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i think the difference is that now someone with no coding knowledge could start describing software and make the agent build that software iteratively. so for e

by mynti 1y ago

i think the difference is that now someone with no coding knowledge could start describing software and make the agent build that software iteratively. so for example a mechanical engineer wants to build some simulation tool. you still need to define those requirements and understand what you want to do but the work could be (and this is the big if still, if agents become good enough for this sort of work) done by the agent not a humand programmer. i do not see that happening at the moment but still this does change the dynamic. you are right in that it is not a silver bullet and a lot of the complexity is impossible to get rid of. but i wonder if for a lot of use cases there will not be a software engineer in the loop. for bigger systems, for sure, but for a lot of smaller business software?

ivan_gammel 1y ago
> for a lot of smaller business software? Small businesses often understand domain less, not more, because they cannot invest as much as big businesses in building expertise. They may achieve something within that limited understanding, but the outcome will limit their growth. Of course, AI can help with discovery, but it may overcomplicate things. Product discovery is an art of figuring out what to do without doing too much or not enough, which AI has not mastered yet.
globular-toast 1y ago
A mechanical engineer has a job to do. They can't all spend their time yak shaving with an AI agent building software that they then use to do their actual job. The whole point of building software is it's more efficient to build it once then use it many times. Why would a "someone with no coding knowledge" do this when someone with coding knowledge could do it?
spwa4 1y ago
This totally breaks due to complexity. This "works", except that AI destroys earlier functionality when adding new things. Also there is a very low level of complexity where AI just blows up and won't work anymore, not even a little bit. (and certainly Google's newest AI model is actually a step backwards on this front) Add to that that nothing changes for difficult work. Writing a driver still requires hardware knowledge ... of the actual hardware. Which AI doesn't have ... and doesn't make any attempt to acquire. I've seen articles that this part can actually be fixed. If you create a loop where the AI is forced to slowly build up low-level knowledge it can actually find this sort of things. But you need 10 expert AI researchers to do anything like this. (frankly I don't see how this part could be fixed by better AI models) What's in danger is the coding job consisting of "write me a form with these 20 fields". The 100% repetitive ones.

by mynti 1y ago

ivan_gammel 1y ago

> for a lot of smaller business software? Small businesses often understand domain less, not more, because they cannot invest as much as big businesses in building expertise. They may achieve something within that limited understanding, but the outcome will limit their growth. Of course, AI can help with discovery, but it may overcomplicate things. Product discovery is an art of figuring out what to do without doing too much or not enough, which AI has not mastered yet.

globular-toast 1y ago

A mechanical engineer has a job to do. They can't all spend their time yak shaving with an AI agent building software that they then use to do their actual job. The whole point of building software is it's more efficient to build it once then use it many times. Why would a "someone with no coding knowledge" do this when someone with coding knowledge could do it?

spwa4 1y ago

This totally breaks due to complexity. This "works", except that AI destroys earlier functionality when adding new things. Also there is a very low level of complexity where AI just blows up and won't work anymore, not even a little bit. (and certainly Google's newest AI model is actually a step backwards on this front) Add to that that nothing changes for difficult work. Writing a driver still requires hardware knowledge ... of the actual hardware. Which AI doesn't have ... and doesn't make any attempt to acquire. I've seen articles that this part can actually be fixed. If you create a loop where the AI is forced to slowly build up low-level knowledge it can actually find this sort of things. But you need 10 expert AI researchers to do anything like this. (frankly I don't see how this part could be fixed by better AI models) What's in danger is the coding job consisting of "write me a form with these 20 fields". The 100% repetitive ones.