Software design is now cheap
dottedmag.net
Software design is now cheap
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Re: Software design is now cheap
#2> Less dependency management, less glue, less accidental complexity from adapting your problem to someone else’s abstraction.
Less maintenance and flexibility. You're not really "designing software" until you have a 20+ year old product.
Vibe coders really embody the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset so perfectly.
Re: Software design is now cheap
#3> Less dependency management, less glue, less accidental complexity from adapting your problem to someone else’s abstraction. Less maintenance and flexibility. You're not really "designing software" until you have a 20+ year old product. Vibe coders really embody the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset so perfectly.
This seems like an uncharitable take. Personally I would refrain from putting a 20 year barrier around the qualification, that seems a little harsh.
TFA's take makes sense in a certain context. Getting a high-quality design which is flexible in desirable ways is now easier than ever. As the human asking an LLM for the design, maybe you shouldn't be claiming to have "designed" it, though.
Re: Software design is now cheap
#4> What matters less is the mechanical knowledge of how to express the solution in code. The LLM generates code, not understanding.
I think it's the opposite -- if you have a good way to design your software (e.g., conceptual and modular), LLM will generate the understanding as well. Design does not only mean code architecture, it also means how you express the concepts in it to a user. If software isn't really understood by humans, I doubt LLMs will be able to generate working code for it anyway, so we get a design problem to solve.
Re: Software design is now cheap
#5This couldn't be more wrong.
LLM's are only as good as they are because we have such amazing incredible open source software everywhere. Because their job is to look at the types of really good libraries that have decades of direct and indirect wisdom poured into them, and then to be a little glue.
Yes the LLM can go make you alternatives, and it will be mostly fine-ish in many cases. But LLMs are not about pure endless frivolous frontiersing. They deeply reward and they are trained on what the settlers and town planners have done (referencing Wardley here).
And they will be far better at using those good robust well built tools (which they have latently built-in to their models some!) than they will be at re-learning and fine-tuning for your bespoke weird hodgepodge solution.
Cheap design is cheap now. Sure. But good design will be ever more important. Model's ability, their capacity, is a function of what material they can work with, and I can't for the life of me imagine shorting yourself with cheap design like proposed here. The LLM's are very good, but but honing in on good design is hard, period, and I think that judgement and character is something the next orders of magnitude of parameters is still not going to close the gap on.
Re: Software design is now cheap
#6> Less dependency management, less glue, less accidental complexity from adapting your problem to someone else’s abstraction. Less maintenance and flexibility. You're not really "designing software" until you have a 20+ year old product. Vibe coders really embody the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset so perfectly.
This is ridiculous. There are numerous multi billion dollar software companies with customers less than half that age.
Re: Software design is now cheap
#7The problem is that if you don’t understand the code you’re taking a risk shipping that code.
There’s a reason why most vibe coded apps I’ve seen leak keys and have basic security flaws all over the place.
If you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re generating code at scale that you can’t manage you’re going to have a bad time.
The models are trained on all the slop we had to ship under time pressure and swore we’d fix later, etc. They’re not going to autocomplete the good code. They’re going to autocomplete the most common denominator code.
I don’t agree that design is cheap. Maybe for line-of-business software that doesn’t matter much.
Re: Software design is now cheap
#8This article is lumps design and implementation together. In my experience, LLMs are really quite bad at designing anything interesting. They are sort of tolerable at implementation — they’re remarkably persistent (compared to humans, anyway), they will tirelessly use whatever framework, good or bad, you throw at them, and they will produce code that is quite painful to look at. And they’ll say that they’re architecting things and hope you’re impressed.
Re: Software design is now cheap
#9This article is lumps design and implementation together. In my experience, LLMs are really quite bad at designing anything interesting. They are sort of tolerable at implementation — they’re remarkably persistent (compared to humans, anyway), they will tirelessly use whatever framework, good or bad, you throw at them, and they will produce code that is quite painful to look at. And they’ll say that they’re architect…
I was going to say - with agents the only part I actually have to do is design. Well, and testing. But they don’t really do design work so much as architecture selection if you provide a design.
Re: Software design is now cheap
#10This is a great take. It applies the SaaS is dead theory at a lower level (libraries are dead) but has it a much more nuanced view.
Yeh even if LLMs are 10x better than today you probably still don't want to implement cryptography from scratch, but use a library.
I also like the 3d printing analogy. We will see how good LLMs get, but I will say that a lot of AI coded tools today have the same feeling as 3d printed hardware. If no engineer was involved the software is cheap and breaks under pressure because no one considered the edge cases. It looks good on the surface but if you use it for something serious it does break.
The engineer might still use an LLM/3d printer but where necessary he'll use a metal connection (write code by hand or at least tightly guide the LLM) to make the product sturdy.