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The Future of AI Software Development

martinfowler.com

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Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#91
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Fowler and reviewed it well. Are you assuming tech debt has no financial cost?

Oh sure but it just usually doesn't show up on a financial statement so just seemed a bit strange to be commenting on the financials is all, maybe I misunderstood your context.

>it just usually doesn't show up on a financial statement

Exactly.

That's one of the reasons it's gotten so out-of-hand.

Edit: Thought I'd add that once wealth rises up to a stratospheric degree, the higher it is the less there is a need to get their money's worth. If you could put a dollar figure on it, the biggest can afford more technical debt than anybody theoretically, and they still won't actually have to deal with it.

It'll be somebody elses' problem since it's not on the balance sheet.

I guess I was commenting on the movers & shakers, not the financials specifically.

Good observations you make though.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#92
post #54
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need to go this expensive. An AMD Ryzen Strix Halo (AI Max+ 395) machine with 128 GiB of unified RAM will set you back about $2500 these days. I can get about 20 tokens/s on Qwen3 Coder Next at an 8 bit quant, or 17 tokens per second on Minimax M2.5 at a 3 bit quant. Now, these models are a bit weaker, but they're in the realm of Claude Sonnet to Claude Opus 4. 6-12 months behind SOTA on something that…

If you don't mind saying, what distro and/or Docker container are you using to bet Qwen3 Coder Next going?

I'm running Fedora Silverblue as my host OS, this is the kernel:

  $ uname -a
  Linux fedora 6.18.9-200.fc43.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Feb  6 21:43:09 UTC 2026 x86_64 GNU/Linux
You also need to set a few kernel command line paramters to set it up to allow it to use most of your memory as graphics memory, I have the following in my kernel command line, those are each 110 GiB expressed in number of pages (I figure leaving 18 GiB or so for CPU memory is probably a good idea):

  ttm.pages_limit=28835840 ttm.page_pool_size=28835840
Then I'm running llama.cpp in the official llama.cpp Docker containers. The Vulkan one works out of the box. I had to build the container myself for ROCm, the llama.cpp container has ROCm 7.0 but I need 7.2 to be compatible with my kernel. I haven't actually compared the speed directly between Vulkan and ROCm yet, I'm pretty much at the point where I've just gotten everything working.

In a checkout of the llama.cpp repo:

  podman build -t llama.cpp-rocm7.2 -f .devops/rocm.Dockerfile --build-arg ROCM_VERSION=7.2 --build-arg ROCM_DOCKER_ARCH='gfx1151' .
Then I run the container with something like:

  podman run -p 8080:8080 --device /dev/kfd --device /dev/dri --security-opt seccomp=unconfined --security-opt label=disable --rm -it -v ~/.cache/llama.cpp/:/root/.cache/llama.cpp/ -v ./unsloth:/app/unsloth llama.cpp-rocm7.2  --model unsloth/MiniMax-M2.5-GGUF/UD-Q3_K_XL/MiniMax-M2.5-UD-Q3_K_XL-00001-of-00004.gguf --jinja --ctx-size 16384 --seed 3407 --temp 1.0 --top-p 0.95 --min-p 0.01 --top-k 40 --port 8080 --host 0.0.0.0 -dio
Still getting my setup dialed in, but this is working for now.

Edit: Oh, yeah, you had asked about Qwen3 Coder Next. That command was:

  podman run -p 8080:8080 --device /dev/kfd --device /dev/dri --security-opt seccomp=unconfined --security-opt label=disable \
    --rm -it -v ~/.cache/llama.cpp/:/root/.cache/llama.cpp/ -v ./unsloth:/app/unsloth llama.cpp-rocm7.2  -hf unsloth/Qwen3-Coder-Next-GGUF:UD-Q6_K_XL \
    --jinja --ctx-size 262144 --seed 3407 --temp 1.0 --top-p 0.95 --min-p 0.01 --top-k 40 --port 8080 --host 0.0.0.0 -dio
(as mentioned, still just getting this set up so I've been moving around between using `-hf` to pull directly from HuggingFace vs. using `uvx hf download` in advance, sorry that these commands are a bit messy, the problem with using `-hf` in llama.cpp is that you'll sometimes get surprise updates where it has to download many gigabytes before starting up)

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been running K2.5 (through the API) as my daily driver for coding through Kimi Code CLI and it’s been pretty much flawless. It’s also notably cheaper and I like the option that if my vibe coded side projects became more than side projects I could run everything in house. I’ve been pretty active in the open model space and 2 years ago you would have had to pay 20k to run models that were nowhere near as powerful.…

Depends what you see as flawless. From my perspective even GPT 5.2 produces mostly garbage grade code (yes it often works, but it is not suitable for anywhere near production) and takes several iterations to get it to remotely workable state.

> not suitable for anywhere near production

This is what I've been increasingly understanding is the wrong way to understand how LLMs are changing things.

I fully agree that LLMs are not suitable for creating production code. But the bigger question you need to ask is 'why do we need production code?' (and to be clear, there are and always will be cases where this is true, just increasingly less of them)

The entire paradigm of modern software engineering is fairly new. I mean it wasn't until the invention of the programmable microprocessor that we even had the concept of software and that was less than 100 years ago. Even if you go back to the 80s, a lot of software doesn't need to be distributed or serve a endless variety of users. I've been reading a lot of old Common Lisp books recently and it's fascinating how often you're really programming lisp for you and your experiments. But since the advent of the web and scaling software to many users with diverse needs we've increasingly needed to maintain systems that have all the assumed properties of "production" software.

Scalable, robust, adaptable software is only a requirement because it was previously infeasible for individuals to build non-trivial systems for solving any more than a one or two personal problems. Even software engineers couldn't write their own text editor and still have enough time to also write software.

All of the standard requirements of good software exist for reasons that are increasingly becoming less relevant. You shouldn't rely on agents/LLMs to write production code, but you also should increasingly question "do I need production code?"

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people aren’t realizing that it’s not about replacing software engineers, it’s about replacing software . We’ve been trying to build well engineered, robust, scalable systems because software had to be written to serve other users. But LLMs change that. I have a bunch of vibe coded command lines tools that exactly solve my problems, but very likely would make terrible software. The thing is, this program onl…

This is the thing a lot of skeptics aren't grappling with. Software engineering as a profession is mostly about building software that can operate at scale. If you remove scale from the equation then you can remove a massive chunk of the complexity required to build useful software. There are a ton of recipe management apps out there, and all of them are more complex than I really need. They have to be, because other…

Tools for the non-professional developer to put their skills on wheels have always been part of the equation since we've had microcomputers if not minicomputer, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s been pretty much flawless So above and beyond frontier models? Because they certainly aren't "flawless" yet, or we have very different understanding of that word.

I have increasingly changed my view on LLMs and what they're good for. I still strongly believe LLMs cannot replace software engineers (they can assist yes, but software engineering requires too much 'other' stuff that LLMs really can't do), but LLMs can replace the need for software. During the day I am working on building systems that move lots of data around where context and understanding of the business problem…

Your definition of flawless is fine for you and requires a big asterix. But without being called out on it look how your message would have read for someone that's not in the known of LLM limitations, and contributed further to the dissilusionment of the field and the gaslighting that's already going on by big comapnies.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#96
> When I began in software in the 1980s I was dismissed as an “object guy” by database folks and as a “data modeler” by object folks. I've since been dismissed as a “patterns guy”, “agile guy”, “architecture guy”, “java guy”, “ruby guy”, and “anti-architect guy”. I'm now a past-it gray-beard surviving on drinking the intellectual blood of my younger colleagues. It's tasty.

I don't think you can find that level of ego anywhere in the software industry or any other industry for that matter. Respetc.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people aren’t realizing that it’s not about replacing software engineers, it’s about replacing software . We’ve been trying to build well engineered, robust, scalable systems because software had to be written to serve other users. But LLMs change that. I have a bunch of vibe coded command lines tools that exactly solve my problems, but very likely would make terrible software. The thing is, this program onl…

This is the thing a lot of skeptics aren't grappling with. Software engineering as a profession is mostly about building software that can operate at scale. If you remove scale from the equation then you can remove a massive chunk of the complexity required to build useful software. There are a ton of recipe management apps out there, and all of them are more complex than I really need. They have to be, because other…

A lot of people don’t care about software other than the fact that the ones they use work well. They don’t want to create it, to maintain it, or to upgrade it. That’s what the IT department is for.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#98
post #88
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is crazy to me that it is that slow, 4 bit quants don't lose much with Qwen3 coder next and unsloth/Qwen3-Coder-Next-UD-Q4_K_XL gets 32 tps with a 3090 (24gb) as a VM with 256k context size with llama.cpp Same with unsloth/gpt-oss-120b-GGUF:F16 gets 25 tps and gpt-oss20b gets 195 tps!!! The advantage is that you can use the APU for booting, and pass through the GPU to a VM, and have nice safer VMs for agents at th…

Yeah, this is an AMD laptop integrated GPU, not a discrete NVIDIA GPU on a desktop. Also, I haven't really done much to try tweaking performance, this is just the first setup I've gotten that works.

The memory bandwidth of the Laptop CPU is better for fine tuning, but MoE really works well for inference.

I won’t use a public model for my secret sauce, no reason to help the foundation models on my secret sauce.

Even an old 1080ti works well for FIM for IDEs.

IMHO the above setup works well for boilerplate and even the sota models fail for the domain specific portions.

While I lucked out and foresaw the huge price increases, you can still find some good deals. Old gaming computers work pretty well, especially if you have Claude code locally churn on the boring parts while you work on the hard parts.

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#99
post #86

One thing that I'm sure of is that the agentic future is test-driven. Tests are basically executable specs the agent can follow and verify against. When we have solid tests, the agent output is useful and we can trust it. When tests are thin or missing, the agents still ship a lot of code, but we spend way more time debugging and fixing subtle bugs.

[deleted]

Re: The Future of AI Software Development

#100
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been running K2.5 (through the API) as my daily driver for coding through Kimi Code CLI and it’s been pretty much flawless. It’s also notably cheaper and I like the option that if my vibe coded side projects became more than side projects I could run everything in house. I’ve been pretty active in the open model space and 2 years ago you would have had to pay 20k to run models that were nowhere near as powerful.…

I agree with this statement. Kimi K2.5 is at least as good as the best closed source models today for my purposes. I've switched from Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 to OpenCode w/ Kimi K2.5 provided by Fireworks AI. I never run into time-based limits, whereas before I was running into daily/hourly/weekly/monthly limits all the time. And I'm paying a fraction of what Anthropic was charging (from well over $100 per month to l…

> OpenCode w/ Kimi K2.5 provided by Fireworks AI

Are you just using the API mode?

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