by HeavyStorm »

OldSchool wrote: post #39

More "bad news" and from the man who helped create and then promote Agile to dilute the value of software developers by forcing software development out of the control freak's nightmare where it started: seemingly esoteric, non-understandable by management, and make sure the next generation of developers knows their place. That's Agile's insidious purpose as far I am concerned. As for AI-written code, I wouldn't fly…

That's a conspiracy theory if I ever heard one.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#53

Post by b65e8bee43c2ed0 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #48
amarant wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White men are not allowed to grow old? How come? Doesn't really seem fair, I'm gonna be a old white man some day, ain't really that much I can do about it...(Well, I suppose sex changes are a thing now, but really?)

Are you going to be wealthy, with your head buried in the firehose of an algorithmic feed? Those are things you can do something about. Alternatively, you could take a crack at deconstructing whiteness. Depending how young you currently are, you might be able to make a dent by the time you're an old man. That's trickier though, because it involves serious social reform. Or if sociology isn't your deal, maybe you coul…

shalom

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#54

Post by doginasuit »

tonyarkles wrote: post #43
doginasuit wrote: post #17

There are probably some respectable workflows that involve an LLM writing most of the code, but AI is still terrible at understanding some critical parts of the problem. You still have to tell it what to write and how it should work or there are high odds that you'll get a hot mess. And there still needs to be a human that understands everything there and how to debug it. For me, the most enjoyable path there is to w…

> but AI is still terrible at understanding some critical parts of the problem I agree to some extent with regards to writing new code. One piece where I have been perpetually impressed is at asking it to put together a plausible explanation of how something weird has happened. I have been blown away, multiple times, by Codex and Claude’s ability to take a prompt like “When I did X, I expected Y to happen but instead…

That is how I use it too, for explanations and suggestions when I run into something unexpected. It is incredible in the back seat.

I don't mean to completely dismiss their utility. I realized recently that I was having more fun coding than I ever remember. It is a strange feeling to go along with vibe out there that software developers are becoming obsolete.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#55

Post by HeavyStorm »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #16

The craziest thing about AI is you can just try it yourself and check if the claims are true. I use Claude code and codex daily. They have become an integral part of my workflow. There is no task that takes me a day that they can complete in five minutes. Even with the lightning fast progress being made, it looks like LLMs are a decade or more away from being that good. If AI can do your job for you, you should be th…

Not my experience. AI takes a lot less time doing tasks than myself. My current issue is that 2 out of 3 they don't produce the code that I want, so I either have to reprompt or do it myself. And the solution is simple: just accept their way; I'm just not there yet.

In any case, on that one time that AI works perfectly, it saves me hours of coding. So the potential is there...

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#56

Post by lelanthran »

renticulous wrote: post #12
nine_k wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not human readability, but good structure. Spaghetti code is as bad for an LLM as for a human, because structural complexity and the amount of coupling are fundamental limits, not human-specific.

Amazing tweet. https://x.com/stevesi/status/2050325415793951124 Here's how history rhymes with this logic. The development of compilers v writing assembly language was not without a very similar "controversy" — that is, are the new tools more efficient or less efficient. The first compilers were measured relative to hand-tuned assembly language efficiency . The existing world of compute was very much "compute bound"…

> Also worth noting, early compilers (all through the 1980s) routinely had bugs that generated incorrect code.

Incorrect. They had bugs that generated incorrect code. They didn't routinely have bugs that generated incorrect code :-/

And the bugs they had were reproducible.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#57

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

johnfn wrote: post #34
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #16

The craziest thing about AI is you can just try it yourself and check if the claims are true. I use Claude code and codex daily. They have become an integral part of my workflow. There is no task that takes me a day that they can complete in five minutes. Even with the lightning fast progress being made, it looks like LLMs are a decade or more away from being that good. If AI can do your job for you, you should be th…

There are definitely tasks you can prompt an AI in 5 minutes that would take a whole day to do. One example is adding something to a CI pipeline and getting it to green (i.e. maybe you're adding your first ever e2e test), especially when your CI pipeline is painfully slow. e.g. if your pipeline takes 30 minutes to finish, and it takes around 10 tries to figure out all the random problems, that was easily a full day t…

There are definitely some tasks that AI has made 10x or 100x faster, but not the tasks that make up my day to day.

For me, there may be one thing I do every few months that AI is really good at.

The overwhelming majority of the work I do, LLM tooling is just ok at. Definitely faster overall, but with lots of human planning, hand holding and course correction.

I would estimate LLMs make me, on average 50% more productive , which is huge! But from my experience I cannot believe anyone is experiencing a 8h/5m multiple productivity boost overall

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#58

Post by lelanthran »

whstl wrote: post #38
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #16

The craziest thing about AI is you can just try it yourself and check if the claims are true. I use Claude code and codex daily. They have become an integral part of my workflow. There is no task that takes me a day that they can complete in five minutes. Even with the lightning fast progress being made, it looks like LLMs are a decade or more away from being that good. If AI can do your job for you, you should be th…

Yep. It depends so much on task, expectations, ability to express what you want and whether the problem has been solved elsewhere or not. The results are always so ridiculously different.

> The results are always so ridiculously different.

Well... yes! It's not the same as running a program through a compiler 100k times and getting the same binary, it's... different: https://www.lelanthran.com/chap15/content.html

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#60

Post by johnfn »

Aurornis wrote: post #50
johnfn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely tasks you can prompt an AI in 5 minutes that would take a whole day to do. One example is adding something to a CI pipeline and getting it to green (i.e. maybe you're adding your first ever e2e test), especially when your CI pipeline is painfully slow. e.g. if your pipeline takes 30 minutes to finish, and it takes around 10 tries to figure out all the random problems, that was easily a full day t…

I mean I wasn’t sitting around unproductively waiting for 30 minute CI runs to finish before LLMs came along, either. I also like to use LLMs for background work on iterative tasks, but the way some people talk about work in the days before LLMs make me realize how we’re arriving at these claims that LLMs make us 10X more productive. If it took someone all day to do a few minutes of active work then I could see how L…

Count yourself as one of the lucky few that can pay a 0 minute context switching price to switch between whatever other productive work you were doing and debugging CI. Most people I speak to remark that continually switching between unrelated tasks significantly diminishes their productivity.
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