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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

#541

Post by mrwrong »

throw4847285 wrote: post #295
mrwrong wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The variance is great this strikes me as a very important thing to reflect on. when the automobile was invented, was the apparent benefit so incredibly variable?

Is this a trick question? Yes it was. A horse could go over any terrain while a car could only really go over very specific terrain designed for it. We had to terraform the world in order to make the automobile so beneficial. And it turned out that this terraforming had many unintended consequences. It's actually a pretty apt comparison to LLMs.

who would I be trying to trick if it was? you didn't answer the question anyways. I'm not wondering whether cars were seen as strictly better than horses in all situations. I'm wondering if people disagreed so vehemently about whether cars were faster road transportation than horses

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#542

Post by mrwrong »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #292
mrwrong wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tried using $NEWEST_MODEL ?

It’s because depending on the person the newest model crossed the line into being useful for them personally. It’s not like a new version crosses the line for everyone. It happens gradually. Each version more and more people come into the fold. For me Claude code changed the game.

yes, it is trivially true that each new person who recommends LLMs is a new person coming into the fold

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#543

Post by signatoremo »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #529
mkozlows wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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

Ever notice that even where Uber doesn’t operate most of ride sharing alternatives work pretty much the same way? Go to South Asia, China, Middle East, or South East Asia.

Consumers pick those services because of what Uber pioneered — trust and convenience. You know exactly how much you pay, you pay everything upfront, you know you are dropped off where you need to be. There are of course exceptions, but exceptions they are.

Cost maybe the initial selling point but people stick with Uber and similar services despite higher cost, not because they don’t have other options.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#544

Post by threethirtytwo »

mrwrong wrote: post #542
threethirtytwo wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because depending on the person the newest model crossed the line into being useful for them personally. It’s not like a new version crosses the line for everyone. It happens gradually. Each version more and more people come into the fold. For me Claude code changed the game.

yes, it is trivially true that each new person who recommends LLMs is a new person coming into the fold

You get new people recommending the latest version all the time to people who are unconvinced because that version is usually what brought them into the fold.

What you’re mocking is somewhat of a signal of actual improvement of the models and that improvement as a result becoming useful to more and more people.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#545

Post by threethirtytwo »

leptons wrote: post #505
aspenmartin wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of what? Should you also have to prove you are not a bot sponsored by short-sellers? It’s all so so silly, anti-AI crowds on HN rehash so many of the same tired arguments it’s ridiculous: - bad for environment: how? Why? - takes all creative output and doesn’t credit: common crawl has been around for decades and models have been training for decades, the difference is that now they’re good. Regurgitating traini…

>Should you also have to prove you are not a bot sponsored by short-sellers? On a 35 day-old account, yes. Anything "post-AI" is suspect now. The rest of your comment reads like manufactured AI slop, replying to things I never even wrote in my one sentence comment. And no surprise coming from an account created 1 day ago .

I think it’s quite obvious I’m not writing AI slop.

The latest chatgpt for example will produce comments that are now distinguishable from the real thing only because they’re much better written. It’s insane that the main visible marker rn is that the arguments and writings it crafts are superior then what your average joe can write.

My shit writing can’t hold a candle and that’s pretty obvious. AI slop is not accepted here but I can post an example of what AI slop will now look like, if AI responded to you it would look like this:

Fair to be skeptical of new accounts. But account age and “sounds like AI” are not workable filters for truth. Humans can write like bots, bots can write like humans, and both can be new. That standard selects for tenure, not correctness.

More importantly, you did not engage any claim. If the position is simply “post-AI content from new accounts is suspect,” say that as a moderation concern. But as an argument, suspicion alone does not refute anything.

Pick one concrete claim and say why it is wrong or what evidence would change your mind. Otherwise “this reads like slop” is just pattern matching. That is exactly the failure mode being complained about.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#546

Post by wojciii »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #529
mkozlows wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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

Not everywhere. Here the government fucked Uber etc. big time because it required the companies to pay for taxi licenses if I remember correctly. That is if they want to deliver a taxi service.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#547

Post by conartist6 »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #518
conartist6 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm as high on the chain as it is possible to get! I don't use AI at all. Models help people follow, but I'm leading. Bite me.

No reason to be uncivil. Just so we are clear, you are saying you don't use it at all, but you are providing advice about it? Specifically detailing with certainty that the current state of the art has or doesn't have certain traits or abilities.

Yes. I'm not providing advice on how to use it, I'm providing advice on whether or not to use it. A million people cried out that I would be obsolete. I would be replaced: left behind. Career suicide one said LOL.

I think I'm the perfect person to be qualified to stand up and say "if they tell you you can't live without it, they are lying to your face." Only someone who has lived without it as I have would be in a position to know

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#548

Post by embedding-shape »

doxeddaily wrote: post #451
embedding-shape wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd take it a step further and say that for any engineer who is used to collaborating with others, engineers or not, should have these skills already, but as most of us know, communication is a generally lacking skill among the population at large, even among engineers too.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#549

Post by bossyTeacher »

Playing devil's advocate here. My main take with the responses here is that the naysayers are assuming that the current capabilities of models will remain fixed for the next 1-2 decades which is questionable. They are saying that AI (now or in the future) won't eat a good chunk of my career opportunities because AI now isn't good now. That's the wrong viewpoint.

My views:

- Developers are expensive

- Most development isn't that hard or that creative

- LLMs can already do some of the sub tasks that the above kind of development entails

- If the above kind of development disappears, then there is only the harder, creative kind of development left

- Less development jobs and more developers will reduce dev salaries and increase dev competition regardless of the kind of development that you do. Any such change will be fairly slow and gradual

- The 2010s Everyone Can Code era is gone and is not going to come back as a result of the above

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#550

Post by embedding-shape »

1718627440 wrote: post #522
embedding-shape wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But people don't stay novices after years/decades

Some absolutely do. I know programmers who entered web development at the same time as me, and now after decades they're still creating typical CRUD applications for whatever their client today is, using the same frameworks and languages. If it works, makes enough money and you're happy, why change?

> 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.

Some code you produce for others definitively fall under their control, but obviously depends on the contracts and the laws of the country you're in. But I've written code for others that I couldn't just "abstract into a FOSS library and use in this project", even if it wasn't trade secrets or what not, just some utility for reducing boilerplate.

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