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I would actually bet that AI will prove to be particularly good at classical debugging - i.e. the effort of changing the code to make a given failing test pass
by falcor84 2y ago
I would actually bet that AI will prove to be particularly good at classical debugging - i.e. the effort of changing the code to make a given failing test pass while keeping all the other tests green too. This is pretty much what SWE-Bench is judging, and the progress there has been phenomenal.
We will still probably need humans to do validation (vs. verification), but I don't think it'll take "armies of people".
- kazinator 2y agoClassical debugging is looking at a dump of memory in search for the bit that is flipped wrong. :)
- bsaul 2y agonever had to do that in 25 years of software dev
- fragmede 2y ago24 years would only put you back to 1999, and by that time GUIs had largely taken over, with Win 95 having been released and the pentium was just hitting its stride. There's still a need to pour over memory dumps if you're doing reverse engineering or early stage hardware engineering. What killed it really though was the Internet and the cloud. The expertise to debug a system and get to know it intimately well just isn't as necessary these days. just fire up an ASG and cycle the instances before the problem happens. Software that's running on your servers instead of on customer computers means you can debug those systems and don't have to rely on customer reports.
- bsaul 2y agonever had to analyse a memory dump. I tried to, sometimes, just for fun, but nothing good came of it. Crash dumps are symbolicated, so you never go at the bit level.