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I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need

by mohsen1 10mo ago

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me. I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes. Oh, and don't ask about coding. If you use AI for tasks above, as a result you'll get very well defined coding task definitions which an AI would ace. I’m still hired, but I feel like I’m doing the work of an entire org that used to need twenty engineers. From where I’m standing, it’s scary.

khalic 10mo ago
I feel you, it's scary. But the possibilities we're presented with are incredible. I'm revisiting all these projects that I put aside because they were "too big" or "too much for a machine". It's quite exciting
belter 10mo ago
>> From where I’m standing, it’s scary. You are being fooled by randomness [1] Not because the models are random, but because you are mistaking a massive combinatorial search over seen patterns for genuine reasoning. Taleb point was about confusing luck for skill. Dont confuse interpolation for understanding. You can read a Rust book after years of Java, then go build software for an industry that did not exist when you started. Ask any LLM to write a driver for hardware that shipped last month, or model a regulatory framework that just passed... It will confidently hallucinate. You will figure it out. That is the difference between pattern matching and understanding. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness
- joefourier 10mo ago
  Have you used an LLM specifically trained for tool calling, in Claude Code, Cursor or Aider? They’re capable of looking up documentation, correcting their errors by compiling and running tests, and when coupled with a linter, hallucinations are a non issue. I don’t really think it’s possible to dismiss a model that’s been trained with reinforcement learning for both reasoning and tool usage as only doing pattern matching. They’re not at all the same beasts as the old style of LLMs based purely on next token prediction of massive scrapes of web data (with some fine tuning on Q&A pairs and RLHF to pick the best answers).
  - treespace8 10mo ago
    I'm using Claude code to help me learn Godot game programming. One interesting thing is that Claude will not tell me if I'm following the wrong path. It will just make the requested change to the best of its ability. For example a Tower Defence game I'm making I wanted to keep turret position state in an AStarGrid2D. It produced code to do this, but became harder and harder to follow as I went on. It's only after watching more tutorials I figured out I was asking for the wrong thing. (TileMapLayer is a much better choice) LLMs still suffer from Garbage in Garbage out.
    - memoriuaysj 10mo ago
      before coding I just ask the model "what are the best practices in this industry to solve this problem? what tools/libraries/approaches people use? after coding I ask it "review the code, do you see any for which there are common libraries implementing it? are there ways to make it more idiomatic?" you can also ask it "this is an idea on how to solve it that somebody told me, what do you think about it, are there better ways?"
      - skydhash 10mo ago
        Do you also light candles and chant?
      - manmal 10mo ago
        Both the before and after are better done manually. What you are describing is fine for the heck of it (I‘ve vibe coded a whisper related rust port today without having any actual rust skills), but I’d never use fully vibed software in production. That’s irresponsible in multiple ways.
      - hansmayer 10mo ago
        > before coding I just ask the model "what are the best practices in this industry to solve this problem? what tools/libraries/approaches people use? Just for the fun of it, and so you lose your "virginity" so to speak, next time when the magic machine gives you the answer about "what it thinks", tell it its wrong in a strict language and scold it for misleading you. Tell it to give you the "real" best practices instead of what it spat out. Then sit back and marvel at the machine saying you were right and that it had mislead you. Producing a completely, somewhat, or slightly different answer (you never know what you get on the slot machine).
- Verdex 10mo ago
  I've worked with a lot of interns, fresh outs from college, overseas lowest bidders, and mediocre engineers who gave up years ago. All over the course of a ~20 year career. Not once in all that time has anyone PRed and merged my completely unrelated and unfinished branch into main. Except a few weeks ago. By someone who was using the LLM to make PRs. He didn't understand when I asked him about it and was baffled as to how it happened. Really annoying, but I got significantly less concerned about the future of human software engineering after that.
- doug_durham 10mo ago
  Why would you expect an LLM or even a human to succeed in these cases? “Write a piece of code for a specification that you can’t possibly know about?” That’s why you have to do context engineering, just like you’d provide a reference to a new document to an engineer writing code.
- germandiago 10mo ago
  This is exactly what happened to me: novel or uncommon = hallucinate or invent wrong. It is ok for getting snippets for example and saying (I did it). Please make this MVVM style. It is not perfect, but saves time. For very broad or novel reasoning, as of today... forget it.
ravenstine 10mo ago
Yeah, it makes me wonder whether I should start learning to be a carpenter or something. Those who either support AI or thinks "it's all bullshit" cite a lack of evidence for humans truly being replaced in the engineering process, but that's just the thing; the unprecedented levels of uncertainty make it very difficult to invest one's self in the present, intellectually and emotionally. With the current state of things, I don't think it's silly to wonder "what's the point" if another 5 years of this trajectory is going to mean not getting hired as a software dev again unless you have a PhD and want to work for an AI company. What doesn't help is that the current state of AI adoption is heavily top-down. What I mean is the buy-in is coming from the leadership class and the shareholder class, both of whom have the incentive to remove the necessary evil of human beings from their processes. Ironically, these classes are perhaps the least qualified to decide whether generative AI can replace swathes of their workforce without serious unforeseen consequences. To make matters worse, those consequences might be as distal as too many NEETs in the system such that no one can afford to buy their crap anymore; good luck getting anyone focused on making it to the next financial quarter to give a shit about that. And that's really all that matters at the end of the day; what leadership believes, whether or not they are in touch with reality.
btbuildem 10mo ago
They do all those things you've mentioned more efficiently than most of us, but they fall woefully short as soon as novelty is required. Creativity is not in their repertoire. So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce. But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the comfortable valley of the familiar at every step. I choose to look at it as an opportunity to spend more time on the interesting problems, and work at a higher level. We used to worry about pointers and memory allocation. Now we will worry less and less about how the code is written and more about the result it built.
- 9dev 10mo ago
  I think your image of LLMs is a bit outdated. Claude Code with well-configured agents will get entirely novel stuff done pretty well, and that’s only going to get better over time. I wouldn’t want to bet my career on that anyway.
  - germandiago 10mo ago
    I am all ears. What is your setup?
- skydhash 10mo ago
  > So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce. The same thing over and over again should be a SaaS, some internal tool, or a plugin. Computers are good at doing the same thing over and over again and that's what we've been using them for > But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the comfortable valley of the familiar at every step. Even if the high level description of a task may be similar to another, there's always something different in the implementation. A sports car and a sedan have roughly the same components, but they're not engineered the same. > We used to worry about pointers and memory allocation. Some still do. It's not in every case you will have a system that handle allocations and a garbage collector. And even in those, you will see memory leaks. > Now we will worry less and less about how the code is written and more about the result it built. Wasn't that Dreamweaver?
63stack 10mo ago
This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make. Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.
- aspenmartin 10mo ago
  No it doesn’t read like shilling and advertisement, it’s tiring hearing people continually dismiss coding agents as if they have not massively improved and are driving real value despite limitations and they are only just getting started. I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, and I’ve done things where Claude made the whole effort take twice as long and 3x more of my time. It’s not like people are ignoring the limitations, it’s that people can see how powerful the already are and how much more headroom there is even with existing paradigms not to mention the compute scaling happening in 26-27 and the idea pipeline from the massive hoarding of talent.
  - jayd16 10mo ago
    When prices go down or product velocity goes up we'll start believing in the new 20x developer. Until then, it doesn't align with most experiences and just reads like fiction. You'll notice no one ever seems to talk about the products they're making 20x faster or cheaper.
    - hansmayer 10mo ago
      +1 - I wish at least one of these AI boosters had shown us a real commercialised product they've built.
      - aspenmartin 10mo ago
        AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right! In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative hostile attitude references some “promise” that has gone unfulfilled but it’s so silly: judge the product they are producing and maybe just maybe consider the rate of progress to _guess_ where things are heading
heliumtera 10mo ago
Stop freaking out. Seriously. You're afraid of something completely ridiculous. It is certainly more eloquent than you regarding software architecture (which was a scam all along, but conversation for another time). It will find SOME bugs better than you, that's a given. Review code better than you? Seriously? What you're using and what you consider code review? Assume I could identify one change broke production and you reviewed the latest commit. I am pinging you and you better answer. Ok, Claude broke production, now what? Can you begin to understand the difference between you and the generative technology? When you hop on the call, you will explain to me with a great deal of details what you know about the system you built, and explain decision making and changes over time. You'll tell about what worked and what didn't. You will tell about the risks, behavior and expectations. About where the code runs, it's dependencies, users, usage patterns, load, CPU usage and memory footprint, you could probably tell what's happening without looking at logs but at metrics. With Claude I get: you're absolutely right! You asked about what it WAS, but I told you about what it WASN'T! MY BAD. Knowledge requires a soul to experience and this is why you're paid.
- mywittyname 10mo ago
  We use code rabbit and it's better than practically any human I've worked with at a number of code review tasks, such as finding vulnerabilities, highlighting configuration issues, bad practices, etc. It's not the greatest at "does this make sense here" type questions, but I'd be the one answering those questions anyway. Yeah, maybe the people I've worked with suck at code reviews, but that's pretty normal. Not to say your answer is wrong. I think the gist is accurate. But I think tooling will get better at answering exactly the kind of questions you bring up. Also, someone has to be responsible. I don't think the industry can continue with this BS "AI broke it." Our jobs might devolve into something more akin to a SDET role and writing the "last mile" of novel code the AI can't produce accurately.
  - andrekandre 10mo ago
    > We use code rabbit and it's better than practically any human code rabbit does find things occasionally, but it also calls things 'critical' that arent and flags issues that dont actually exist and even lies in replies sometimes... it also is extremely verbose to the point of being slog to go through... and the haikus: they are so cringe and infantilizing... maybe its our config, but code rabbit has been underwhelming...
dataviz1000 10mo ago
I was a chef in Michelin-starred restaurants for 11 years. One of my favorite positions was washing dishes. The goal was always to keep the machine running on its 5-minute cycle. It was about getting the dishes into racks, rinsing them, and having them ready and waiting for the previous cycle to end—so you could push them into the machine immediately—then getting them dried and put away after the cycle, making sure the quality was there and no spot was missed. If the machine stopped, the goal was to get another batch into it, putting everything else on hold. Keeping the machine running was the only way to prevent dishes from piling up, which would end with the towers falling over and breaking plates. This work requires moving lightning fast with dexterity. AI coding agents are analogous to the machine. My job is to get the prompts written, and to do quality control and housekeeping after it runs a cycle. Nonetheless, like all automation, humans are still needed... for now.
- conductr 10mo ago
  If it requires an expert engineer/dishwasher to keep the flow running perfectly, the human is the bottleneck in the process. This sounds a lot more like the past before AI to me. What AI does is just give you enough dishes that they don’t need to be washed at all during dinner service. Just let them pile up dirty or throw them away and get new dishes tomorrow it’s so immaterial to replace that washing them doesn’t always make sense. But if for some reason you do want to reuse them, then, it washes and dries them for you too. You just look over things at the end and make sure they pass your quality standards. If they left some muck on a plate or lipstick on a cup, just tell it not to let that happen again and it won’t. So even your QC work gets easier over time. The labor needed to deal with dirty dishes is drastically reduced in any case.
- leptons 10mo ago
  > humans are still needed... for now "AI" doesn't have a clue what to do on its own. Humans will always be in the loop, because they have goals, while the AI is designed to placate and not create. The amount of "AI" garbage I have to sift through to find one single gem is about the same or more work than if I had just coded it myself. Add to that the frustration of dealing with a compulsive liar, and it's just a fucking awful experience for anyone that actually can code.
deadbabe 10mo ago
Where the hell was all this fear when the push for open source everything got fully underway? When entire websites were being spawned and scaffolded with just a couple lines of code? Do we not remember all those impressive tech demos of developers doing massive complex thing with "just one line of code"? How did we not just write software for every kind of software problem that could exist by now? How has free code, developed by humans, become more available than ever and yet somehow we have had to employ more and more developers? Why didn't we trend toward less developers? It just doesn't make sense. AI is nothing but a snippet generator, a static analyzer, a linter, a compiler, an LSP, a google search, a copy paste from stackoverflow, all technologies we've had for a long time, all things developers used to have to go without at some point in history. I don't have the answers.
scellus 10mo ago
Perfect economic substitution in coding doesn't happen for a long time. Meanwhile, AI appears as an amplifier to the human and vice versa. That the work will change is scary, but the change also opens up possibilities, many of them now hard to imagine.
Herring 10mo ago
Try have your engineers pick up some product work. Clients do NOT want to talk to bots.
jayd16 10mo ago
My experience with these tools is far and away no where close to this. If you're really able to do the work of a 20 man org on your own, start a business.
to11mtm 10mo ago
It's definitely scary in a way. However I'm still finding a trend even in my org; better non-AI developers tend to be better at using AI to develop. AI still forgets requirements. I'm currently running an experiment where I try to get a design and then execute on an enterprise 'SAAS-replacement' application [0]. AI can spit forth a completely convincing looking overall project plan [1] that has gaps if anyone, even the AI itself, tries to execute on the plan; this is where a proper, experienced developer can step in at the right steps to help out. IDK if that's the right way to venture into the brave new world, but I am at least doing my best to be at a forefront of how my org is using the tech. [0] - I figured it was a good exercise for testing limits of both my skills prompting and the AI's capability. I do not expect success.
- dent9 10mo ago
  AI does not forget requirements when you use a spec driven AI tool like Kiro
  - songodongo 10mo ago
    Are you on the Kiro marketing team?
foxygen 10mo ago
I think I've been using AI wrong. I can't understand testimonies like this. Most times I try to use AI for a task, it is a shitshow, and I have to rewrite everything anyway.
- doug_durham 10mo ago
  I don’t know about right/wrong. You need to use the tools that make you productive. I personally find that in my work there are dozens of little scripts or helper functions that accelerate my work. However I usually don’t write them because I don’t have the time. AI can generate these little scripts very consistently. That accelerates my work. Perhaps just start simple.
  - JSDave 10mo ago
    Instead of generating, exporting or copy pasting just seems more reliable to me and also takes very little time. I think what matters most is just what you're working on. It's great for crud or working with public APIs with lots of examples. For everything else, AI has been a net loss for me.
  - 63stack 10mo ago
    > there are dozens of little scripts or helper functions that accelerate my work. However I usually don’t write them because I don’t have the time People who write things like this can't expect to be taken seriously. Before AI you didn't have time to write things that saved you time? So you just ended up spending (wasting) more time by going the long way? That was a better choice than just doing the thing that would have saved you time?
- weakfish 10mo ago
  Same. Seems to be the never ending theme of AI.
- bdangubic 10mo ago
  how much time/effort have you put in to educate yourself about how they work, what they excel at, what they suck at, what is your responsibility when you use them…? this effort is directly proportional to how well they will serve you
Desafinado 10mo ago
That's kind of the point of the article, though. Sure LLMs can churn out code, and they sort of work for developers who already understand code and design, but what happens when that junior dev with no hard experience builds their years of experience with LLMs? Over time those who actually understand what the LLMs are doing and how to correct the output are replaced by developers who've never learned the hard lessons of writing code line by line. The ability to reason about code gets lost. This points to the hard problem that the article highlights. The hard problem of software is actually knowing how to write it, which usually takes years, sometimes up to a decade of real experience. Any idiot can churn out code that doesn't work. But working, effective software takes a lot of skill that LLMs will be stripping people of. Leaving a market there for people who have actually put the time in and understand software.
tom_m 10mo ago
There will be a need. Don't worry. Most people still haven't figured out how to properly read and interpret instructions. So they build things incorrectly - with or without AI Seriously. The bar is that low. When people say "AI slop" I just chuckle because it's not "AI" it's everyone. That's the general state of the industry. So all you have to do is stay engaged, ask questions, and understand the requirements. Know what it is you're building and you'll be fine.
Deep-Blue 10mo ago
As of today NONE of the known AI codebots can solve correctly ANY of the 50+ programming exercises we use to interview fresh grads or summer interns. NONE! Not even level 1 problems that can be solved in fewer than 20 lines of code with a bit of middle school math.
- cheevly 10mo ago
  I promise you that I can show you how to reliably solve any of them using any of the latest OpenAI models. Email me if you want proof; josh.d.griffith at gmail
  - utopiah 10mo ago
    I'd watch that show ideally with few base rules though, e.g. - the problems to solve must NOT be part of the training set - the person using the tool (e.g. OpenAI, Claude, DevStral, DeepSeek, etc) must NOT be able to solve problems alone as I believe otherwise the 1st is "just" search and the 2nd is basically offloading the actual problem solving to the user.
    - ehnto 10mo ago
      > the person using the tool (e.g. OpenAI, Claude, DevStral, DeepSeek, etc) must NOT be able to solve problems alone I think this is a good point, as I find the operators input is often forgotten when considering the AIs output. If it took me an hour and decades of expertise to get the AI to output the right program, did the AI really do it? Could someone without my expertise get the same result? If not, then maybe we are wasting our time trying to mash our skills through vector space via a chat interface.
    - cheevly 10mo ago
      Im talking generalized solutions that solve all of them.
- NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
  After 25+ years in this field, having interviewed ~100 people for both my startup and other companies, I'm having a hard time believing this. You're either in an extremely niche field (such as to make your statement irrelevant to 99.9% of the industry), or it's hyperbole, or straight up bs. Interviewing is an art, and IME "gotcha" types of questions never work. You want to search for real-world capabilities, and like it or not the questions need to match those expectations. If you're hiring summer interns and the SotA models can't solve those questions, then you're doing something wrong. Sorry, but having used these tools for the past three years this is extremely ahrd to believe. I of course understand if you can't, but sharing even one of those questions would be nice.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 10mo ago
> I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes. Orchestrating harmony is no mean feat.
threethirtytwo 10mo ago
His logic is off and his experience is irrelevant because i doesn’t encompass scale to have been exposed to an actual paradigm shifting event. Civilizations and entire technologies have been overturned so he can’t say it won’t happen this time. What we do know is this. If AI keeps improving at the current rate it’s improving then it will eventually hit a point where we don’t need software engineers. That’s inevitable. The way for it to not happen is for this technology to hit an impenetrable wall. This wave of AI came so fast that there are still stubborn people who think it’s a stochastic parrot. They missed the boat.
germandiago 10mo ago
I am sorry to say you are not a good programmer. I mean, AIs can drop something fast the same way you cannot beat a computer at adding or multiplying. After that, you find mistakes, false positives, code that does not work fully, and the worse part is the last one: code that does not work fully but also, as a consequence, that you do NOT understand yet. That is where your time shrinks: now you need to review it. Also, they do not design systems better. Maybe partial pieces. Give them something complex and they will hallucinate worse solutions than what you already know if you have, let us say, over 10 years of experience programming in a language (or mabye 5). Now multiply this unreliability problem as the code you "AI-generate" grows. Now you have a system you do not know if it is reliable and that you do not understand to modify. Congrats... I use AI moderately for the tasks is good at: generate some scripts, give me this small typical function amd I review it. Review my code: I will discard part of your mistakes and hallucinations as a person that knows well the language and will find maybe a few valuable things. Also, when reviewing and found problems in my code I saw that the LLMs really need to hallucinate errors that do not exist to justify their help. This is just something LLMs seem to not be accurate at. Also, when problems go a bit more atypical or past a level of difficulty, it gets much more unreliable. All in all: you are going to need humans. I do not know how many, I do not know how much they will improve. I just know that they are not reliable and this "generate-fast-unreliable vs now I do not know the codebase" is a fundamental obstacle that I think it is if not very difficult, impossible to workaround.
bob1029 10mo ago
The AI is pretty scary if you think most of software engineering is about authoring individual methods and rubber ducking about colors of paint and brands of tools. Once you learn that it's mostly about interacting with a customer (sometimes this is yourself), you will realize the AI is pretty awful at handling even the most basic tasks. Following a product vision, selecting an appropriate architecture and eschewing 3rd party slop are examples of critical areas where these models are either fundamentally incapable or adversely aligned. I find I have to probe ChatGPT very hard to get it to offer a direct implementation of something like a SAML service provider. This isn't a particularly difficult thing to do in a language like C# with all of the built in XML libraries, but the LLM will constantly try to push you to use 3rd party and cloud shit throughout. If you don't have strong internal convictions (vision) about what you really want, it's going to take you for a ride. One other thing to remember is that our economies are incredibly efficient. The statistical mean of all information in sight of the LLMs likely does not represent much of an arbitrage opportunity at scale. Everyone else has access to the same information. This also means that composing these systems in recursive or agentic styles means you aren't gaining anything. You cannot increase the information content of a system by simply creating another instance of the same system and having it argue with itself. There usually exists some simple prompt that makes a multi agent Rube Goldberg contraption look silly. > I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes. "Basically" and "just" are doing some heroic weight lifting here. Effectively conducting all of the things an LLM is good at still requires a lot of experience. Making the constraints live together in one happy place is the hard part. This is why some of us call it "engineering".
bigstrat2003 10mo ago
> Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me. That is just not true, assuming you have a modicum of competence (which I assume you do). AIs suck at all these tasks; they are not even as good as an inexperienced human.
- gentooflux 10mo ago
  LLMs generate the most likely code given the problem they're presented and everything they've been trained on, they don't actually understand how (or even if) it works. I only ever get away with that when I'm writing a parser.
  - chii 10mo ago
    > they don't actually understand how but if it empirically works, does it matter if the "intelligence" doesn't "understand" it? Does a chess engine "understand" the moves it makes?
    - jvanderbot 10mo ago
      This is a semantic dead end when discussing results and career choices
    - goatlover 10mo ago
      It matters if AGI is the goal. If it remains a tool to make workers more productive, then it doesn't need to truly understand, since the humans using the tools understand. I'm of the opinion AI should have stood for Augmented (Human) Intelligence outside of science fiction. I believe that's what early pioneers like Douglas Engalbert thought. Clearly that's what Steve Jobs and Alan Kay thought computing was for.
      - victorbjorklund 10mo ago
        AGI is such a meaningless concept. We can’t even fully design what human intelligence is (and when a human fails it meaning they lack human intelligence). It’s just philosophy.
otabdeveloper4 10mo ago
AI is absolutely rock-bottom shit at all that.
goodpoint 10mo ago
> Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me ChatGPT, is that you?
CraigJPerry 10mo ago
>> Coding AIs design software better than me Absolutely flat out not true. I'm extremely pro-faster-keyboard, i use the faster keyboards in almost every opportunity i can, i've been amazed by debugging skills (in fairness, i've also been very disappointed many times), i've been bowled over by my faster keyboard's ability to whip out HTML UI's in record time, i've been genuinely impressed by my faster keyboard's ability to flag flaws in PRs i'm reviewing. All this to say, i see lots of value in faster keyboard's but add all the prompts, skills and hooks you like, explain in as much detail as you like about modularisation, and still "agents" cannot design software as well as a human. Whatever the underlying mechanism of an LLM (to call it a next token predictor is dismissively underselling its capabilities) it does not have a mechanism to decompose a problem into independently solvable pieces. While that remains true, and i've seen zero precursor of a coming change here - the state of the art today is equiv to having the agent employ a todo list - while this remains true, LLMs cannot design better than humans. There are many simple CRUD line of business apps where they design well enough (well more accurately stated, the problem is small/simple enough) that it doesn't matter about this lack of design skill in LLMs or agents. But don't confuse that for being able to design software in the more general use case.
- tatjam 10mo ago
  Exactly, for the thing that has been done in Github 10000x times over, LLMs are pretty awesome and they speed up your job significantly (it's arguable if you would be better off using some abstraction already built if that's the case). But try to do something novel and... they become nearly useless. Not like anything particularly difficult, just something that's so niche it's never been done before. It will most likely hallucinate some methods and call it a day. As a personal anecdote, I was doing some LTSpice simulations and tried to get Claude Sonnet to write a plot expression to convert reactance to apparent capacitance in an AC sweep. It hallucinated pretty much the entire thing, and got the equation wrong (assumed the source was unit intensity, while LTSpice models AC circuits with unit voltage. This surely is on the internet, but apparently has never been written alongside the need to convert an impedance to capacitance!).
zsoltkacsandi 10mo ago
I have been using the most recent Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini models for coding for a bit more than a year, on a daily basis. They are pretty good at writing code *after* I thoroughly described what to do, step by step. If you miss a small detail they get loose and the end result is a complete mess that takes hours to clean up. This still requires years of coding experience, planning ahead in head, you won't be able to spare that, or replace developers with LLMs. They are like autocomplete on steroids, that's pretty much it.
- dent9 10mo ago
  Yes what you are describing is exactly what Kiro solves
  - zsoltkacsandi 10mo ago
    > Through Kiro, we reinvented how developers work with AI agents. Even according to it’s documentation it is still built for developers, so my point still stands. You need dev experience to use this tool, same as other LLM-based coding tools.
gingersnap 10mo ago
This is not how I think about it. Me and the coding assistant is better then me or the coding assistant separately. For me its not about me or the coding assistant, its me and the coding assistant. But I'm also not a professional coder, i dont identify as a coder. I've been fiddling with programming my whole life, but never had it as title, I've more worked from product side or from stakeholder side, but always got more involved, as I could speak with the dev team. This also makes it natural for me to work side-by-side with the coding assistant, compared maybe to pure coders, who are used to keeping the coding side to themselves.
chii 10mo ago
> I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes. a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)? Perhaps autodriving would in the near future, but there still needs to be someone making decisions on how best to utilize that car - surely, it isn't deciding to go to destination A without someone telling them. > I feel like I’m doing the work of an entire org that used to need twenty engineers. and this is great. A combine harvester does the work of what used to be an entire village for a week in a day. More output for less people/resources expended means more wealth produced.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)? People whose life were based around using horses for transportation were very scared of cars replacing them though, and correctly so, because horses for transportation is something people do for leisure today, not necessity. I feel like that's a more apt analogy than comparing cars to any human. > More output for less people/resources expended means more wealth produced. This is true, but it probably also means that this "more wealth produced" will be more concentrated, because it's easier to convince one person using AI that you should have half of the wealth they produce, rather than convincing 100 people you should have half of what they produce. From where I'm standing, it seems to have the same effects (but not as widespread or impactful, yet) as industrialization, that induced that side-effect as well.
  - jvanderbot 10mo ago
    Analogies are not going to work. Bug it's just as likely that, in the worst case, we are stage coach drivers who have to use cars when we just really love the quiet slowness of horses.
- lelanthran 10mo ago
  > a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)? ??? Cars replaced horses, not people. In this scenario you are the horse.
lelanthran 10mo ago
> Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me. They don't do any of that better than me; they do it poorer and faster, but well enough for most of the time.
- dent9 10mo ago
  Then you are using the wrong AI tools or using them poorly
bborud 10mo ago
Notice who makes these predictions that programmers will become irrelevant.
conartist6 10mo ago
More than any other effect they have LLMs breed something called "learned helplessness". You just listed a few things it may stay better than you at, and a few things that it is not better than you at and never will be. Planning long running projects and deciding are things only you can do well!! Humans manage costs. We look out for our future. We worry. We have excitement, and pride. It wants you to think none of these things matter of course, because it doesn't have them. It says plausible things at random, basically. It can't love, it can't care, it won't persist. WHATEVER you do don't let it make you forget that it's a bag of words and you are someing almost infinitely more capable, not in spite of human "flaws" like caring, but because of them :)
- conartist6 10mo ago
  Plus I think I've almost never see so little competition for what I think are the real prizes! Everyone's off making copies of copies of copies of the same crappy infrastructure we already have. They're busy building small inconsequential side projects so they can say they built something using an LLM.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > They're busy building small inconsequential side projects Unironically, sending a program to build those for me have send me almost endless amount of time. I'm a pretty distracted individual, and pretty anal about my workflow/environment, so lots of times I've spent hours going into rabbit-holes to make something better, when I could have just sucked it up and do it the manual way instead, even if it takes mental energy. Now, I can still do those things, but not spend hours, just a couple of minutes, and come back after 20-30 minutes to something that lets me avoid that stuff wholesale. Once you start stacking these things, it tends to save a lot of time and more importantly, mental energy. So the programs by themselves are basically "small inconsequential side projects" because they're not "production worthy and web scale SaaS ready to earn money", but they help me and others who are building those things in a big way.
    - throw4847285 10mo ago
robofanatic 10mo ago
>I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant Think of yourself as a chef and LLMs as ready to eat meals or a recipe app. Can ready to eat meals OR recipe apps put a chef out of business?

by mohsen1 10mo ago

khalic 10mo ago

I feel you, it's scary. But the possibilities we're presented with are incredible. I'm revisiting all these projects that I put aside because they were "too big" or "too much for a machine". It's quite exciting

belter 10mo ago

>> From where I’m standing, it’s scary. You are being fooled by randomness [1] Not because the models are random, but because you are mistaking a massive combinatorial search over seen patterns for genuine reasoning. Taleb point was about confusing luck for skill. Dont confuse interpolation for understanding. You can read a Rust book after years of Java, then go build software for an industry that did not exist when you started. Ask any LLM to write a driver for hardware that shipped last month, or model a regulatory framework that just passed... It will confidently hallucinate. You will figure it out. That is the difference between pattern matching and understanding. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness

joefourier 10mo ago
Have you used an LLM specifically trained for tool calling, in Claude Code, Cursor or Aider? They’re capable of looking up documentation, correcting their errors by compiling and running tests, and when coupled with a linter, hallucinations are a non issue. I don’t really think it’s possible to dismiss a model that’s been trained with reinforcement learning for both reasoning and tool usage as only doing pattern matching. They’re not at all the same beasts as the old style of LLMs based purely on next token prediction of massive scrapes of web data (with some fine tuning on Q&A pairs and RLHF to pick the best answers).
- treespace8 10mo ago
  I'm using Claude code to help me learn Godot game programming. One interesting thing is that Claude will not tell me if I'm following the wrong path. It will just make the requested change to the best of its ability. For example a Tower Defence game I'm making I wanted to keep turret position state in an AStarGrid2D. It produced code to do this, but became harder and harder to follow as I went on. It's only after watching more tutorials I figured out I was asking for the wrong thing. (TileMapLayer is a much better choice) LLMs still suffer from Garbage in Garbage out.
  - memoriuaysj 10mo ago
    before coding I just ask the model "what are the best practices in this industry to solve this problem? what tools/libraries/approaches people use? after coding I ask it "review the code, do you see any for which there are common libraries implementing it? are there ways to make it more idiomatic?" you can also ask it "this is an idea on how to solve it that somebody told me, what do you think about it, are there better ways?"
    - skydhash 10mo ago
      Do you also light candles and chant?
    - manmal 10mo ago
      Both the before and after are better done manually. What you are describing is fine for the heck of it (I‘ve vibe coded a whisper related rust port today without having any actual rust skills), but I’d never use fully vibed software in production. That’s irresponsible in multiple ways.
    - hansmayer 10mo ago
      > before coding I just ask the model "what are the best practices in this industry to solve this problem? what tools/libraries/approaches people use? Just for the fun of it, and so you lose your "virginity" so to speak, next time when the magic machine gives you the answer about "what it thinks", tell it its wrong in a strict language and scold it for misleading you. Tell it to give you the "real" best practices instead of what it spat out. Then sit back and marvel at the machine saying you were right and that it had mislead you. Producing a completely, somewhat, or slightly different answer (you never know what you get on the slot machine).
Verdex 10mo ago
I've worked with a lot of interns, fresh outs from college, overseas lowest bidders, and mediocre engineers who gave up years ago. All over the course of a ~20 year career. Not once in all that time has anyone PRed and merged my completely unrelated and unfinished branch into main. Except a few weeks ago. By someone who was using the LLM to make PRs. He didn't understand when I asked him about it and was baffled as to how it happened. Really annoying, but I got significantly less concerned about the future of human software engineering after that.
doug_durham 10mo ago
Why would you expect an LLM or even a human to succeed in these cases? “Write a piece of code for a specification that you can’t possibly know about?” That’s why you have to do context engineering, just like you’d provide a reference to a new document to an engineer writing code.
germandiago 10mo ago
This is exactly what happened to me: novel or uncommon = hallucinate or invent wrong. It is ok for getting snippets for example and saying (I did it). Please make this MVVM style. It is not perfect, but saves time. For very broad or novel reasoning, as of today... forget it.

ravenstine 10mo ago

Yeah, it makes me wonder whether I should start learning to be a carpenter or something. Those who either support AI or thinks "it's all bullshit" cite a lack of evidence for humans truly being replaced in the engineering process, but that's just the thing; the unprecedented levels of uncertainty make it very difficult to invest one's self in the present, intellectually and emotionally. With the current state of things, I don't think it's silly to wonder "what's the point" if another 5 years of this trajectory is going to mean not getting hired as a software dev again unless you have a PhD and want to work for an AI company. What doesn't help is that the current state of AI adoption is heavily top-down. What I mean is the buy-in is coming from the leadership class and the shareholder class, both of whom have the incentive to remove the necessary evil of human beings from their processes. Ironically, these classes are perhaps the least qualified to decide whether generative AI can replace swathes of their workforce without serious unforeseen consequences. To make matters worse, those consequences might be as distal as too many NEETs in the system such that no one can afford to buy their crap anymore; good luck getting anyone focused on making it to the next financial quarter to give a shit about that. And that's really all that matters at the end of the day; what leadership believes, whether or not they are in touch with reality.

btbuildem 10mo ago

They do all those things you've mentioned more efficiently than most of us, but they fall woefully short as soon as novelty is required. Creativity is not in their repertoire. So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce. But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the comfortable valley of the familiar at every step. I choose to look at it as an opportunity to spend more time on the interesting problems, and work at a higher level. We used to worry about pointers and memory allocation. Now we will worry less and less about how the code is written and more about the result it built.

9dev 10mo ago
I think your image of LLMs is a bit outdated. Claude Code with well-configured agents will get entirely novel stuff done pretty well, and that’s only going to get better over time. I wouldn’t want to bet my career on that anyway.
- germandiago 10mo ago
  I am all ears. What is your setup?
skydhash 10mo ago
> So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce. The same thing over and over again should be a SaaS, some internal tool, or a plugin. Computers are good at doing the same thing over and over again and that's what we've been using them for > But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the comfortable valley of the familiar at every step. Even if the high level description of a task may be similar to another, there's always something different in the implementation. A sports car and a sedan have roughly the same components, but they're not engineered the same. > We used to worry about pointers and memory allocation. Some still do. It's not in every case you will have a system that handle allocations and a garbage collector. And even in those, you will see memory leaks. > Now we will worry less and less about how the code is written and more about the result it built. Wasn't that Dreamweaver?

63stack 10mo ago

This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make. Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.

aspenmartin 10mo ago
No it doesn’t read like shilling and advertisement, it’s tiring hearing people continually dismiss coding agents as if they have not massively improved and are driving real value despite limitations and they are only just getting started. I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, and I’ve done things where Claude made the whole effort take twice as long and 3x more of my time. It’s not like people are ignoring the limitations, it’s that people can see how powerful the already are and how much more headroom there is even with existing paradigms not to mention the compute scaling happening in 26-27 and the idea pipeline from the massive hoarding of talent.
- jayd16 10mo ago
  When prices go down or product velocity goes up we'll start believing in the new 20x developer. Until then, it doesn't align with most experiences and just reads like fiction. You'll notice no one ever seems to talk about the products they're making 20x faster or cheaper.
  - hansmayer 10mo ago
    +1 - I wish at least one of these AI boosters had shown us a real commercialised product they've built.
    - aspenmartin 10mo ago
      AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right! In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative hostile attitude references some “promise” that has gone unfulfilled but it’s so silly: judge the product they are producing and maybe just maybe consider the rate of progress to _guess_ where things are heading

heliumtera 10mo ago

Stop freaking out. Seriously. You're afraid of something completely ridiculous. It is certainly more eloquent than you regarding software architecture (which was a scam all along, but conversation for another time). It will find SOME bugs better than you, that's a given. Review code better than you? Seriously? What you're using and what you consider code review? Assume I could identify one change broke production and you reviewed the latest commit. I am pinging you and you better answer. Ok, Claude broke production, now what? Can you begin to understand the difference between you and the generative technology? When you hop on the call, you will explain to me with a great deal of details what you know about the system you built, and explain decision making and changes over time. You'll tell about what worked and what didn't. You will tell about the risks, behavior and expectations. About where the code runs, it's dependencies, users, usage patterns, load, CPU usage and memory footprint, you could probably tell what's happening without looking at logs but at metrics. With Claude I get: you're absolutely right! You asked about what it WAS, but I told you about what it WASN'T! MY BAD. Knowledge requires a soul to experience and this is why you're paid.

mywittyname 10mo ago
We use code rabbit and it's better than practically any human I've worked with at a number of code review tasks, such as finding vulnerabilities, highlighting configuration issues, bad practices, etc. It's not the greatest at "does this make sense here" type questions, but I'd be the one answering those questions anyway. Yeah, maybe the people I've worked with suck at code reviews, but that's pretty normal. Not to say your answer is wrong. I think the gist is accurate. But I think tooling will get better at answering exactly the kind of questions you bring up. Also, someone has to be responsible. I don't think the industry can continue with this BS "AI broke it." Our jobs might devolve into something more akin to a SDET role and writing the "last mile" of novel code the AI can't produce accurately.
- andrekandre 10mo ago
  > We use code rabbit and it's better than practically any human code rabbit does find things occasionally, but it also calls things 'critical' that arent and flags issues that dont actually exist and even lies in replies sometimes... it also is extremely verbose to the point of being slog to go through... and the haikus: they are so cringe and infantilizing... maybe its our config, but code rabbit has been underwhelming...

dataviz1000 10mo ago

I was a chef in Michelin-starred restaurants for 11 years. One of my favorite positions was washing dishes. The goal was always to keep the machine running on its 5-minute cycle. It was about getting the dishes into racks, rinsing them, and having them ready and waiting for the previous cycle to end—so you could push them into the machine immediately—then getting them dried and put away after the cycle, making sure the quality was there and no spot was missed. If the machine stopped, the goal was to get another batch into it, putting everything else on hold. Keeping the machine running was the only way to prevent dishes from piling up, which would end with the towers falling over and breaking plates. This work requires moving lightning fast with dexterity. AI coding agents are analogous to the machine. My job is to get the prompts written, and to do quality control and housekeeping after it runs a cycle. Nonetheless, like all automation, humans are still needed... for now.

conductr 10mo ago
If it requires an expert engineer/dishwasher to keep the flow running perfectly, the human is the bottleneck in the process. This sounds a lot more like the past before AI to me. What AI does is just give you enough dishes that they don’t need to be washed at all during dinner service. Just let them pile up dirty or throw them away and get new dishes tomorrow it’s so immaterial to replace that washing them doesn’t always make sense. But if for some reason you do want to reuse them, then, it washes and dries them for you too. You just look over things at the end and make sure they pass your quality standards. If they left some muck on a plate or lipstick on a cup, just tell it not to let that happen again and it won’t. So even your QC work gets easier over time. The labor needed to deal with dirty dishes is drastically reduced in any case.
leptons 10mo ago
> humans are still needed... for now "AI" doesn't have a clue what to do on its own. Humans will always be in the loop, because they have goals, while the AI is designed to placate and not create. The amount of "AI" garbage I have to sift through to find one single gem is about the same or more work than if I had just coded it myself. Add to that the frustration of dealing with a compulsive liar, and it's just a fucking awful experience for anyone that actually can code.

deadbabe 10mo ago

Where the hell was all this fear when the push for open source everything got fully underway? When entire websites were being spawned and scaffolded with just a couple lines of code? Do we not remember all those impressive tech demos of developers doing massive complex thing with "just one line of code"? How did we not just write software for every kind of software problem that could exist by now? How has free code, developed by humans, become more available than ever and yet somehow we have had to employ more and more developers? Why didn't we trend toward less developers? It just doesn't make sense. AI is nothing but a snippet generator, a static analyzer, a linter, a compiler, an LSP, a google search, a copy paste from stackoverflow, all technologies we've had for a long time, all things developers used to have to go without at some point in history. I don't have the answers.

scellus 10mo ago

Perfect economic substitution in coding doesn't happen for a long time. Meanwhile, AI appears as an amplifier to the human and vice versa. That the work will change is scary, but the change also opens up possibilities, many of them now hard to imagine.

Herring 10mo ago

Try have your engineers pick up some product work. Clients do NOT want to talk to bots.

jayd16 10mo ago

My experience with these tools is far and away no where close to this. If you're really able to do the work of a 20 man org on your own, start a business.

to11mtm 10mo ago

It's definitely scary in a way. However I'm still finding a trend even in my org; better non-AI developers tend to be better at using AI to develop. AI still forgets requirements. I'm currently running an experiment where I try to get a design and then execute on an enterprise 'SAAS-replacement' application [0]. AI can spit forth a completely convincing looking overall project plan [1] that has gaps if anyone, even the AI itself, tries to execute on the plan; this is where a proper, experienced developer can step in at the right steps to help out. IDK if that's the right way to venture into the brave new world, but I am at least doing my best to be at a forefront of how my org is using the tech. [0] - I figured it was a good exercise for testing limits of both my skills prompting and the AI's capability. I do not expect success.

dent9 10mo ago
AI does not forget requirements when you use a spec driven AI tool like Kiro
- songodongo 10mo ago
  Are you on the Kiro marketing team?

foxygen 10mo ago

I think I've been using AI wrong. I can't understand testimonies like this. Most times I try to use AI for a task, it is a shitshow, and I have to rewrite everything anyway.

doug_durham 10mo ago
I don’t know about right/wrong. You need to use the tools that make you productive. I personally find that in my work there are dozens of little scripts or helper functions that accelerate my work. However I usually don’t write them because I don’t have the time. AI can generate these little scripts very consistently. That accelerates my work. Perhaps just start simple.
- JSDave 10mo ago
  Instead of generating, exporting or copy pasting just seems more reliable to me and also takes very little time. I think what matters most is just what you're working on. It's great for crud or working with public APIs with lots of examples. For everything else, AI has been a net loss for me.
- 63stack 10mo ago
  > there are dozens of little scripts or helper functions that accelerate my work. However I usually don’t write them because I don’t have the time People who write things like this can't expect to be taken seriously. Before AI you didn't have time to write things that saved you time? So you just ended up spending (wasting) more time by going the long way? That was a better choice than just doing the thing that would have saved you time?
weakfish 10mo ago
Same. Seems to be the never ending theme of AI.
bdangubic 10mo ago
how much time/effort have you put in to educate yourself about how they work, what they excel at, what they suck at, what is your responsibility when you use them…? this effort is directly proportional to how well they will serve you

Desafinado 10mo ago

That's kind of the point of the article, though. Sure LLMs can churn out code, and they sort of work for developers who already understand code and design, but what happens when that junior dev with no hard experience builds their years of experience with LLMs? Over time those who actually understand what the LLMs are doing and how to correct the output are replaced by developers who've never learned the hard lessons of writing code line by line. The ability to reason about code gets lost. This points to the hard problem that the article highlights. The hard problem of software is actually knowing how to write it, which usually takes years, sometimes up to a decade of real experience. Any idiot can churn out code that doesn't work. But working, effective software takes a lot of skill that LLMs will be stripping people of. Leaving a market there for people who have actually put the time in and understand software.

tom_m 10mo ago

There will be a need. Don't worry. Most people still haven't figured out how to properly read and interpret instructions. So they build things incorrectly - with or without AI Seriously. The bar is that low. When people say "AI slop" I just chuckle because it's not "AI" it's everyone. That's the general state of the industry. So all you have to do is stay engaged, ask questions, and understand the requirements. Know what it is you're building and you'll be fine.

Deep-Blue 10mo ago

As of today NONE of the known AI codebots can solve correctly ANY of the 50+ programming exercises we use to interview fresh grads or summer interns. NONE! Not even level 1 problems that can be solved in fewer than 20 lines of code with a bit of middle school math.

cheevly 10mo ago
I promise you that I can show you how to reliably solve any of them using any of the latest OpenAI models. Email me if you want proof; josh.d.griffith at gmail
- utopiah 10mo ago
  I'd watch that show ideally with few base rules though, e.g. - the problems to solve must NOT be part of the training set - the person using the tool (e.g. OpenAI, Claude, DevStral, DeepSeek, etc) must NOT be able to solve problems alone as I believe otherwise the 1st is "just" search and the 2nd is basically offloading the actual problem solving to the user.
  - ehnto 10mo ago
    > the person using the tool (e.g. OpenAI, Claude, DevStral, DeepSeek, etc) must NOT be able to solve problems alone I think this is a good point, as I find the operators input is often forgotten when considering the AIs output. If it took me an hour and decades of expertise to get the AI to output the right program, did the AI really do it? Could someone without my expertise get the same result? If not, then maybe we are wasting our time trying to mash our skills through vector space via a chat interface.
  - cheevly 10mo ago
    Im talking generalized solutions that solve all of them.
NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
After 25+ years in this field, having interviewed ~100 people for both my startup and other companies, I'm having a hard time believing this. You're either in an extremely niche field (such as to make your statement irrelevant to 99.9% of the industry), or it's hyperbole, or straight up bs. Interviewing is an art, and IME "gotcha" types of questions never work. You want to search for real-world capabilities, and like it or not the questions need to match those expectations. If you're hiring summer interns and the SotA models can't solve those questions, then you're doing something wrong. Sorry, but having used these tools for the past three years this is extremely ahrd to believe. I of course understand if you can't, but sharing even one of those questions would be nice.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

andsoitis 10mo ago

> I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes. Orchestrating harmony is no mean feat.

threethirtytwo 10mo ago

His logic is off and his experience is irrelevant because i doesn’t encompass scale to have been exposed to an actual paradigm shifting event. Civilizations and entire technologies have been overturned so he can’t say it won’t happen this time. What we do know is this. If AI keeps improving at the current rate it’s improving then it will eventually hit a point where we don’t need software engineers. That’s inevitable. The way for it to not happen is for this technology to hit an impenetrable wall. This wave of AI came so fast that there are still stubborn people who think it’s a stochastic parrot. They missed the boat.

germandiago 10mo ago

I am sorry to say you are not a good programmer. I mean, AIs can drop something fast the same way you cannot beat a computer at adding or multiplying. After that, you find mistakes, false positives, code that does not work fully, and the worse part is the last one: code that does not work fully but also, as a consequence, that you do NOT understand yet. That is where your time shrinks: now you need to review it. Also, they do not design systems better. Maybe partial pieces. Give them something complex and they will hallucinate worse solutions than what you already know if you have, let us say, over 10 years of experience programming in a language (or mabye 5). Now multiply this unreliability problem as the code you "AI-generate" grows. Now you have a system you do not know if it is reliable and that you do not understand to modify. Congrats... I use AI moderately for the tasks is good at: generate some scripts, give me this small typical function amd I review it. Review my code: I will discard part of your mistakes and hallucinations as a person that knows well the language and will find maybe a few valuable things. Also, when reviewing and found problems in my code I saw that the LLMs really need to hallucinate errors that do not exist to justify their help. This is just something LLMs seem to not be accurate at. Also, when problems go a bit more atypical or past a level of difficulty, it gets much more unreliable. All in all: you are going to need humans. I do not know how many, I do not know how much they will improve. I just know that they are not reliable and this "generate-fast-unreliable vs now I do not know the codebase" is a fundamental obstacle that I think it is if not very difficult, impossible to workaround.

bob1029 10mo ago

The AI is pretty scary if you think most of software engineering is about authoring individual methods and rubber ducking about colors of paint and brands of tools. Once you learn that it's mostly about interacting with a customer (sometimes this is yourself), you will realize the AI is pretty awful at handling even the most basic tasks. Following a product vision, selecting an appropriate architecture and eschewing 3rd party slop are examples of critical areas where these models are either fundamentally incapable or adversely aligned. I find I have to probe ChatGPT very hard to get it to offer a direct implementation of something like a SAML service provider. This isn't a particularly difficult thing to do in a language like C# with all of the built in XML libraries, but the LLM will constantly try to push you to use 3rd party and cloud shit throughout. If you don't have strong internal convictions (vision) about what you really want, it's going to take you for a ride. One other thing to remember is that our economies are incredibly efficient. The statistical mean of all information in sight of the LLMs likely does not represent much of an arbitrage opportunity at scale. Everyone else has access to the same information. This also means that composing these systems in recursive or agentic styles means you aren't gaining anything. You cannot increase the information content of a system by simply creating another instance of the same system and having it argue with itself. There usually exists some simple prompt that makes a multi agent Rube Goldberg contraption look silly. > I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes. "Basically" and "just" are doing some heroic weight lifting here. Effectively conducting all of the things an LLM is good at still requires a lot of experience. Making the constraints live together in one happy place is the hard part. This is why some of us call it "engineering".

bigstrat2003 10mo ago

> Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me. That is just not true, assuming you have a modicum of competence (which I assume you do). AIs suck at all these tasks; they are not even as good as an inexperienced human.

gentooflux 10mo ago
LLMs generate the most likely code given the problem they're presented and everything they've been trained on, they don't actually understand how (or even if) it works. I only ever get away with that when I'm writing a parser.
- chii 10mo ago
  > they don't actually understand how but if it empirically works, does it matter if the "intelligence" doesn't "understand" it? Does a chess engine "understand" the moves it makes?
  - jvanderbot 10mo ago
    This is a semantic dead end when discussing results and career choices
  - goatlover 10mo ago
    It matters if AGI is the goal. If it remains a tool to make workers more productive, then it doesn't need to truly understand, since the humans using the tools understand. I'm of the opinion AI should have stood for Augmented (Human) Intelligence outside of science fiction. I believe that's what early pioneers like Douglas Engalbert thought. Clearly that's what Steve Jobs and Alan Kay thought computing was for.
    - victorbjorklund 10mo ago
      AGI is such a meaningless concept. We can’t even fully design what human intelligence is (and when a human fails it meaning they lack human intelligence). It’s just philosophy.

otabdeveloper4 10mo ago

AI is absolutely rock-bottom shit at all that.

goodpoint 10mo ago

CraigJPerry 10mo ago

>> Coding AIs design software better than me Absolutely flat out not true. I'm extremely pro-faster-keyboard, i use the faster keyboards in almost every opportunity i can, i've been amazed by debugging skills (in fairness, i've also been very disappointed many times), i've been bowled over by my faster keyboard's ability to whip out HTML UI's in record time, i've been genuinely impressed by my faster keyboard's ability to flag flaws in PRs i'm reviewing. All this to say, i see lots of value in faster keyboard's but add all the prompts, skills and hooks you like, explain in as much detail as you like about modularisation, and still "agents" cannot design software as well as a human. Whatever the underlying mechanism of an LLM (to call it a next token predictor is dismissively underselling its capabilities) it does not have a mechanism to decompose a problem into independently solvable pieces. While that remains true, and i've seen zero precursor of a coming change here - the state of the art today is equiv to having the agent employ a todo list - while this remains true, LLMs cannot design better than humans. There are many simple CRUD line of business apps where they design well enough (well more accurately stated, the problem is small/simple enough) that it doesn't matter about this lack of design skill in LLMs or agents. But don't confuse that for being able to design software in the more general use case.

tatjam 10mo ago
Exactly, for the thing that has been done in Github 10000x times over, LLMs are pretty awesome and they speed up your job significantly (it's arguable if you would be better off using some abstraction already built if that's the case). But try to do something novel and... they become nearly useless. Not like anything particularly difficult, just something that's so niche it's never been done before. It will most likely hallucinate some methods and call it a day. As a personal anecdote, I was doing some LTSpice simulations and tried to get Claude Sonnet to write a plot expression to convert reactance to apparent capacitance in an AC sweep. It hallucinated pretty much the entire thing, and got the equation wrong (assumed the source was unit intensity, while LTSpice models AC circuits with unit voltage. This surely is on the internet, but apparently has never been written alongside the need to convert an impedance to capacitance!).

zsoltkacsandi 10mo ago

I have been using the most recent Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini models for coding for a bit more than a year, on a daily basis. They are pretty good at writing code *after* I thoroughly described what to do, step by step. If you miss a small detail they get loose and the end result is a complete mess that takes hours to clean up. This still requires years of coding experience, planning ahead in head, you won't be able to spare that, or replace developers with LLMs. They are like autocomplete on steroids, that's pretty much it.

dent9 10mo ago
Yes what you are describing is exactly what Kiro solves
- zsoltkacsandi 10mo ago
  > Through Kiro, we reinvented how developers work with AI agents. Even according to it’s documentation it is still built for developers, so my point still stands. You need dev experience to use this tool, same as other LLM-based coding tools.

gingersnap 10mo ago

This is not how I think about it. Me and the coding assistant is better then me or the coding assistant separately. For me its not about me or the coding assistant, its me and the coding assistant. But I'm also not a professional coder, i dont identify as a coder. I've been fiddling with programming my whole life, but never had it as title, I've more worked from product side or from stakeholder side, but always got more involved, as I could speak with the dev team. This also makes it natural for me to work side-by-side with the coding assistant, compared maybe to pure coders, who are used to keeping the coding side to themselves.

chii 10mo ago

> I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes. a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)? Perhaps autodriving would in the near future, but there still needs to be someone making decisions on how best to utilize that car - surely, it isn't deciding to go to destination A without someone telling them. > I feel like I’m doing the work of an entire org that used to need twenty engineers. and this is great. A combine harvester does the work of what used to be an entire village for a week in a day. More output for less people/resources expended means more wealth produced.

embedding-shape 10mo ago
> a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)? People whose life were based around using horses for transportation were very scared of cars replacing them though, and correctly so, because horses for transportation is something people do for leisure today, not necessity. I feel like that's a more apt analogy than comparing cars to any human. > More output for less people/resources expended means more wealth produced. This is true, but it probably also means that this "more wealth produced" will be more concentrated, because it's easier to convince one person using AI that you should have half of the wealth they produce, rather than convincing 100 people you should have half of what they produce. From where I'm standing, it seems to have the same effects (but not as widespread or impactful, yet) as industrialization, that induced that side-effect as well.
- jvanderbot 10mo ago
  Analogies are not going to work. Bug it's just as likely that, in the worst case, we are stage coach drivers who have to use cars when we just really love the quiet slowness of horses.
lelanthran 10mo ago
> a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)? ??? Cars replaced horses, not people. In this scenario you are the horse.

lelanthran 10mo ago

> Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me. They don't do any of that better than me; they do it poorer and faster, but well enough for most of the time.

dent9 10mo ago
Then you are using the wrong AI tools or using them poorly

bborud 10mo ago

Notice who makes these predictions that programmers will become irrelevant.

conartist6 10mo ago

More than any other effect they have LLMs breed something called "learned helplessness". You just listed a few things it may stay better than you at, and a few things that it is not better than you at and never will be. Planning long running projects and deciding are things only you can do well!! Humans manage costs. We look out for our future. We worry. We have excitement, and pride. It wants you to think none of these things matter of course, because it doesn't have them. It says plausible things at random, basically. It can't love, it can't care, it won't persist. WHATEVER you do don't let it make you forget that it's a bag of words and you are someing almost infinitely more capable, not in spite of human "flaws" like caring, but because of them :)

conartist6 10mo ago
Plus I think I've almost never see so little competition for what I think are the real prizes! Everyone's off making copies of copies of copies of the same crappy infrastructure we already have. They're busy building small inconsequential side projects so they can say they built something using an LLM.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > They're busy building small inconsequential side projects Unironically, sending a program to build those for me have send me almost endless amount of time. I'm a pretty distracted individual, and pretty anal about my workflow/environment, so lots of times I've spent hours going into rabbit-holes to make something better, when I could have just sucked it up and do it the manual way instead, even if it takes mental energy. Now, I can still do those things, but not spend hours, just a couple of minutes, and come back after 20-30 minutes to something that lets me avoid that stuff wholesale. Once you start stacking these things, it tends to save a lot of time and more importantly, mental energy. So the programs by themselves are basically "small inconsequential side projects" because they're not "production worthy and web scale SaaS ready to earn money", but they help me and others who are building those things in a big way.
  - throw4847285 10mo ago

robofanatic 10mo ago

>I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant Think of yourself as a chef and LLMs as ready to eat meals or a recipe app. Can ready to eat meals OR recipe apps put a chef out of business?