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Automating myself out of development

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Re: Automating myself out of development

#91

Post by mattmanser »

girvo wrote: post #72
mattmanser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a problem here is you're overestimating how hard it is to rewrite something when you have one example of how to do it right. Even in the 2000s, I remember a junior essentially rewriting our entire codebase from old school asp vbscript to .Net in a few months. A 100 or so pages back then. Your team could have done it pre-AI, but you just thought it was hard so you didn't try. I remember migrating a code base f…

No, I'm not. Because, as I said, we've literally done it first for the first half of our application, and it took us eight engineers for ~5 months. Its genuinely weird to have you say that so confidently lol

Yeah and you've said yourself, you've already done the hard part.

You're overestimating how hard it would be just to copy what you did and apply it rote manually.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#92

Post by bonoboTP »

general1465 wrote: post #89
bonoboTP wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but it takes weeks of trial and error for expert humans. If you allow the llm to run the code and see the results and do trial and error, it will also likely figure it out, no?

That's not how it works in embedded world. If you set your registers wrong, you can have i.e. double the clock, then your quanta on CAN is not correct (they are half) and you have double the baudrate or set point off. The thing is that LLM does not have implementation of target processor, so it can't run the code nor it has implementation of peripherals so it can't know if CAN driver is implemented correctly or incor…

Why can't it do that? How do you do it then? An LLM-based agent can execute any commands in a terminal, including running whatever commands that will send commands to an external device through whatever wires you have set up. Is the claim that you need to have hands-on access to fiddle with the embedded device? That there is no way to just send wire signals out from the workstation towards the device that could load the program, see the results etc?

Re: Automating myself out of development

#93

Post by iot_devs »

Swizec wrote: post #60
iot_devs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also the majority of people just don’t care enough. Yet! It is the next frontier and we will need it for having agent as described in the post to really work

> Yet! It is the next frontier While researching my book I read papers from the 80’s saying this. If you get a good enough spec and define the contracts and architecture, you then just hand off implementation to juniors/offshore/etc So far has not worked. Maybe this time!

Why I believe to be different this time is that the engineer themselves feel this need AND this is a real need making software delivery actually faster.

We will see!

Re: Automating myself out of development

#94

Post by thegrim33 »

"Automating Myself Out of Development" .. "I’m neither an AI-fanatic"

Clicks through bio, clicks into their linkedin .. wow, who could have ever guessed .. they're the CTO at an AI company whose sole product is trying to replace workers with AI solutions. Who could have ever guessed? That the person writing a personal blog post about how they're not an AI fanatic and how they can automate their work using AI tools .. is the CTO at an AI company selling products that do exactly that? Wow, what a coincidence. Surely this blog post contains a purely objective, impartial analysis of the topic.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#95

Post by deterministic »

Swizec wrote: post #42
germanptr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get this question a lot, and I found it hard to answer briefly, so I ended up writing a longer post about how I work: https://www.trigosec.com/insights/mob-programming-for-one/ The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers. Different agents get different roles (implementer, reviewer, architec…

> We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality Architectural complexity[1]! There’s several really good papers on this. Unfortunately it never caught on and we don’t have great automated tools to spit out a number. Also the majority of people just don’t care enough. Research in this field kinda died out when we invented microservices and started treating those as a silver bullet to The…

> we invented microservices and started treating those as a silver bullet

Is that actually a thing? All projects I have worked on for 30+ years were monoliths doing just fine thank you very much.

However colleagues are fighting daily battles with an ancient microservices monster. I am very happy that isn't me.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#96

Post by nisabek »

thegrim33 wrote: post #94

"Automating Myself Out of Development" .. "I’m neither an AI-fanatic" Clicks through bio, clicks into their linkedin .. wow, who could have ever guessed .. they're the CTO at an AI company whose sole product is trying to replace workers with AI solutions. Who could have ever guessed? That the person writing a personal blog post about how they're not an AI fanatic and how they can automate their work using AI tools ..…

I'm not some evil spy trying to make everyone use AI... both the startup and the blogpost are an experiment, a work in progress that I'm sharing I don't think anyone would read my blog and be like "Oh, now I need a tool for my SRE to automate incident management" People are starved for real life examples, this is a real life example. of course I'm not objective. To be objective you'd need to make a large scale study among thousands of companies. I'm sorry I don't have resources for that... just trying to get other people's feedback

Re: Automating myself out of development

#97

Post by ProllyInfamous »

thegrim33 wrote: post #94

"Automating Myself Out of Development" .. "I’m neither an AI-fanatic" Clicks through bio, clicks into their linkedin .. wow, who could have ever guessed .. they're the CTO at an AI company whose sole product is trying to replace workers with AI solutions. Who could have ever guessed? That the person writing a personal blog post about how they're not an AI fanatic and how they can automate their work using AI tools ..…

I'm in general more supportive of others' comments within this article... but I'm still glad your research/tone is posted here, too.

Nobody is entirely correct/wrong about the coming Future changes. Nobody knows what is reasonably believable, anymore...

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