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I think the article is mostly wrong about why it is right. > It's architecting systems. And that's the one thing AI can't do. Why do people insist on this? AI
by jstummbillig 1y ago
I think the article is mostly wrong about why it is right.
> It's architecting systems. And that's the one thing AI can't do.
Why do people insist on this? AI absolutely will be able to do that, because it increasingly can do that already, and we are now goalposting around what "architecting systems" means.
What it cannot do, even in theory, is decide for you to want to do something and decide for you what that should be. (It can certainly provide ideas, but the context space is so large that I don't see how it would realistically be better at seeing an issue that exists in your world, including what you can do, who you know, and what interests you.)
For the foreseeable future, we will need people who want to make something happen. Being a developer will mean something else, but that does not mean that you are not the person most equipped to handle that task and deal with the complexities involved.
- cheschire 1y agoMaybe I misunderstood your phrasing, butI think with enough context an AI could determine what you want to do with reasonable accuracy. In fact, I think this is the scary thing that people are ringing the alarm bells about. With enough surveillance, organizations will be able to identify you reliably out in the world enough to build significant amount of context, even if you aren’t wearing a pair of AI glasses. And with all that context, it will become a reasonable task for AI to guess what you want. Perhaps even guess a string of events or actions or activities that would lead you towards an end state that is desirable by that organization. This is primarily responding to that one assertion though and is perhaps tangential to your actual overall point.
- dakiol 1y ago> but I think with enough context [...] I think that's the key. The only ones who can provide enough accurate context are software developers. No POs or managers can handle such levels of detail (or abstraction) to hand them over via prompts to a chatbot; engineers are doing this on a daily basis. I laugh at the image of a non-technical person like my PO or the manager of my manager giving "orders" to an LLM to design a high-scalable tiny component for handling payments. There are dozens of details that can go wrong if not-enough details are provided: from security, to versioning, to resilience, to deployment, to maintainability...
- malnourish 1y agoUntil LLMs are hooked directly into business and market data and making decisions without, or with nominal, human intervention.
- ZephyrBlu 1y agoI believe this is utter fantasy. That kind of data is usually super messy. LLMs are terrible at disambiguating if something is useful vs harmful information. It's also unlikely that context windows will become unbounded to the point where all that data can fit in context, and even if it can it's another question entirely whether the model can actually utilize all the information. Many, many unknown unknowns would need to be overcome for this to even be in the realm of possibility. Right now it's difficult enough to get simple agents with relatively small context to be reliable and perform well, let alone something like what you're suggesting.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoWell, I look forward to watching the first meeting where the CEO needs to explain their business plan to a LLM.
- bee_rider 1y agoI’d definitely be interested in at least giving a shot at working for a company CEO’d by a LLM… maybe, 3 years from now. I don’t know if I really believe that it would be better than a human in every domain. But it definitely won’t have a cousin on the board of a competitor, reveal our plans to golfing buddies, make promotions based on handshake strength, or get canceled for hitting on employees.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoBut it will change its business plan the first time someone says "No, that doesn't make sense", and then it'll forget what either plan was after a half hour. To be CEO is to have opinions and convictions, even if they are incorrect. That's beyond LLMs.
- psychoslave 1y agoI want peace and thrive for all members of humanity¹ to the largest, starting where it makes reciprocal florishing and staying free of excluding anyone by favoring someone else. See, "AI" don't even have to guess it, I make full public disclosure of it. If anything can help with such a goal, including automated inference (AI) devices, there is no major concern with such a tool per se. The leviathan monopolizing the tool for its own benefit in a detrimental way for human beings is an orthogonal issue. ¹ this is a bit anthropocentric statement, but it's a good way to favor human agreement, and I believe still actually implicitely require living in harmony with the rest of our follow earth inhabitants
- jstummbillig 1y agoTake a look at your life and the signals you use to operate. If you are anything like me, summarizing them in a somewhat reasonable fashion feels basically impossible. For example, my mother calls and asks if I want to come over. How is an AI ever going to have the context to decide that for me? Given the right amount and quality of sensors starting from birth or soon after – sure, it's not theoretically impossible. But as a grown up person that has knowledge about the things we share, and don't share, the conflicts in our present and past, the things I never talked about to anyone and that I would find hard to verbalize if I wanted to, or admit to myself that I don't. It can check my calendar. But it can't understand that I have been thinking about doing something for a while, and I just heard someone randomly talking about something else, that resurfaced that idea and now I would really rather do that. How would the AI know? (Again, not theoretically impossible given the right sensors, but it seems fairly far away.) I could try and explain of course. But where to start? And how would I explain how to explain this to mum? It's really fucking complicated. I am not saying that llm's would not be helpful here by generalization monsters, actually it's both insane and sobering how helpful they can be giving the amount of context that they do not have about us.
- prmph 1y agoExactly, even AGI would not be able to answer that question on my behalf. Which means it cannot architect a software solution just by itself, unless it could read people's minds and know what they might want.
- mnky9800n 1y agoI think this is already what happens in social media advertising. It’s not hard to develop a pattern of behaviours for a subset of people that lead to conversion and then build a model that delivers information to people that leads them on those paths. And conversion doesn’t mean they need to buy a product it could also be accept an idea, vote for a candidate, etc. The scary thing, as you point out, is that this could happen in the real world given the massive amount of data that is passively collected about everything and everybody.
- squidbeak 1y agoWell put. It's routinely spoken about as if there's no timescale on which AI could ever advance to match elite human capabilities, which seems delusionally pessimistic.
- paulddraper 1y agoExactly. AIs can ——— on some time horizon ——— do anything that Is can do. Just because one is organic-based doesn’t necessitate superior talent.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoGiven that people love to try and talk as if they can replace developers right now, I wll disagree with any such assertions. Speculating on the future is worthless in this context. But if we want to do it anyway: the current stalls and approaches to iterating on LLM's do not give much short term promise. This approach seems to already be plateauing.
- suyash 1y agoThe article is mostly wrong, companies are already not recruiting as many junior/fresh college graduates as before. If AI is doing everything but architecting (which is a false argument but let's roll with it), naturally companies will need fewer engineers to architect and supervise AI systems.
- uludag 1y agoThere's the software factory hypothesis though that states that LLMs will bring down the level of skill required to produce software, reducing the skill bar required to produce the same software (i.e. automation leads to SWE being like working on factory line). In this scenario, unskilled cheap labor would be desired, making juniors more preferable. My guess though is that the lack of hiring is simply a result of the over saturation of the market. Just looking at the growth of CS degrees awarded you have to conclude that we'd be in such a situation eventually.
- roenxi 1y agoThe equilibriums wouldn't quite work out that way. The companies would still hire the most capable software engineers (why not?), but the threat of being replaced by cheap juniors means that they don't have much leverage and their wages drop. It'll still be grizzled veterans and competitive hiring processes looking for people with lots of experience. These things don't happen overnight though, it'll probably take a few years yet for the shock of whatever is going on right now to really play out.
- VBprogrammer 1y agoI suspect that any reduction in hiring is more a function of market sentiment than jobs being replaced by AI. Many companies are cutting costs rather than expanding as rapidly as possible during the capture the flag years.
- bradlys 1y agoPeople keep forgetting that the hiring cuts were happening before AI was hyped up. AI is merely the justification right now because it helps stock price. We’ve been seeing layoffs for over 3 years…
- austin-cheney 1y agoNo, AI is not yet able to architect. The confusion here is the inability to discern architecture from planning. Planning is the ability to map concerns to solutions and project solution delivery according to resources available. I am not convinced AI is anywhere near getting that right. It’s not straightforward even when your human assets are commodities. Acting on plans is called task execution. Architecture is the design and art of interrelated systems. This involves layers of competing and/or cooperative plans. AI absolutely cannot do this. A gross hallucination at one layer potentially destroys or displaces other layers and that is catastrophically expensive. That is why real people do this work and why they are constantly audited.
- Dumblydorr 1y agoIt can’t actively become a coding agent and make the changes, but it doesn’t do that for individual scripts now, and yet we say it can code. And yet I can ask it how to architect my database in a logical way, and it clearly has solid ideas that again, it doesn’t script itself. So really it teaches us or instructs us one way to do things, it’s not executing in any realm…yet
- austin-cheney 1y agoNone of my parent comment had anything to do with writing code. Architects in physical engineering don’t hammer nails or pour concrete. Architects in software, likewise, aren’t concerned with islands of code.
- conartist6 1y agoBut that's what it's sold as. The decide-for-you bot. If people still had to think for themselves, what would be the point?
- bonoboTP 1y agoWhat's the point of a lever if I still have to move it?
- tonyhart7 1y agoYeah we just need Amazon release their aws sdk mcp then wait until few years when the rough parts get smoothed and then it would be possible I mean we literally have a industry that just do that (Vercel,Netfly etc)
- elzbardico 1y agoAI can't architect. AI can simulate architecting. A lot of times AI can't even code.
- GuB-42 1y ago> Being a developer will mean something else Not really. Programming means explaining the machine what to do. How you do it has changed over the years. From writing machine language and punching cards to gluing frameworks and drawing boxes. But the core is always the same: take approximative and ambiguous requirements from someone who doesn't really knows what he wants and turn it into something precise the machine can execute reliably, without supervision. Over the years, programmers have figured out that the best way to do it is with code. GUIs are usually not expressive enough, and English is too ambiguous and/or too verbose, that's why we have programming languages. There are fields that had specialized languages before electronic computers existed, like maths, and for the same reason. LLMs are just the current step in the evolution of programming, but the role of the programmer is still the same: getting the machine to do what people want, be it by prompting, drawing, or writing code, and I suspect code will still prevail. LLMs are quite good at repeating what has been done before, but having them write something original using natural language descriptions is quite a frustrating experience, and if you are programming, there is a good chance there is at least something original to it, otherwise, why not use an off-the-shelf product? We are at the peak of the hype cycle now, but things will settle down. Some things will change for sure, as always when some new technology emerges.
- aaronblohowiak 1y ago+100. I feel like a lot of people need to go re-read moon is a harsh mistress.
- lubujackson 1y agoI agree, I see AI as just a level of abstraction. Make a function to do X, Y, Z? Works great. Even architect a DAG, pretty good. Integrate everything smoothly? Call in the devs. On the bright side, the element of development that is LEAST represented in teaching and interviewing (how to structure large codebases) will be the new frontier and differentiator. But much as scripting language removed the focus on pointers and memory management, AI will abstract away discrete blocks of code. It is kind of the dream of open source software, but advanced - don't rebuild standard functions. But also, don't bother searching for them or work out how to integrate them. Just request what you need and keep going.
- jerf 1y agoIf you read their use of "AI" as "LLM", then, yes, LLMs can't architect and I don't expect they ever will. You could power them up by a 10, past all the scaling limits we have now, and LLMs would still be fundamentally unsuited for architecture. It's a technology fundamentally unsuited for even medium-small scale code coherence, let alone architectural-level coherence, just by its nature. It is simply constitutionally too likely to say "I need to validate user names" and slam out a fresh copy of a "username validation routine" because that autocompletes nicely, but now you've got a seventh "username validation routine" because the LLM has previously already done this several times before, and none of the seven are the same, and that's just one particularly easy-to-grasp example of their current pathologies. If anyone's moving the "architecture" goal posts it would be anyone who thinks that "architecture" so much as fits into the context window of a modern LLM, let alone that they are successfully doing it. They're terrible architects right now, like, worse than useless, worse than I'd expect from an intern. An intern may cargo cult design methodologies they don't understand yet but even that is better than what LLMs are producing. Whatever the next generation AI is, though, who can tell. What an AI could do that could actually construct symbolic maps of a system, manipulate that map directly, then manifest that in code, could accomplish is difficult to say. However nobody knows how to do that right now. It's not for lack of trying, either.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago>Why do people insist on this? Because it isn't even close to entry level architecture. And the structure of LLM's makes it hard to iterate the way architecture requires. It basically gets a little bit of context only to essentially tear down and rebuild at blistering speeds. You can't really architect that way. >What it cannot do, even in theory, is decide for you to want to do something and decide for you what that should be. Something sadly common among clients, even large ones.
- raxxorraxor 1y agoSince the inception of AI and everyone firing their AI generated scripts towards random infrastructure, I have significantly more work and it isn't the work where I can take this stuff, throw it to an AI and get a solution. It is the usual development work. Part of it is our own fault, since we supplied AI agents left and right for any user. I tried to formalize and embed information about infrastructure, so AI generated code can adapt to that, but there are serious challenges. I wish I would get an AI secretary, but in that case please be a real human. AI is much better at creating code line by line with small context windows. If it gets too big and complicated, the code will certainly not run or work. Statistical certainty with the same mechanisms that make AI work in the first place. If an AI can create a project, it has to be completely self-contained. Still useful, but also restricted. And AI embedding is another pain in the arse and even the large tech firms fail here. It is so much work to prepare data for embedding. Human work, since AI isn't fit to do that yet. Maybe it will, but it would be naive to estimate that you can finally rest as a developer. There will be other bullshit to deal with.