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Is it all just vapourware?

kirahowe.com

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#61

Post by kvark »

20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

Or maybe open-source development is just poorly compatible with AI workflow? Today, projects may need a community, an issue tracker, but pull requests are becoming less important.

I suspect the ban of AI in established projects to be a very complex decision. Even if core developers would like to use AI, they don't want to review all of the AI-generated code from the larger community. So the only consistent way to preserve sanity is to declare that nobody would use it. Good luck enforcing it though!

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#62

Post by satvikpendem »

20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

We have a greenfield project at our company, yes proprietary, now taking us months where previously it'd have taken weeks for even a single feature. We definitely see the (whatever)x performance boost with our own eyes.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#63

Post by ethin »

badlibrarian wrote: post #17

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

Okay. Please generate using an AI model code for a safety-critical system which is able to be incorporated into an aircraft and that passes the coding standards and requirements in that domain and come back and tell us all about it. Surely, if AI was so good across the entire domain of software engineering, this would be trivial to do.

Edit: although you might be subject to an NDA... But this is pretty much my test for "AIs will take all the jobs": can it write truly safety-critical software yet?

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#64

Post by 20k »

badlibrarian wrote: post #17

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

I recently asked it a series of technical physics questions about a field I used to be involved in to evaluate whether it'd be useful for doing research, and literally every single answer it gave was critically wrong - even for basic questions. Its certainly true that I went "holy shit", but not in a good way

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#65

Post by smargopulos »

fryanyway_swe wrote: post #50
smargopulos wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Learning is lifelong, in most trades. What are you on about? Especially in something vast as programming/SW/ops.

That's exactly my point — by now you should have learned enough not to be surprised.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#66

Post by gmueckl »

pixelesque wrote: post #45
uncivilized wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is a web developer bub

I had DeepSeek 4 Pro do a very good job yesterday of loop-unrolling and SIMD-ifying (both SSE/AVX and ARM Neon versions) some very old scalar Col3f image processing and resampling/resizing C++ code I hadn't touched in 12 years or so. It also wrote some unit tests that validated the kernel sampling weights, and wrote some Jupyter notebooks to go along with the kernel algorithms as comparisons. It's not just web dev...…

This is still rather basic stuff to be absolutely honest with you.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#67

Post by mwcampbell »

api wrote: post #25
badlibrarian wrote: post #17

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

[flagged]

I respect the people who still haven't tried. They held a firm line when the rest of us were drawn to the shiny new thing. They're not becoming dependent on yet another centralized service (let's be real, the big centralized models are still way better than the open-weights models that most of us can run, particularly for coding). They can still develop software with nothing but their own computer, and that computer doesn't even have to be particularly new.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#68

Post by [deleted] »

badlibrarian wrote: post #53
skrebbel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a "very very senior dev" wouldn't tell me that I'm doing it wrong without telling me what I'm doing wrong.

I've tried. It's like trying to teach squirrels how to Google. Really, you just have to figure out what works for you. You will be rewarded.

[deleted]

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#69

Post by copperx »

Multiplayer wrote: post #9

YMMV but I think with the SOTA models building a token efficient engineering loop is absolutely doable with (imho) solid development and testing practices. I see no reason to buy a 3rd party system for this either. I'm not in enterprise so don't come at me here - I'm a small shop and I'm not trying to corral 100 devs or whatever. We've got linear boards getting cards pushed and pulled, debated over by multiple models…

> True software factories now exist

That statement somehow amazes me. Obviously, LLMs need plenty of steering, but I don't get how a company can be built on that.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#70

Post by vatsachak »

satvikpendem wrote: post #62
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

We have a greenfield project at our company, yes proprietary, now taking us months where previously it'd have taken weeks for even a single feature. We definitely see the (whatever)x performance boost with our own eyes.

> now taking us months where it'd have taken weeks...

So 0<whatever<1

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