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They lied to you. Building software is hard

blog.nordcraft.com

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Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#81

Post by Thanemate »

vineethy wrote: post #66

strongly disagree with this article. I think using the tools can actually directly lead to a junior engineer getting closer to a senior engineer. Telling junior engineers that they have to get better at typing out code in order to be better engineers misses what actually makes someone a better engineer. It's worth actually being specific about what differentiates a junior engineer from a senior engineer. There's two…

People don't develop the ability to solve algebraic equations when they see a professor solving it on the whiteboard. That's just the introduction to the methodology. The way people develop problem solving is by solving problems themselves.

This is why everyone's thirsty for senior/staff engineers who are AI powered right now, because their entire work experience was the typical SWE experience.

I cannot wait for the industry to have a highly skilled SWE drought in the next 5 years, so I can sweep in and become the AI powered engineer who saves the day because other junior-mid SWE's outsourced their problem solving way too early, either due to falling for the "don't be left behind" narrative (which is absurd because what about people who will get into CS in 6 years from now? Do they miss some metaphorical train?) or because their manager forced them to adopt the tools.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#82

Post by matthewkayin »

citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

> Compare modern languages like Go & Rust to C & C++, simply for their ease-of-compilation and execution.

Except that at least for game development, C and C++ are still the go-to tools?

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#83

Post by raincole »

idle_zealot wrote: post #74
raincole wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think software was indeed 9/10 accidental activities before AI. Probably still mostly accidental activities with the current LLM. The essence: query all the users within a certain area and do it as fast as possible The accident: spending an hour to survey spatial tree library, another hour debating whether to make our own, one more hour reading the algorithm, a few hours to code it, a few days to test and debug it…

Isn't the solution to that standardizing on good-enough implementations of common data structures, algorithms, patterns, etc? Then those shared implementations can be audited, iteratively improved, critiqued, etc. For most cases, actual application code should probably be a small core of businesses logic gluing together a robust set of collectively developed libraries. What the LLM-driven approach does is basically t…

I mean, of course libraries are great. But the process to create a standardized, widely accepted library/framework usually involves with another kind of accidental complexity: the "designed by committee" complexity. Every user, and every future user will have different ideas about how it should work and what options it should support. People need to communicate their opinions to the maintainers, and sometimes it can even get political.

At the end, the 80% features and options will bloat the API and documentation, creating another layer of accidental activity: every user will need to rummage through the doc and something source code to find the 20% they need. Figuring how to do what you want with ImageMagick or FFmpeg always involved with a lot of reading time before LLM. (These libraries are so huge that I think most people only use more like 2% instead of 20% of them.)

Anyway, I don't claim AI would eliminate all the accidental activities and the current LLM surely can't. But I do think there are an enormous amount of them in software development.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#85

Post by ryandvm »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #84

I read a quote from somebody in the industry recently that stuck. I don't remember who it was. "Writing software is easy, changing it is hard."

Absolutely true. Especially so with poorly abstracted software design.

This is why so many new teams' first order of business is invariably a suggestion to "rewrite everything".

They're not going to do a better job or get a better product, it's just the only way they're going to get a software stack that does what they want.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#86

Post by Bishonen88 »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lzx9ft7uMw

^ Everything App for Personal use that I'm thinking about making public in some way

~50k loc with ~400 files. Docker, postgres, react + fastify I'd say between 15 and 20 hours of vibe coding

- Tasks, Goals, Habits

- Calendar showing all of the above with two way google sync

- Household sharing of markdown notes, goals and more

- Financial projections, spending, earning, recurring transactions and more

- Meal tracking with pics, last eaten, star rating and more

- Gantt chart for goals

- Dashboard for at a glance view

- PWA for android with layout optimizations

- Dark mode

... and more

Could've I done it in the last 5 years? Yes. It would've taken 3-4 months if not more though. Now we could talk 24/7 about whether it's clean code, super maintainable, etc. etc. The code written by hand wouldn't be either if it'd be me just doing a hobby project.

Shipping is rather straightforward as well thanks to LLM's. They hold your hand most of the way. Being a techie makes this much, much easier...

I think developers are cooked one way or another. Won't take long now. Same question asked a year ago was dramatically different. AI were helpful to some extent but couldn't code up basic things.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#87

Post by atmavatar »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #80
gdubs wrote: post #48

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project. I think the reality is th…

I definitely agree with this. Older folks have to deal with the double whammy of being familiar with what they already know, plus there is a good bit of research that learning and absorbing new things just gets harder past mid-40s or so. That said, I don't think this negates what TFA is trying to say. The difficulty with software has always been around focusing on the details while still keeping the overall system in…

> Older folks have to deal with the double whammy of being familiar with what they already know, plus there is a good bit of research that learning and absorbing new things just gets harder past mid-40s or so.

Unfortunately, since the tech industry still largely skews young, reticence to chase every new hype cycle also feeds into the perception of an inability to learn new things, even after many prove to be fads (e.g., blockchain).

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#88

Post by charcircuit »

idle_zealot wrote: post #68
mlsu wrote: post #53

Fred Brooks, from "No Silver Bullet" (1986) > All software construction involves essential tasks, the fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of these abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of these onto machine languages within space and speed constraints. Most of the big past gains in software productivit…

There are mixed views here. Some are making the claim relevant to the Silver Bullet observation, than LLMs are cutting down time spent on non-essential work. But the view that's really driving hype is that the machine can do essential work , design the system for you, and implement it, explore the possibility space and make judgments about the tradeoffs, and make decisions . Now, can it actually do those things? Not…

>Now, can it actually do those things? Not in my estimation

Just today I asked my clawbot to generate a daily report for me and it was able to build an entire scraping skill for itself to use for making the report. It designed it along with making decisions along the way including changing data sources when it realized one it was trying was blocking it as a bot.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#89

Post by bdangubic »

gdubs wrote: post #48

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project. I think the reality is th…

This reminds of talking to my nephew at Thanksgiving years ago. He was studying for an exam after the holidays and I was looking at his screen open to a Google Doc which looked like his study notes except - they were being edited as I was watching - by someone else. I asked about it and he goes “we have a single Google Doc where all students collaborate on the study notes.” My mind was blown, I was also using Google Docs but not in a millions years would it cross my mind its utility for such a thing he and his classmates were using it for. Can’t wait to see what new blood “Juniors” brings to the table!

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#90

Post by bsoles »

gdubs wrote: post #48

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project. I think the reality is th…

Over the last 25 years of building commercial software, but being a programming enthusiast since I was 15 years old, I came to the conclusion that self-improvement (in the sense of gaining real expertise in a field, building a philosophy of things, and doing the right things) is in direct opposition to creating "value" in the corporate/commercial sense of today.

Using AI/LLMs, you perhaps will create more commercial value for yourself or your employer, but it will not make you a better learner, developer, creator, or person. Going back to the electronic calculator analogy that people like to refer to these days when discussing AI, I also now think that, yes, electronic calculators actually made us worse with being able to use our brains for complex things, which is the thing that I value more than creating profits for some faceless corporation that happens to be my employer at the moment.

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