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Part of me feels like LLMs will struggle to architect code properly, no matter how good they get. Software engineering is different from programming. Other kin

Part of me feels like LLMs will struggle to architect code properly, no matter how good they get. Software engineering is different from programming. Other kinds of engineers often ridiculed software engineers as "not real engineers" because mainstream engineers never had to build arbitrarily complex software systems from scratch. They have never experienced the cascading issues which often happen when trying to make changes to complex software systems. Their brief exposure to programming during their university days gave them a glimpse into programming but not software engineering. They think they understand it but they don't. Other engineers think that they're the only ones wrestling with the laws of nature. They're wrong. Software engineering involves wrestling with entropy itself. In some ways, it's an even purer form of engineering. Software engineering struggles against the most fundamental forces and requires reasoning skills of the highest order. I think software engineers will be among the last of the white collar professions to be automated besides the ones which have legal protections like lawyers, judges, politicians, accountants, pilots... where a human is required to provide a layer of accountability. Though I think lawyers will be reduced to being "official human stamping machines" before software engineers are reduced to mere Product Owners.

sebmellen 8mo ago
Beautifully expressed… you missed doctors in your list of white collar professions, but I’m sure surgeons and pilots will outlive all of us from an AI resilience standpoint.
- jongjong 8mo ago
  Ah yes 100%, doctors have legal moats too. It's kind of terrifying to think that all professions are going to have to shift away from value creation to pure politics to survive. I have a feeling that big tech companies will be legally forced to pay royalties to software engineers. Once software engineers stop applying their reasoning skills to solving real problems and start vengefully focusing it on politics, we're going to corrupt the whole system in our favor. We have enough collective knowledge to frame such corruption as moral in the context of an already corrupt system. Either software engineers will create regulatory moats for themselves or there will be a more broad political movement like communism. I've met many people working deep in the critical systems which underpin our society who are full-blown communists.
  - whattheheckheck 8mo ago
    Openclaw as your own person political advisor is pretty cool
  - linkregister 8mo ago
    Software engineering as a field has exceptionally low worker solidarity. This is largely because the talent and productivity is so stratified that even the median engineer produces an order of magnitude less value than the p95. Furthermore, a sufficient amount of opportunities exist —for engineers to become capitalists by founding, joining, or investing in an enterprise early enough to capture its upside— to credibly convince individuals that they may achieve this. Software engineers in aggregate will happily automate themselves out of a job. Legal cartels like the AMA and the ABA will persist. It would take years of strong threats to software engineers' livelihoods to compel them to support a cartel of their own. Even the first step for their regulatory capture, credentialization, is rejected, as enough autodidacts without degrees practice in the field. Essentially, too many software engineers view themselves as temporary embarrassed millionaires, rather than workers who need to band together. Automation in the field is happening faster than individuals' minds will change.
Swizec 8mo ago
> Though I think lawyers will be reduced to being "official human stamping machines" before software engineers are reduced to mere Product Owners GeLLMan Amnesia – AI can fully automate every profession except the ones I’m deeply familiar with. I’m a software engineer who wears the product owner hat a lot these days, there’s no way AI will automate this any time soon. Too much peopling and accountability.
- Herring 8mo ago
  Don't be so sure about that. These days I'm already finding it 100x easier/informative to have complicated charged discussions (eg immigration) with Gemini than with actual people. It's day and night. Accountability might be solvable too, maybe escrow and pay me if you waste my time. Or amazon-like reviews.
  - Aurornis 8mo ago
    > These days I'm already finding it 100x easier/informative to have complicated charged discussions (eg immigration) with Gemini than with actual people. It’s scary how quickly people start to mistake LLMs appeasing them for actual conversation. Discussing something with an LLM isn’t equivalent to having a conversation with a person. It’s just a text generator trained to show you what you want to see.
    - Herring 8mo ago
      Don't assume everyone is like you. I'm an early adopter and I know how to scaffold it. I generally love the bleeding edge in all things, and I'm increasingly sure it's an actual talent to be able to quickly adapt to unfamiliar things (this includes not making assumptions).
      - paulryanrogers 8mo ago
        What do you feel like you get out of discussions with Gemini about politically charged topics like immigration?
metadat 8mo ago
With the requisite planning steps Codex and Claude are already coming up with better architecture and design than I can. I've been doing this for more than 25 years.
- whattheheckheck 8mo ago
  What's the most complicated thing its designed so far for you
  - Herring 8mo ago
    Not that guy, but for me it's something like Tensorflow/Pytorch. A domain-specific language for a scientific application, Python API with a Rust core for very fast/safe calculations. It has all kinds of bells & whistles you'd want, like automatic differentiation, lazy evaluation, provenance, serialization, etc. Occasionally dips down to raw pointer work too. It's easy to test, so AI excels at this type of thing.
- _se 8mo ago
  Brother, you are just outing yourself as being incompetent here. That is embarrassing.

sebmellen 8mo ago

Beautifully expressed… you missed doctors in your list of white collar professions, but I’m sure surgeons and pilots will outlive all of us from an AI resilience standpoint.

jongjong 8mo ago
Ah yes 100%, doctors have legal moats too. It's kind of terrifying to think that all professions are going to have to shift away from value creation to pure politics to survive. I have a feeling that big tech companies will be legally forced to pay royalties to software engineers. Once software engineers stop applying their reasoning skills to solving real problems and start vengefully focusing it on politics, we're going to corrupt the whole system in our favor. We have enough collective knowledge to frame such corruption as moral in the context of an already corrupt system. Either software engineers will create regulatory moats for themselves or there will be a more broad political movement like communism. I've met many people working deep in the critical systems which underpin our society who are full-blown communists.
- whattheheckheck 8mo ago
  Openclaw as your own person political advisor is pretty cool
- linkregister 8mo ago
  Software engineering as a field has exceptionally low worker solidarity. This is largely because the talent and productivity is so stratified that even the median engineer produces an order of magnitude less value than the p95. Furthermore, a sufficient amount of opportunities exist —for engineers to become capitalists by founding, joining, or investing in an enterprise early enough to capture its upside— to credibly convince individuals that they may achieve this. Software engineers in aggregate will happily automate themselves out of a job. Legal cartels like the AMA and the ABA will persist. It would take years of strong threats to software engineers' livelihoods to compel them to support a cartel of their own. Even the first step for their regulatory capture, credentialization, is rejected, as enough autodidacts without degrees practice in the field. Essentially, too many software engineers view themselves as temporary embarrassed millionaires, rather than workers who need to band together. Automation in the field is happening faster than individuals' minds will change.

Swizec 8mo ago

> Though I think lawyers will be reduced to being "official human stamping machines" before software engineers are reduced to mere Product Owners GeLLMan Amnesia – AI can fully automate every profession except the ones I’m deeply familiar with. I’m a software engineer who wears the product owner hat a lot these days, there’s no way AI will automate this any time soon. Too much peopling and accountability.

Herring 8mo ago
Don't be so sure about that. These days I'm already finding it 100x easier/informative to have complicated charged discussions (eg immigration) with Gemini than with actual people. It's day and night. Accountability might be solvable too, maybe escrow and pay me if you waste my time. Or amazon-like reviews.
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  > These days I'm already finding it 100x easier/informative to have complicated charged discussions (eg immigration) with Gemini than with actual people. It’s scary how quickly people start to mistake LLMs appeasing them for actual conversation. Discussing something with an LLM isn’t equivalent to having a conversation with a person. It’s just a text generator trained to show you what you want to see.
  - Herring 8mo ago
    Don't assume everyone is like you. I'm an early adopter and I know how to scaffold it. I generally love the bleeding edge in all things, and I'm increasingly sure it's an actual talent to be able to quickly adapt to unfamiliar things (this includes not making assumptions).
    - paulryanrogers 8mo ago
      What do you feel like you get out of discussions with Gemini about politically charged topics like immigration?

metadat 8mo ago

With the requisite planning steps Codex and Claude are already coming up with better architecture and design than I can. I've been doing this for more than 25 years.

whattheheckheck 8mo ago
What's the most complicated thing its designed so far for you
- Herring 8mo ago
  Not that guy, but for me it's something like Tensorflow/Pytorch. A domain-specific language for a scientific application, Python API with a Rust core for very fast/safe calculations. It has all kinds of bells & whistles you'd want, like automatic differentiation, lazy evaluation, provenance, serialization, etc. Occasionally dips down to raw pointer work too. It's easy to test, so AI excels at this type of thing.
_se 8mo ago
Brother, you are just outing yourself as being incompetent here. That is embarrassing.