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Uncle Bob: It's Over

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Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#71

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

k3vinw wrote: post #69

I’m not so sure. I had a recent experience where Kiro was convinced there was a defect in the testing library when I asked it to refactor some existing project code. However this conclusion made no sense as we had similar scenarios across our project that worked flawlessly. After intervening I determined the root cause was a combination of an async issue with the production code and some incorrect mocking that was co…

I think uncle bob meant you are not going to type the code anymore, not that you stop coding.

I would argue your example is exactly the reason why you need to supervise AI

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#72

Post by rich_sasha »

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…

People say LLMs do better on tasks where success is clear, like tests passing, and I can imagine it's true.

Still, I find complex code fixes confirmed by tests end in the LLM fudging the code to make the specific test pass, rather than fixing the general issue. Like, where successful code run should generate a file and the test checks for the file, eventually LLM will just touch the file regardless and be done.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#73

Post by lelanthran »

renticulous wrote: post #70
lelanthran wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Didn't someone say LLMs memorize Harry Potter books? You can't have it both ways.

> Didn't someone say LLMs memorize Harry Potter books? You can't have it both ways.

What both ways? You can't consistently get it to output Harry Potter verbatim. That's my point - not reproducible.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#74

Post by muglug »

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…

For select tasks the latest LLMs can speed things up by an order of magnitude.

Best example I’ve found: translating code from one language to another where there’s a large corpus of existing acceptance tests.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#75

Post by wild_egg »

rich_sasha wrote: post #72
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…

People say LLMs do better on tasks where success is clear, like tests passing, and I can imagine it's true. Still, I find complex code fixes confirmed by tests end in the LLM fudging the code to make the specific test pass, rather than fixing the general issue. Like, where successful code run should generate a file and the test checks for the file, eventually LLM will just touch the file regardless and be done.

Skill issue. Literally. Make a SKILL.md that has the agent leverage subagents to do all work. An implementor agent does the thing, and then a separate agent reviews and verifies afterwards. The fresh context window of the second agent doesn't have the shortcut chain of thought in it and so it will very happily flag if the first agent cheated. Main agent can then have a new set of agents go fix it.

This has completely solved the cheating and fudging to make tests pass for me.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#76

Post by potsandpans »

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…

Agreed with you. Non argumentative, just want to add to the convo: what's even more crazy is the cognitive dissonance around this idea.

> There is no task that takes me a day that they can complete in five minutes.

It's highly dependent on task. I was watching a podcast with Simon Wilson, where he said something like, (paraphrasing) "My whole selling point as a dev was that I could ship POCs / MVPs fast. Now that's somewhat obsolete."

It resonated with me because I feel like that also was a skill that I cultivated and excelled at. I agree with Simon's general thesis: that skill is largely dead. There are many pedants and detractors that will race to the defense of this art with various arguments to try to challenge the idea, but they simply do not hold up to reality. I have non-programmer friends with 10 dollar claude code subscriptions whipping up products to solve niche problems in their life / job.

I offered to help one of my friends who's working on generating math exams based on curricula and seed problem sets. I taught him how to use git, he pushed the repo, I looked at the repo and it wasn't clear he needed me. Everything I could do would be related to scale / reliability / optimization. They don't need any of that, they just need to prompt the ai to say, "go burn some subscription tokens for my AP Calc track this year." There's a whole saas and c2c industry built around this problem that this guy just solved for 10 bucks a month.

Of course, there's much more depth to engineering then just cranking out prototypes. There is still "real engineering" to be done, and software will likely start focusing more towards specification / verification.

But a lot of the industry was built around the idea of speed of delivery / time to market to explore product fit and rapidly iterate. IMO frontier llms (private and open weights) have this largely solved. I can build and test ideas that would have taken me a weekend last year in half a day now, the majority of that time I can be talking to the llm via matrix while I'm out in the world.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#77

Post by k3vinw »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #71
k3vinw wrote: post #69

I’m not so sure. I had a recent experience where Kiro was convinced there was a defect in the testing library when I asked it to refactor some existing project code. However this conclusion made no sense as we had similar scenarios across our project that worked flawlessly. After intervening I determined the root cause was a combination of an async issue with the production code and some incorrect mocking that was co…

I think uncle bob meant you are not going to type the code anymore, not that you stop coding. I would argue your example is exactly the reason why you need to supervise AI

Fair point. I’m still learning how best to take advantage of Ai. And to be honest, a statically typed language would have caught the issue with the wrong return type before the AI tool.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#78

Post by casey2 »

muglug wrote: post #74
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…

For select tasks the latest LLMs can speed things up by an order of magnitude. Best example I’ve found: translating code from one language to another where there’s a large corpus of existing acceptance tests.

Again, no silver bullet. You will have to know what tasks it's capable of and how to elicit that solution. The bottleneck was never code the bottleneck still is solving the right problem in the right way.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#79

Post by mvdtnz »

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…

Your claim is that software developer value has been diluted in the past 20 years? Have you ever compared software developer salaries to the jobs with similar skill levels?
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