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The rise of industrial software

chrisloy.dev

61–70 of 201 posts

Re: The rise of industrial software

#61
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You either see what codex and opus are capable of and extrapolate the trendline or you don’t; the author clearly saw and extrapolated. Not that I disagree: I’m on record agreeing with the article months ago. Folks in labs probably seen it coming for years. Yes we’ve seen major improvements in software development velocity - libraries, OSes, containers, portable bytecodes - but I’m afraid we’ve seen nothing yet. Claud…

And if we extrapolate 5% economic growth per year we will consume all the energy in our light cone in 1000 years.

Economic growth is not directly proportional to energy consumption. A major feature of any useful tool is that it (often dramatically) reduces energy consumption.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#62
post #58

Too many articles are written comparing LLMs to high-level languages. Sure, if you squint enough, both has to do with computers. But that comparison misses everything that is important about LLMs. High-level languages are about higher abstractions for deterministic processes. LLMs are not necessarily higher abstractions but instead about non-deterministic processes, a fundamentally different thing altogether.

Perhaps you mean reliability rather than determinism/reproduceability?

Re: The rise of industrial software

#63
So many fallacies here, imprecise, reaching arguments, attempts at creating moral panic, insistence that most people create poor quality garbage code, in start contrast to the poster, the difference between his bespoke excellence, and the dreck produced by the soulless masses is gracefully omitted.

First the core of the argument that 'Industrialization' produces low quality slop is not true - industrialization is about precisely controlled and repeatable processes. A table cut by a CNC router is likely dimensionally more accurate than one cut by hand, in fact many of the industrial processes and machines have trickled back into the toolboxes of master craftsmen, where they increased productivity and quality.

Second, from my experience of working at large enterprises, and smaller teams, the 80-20 rule definitely holds - there's always a core team of a handful of people who lay down the foundations, and design and architect most of the code, with the rest usually fixing bugs, or making bullet point features.

I'm not saying the people who fall into the 80% don't contribute, or somehow are lesser devs, but they're mostly not well-positioned in the org to make major contributions, and another invariable aspect is that as features are added and complexity grows, along with legacy code, the effort needed to make a change, or understand and fix a bug grows superlinearly, meaning the 'last 10%' often takes as much or more effort than what came before.

This is hardly an original observation, and in today's ever-ongoing iteration environment, what counts as the last 10% is hard to define, but most modern software development is highly incremental, often is focused on building unneeded features, or sidegrade redesigns.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#64
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You either see what codex and opus are capable of and extrapolate the trendline or you don’t; the author clearly saw and extrapolated. Not that I disagree: I’m on record agreeing with the article months ago. Folks in labs probably seen it coming for years. Yes we’ve seen major improvements in software development velocity - libraries, OSes, containers, portable bytecodes - but I’m afraid we’ve seen nothing yet. Claud…

And if we extrapolate 5% economic growth per year we will consume all the energy in our light cone in 1000 years.

Huh. Your statement was probably hyperbole? But just back of the napkin:

If we use about 20 TW today, in a thousand years of 5% growth we’d be at about 3x10^34. I think the sun is around 3.8x10^26 watts? That gives us about 8x10^7 suns worth of energy consumption in 1000 years.

If we figure 0.004 stars per cubic light-year, we end up in that ballpark in a thousand years of uniform spherical expansion at C.

But that assumes millions ( billions?) of probes traveling outward starting soon, and no acceleration or deceleration or development time… so I think your claim is likely true, in any practical sense of the idea.

Time to short the market lol.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#65
post #55
post #47

This essay, like so many others, mistakes the task of "building" software with the task of "writing" software. Anyone in the world can already get cheap, mass-produced software to do almost anything they want their computer to do. Compilers spit out new build of any program on demand within seconds, and you can usually get both source code and pre-compiled copies over the internet. The "industrial process" (as TFA pu…

You're getting caught up on the technical meaning of terms rather than what the author actually wrote. Theyre explicitly saying that most software will no longer be artisianal - a great literary novel - and instead become industrialized - mass produced paperback garbage books. But also saying that good software, like literature, will continue to exist.

I guess two things can be true at the same time. And I think AI will likely matter a lot more than detractors think, and nowhere near as much as enthusiasts think.

Perhaps a good analogy is the spreadsheet. It was a complete shift in the way that humans interacted with numbers. From accounting to engineering to home budgets - there are few people who haven't used a spreadsheet to "program" the computer at some point.

It's a fantastic tool, but has limits. It's also fair to say people use (abuse) spreadsheets far beyond those limits. It's a fantastic tool for accounting, but real accounting systems exist for a reason.

Similarly AI will allow lots more people to "program" their computer. But making the programing task go away just exposes limitations in other parts of the "development" process.

To your analogy I don't think AI does mass-produced paperbacks. I think it is the equivalent of writing a novel for yourself. People don't sell spreadsheets, they use them. AI will allow people to write programs for themselves, just like digital cameras turned us all into photographers. But when we need it "done right" we'll still turn to people with honed skills.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#66
post #37

Thing is: Industrialization is about repeating manufacturing steps. You don't need to repeat anything for software. Software can be copied arbitrarily for no practical cost. The idea of automation creating a massive amount of software sounds ridiculous. Why would we need that? More Games? Can only be consumed at the pace of the player. Agents? Can be reused once they fulfill a task sufficently. We're probably going t…

The "industrialisation" concept is an analogy to emphasize how the costs of production are plummeting. Don't get hung up pointing out how one aspect of software doesn't match the analogy.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#67

[dead]

The article isn't talking talking about "industrial" in relation to user interfaces. It isn't talking about user interfaces at all.

Your consumer/enterprise/industrial framework is orthogonal to the articles focus: how AI is massively reducing the cost of software.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#68
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting caught up on the technical meaning of terms rather than what the author actually wrote. Theyre explicitly saying that most software will no longer be artisianal - a great literary novel - and instead become industrialized - mass produced paperback garbage books. But also saying that good software, like literature, will continue to exist.

I guess two things can be true at the same time. And I think AI will likely matter a lot more than detractors think, and nowhere near as much as enthusiasts think. Perhaps a good analogy is the spreadsheet. It was a complete shift in the way that humans interacted with numbers. From accounting to engineering to home budgets - there are few people who haven't used a spreadsheet to "program" the computer at some point.…

> your analogy I don't think AI does mass-produced paperbacks

It's the article's analogy, not mine.

And, are you really saying that people aren't regularly mass-vibing terrible software that others use...? That seems to be a primary use case...

Though, yes, I'm sure it'll become more common for many people to vibe their own software - even if just tiny, temporary, fit-for-purpose things.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#69
post #37

Thing is: Industrialization is about repeating manufacturing steps. You don't need to repeat anything for software. Software can be copied arbitrarily for no practical cost. The idea of automation creating a massive amount of software sounds ridiculous. Why would we need that? More Games? Can only be consumed at the pace of the player. Agents? Can be reused once they fulfill a task sufficently. We're probably going t…

People re-create the same algorithms all the time for different languages or because of license incompatibility. I'm personally doing just that because I want an algorithm written in C++ in a LGPL library working in another language

In fact this is a counter argument to the point of the article. You're not making 'just more throwaway software' but instead building usable software while standing on the shoulders of existing algo's and libraries.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#70

I've been thinking about this for a while, and largely agree that industralization of software development is what we are seeing. But the emphasis on low quality is misplaced. Take this for example: ``` Industrial systems reliably create economic pressure toward excess, low quality goods. ``` Industrial systems allow for low quality goods, but also they deliver quality way beyond what can be achieved in artisanal pro…

Better along which dimensions? Most luxury cars are made the artisanal way.

That doesn't make them better. It makes them exclusive since only a few could have one.
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