3 ms·

What is the future of software engineering in the age of LLMs?

anthk 5mo ago
To toss them because the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time. https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-behind-proves-it/ https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...
- anthonyrstevens 5mo ago
  >> the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. This sounds like unsubstantiated hyperbole - can we keep HN grounded in reality, please? My alternative hypothesis - you don't like agentic coding or maybe LLMs in general. Not helpful for the group.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- nh23423fefe 5mo ago
  That link doesn't support your statement. It's analysis is bad and irrelevant.
  - weakfish 5mo ago
    Why is the analysis bad? Burden is on you to explain that.
    - nh23423fefe 5mo ago
      no, lazy linkers don't create obligations.
- iLemming 5mo ago
  > Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. Well, you have to separate "future of" from "ensuing damage". This is similar to the fishing industry. Fishermen in the past used spears, rods, small nets, nowadays annual national catch statistics are reported in kilotonnes. They are destroying the ocean floor, causing massive extinction of species, causing irreversible damage. Yet, you can't argue looking 100-150 years back that industrial fishing was not "the future of the fishing industry". That is also why programmers won't ever disappear because of AI progress. Just like we still need fishermen, we'd need programmers. The sad truth about this is that soon we truly may have no need for fishermen, because there's no fish left in the ocean.
  - anthk 5mo ago
    No, this is like fishing with dynamite.
    - iLemming 5mo ago
      Hmm... it's hard to imagine that fishing with dynamite ever caused species extinction; trawling industry definitely did. I don't think it's a fitting analogy, but I get what you're trying to say. I'm not arguing about the damage. The damage this human invention will cause is guaranteed. Just like plastics have. The answer to that is not "ban plastics completely" - kinda late for that, innit? The answer is "put resources into plastic research, make safe plastic possible". Maybe if we make safe, better AI, it will help with the plastic? If there's anything I've learned about humans - first, we probably cause a lot of damage.
LeCompteSftware 5mo ago
"The" future of software engineering is a silly thing to predict. I might predict one substantial change is that we get our house a little more in order about universities and the private sector distinguishing between computer science, software engineering, and software development. Obviously they are not cleanly separated[1], but LLMs will affect each subfield very differently. - The impact on computer science seems almost entirely negative so far: mostly the burden of academic wordslop, though an additional negative impact is AI sucking all the air out of the room. What's worse is how little interesting computer science has come out of the biggest technological development with computers in many years: in fact there has been a terrible and very sudden regression of scientific methodology and integrity, people rationalizing unscientific thinking and unprofessional behavior by pointing to economic success. I think it'll take decades to undo the damage, it's ideological. - The impact on software development actually does seem a bit positive. I am not really a software developer at all. It always felt too frustrating :) However the easing of frustration might be offset by widespread devastation of new FOSS projects. I don't want to put my code online, even though I'm not monetizing it. I'm certainly not alone. That makes me really sad. But I watched ChatGPT copy-paste about 200 lines of F# straight from my own GitHub, without attribution. I'm not letting OpenAI steal my code again. - Software engineering... it does not seem like any of these systems are actually capable of real software engineering, but we are also being adversely affected by an epidemic of unscientific thinking. Speaking of: I would like to see Mythos autonomously attempt a task as complex and serious as a C compiler. Opus 4.6 totally failed (even if popular coverage didn't portray it as such): The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality. "Future of software engineering" folks should stuff like this in mind. What model is going to undo Mythos's mess? What if that mess is your company's product? Hope you know some very patient humans! [1] They should have different educational tracks. There is no reason why a big fancy school like MIT can't have computer scientists do something like SICP and software engineers do the applied Python class. Forcing every computer professional into "computer science" is just silly; half the students gripe about how useless this theory is, the other half gripe about how grubby the practice is. What really sucks here is that I think Big Tech would support the idea, we're just stuck in a weird social rut.

anthk 5mo ago

To toss them because the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time. https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-behind-proves-it/ https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

anthonyrstevens 5mo ago
>> the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. This sounds like unsubstantiated hyperbole - can we keep HN grounded in reality, please? My alternative hypothesis - you don't like agentic coding or maybe LLMs in general. Not helpful for the group.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
nh23423fefe 5mo ago
That link doesn't support your statement. It's analysis is bad and irrelevant.
- weakfish 5mo ago
  Why is the analysis bad? Burden is on you to explain that.
  - nh23423fefe 5mo ago
    no, lazy linkers don't create obligations.
iLemming 5mo ago
> Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. Well, you have to separate "future of" from "ensuing damage". This is similar to the fishing industry. Fishermen in the past used spears, rods, small nets, nowadays annual national catch statistics are reported in kilotonnes. They are destroying the ocean floor, causing massive extinction of species, causing irreversible damage. Yet, you can't argue looking 100-150 years back that industrial fishing was not "the future of the fishing industry". That is also why programmers won't ever disappear because of AI progress. Just like we still need fishermen, we'd need programmers. The sad truth about this is that soon we truly may have no need for fishermen, because there's no fish left in the ocean.
- anthk 5mo ago
  No, this is like fishing with dynamite.
  - iLemming 5mo ago
    Hmm... it's hard to imagine that fishing with dynamite ever caused species extinction; trawling industry definitely did. I don't think it's a fitting analogy, but I get what you're trying to say. I'm not arguing about the damage. The damage this human invention will cause is guaranteed. Just like plastics have. The answer to that is not "ban plastics completely" - kinda late for that, innit? The answer is "put resources into plastic research, make safe plastic possible". Maybe if we make safe, better AI, it will help with the plastic? If there's anything I've learned about humans - first, we probably cause a lot of damage.

LeCompteSftware 5mo ago

"The" future of software engineering is a silly thing to predict. I might predict one substantial change is that we get our house a little more in order about universities and the private sector distinguishing between computer science, software engineering, and software development. Obviously they are not cleanly separated[1], but LLMs will affect each subfield very differently. - The impact on computer science seems almost entirely negative so far: mostly the burden of academic wordslop, though an additional negative impact is AI sucking all the air out of the room. What's worse is how little interesting computer science has come out of the biggest technological development with computers in many years: in fact there has been a terrible and very sudden regression of scientific methodology and integrity, people rationalizing unscientific thinking and unprofessional behavior by pointing to economic success. I think it'll take decades to undo the damage, it's ideological. - The impact on software development actually does seem a bit positive. I am not really a software developer at all. It always felt too frustrating :) However the easing of frustration might be offset by widespread devastation of new FOSS projects. I don't want to put my code online, even though I'm not monetizing it. I'm certainly not alone. That makes me really sad. But I watched ChatGPT copy-paste about 200 lines of F# straight from my own GitHub, without attribution. I'm not letting OpenAI steal my code again. - Software engineering... it does not seem like any of these systems are actually capable of real software engineering, but we are also being adversely affected by an epidemic of unscientific thinking. Speaking of: I would like to see Mythos autonomously attempt a task as complex and serious as a C compiler. Opus 4.6 totally failed (even if popular coverage didn't portray it as such): The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality. "Future of software engineering" folks should stuff like this in mind. What model is going to undo Mythos's mess? What if that mess is your company's product? Hope you know some very patient humans! [1] They should have different educational tracks. There is no reason why a big fancy school like MIT can't have computer scientists do something like SICP and software engineers do the applied Python class. Forcing every computer professional into "computer science" is just silly; half the students gripe about how useless this theory is, the other half gripe about how grubby the practice is. What really sucks here is that I think Big Tech would support the idea, we're just stuck in a weird social rut.