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The future of software development is software developers

codemanship.wordpress.com

521–530 of 588 posts

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#521
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias Please just for fun - reach out to for example Klarna support via their website and tell me how much of your experience can be attributed to an anti-AI bias and how much to the fact that the LLMs are a complete shit for any important production use cas…

My man here is reaching out to Klarna Support, this tells a LOT about his life decision making skills which clearly shine through as well in his comments on the topic of AI

Klarna functions as a payment provider as well, not just a payday loan service (which you are implying I assume). This comment says more about you.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are just writing a large volume of code over and over again But why would you do that? Wouldn't you just have your own library of code eventually that you just sell and sell again with little tweaks? Same money for far less work.

People, at least novice developers, tend to prefer fast and quick boilerplate that makes them look effective, over spending one hour sitting just thinking and designing, then implementing some simple abstraction. This is true today, and been true for as long as I've been in programming. Besides, not all programming work can be abstracted into a library and reused across projects, not because it's technically infeasib…

But people don't stay novices after years/decades. Of course when you write the boilerplate for the 20x time maybe you still accept that, but when you write it for the 2000x time, I bet you do the lazy thing and just copy it.

> cannot for legal reasons or ...

Sure, you can't copy trade secrets, but that's also not the boilerplate part. Copying e.g. a class hierarchy and renaming all the names and replacing the class contents that represent the domain, won't be a legal problem, because this is not original in the first place.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say while LLMs do improve productivity sometimes, I have to say I flatly cannot believe a claim (at least without direct demonstration or evidence) that one person is doing the work of 20 with them in december 2025 at least. I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number, but those claims quickly fell out of the mainstream as people realised it's just not that b…

It's entirely dependent on the type of code being written. For verbose, straightforward code with clear cut test scenarios, one agent can easily 24/7 the work of 20 FT engineers. This is a best case scenario. Your productivity boost will depend entirely on a combination of how much you can remove yourself from the loop (basically, the cost of validation per turn) and how amenable the task/your code is to agents (whic…

>For verbose, straightforward code with clear cut test scenarios, one agent can easily 24/7 the work of 20 FT engineers

I have been working professionally for ~16 years in software development, and scenarios like this was about 5% of my work.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#524
post #297
post #19

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This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make. Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.

This is completely wrong. Codex 5.2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 don't have any of these issues. They will regularly tell you that you're wrong if you bother to ask them and they will explain why and what a better solution is. They don't make up anything. The code they produce is noticeably more efficient in LoC than previous models. And yes they really will do research, they will search the Internet for docs and articles a…

The same response (you are using model X instead of Y) have been perpetuated since 2024, and will still be perpetuated in 2026.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#525
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should look at other engineering disciplines. How many highway over passes have unique “chef quality” designs? Very few. Most engineering is commodity replications of existing designs. The exact same thing applies to software engineering. Most of us engineers are replicating designs that came earlier. LLMs are good at generating the rote designs that make up the bulk of software by volume. Who benefit from an art…

Just like cooking in the middle ages. As the kitchen, hygiene, etc. got better, so did the chefs and so did the food. This is just a transition. re-Rest API, you're right. But again, we use roombas to vacuum when the floor layout is friendly to them. Not all rooms can be vacuumed by roombas. Simple Rest api can be emitted one shot from an LLM and there is no room for interpretation. But ask a future LLM to make a new…

I disagree with the vibecoding take. Its a new skill that absolutely has a place in developers skillset and it may be of great importance for some kinds of projects. You can learn so much by vibecoding little projects that otherwise would never see the light of day.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#526

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…

LLMs cannot generate coherent sentences

LLMs writing prose is too robotic

LLMs output is too dependent on prompts to be interesting

LLMs take too much RAM to run effectively

LLMs take too much electricity to run locally

LLMs work locally but are a bit too slow for my taste

LLMs output mostly correct code but it isn't applicable to my codebase

LLMs make tool calls to pull in additional context

LLMs outputted code works for most developers but not my codebase <---- you are currently here

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at least in the sense that your abstractions are novel and the shape of the abstraction set is different from the standard things that exist People shouldn't be doing this in the first place. Existing abstractions are sufficient for building any software you want.

Software development is a bit like chess. 1. e4 is an abstraction available to all projects, 3. Nc3 is available to 20% of projects, while 15. Nxg5 is unique to your own project. Or, abstractions in your project form a dependency tree, and the nodes near the root are universal, e.g. C, Postgres, json, while the leaf nodes are abstractions peculiar to just your own project.

The possible chess moves is already known ahead of time. Just because an AI can't make up a move like Np5 as a human could do, that doesn't mean anything AI can't play chess. It will be fine with just using the existing moves that have been found so far. The idea that we still need humans to come up with new chess moves is not a requirement for playing chess.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#528
post #152
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask a model to "Write a chess engine where pawns move backward and kings can jump like nights" It will keep slipping back into real chess rules. It learned chess, it did not understand the concept of "rules" Or Ask it to reverse a made up word like "Reverse the string 'glorbix'" It will get it wrong on the first try. You would not fail. Or even better ask it to... "Use the dxastgraphx library to build a DAG scheduler…

You’re trying to interrogate a machine as you would a human and presenting this as evidence that machines aren’t humans. Yes, you’re absolutely right! And also completely missing the point.

The discussion is not about being human. Is about being fit for purpose...

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#529

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.

... and people kept using Uber.

Uber and Lyft put all the taxis out of business and now cost as much as the taxis they displaced

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2025-2035 Depending on other people to maintain backward compatibility so that you can keep coding like it’s 2025 is its own problematic dependency. You could certainly do it but it would be limiting. Imagine that you had a model trained on examples from before 2013 and your boss wants you to take over maintenance for a React app.

You're all referencing the strange idea in a world where there would be no open-weight coding models trained in the future. Even in a world where VC spending vanished completely, coding models are such a valuable utility that I'm sure at the very least companies/individuals would crowdsource them on a reoccurring basis, keeping them up to date. The value of this technology has been established, it's not leaving anyti…

SOTA models cost hundreds of millions to train. I doubt anyone is crowdsourcing that.

And that’s assuming you already have a lot of the infrastructure in place.

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