6 ms·

I'm not sure the notion I keep seeing of "it's ok, we still architect, it just writes the code"(paraphrased) sits well with me. I've not tested it with archite

I'm not sure the notion I keep seeing of "it's ok, we still architect, it just writes the code"(paraphrased) sits well with me. I've not tested it with architecting a full system, but assuming it isn't good at it today... it's only a matter of time. Then what is our use?

borski 7mo ago
LLMs can build anything. The real question is what is worth building, and how it’s delivered. That is what is still human. LLMs, by nature of not being human, cannot understand humans as well as other humans can. (See every attempt at using an LLM as a therapist) In short: LLMs will eventually be able to architect software. But it’s still just a tool
- silisili 7mo ago
  What is the use of software eng/architect at that point? It's a tool, but one that product or C levels can use directly as I see it?
  - borski 7mo ago
    Yes, for building something But for building the right thing? Doubtful. Most of a great engineer’s work isn’t writing code, but interrogating what people think their problems are, to find what the actual problems are. In short: problem solving, not writing code.
    - mattmanser 7mo ago
      Where's this delusion come from recently that great engineers didnt write code? What a load of crap. All you're doing is describing a different job role. What you're talking about is BA work, and a subset of engineers are great at it, but most are just ok. You're claiming a part of the job that was secondary, and not required, is now the whole job.
      - borski 7mo ago
        I never said great engineers didn’t write code. But writing the code was never the point. The point has always been delivering the product to the customer, in any industry. Code is rarely the deliverable. That’s my point.
        wiseowise 7mo ago
        > But writing the code was never the point. Is that why most prestigious jobs grilled you like a devil on algos/system design? > The point has always been delivering the product to the customer, in any industry. Code is rarely the deliverable. That’s just nonsense. It’s like saying “delivering product was always the most important thing, not drinking water”.
        staticassertion 7mo ago
        It's well understood that programming interviews are a pretty shitty tool. They're a proxy for understanding if you have basic skills required to understand a computer. Notably, most companies don't rely on these alone, they have behavioral questions, architecture questions, etc. Have you ever done an interview at these companies you're talking about? They're 8 hours lol maybe 1 is spent programming. But it's just very obvious to any software engineer worth anything that code is just one part of the job, and it's usually somewhere in the middle of a process. Understanding customer requirements, making technical decisions, maintaining the codebase, reviewing code changes/ providing feedback, responding on incidents, deciding what work to do or not to do, deciding when a constraint has to be broken, etc. There are a billion things that aren't "typing code" that an engineer does every day. To deny this is absurd to anyone who lives every day doing those things.
        borski 7mo ago
        Yeah, this is precisely what I meant.
        staticassertion 7mo ago
  - 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
    A software engineer will be a person who inspects the AI's work, same as a building inspector today. A software architect will co-sign on someone's printed-up AI plans, same as a building architect today. Some will be in-house, some will do contract work, and some will be artists trying to create something special, same as today. The brute labor is automated away, and the creativity (and liability) is captured by humans.
  - wiseowise 7mo ago
    > It's a tool, but one that product or C levels can use directly as I see it? Wait, I thought product and C level people are so busy all the time that they can’t fart without a calendar invite, but now you say they have time to completely replace whole org of engineers?
- roncesvalles 7mo ago
  FWIW I find LLMs to be excellent therapists. The commercial solutions probably don't work because they don't use the best SOTA models and/or sully the context with all kinds of guardrails and role-playing nonsense, but if you just open a new chat window in your LLM of choice (set to the highest thinking paid-tier model), it gives you truly excellent therapist advice. In fact in many ways the LLM therapist is actually better than the human, because e.g. you can dump a huge, detailed rant in the chat and it will actually listen to (read) every word you said.
  - borski 7mo ago
    Please, please, please don’t make this mistake. It is not a therapist. At best, it might be a facsimile of a life coach, but it does not have your best interests in mind. It is easy to convince and trivial to make obsequious. That is not what a therapist does. There’s a reason they spend thousands of hours in training; that is not an exaggeration. Humans are complex. An LLM cannot parse that level of complexity.
    - roncesvalles 7mo ago
      You seem to think therapists are only for those in dire straits. Yes, if you're at that point, definitely speak to a human. But there are many ordinary things for which "drop-in" therapist advice is also useful. For me: mild road rage, social anxiety, processing embarrassment from past events, etc. The tools and reframing that LLMs have given me (Gemini 3.0/3.1 Pro) have been extremely effective and have genuinely improved my life. These things don't even cross the threshold to be worth the effort to find and speak to an actual therapist.
      - borski 7mo ago
        I never said therapists were only for those in crisis; that is a misreading of my argument entirely. An LLM cannot parse the complexity of your situation. Period. It is literally incapable of doing that, because it does not have any idea what it is like to be human. Therapy is not an objective science; it is, in many ways, subjective, and the therapeutic relationship is by far the most important part. I am not saying LLMs are not useful for helping people parse their emotions or understand themselves better. But that is not therapy, in the same way that using an app built for CBT is not, in and of itself, therapy. It is one tool in a therapist’s toolbox, and will not be the right tool for all patients. That doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful. But an LLM is not a therapist. The fact that you can trivially convince it to believe things that are absolutely untrue is precisely why, for one simple example.
- staticassertion 7mo ago
  > LLMs can build anything. This is only possibly true if one of two things are true: 1. All new software can be made up of of preexisting patterns of software that can be composed. ie: There is no such thing as "novel" software, it's all just composition of existing software. 2. LLMs are capable of emergent intelligence, allowing them to express patterns that they were not trained on. I am extremely skeptical that either of these is true.
  - borski 7mo ago
    Fair enough; I can see the exaggeration. It is not impossible, however, that an LLM could run enough “random” tests to find new ways of doing something, but I hear you. Let me restate that to “An LLM can build most anything…” and I stand by the rest of my comment.
    - staticassertion 7mo ago
      I think that makes sense, the rest of your comment is definitely true.
chii 7mo ago
> Then what is our use? You will have to find new economic utility. That's the reality of technological progress - it's just that the tech and white collar industries didn't think it can come for them! A skill that becomes obsoleted is useless, obviously. There's still room for artisanal/handcrafted wares today, amidst the industrial scale productions, so i would assume similar levels for coding.
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago
  [flagged]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
PAndreew 7mo ago
Others have already partially answered this, but here’s my 20 cents. Software development really is similar to architecture. The end result is an infrastructure of unique modules with different type of connectors (roads, grid, or APIs). Until now in SW dev the grunt work was done mostly by the same people who did the planning, decided on the type of connectors, etc. Real estate architects also use a bunch of software tools to aid them, but there must be a human being in the end of the chain who understands human needs, understands - after years of studying and practicing - how the whole building and the infrastructure will behave at large and who is ultimately responsible for the end result (and hopefully rewarded depending on the complexity and quality of the end result). So yes we will not need as many SW engineers, but those who remain will work on complex rewarding problems and will push the frontier further.
- rurban 7mo ago
  Since I worked as an architect some comments. Architecture is fine for big, complex projects. Having everything planned out before keeps cost down, and ensures customer will not come with late changes. But if cost are expected to be low, and there's no customer, architecture is overkill. It's like making a movie without following the script line by line (watch Godard in Novelle Vague), or building it by yourself or by a non-architect. 2x faster, 10x cheaper. You immediately see an inflexible overarchitectured project. You can do fine by restricting the agent with proper docs, proper tests and linters.
- dgb23 7mo ago
  The "grunt work" is in many cases just that. As long as it's readable and works it's fine. But there are a substantial amount cases where this isn't true. The nitty gritty is then the important part and it's impossible to make the whole thing work well without being intimate with the code. So I never fully bought into the clean separation of development, engineering and architecture.

borski 7mo ago

LLMs can build anything. The real question is what is worth building, and how it’s delivered. That is what is still human. LLMs, by nature of not being human, cannot understand humans as well as other humans can. (See every attempt at using an LLM as a therapist) In short: LLMs will eventually be able to architect software. But it’s still just a tool

silisili 7mo ago
What is the use of software eng/architect at that point? It's a tool, but one that product or C levels can use directly as I see it?
- borski 7mo ago
  Yes, for building something But for building the right thing? Doubtful. Most of a great engineer’s work isn’t writing code, but interrogating what people think their problems are, to find what the actual problems are. In short: problem solving, not writing code.
  - mattmanser 7mo ago
    Where's this delusion come from recently that great engineers didnt write code? What a load of crap. All you're doing is describing a different job role. What you're talking about is BA work, and a subset of engineers are great at it, but most are just ok. You're claiming a part of the job that was secondary, and not required, is now the whole job.
    - borski 7mo ago
      I never said great engineers didn’t write code. But writing the code was never the point. The point has always been delivering the product to the customer, in any industry. Code is rarely the deliverable. That’s my point.
      - wiseowise 7mo ago
        > But writing the code was never the point. Is that why most prestigious jobs grilled you like a devil on algos/system design? > The point has always been delivering the product to the customer, in any industry. Code is rarely the deliverable. That’s just nonsense. It’s like saying “delivering product was always the most important thing, not drinking water”.
        staticassertion 7mo ago
        It's well understood that programming interviews are a pretty shitty tool. They're a proxy for understanding if you have basic skills required to understand a computer. Notably, most companies don't rely on these alone, they have behavioral questions, architecture questions, etc. Have you ever done an interview at these companies you're talking about? They're 8 hours lol maybe 1 is spent programming. But it's just very obvious to any software engineer worth anything that code is just one part of the job, and it's usually somewhere in the middle of a process. Understanding customer requirements, making technical decisions, maintaining the codebase, reviewing code changes/ providing feedback, responding on incidents, deciding what work to do or not to do, deciding when a constraint has to be broken, etc. There are a billion things that aren't "typing code" that an engineer does every day. To deny this is absurd to anyone who lives every day doing those things.
        borski 7mo ago
        Yeah, this is precisely what I meant.
        staticassertion 7mo ago
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
  A software engineer will be a person who inspects the AI's work, same as a building inspector today. A software architect will co-sign on someone's printed-up AI plans, same as a building architect today. Some will be in-house, some will do contract work, and some will be artists trying to create something special, same as today. The brute labor is automated away, and the creativity (and liability) is captured by humans.
- wiseowise 7mo ago
  > It's a tool, but one that product or C levels can use directly as I see it? Wait, I thought product and C level people are so busy all the time that they can’t fart without a calendar invite, but now you say they have time to completely replace whole org of engineers?
roncesvalles 7mo ago
FWIW I find LLMs to be excellent therapists. The commercial solutions probably don't work because they don't use the best SOTA models and/or sully the context with all kinds of guardrails and role-playing nonsense, but if you just open a new chat window in your LLM of choice (set to the highest thinking paid-tier model), it gives you truly excellent therapist advice. In fact in many ways the LLM therapist is actually better than the human, because e.g. you can dump a huge, detailed rant in the chat and it will actually listen to (read) every word you said.
- borski 7mo ago
  Please, please, please don’t make this mistake. It is not a therapist. At best, it might be a facsimile of a life coach, but it does not have your best interests in mind. It is easy to convince and trivial to make obsequious. That is not what a therapist does. There’s a reason they spend thousands of hours in training; that is not an exaggeration. Humans are complex. An LLM cannot parse that level of complexity.
  - roncesvalles 7mo ago
    You seem to think therapists are only for those in dire straits. Yes, if you're at that point, definitely speak to a human. But there are many ordinary things for which "drop-in" therapist advice is also useful. For me: mild road rage, social anxiety, processing embarrassment from past events, etc. The tools and reframing that LLMs have given me (Gemini 3.0/3.1 Pro) have been extremely effective and have genuinely improved my life. These things don't even cross the threshold to be worth the effort to find and speak to an actual therapist.
    - borski 7mo ago
      I never said therapists were only for those in crisis; that is a misreading of my argument entirely. An LLM cannot parse the complexity of your situation. Period. It is literally incapable of doing that, because it does not have any idea what it is like to be human. Therapy is not an objective science; it is, in many ways, subjective, and the therapeutic relationship is by far the most important part. I am not saying LLMs are not useful for helping people parse their emotions or understand themselves better. But that is not therapy, in the same way that using an app built for CBT is not, in and of itself, therapy. It is one tool in a therapist’s toolbox, and will not be the right tool for all patients. That doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful. But an LLM is not a therapist. The fact that you can trivially convince it to believe things that are absolutely untrue is precisely why, for one simple example.
staticassertion 7mo ago
> LLMs can build anything. This is only possibly true if one of two things are true: 1. All new software can be made up of of preexisting patterns of software that can be composed. ie: There is no such thing as "novel" software, it's all just composition of existing software. 2. LLMs are capable of emergent intelligence, allowing them to express patterns that they were not trained on. I am extremely skeptical that either of these is true.
- borski 7mo ago
  Fair enough; I can see the exaggeration. It is not impossible, however, that an LLM could run enough “random” tests to find new ways of doing something, but I hear you. Let me restate that to “An LLM can build most anything…” and I stand by the rest of my comment.
  - staticassertion 7mo ago
    I think that makes sense, the rest of your comment is definitely true.

chii 7mo ago

> Then what is our use? You will have to find new economic utility. That's the reality of technological progress - it's just that the tech and white collar industries didn't think it can come for them! A skill that becomes obsoleted is useless, obviously. There's still room for artisanal/handcrafted wares today, amidst the industrial scale productions, so i would assume similar levels for coding.

hrmtst93837 7mo ago
[flagged]

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

PAndreew 7mo ago

Others have already partially answered this, but here’s my 20 cents. Software development really is similar to architecture. The end result is an infrastructure of unique modules with different type of connectors (roads, grid, or APIs). Until now in SW dev the grunt work was done mostly by the same people who did the planning, decided on the type of connectors, etc. Real estate architects also use a bunch of software tools to aid them, but there must be a human being in the end of the chain who understands human needs, understands - after years of studying and practicing - how the whole building and the infrastructure will behave at large and who is ultimately responsible for the end result (and hopefully rewarded depending on the complexity and quality of the end result). So yes we will not need as many SW engineers, but those who remain will work on complex rewarding problems and will push the frontier further.

rurban 7mo ago
Since I worked as an architect some comments. Architecture is fine for big, complex projects. Having everything planned out before keeps cost down, and ensures customer will not come with late changes. But if cost are expected to be low, and there's no customer, architecture is overkill. It's like making a movie without following the script line by line (watch Godard in Novelle Vague), or building it by yourself or by a non-architect. 2x faster, 10x cheaper. You immediately see an inflexible overarchitectured project. You can do fine by restricting the agent with proper docs, proper tests and linters.
dgb23 7mo ago
The "grunt work" is in many cases just that. As long as it's readable and works it's fine. But there are a substantial amount cases where this isn't true. The nitty gritty is then the important part and it's impossible to make the whole thing work well without being intimate with the code. So I never fully bought into the clean separation of development, engineering and architecture.