7 ms·
Don't worry -- soon after that, there will be high demand for human coders as companies scramble to hire to rewrite all the buggy and vuln-ridden AI-hallucinate
by mholt 1y ago
Don't worry -- soon after that, there will be high demand for human coders as companies scramble to hire to rewrite all the buggy and vuln-ridden AI-hallucinated software. We're on the verge of two revolutions in tech, not one.
- aaomidi 1y agoI wouldn’t bet on this
- lucasyvas 1y agoJust become a black hat then. It will be easy to find problems in everything but the very top percent of AI generated software.
- aaomidi 1y agoI had Claude Code do some of the challenges at defcon, it was doing surprisingly well. (I did make sure the challenges didn’t ban AI).
- NDizzle 1y agoI love love love Claude Code. It's my weapon of choice. However, we're still a ways off. The most recent thing I did prior to typing this comment was have it look at a cosmosdb integration and recommend changes to my CosmosClientOptions to reduce CPU, based on a few exceptions I'm seeing. It recommended 5 changes to 5 settings, and every single one of them was outside of the allowed range for those 5 settings. I told it as much, and asked nicely (always nicely, I don't want to be on the Singularity's naughty list) to try again, those aren't valid values. It came back with 4/5 values within the allowed scope, one still outside of the scope, and 2 of the 4 that were accurate were the same values that I already have configured. Not there yet. Better every day, but definitely not there.
- hyperliner 1y ago[dead]
- aisosozjbx 1y agoWhy not? Seems to match the trend of tech innovation creating more demand for tech. The reality is lots of software problems can’t be solved with the level of “intelligence” LLMs have. And if they could, it wouldn’t be just software in danger - it’d be every human profession. Even the physical ones, since AI would quickly figure out how to build machinery to automate those.
- ncr100 1y agoThe industry might evolve to "AI Please rewrite the faulty code and redeploy, eating the cost of inefficiencies as business expense, instead of hiring back to the Full Software Engineering Employment Levels".
- enraged_camel 1y ago>> Why not? Because it's just cope. Look at the current reality. Are companies rushing to fix bad or even buggy code written by human devs? No, not in most cases. In most cases, if a piece of code "works", it is left the hell alone. And that's the thing about AI code: it does work. The quality is irrelevant in the overwhelming majority of cases (especially if it's other AIs that are adding to it, which is the case more and more often).
- westurner 1y ago> The quality is irrelevant in the overwhelming majority of cases Software quality is especially important in safety critical applications. We should not expect an LLM trained solely on formally-verified code to produce formally-verified code. I don't think that also training on specs and hateful training material will fix that. So then we're back to the original software engineering objectives of writing better SAST, DAST, Formal Method, side channel, and fuzzing tools for software quality assurance.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoI've been to birthday parties that employed more people than "safety critical" software development. We're talking about 99.99% of the software development jobs evaporating.
- ponector 1y agoThere are many examples of buggy and vuln-ridden non-AI-hallucinated software. Never been a rush to fix them.
- fusslo 1y agoI've been thinking about this lately. While we engineers understand how to judge and evaluate AI solutions, I am not sure Business Owners (BO) care. BO's are ok with a certain percentage of bugs/rework/inefficiency/instability. And the tradeoff of eliminating (or marginalizing) Engineering may be worth the increased percentage of unfavorable outcomes.
- evklein 1y agoProbably depends on BO/stakeholder as well. B2B solution that has a low risk of killing anyone? Maybe fuck it, let the model have its way. Technology that controls software that keeps people alive, controls infrastructure, etc., uhhhh I don't think so. I guess we're just waiting for the first news story of someone's pacemaker going haywire and shocking them to death because the monitoring code was vibed through to production.
- fusslo 1y agoIsn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small? medical devices, and maybe some control software? Oh and probably defense too I don't feel much better ( as someone who has spent their career in consumer electronics )
- evklein 1y ago> Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small? I think it's large. Think about the software that goes into something like air travel - ATC, weather tracking, the actual control software for the aircraft... I am aware that nothing is perfect, but I'd at least like to know that a person wrote those things who could be held accountable.
- AstroBen 1y agoI shared your view a year ago. Hell half my posts here on HN are arguing against the annoying hype. Today I make heavy use of AI and my code quality has gone up, not down. It's better tested, better factored, with better error handling covering more edge cases AI code is only buggy if no-one is guiding or reviewing it I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
- nicolapede 1y agoWhat's your workflow/tool set?
- WaltPurvis 1y ago>someone in the middle In the middle between AI and what?
- ffsm8 1y agoThe requirements. He's essentially saying that it's a complete guess how long the job of a programmer exists, and when it will change over to essentially product manager, of which you'll need a lot less. It could be decades... Or next month.
- sundaeofshock 1y agoThat works because you are a senior developer who knows how to properly use the AI tools. What 10 years from now? What happens when senior devs are retiring and we do t have replacements since we replaced junior devs with AI?
- cosmicgadget 1y ago"Use our agentic coding model version n+1, it will fix all your buggy and vuln-ridden source and you won't have to apologize to your CEO/board!"
- xlbuttplug2 1y agoThe rate at which AI is capable of producing code is intractable for humans to deal with. Right now the bottleneck is human reviewers. If AI ever becomes effective at generating provably correct code, it's joever.
- Nevermark 1y agoBut will humans understand the proofs? Oh…
- xlbuttplug2 1y agoThe proofs are not meant for human consumption. It's for the AI to know to try again rather than spit out hallucinations. Of course there's a leap of faith somewhere here.
- yencabulator 1y agoThe proof either passes the SAT solver in a reasonable amount of time, or it doesn't.
- kamaal 1y agoSomebody will have to write proof verifier, and that in many ways will be harder than writing some CRUD app that they want proof verifier to validate. We might even end up increasing the demand and pay for devs if this happens to pass.
- yencabulator 1y agoWe have many of those that are perfectly fine. Writing proofs is still quite hard, especially proofs that actually say something about your program.
- kamaal 1y agoProving something is correct is a far harder exercise, than writing a broken but acceptable version of that thing.
- curiousguy 1y agoThe lack of devs that understand the domain knowledge and the codebase will be the main issue. I would say that the current capabilities of genAI is like a junior dev, sometimes even a mid-level. But one main difference is that a dev is slowly learning and improving and at some point will become a senior dev and also domain specialist. If there is a codebase created by genAI, then it’s equivalent as if all devs left the company, so no one knows why some piece of code was created in a certain way, if it was part of the business logic or some implementation detail
- znpy 1y agoI wonder if the codebase will be understandable at all. You can most often “get used” to a codebase because they authors tend to stick to the same patterns in many ways, and they are somewhat coherent across time. After a bit you can kinda guess in what file is a feature implemented etc etc. Will this still be true with ai doing most of the work?
- more_corn 1y agoClaude is really good about documenting what it has done. I’ve also had some good luck with “I’m interested in this part of the codebase please explain it to me” And “this part is not working let’s diagnose” I’ve been doing a lot of productionization of nontechnical vibecoding. And I provide a lot of feedback on best practices (one of which is to ask “is this best practices for security and data protection?”) That being said there’s no replacement for a real knowledgeable human software engineer.
- snapplebobapple 1y agonah, just throw more hardware at it. never rewrite buggy code, increase processing power is the winner almost always. That's one of the things that is nice about opensource. You can't hide the crap code unless the users don't care at all.