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Within the next 24 months that's what all engineers will transition to. Is it healthy or not, it's how it goes. Engineers move to abstract work like architectur

Within the next 24 months that's what all engineers will transition to. Is it healthy or not, it's how it goes. Engineers move to abstract work like architecture, interfaces, and the implementation is handled by AIs, with humans just tweaking when it's not right.

bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
I'll take that bet.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
I will take the other side of this bet. I don’t see this happening within the next 24 months.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  We already have apps written by non coders in GPT. But sure let’s wait 24 months.
  - WJW 3y ago
    We also had apps written by "non coders" in excel. We had apps written by some hackthon participants who hadn't coded at all a week before the hackathon. Writing the code is not the hard part of software development, and never has been. The various LLMs do very poorly at generating and implementing high level designs, especially if they need to generate the specs themselves from a bunch a requirements and/or poorly formulated user feedback.
    - valval 3y ago
      You’re reiterating his argument almost perfectly. He initially said the code writing will be left to the AIs while high level designs will be left to the engineers. That’s exactly what they mention foreseeing in the next 24 months, which I also intuitively agree with.
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    Woooooooooow, a greenfield project developed by a single or a couple of people! That for sure will scale on larger projects!
xupybd 3y ago
What are you basing this on? I've played with code generation from AIs it works sometimes but confidently produces bugs and doesn't scale at all. I think another giant leap is required to get to the point that humans are just tweaking. I'm saying we won't get there but what in the pipeline in the next 24 months that is going to get us there?
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  We all confidently write bugs and discover them in testing. The same process has been implemented for GPT, for example GPT Engineer, you can also instruct the Code Interpreter model for it in GPT Plus and it works. I see some people are not up to date here. What I base my guess on: the fact we already have GPT apps that write apps and clearly it works fine, and as we like to say "this is the worst it'll ever be". When people say "it's not very good right now, it produces garbage" I only see people who are not used with the speed of progress right now. Midjourney a year ago produced weird abstract doodles that only looked like images from distance. Now it produces photorealistic art that's taking jobs. One year. What we need: Bigger context, expert models in constellation and scale. You need nothing else. Of course some architectural modifications will emerge in the journey of achieving this, but that's a comparatively trivial constraint to solve, it's just normal software engineering as we've done for decades, but this time for models.
  - LtWorf 3y ago
    Just because you happen to do a trivial and menial job, it doesn't mean that every software developer does.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
coldtea 3y ago
Don't drink too much of the AI kool-aid.
analog31 3y ago
Do the AI's need those things? I mean, they exist so that humans can understand their 10 million line code bases. Maybe something else will be needed, for AI's to understand their 10 billion line code bases. Something that we won't even be able to discern.
formulathree 3y ago
First: the AI isn't that accurate yet. It gets shit wrong. It's almost there but not yet. Maybe in 24 months... but a lot of people think we hit a wall. Second: implementation is harder then design. If AI can do implementation it can for sure do design. And it is demonstrably true that chatGPT can do design just as well if not better than implementation.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  My observations are literally the opposite of what you said so YMMV. Design is where the needs of humans interface with the needs of a machine. Models are good at translating basic needs to code. Not so great knowing or figuring those needs in wider context. Yet. They’re interns.

bqmjjx0kac 3y ago

I'll take that bet.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

I will take the other side of this bet. I don’t see this happening within the next 24 months.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
We already have apps written by non coders in GPT. But sure let’s wait 24 months.
- WJW 3y ago
  We also had apps written by "non coders" in excel. We had apps written by some hackthon participants who hadn't coded at all a week before the hackathon. Writing the code is not the hard part of software development, and never has been. The various LLMs do very poorly at generating and implementing high level designs, especially if they need to generate the specs themselves from a bunch a requirements and/or poorly formulated user feedback.
  - valval 3y ago
    You’re reiterating his argument almost perfectly. He initially said the code writing will be left to the AIs while high level designs will be left to the engineers. That’s exactly what they mention foreseeing in the next 24 months, which I also intuitively agree with.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  Woooooooooow, a greenfield project developed by a single or a couple of people! That for sure will scale on larger projects!

xupybd 3y ago

What are you basing this on? I've played with code generation from AIs it works sometimes but confidently produces bugs and doesn't scale at all. I think another giant leap is required to get to the point that humans are just tweaking. I'm saying we won't get there but what in the pipeline in the next 24 months that is going to get us there?

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
We all confidently write bugs and discover them in testing. The same process has been implemented for GPT, for example GPT Engineer, you can also instruct the Code Interpreter model for it in GPT Plus and it works. I see some people are not up to date here. What I base my guess on: the fact we already have GPT apps that write apps and clearly it works fine, and as we like to say "this is the worst it'll ever be". When people say "it's not very good right now, it produces garbage" I only see people who are not used with the speed of progress right now. Midjourney a year ago produced weird abstract doodles that only looked like images from distance. Now it produces photorealistic art that's taking jobs. One year. What we need: Bigger context, expert models in constellation and scale. You need nothing else. Of course some architectural modifications will emerge in the journey of achieving this, but that's a comparatively trivial constraint to solve, it's just normal software engineering as we've done for decades, but this time for models.
- LtWorf 3y ago
  Just because you happen to do a trivial and menial job, it doesn't mean that every software developer does.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

coldtea 3y ago

Don't drink too much of the AI kool-aid.

analog31 3y ago

Do the AI's need those things? I mean, they exist so that humans can understand their 10 million line code bases. Maybe something else will be needed, for AI's to understand their 10 billion line code bases. Something that we won't even be able to discern.

formulathree 3y ago

First: the AI isn't that accurate yet. It gets shit wrong. It's almost there but not yet. Maybe in 24 months... but a lot of people think we hit a wall. Second: implementation is harder then design. If AI can do implementation it can for sure do design. And it is demonstrably true that chatGPT can do design just as well if not better than implementation.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
My observations are literally the opposite of what you said so YMMV. Design is where the needs of humans interface with the needs of a machine. Models are good at translating basic needs to code. Not so great knowing or figuring those needs in wider context. Yet. They’re interns.