5 ms·

> Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail Every time we make progress complexity increases and it becomes more difficult to make progress. I'm not sure why t

by godelski 10mo ago

> Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail Every time we make progress complexity increases and it becomes more difficult to make progress. I'm not sure why this is surprising to many. We always do things to "good enough", not to perfection. Not that perfection even exists... "Good enough" means we tabled some things and triaged, addressing the most important things. But now to improve those little things now need to be addressed. This repeats over and over. There are no big problems, there are only a bunch of little problems that accumulate. As engineers, scientists, researchers, etc our literal job is to break down problems into many smaller problems and then solve them one at a time. And again, we only solve them to the good enough level, as perfection doesn't exist. The problems we solve never were a single problem, but many many smaller ones. I think the problem is we want to avoid depth. It's difficult! It's frustrating. It would be great if depth were never needed. But everything is simple until you actually have to deal with it.

echelon 10mo ago
I think we're all coping a bit here. This time, it really is different. The fact is, one developer with Claude code can now do the work of at least two developers. If that developer doesn't have ADHD, maybe that number is even higher. I don't think the amount of work to do increases. I think the number of developers or the salary of developers decreases. In any case, we'll see this in salaries over the next year or two. The very best move here might be to start working for yourself and delete the dependency on your employer. These models might enable more startups.
- mattgreenrocks 10mo ago
  Alternate take: what agents can spit out becomes table stakes for all software. Making it cohesive, focused on business needs, and stemming complexity are now requirements for all devs. By the same token (couldn’t resist), I also would argue we should be seeing the quality of average software products notch up by now with how long LLMs have been available. I’m not seeing it. I’m not sure it’s a function of model quality, either. I suspect devs that didn’t care as much about quality hadn’t really changed their tune.
  - godelski 10mo ago
    Honestly, in many ways it feels like quality is decreasing. I'm also not convinced it's a function of model quality. The model isn't going to do something if the prompter doesn't even know. It does what the programmer asked. I'll give a basic example. Most people suck at writing bash scripts. It's also a common claim as to LLMs utility. Yet they never write functions unless I explicitly ask. Here try this command curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | less (You don't need to pipe into less but it helps for reading) Can you spot a fatal error in the code where when running curl-pipe-bash the program might cause major issues? Funny enough I asked Claude and it asked me this Is this script currently in production? If so, I’d strongly recommend adding the function wrapper before anyone uses it via curl-pipe-bash. The errors made here are quite common in curl-pipe-bash scripts. I'm pretty certain Claude would write a program with the same mistakes despite being able to tell you about the problems and their trivial corrections. The problem with vibe coding is you get code that is close. But close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades. You get a bunch of unknown unknowns. The classic problem of programming still exists: the computer does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. LLMs just might also do things you don't tell it to...
  - funkyfiddler69 10mo ago
    how much new software do we really use? and how much can old software become qualitatively better without just becoming new software in different times with a much bigger and younger customer base? I misunderstood two things for a very long time: a) standards are not lower or higher, people are happy that they can do stuff at all or a little to a lot faster using software. standards then grow with the people, as does the software. b) of course software is always opinionated and there are always constraints and devs can't get stuck in a recursive loop of optimization but what's way more important: they don't have to because of a). Quality is, often enough, a matter of how much time you spent on nitpicking even though you absolutely could get the job done. Software is part of a pipeline, a supply chain, and someone is somehow aware why it should be "this" and not better or that other version the devs have prepared knowing well enough it won't see the light of day.
- thechao 10mo ago
  You sound bored. If we triple head count overnight, we'd only slow our backlog, temporarily. Every problem we solve only opens up a larger group of harder problems to solve.
- immibis 10mo ago
  If LLMs are good at writing software, then there's lots of good software around written by LLMs. Where is that software? I don't see it. Logical conclusion: LLMs aren't good at writing software.
  - CPLX 10mo ago
    Presumably they are writing the same quality software faster, the market having decided what quality it will accept. Once that trend maxes out it’s entirely plausible that the level of quality demanded will rise quickly. That’s basically what happened in the first dot com era.
    - godelski 10mo ago
      I'm not convinced. Honestly it seems like we're in a market of lemons and I don't know how we escape the kind of environment that is ripe for lemons. To get out requires customers to be well informed at the time of purchase. This is always difficult with software as we usually need to try it first and frankly, the average person is woefully tech illiterate. But these days? We are selling products based on promises, not actual capabilities. I can't think of a more fertile environment for a lemon market than that. No one can be informed and bigger and bigger promises need to be made every year.
  - brandonmb 10mo ago
    Are you trying to make a distinction between writing software vs writing code? LLMs are pretty great at writing good code (a relative term of course) if you lay things out for them. I use Claude Code on both greenfield new projects and a giant corporate mono repo and it works pretty well in both. In the giant mono repo, I have the benefit of many of my coworkers developing really nice Claude.md files and skills, so that helps a lot. It’s very similar to working with a college hire SWE: you need to break things down to give them a manageable chunk and do a bit of babysitting, but I’m much more productive than I was before. Particularly in the broad range of things where I know enough to know what needs to be done but I’m not super familiar with the framework to do it.
- sanderjd 10mo ago
  Why wouldn't we find new things to do with all that new productivity? Anecdotally, this is what I see happening in the small in my own work - we say yes to more ideas, more projects, because we know we can unblock things more quickly now - and I don't see why that wouldn't extend. I do expect to see smaller teams - maybe a lot more one-person "teams" - and perhaps smaller companies. But I expect to see more work being done, not less, or the same.
  - knollimar 10mo ago
    What new things would we do? I do contracting so maybe I'm lowest-bidder-pilled but I feel like drops in price in lean organizations sre going to eat the lunch of shops trying to make more quality software in most software disciplines. How much software is really required to be extensible?
    - sanderjd 10mo ago
      There is tons of stuff to do. Lots of technologies out there that need to be invented and commercialized. Tons of inefficient processes in business, government, and academia to improve. None of this means that it will be the kinds of professional specialized software development teams that we're used to doing any of this work, but I have some amount of optimism that this is actually going to be a golden age for "doing useful things with computers" work.
      - knollimar 10mo ago
        I still think it's more likely to be more of the same thing but with less people. One man shops being the ideal, and I don't think there will be proportionately more of them
        sanderjd 10mo ago
        This doesn't mesh with anything that has happened in the development of computing, or technology in general.
ranit 10mo ago
> As engineers, scientists, researchers, etc our literal job is to break down problems into many smaller problems and then solve them one at a time. Our literal job is also to look for and find patterns in these problems, so we can solve them as a more common problem, if possible, instead of solving them one at a time all the time.
- godelski 10mo ago
  Very true. But I didn't want to discuss elegance and abstraction as people seem to misunderstand abstraction in programming. I mean all programming is abstraction... abstraction isn't to be avoided, but things can become too abstract

echelon 10mo ago

I think we're all coping a bit here. This time, it really is different. The fact is, one developer with Claude code can now do the work of at least two developers. If that developer doesn't have ADHD, maybe that number is even higher. I don't think the amount of work to do increases. I think the number of developers or the salary of developers decreases. In any case, we'll see this in salaries over the next year or two. The very best move here might be to start working for yourself and delete the dependency on your employer. These models might enable more startups.

mattgreenrocks 10mo ago
Alternate take: what agents can spit out becomes table stakes for all software. Making it cohesive, focused on business needs, and stemming complexity are now requirements for all devs. By the same token (couldn’t resist), I also would argue we should be seeing the quality of average software products notch up by now with how long LLMs have been available. I’m not seeing it. I’m not sure it’s a function of model quality, either. I suspect devs that didn’t care as much about quality hadn’t really changed their tune.
- godelski 10mo ago
  Honestly, in many ways it feels like quality is decreasing. I'm also not convinced it's a function of model quality. The model isn't going to do something if the prompter doesn't even know. It does what the programmer asked. I'll give a basic example. Most people suck at writing bash scripts. It's also a common claim as to LLMs utility. Yet they never write functions unless I explicitly ask. Here try this command curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | less (You don't need to pipe into less but it helps for reading) Can you spot a fatal error in the code where when running curl-pipe-bash the program might cause major issues? Funny enough I asked Claude and it asked me this Is this script currently in production? If so, I’d strongly recommend adding the function wrapper before anyone uses it via curl-pipe-bash. The errors made here are quite common in curl-pipe-bash scripts. I'm pretty certain Claude would write a program with the same mistakes despite being able to tell you about the problems and their trivial corrections. The problem with vibe coding is you get code that is close. But close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades. You get a bunch of unknown unknowns. The classic problem of programming still exists: the computer does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. LLMs just might also do things you don't tell it to...
- funkyfiddler69 10mo ago
  how much new software do we really use? and how much can old software become qualitatively better without just becoming new software in different times with a much bigger and younger customer base? I misunderstood two things for a very long time: a) standards are not lower or higher, people are happy that they can do stuff at all or a little to a lot faster using software. standards then grow with the people, as does the software. b) of course software is always opinionated and there are always constraints and devs can't get stuck in a recursive loop of optimization but what's way more important: they don't have to because of a). Quality is, often enough, a matter of how much time you spent on nitpicking even though you absolutely could get the job done. Software is part of a pipeline, a supply chain, and someone is somehow aware why it should be "this" and not better or that other version the devs have prepared knowing well enough it won't see the light of day.
thechao 10mo ago
You sound bored. If we triple head count overnight, we'd only slow our backlog, temporarily. Every problem we solve only opens up a larger group of harder problems to solve.
immibis 10mo ago
If LLMs are good at writing software, then there's lots of good software around written by LLMs. Where is that software? I don't see it. Logical conclusion: LLMs aren't good at writing software.
- CPLX 10mo ago
  Presumably they are writing the same quality software faster, the market having decided what quality it will accept. Once that trend maxes out it’s entirely plausible that the level of quality demanded will rise quickly. That’s basically what happened in the first dot com era.
  - godelski 10mo ago
    I'm not convinced. Honestly it seems like we're in a market of lemons and I don't know how we escape the kind of environment that is ripe for lemons. To get out requires customers to be well informed at the time of purchase. This is always difficult with software as we usually need to try it first and frankly, the average person is woefully tech illiterate. But these days? We are selling products based on promises, not actual capabilities. I can't think of a more fertile environment for a lemon market than that. No one can be informed and bigger and bigger promises need to be made every year.
- brandonmb 10mo ago
  Are you trying to make a distinction between writing software vs writing code? LLMs are pretty great at writing good code (a relative term of course) if you lay things out for them. I use Claude Code on both greenfield new projects and a giant corporate mono repo and it works pretty well in both. In the giant mono repo, I have the benefit of many of my coworkers developing really nice Claude.md files and skills, so that helps a lot. It’s very similar to working with a college hire SWE: you need to break things down to give them a manageable chunk and do a bit of babysitting, but I’m much more productive than I was before. Particularly in the broad range of things where I know enough to know what needs to be done but I’m not super familiar with the framework to do it.
sanderjd 10mo ago
Why wouldn't we find new things to do with all that new productivity? Anecdotally, this is what I see happening in the small in my own work - we say yes to more ideas, more projects, because we know we can unblock things more quickly now - and I don't see why that wouldn't extend. I do expect to see smaller teams - maybe a lot more one-person "teams" - and perhaps smaller companies. But I expect to see more work being done, not less, or the same.
- knollimar 10mo ago
  What new things would we do? I do contracting so maybe I'm lowest-bidder-pilled but I feel like drops in price in lean organizations sre going to eat the lunch of shops trying to make more quality software in most software disciplines. How much software is really required to be extensible?
  - sanderjd 10mo ago
    There is tons of stuff to do. Lots of technologies out there that need to be invented and commercialized. Tons of inefficient processes in business, government, and academia to improve. None of this means that it will be the kinds of professional specialized software development teams that we're used to doing any of this work, but I have some amount of optimism that this is actually going to be a golden age for "doing useful things with computers" work.
    - knollimar 10mo ago
      I still think it's more likely to be more of the same thing but with less people. One man shops being the ideal, and I don't think there will be proportionately more of them
      - sanderjd 10mo ago
        This doesn't mesh with anything that has happened in the development of computing, or technology in general.

ranit 10mo ago

> As engineers, scientists, researchers, etc our literal job is to break down problems into many smaller problems and then solve them one at a time. Our literal job is also to look for and find patterns in these problems, so we can solve them as a more common problem, if possible, instead of solving them one at a time all the time.

godelski 10mo ago
Very true. But I didn't want to discuss elegance and abstraction as people seem to misunderstand abstraction in programming. I mean all programming is abstraction... abstraction isn't to be avoided, but things can become too abstract