None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs You left out the Autocoder. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/1410/C28-0309-1_1410_autocoder.pdf
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@thomasfuchs the irony is, the more plentiful that software becomes, the more the human role becomes exactly what you're describing. Even more than it already was...research, design, planning, talking to people. Before I'd fight uphill battles "selling" research and design to my old team. AI now makes it impossible to ignore
@jg This is a good argument—as a silver lining it may force programmers into systems thinking and learn about systems design instead of just blindly hacking on low-level stuff.
Otoh without knowing low-level stuff inside-out you can’t do higher level thinking properly.
I wonder how many programmers actually have the discipline to do this properly.
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@thomasfuchs You left out the Autocoder. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/1410/C28-0309-1_1410_autocoder.pdf
@riley now I want to listen to Kraftwerk
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs This is a fantastic point. I've worked on teams that have been death marched to ship features only to find - wah wah - nobody cares about what we've built because no one understood what users actually wanted in the first place.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, what hurts software companies isn't the code that ships slow, it's the code they're sure they need to ship when that just ain't so.
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs Yep. My career for the last several years has been based on “low code/no code.” Microsoft’s “citizen developers” push was a big deal right before LLMs took over.
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs this is one of the things that pissed me off about the Paul Ford op-ed. Like, he wants software dev to be so easy that it takes no effort. But even if that were to be possible, the amount of shit that would be produced would be exponentially worse.
All these people think that making all the difficult things easy will automatically elevate everything, but that’s not really the main and foremost thing happening with AI and they’re turning a blind eye on so much bad stuff.
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@thomasfuchs Yep. My career for the last several years has been based on “low code/no code.” Microsoft’s “citizen developers” push was a big deal right before LLMs took over.
@maxleibman @thomasfuchs Why, just today I debugged a piece of "no-code".
By looking at the code, because clicking thru innumerable dialogs to find out what the no-code is doing isn't really an option.
They've had us for absolute fools
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs And even today I was hearing some colleagues talk: ”In the future, there will be no software development because applications will be prompts!”
I didn’t even bother. Sure, some prompts will be spread, some of them will even be entertaining. Someone might even make money selling prompts.
But that will be the ”brainrot of software”. Serious applications will still require design, knowledge and experience of interconnecting systems.
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs What is new is that it suddenly started working.
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@thomasfuchs I generally agree with you, but I don't think I ever expected to see OOP framed as a tool for the suits to get us to work faster.
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs when I spend an entire day figuring out how to write one line of code with 30 lines of comments explaining why it's there, that's a good day
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs thank you for posting this!
you expressed my feelings about the current push for coding assistants with better words and clarity than i could.
one more problematic thing is that this technology mimics human interaction so well that even many smart people i know genuinely believe it is more than just technology. they believe "AI" actually can come up with original solutions and be creative in solving complex problems... or, when confronted with the reality of it being just an algorithm, even think less of human creativity itself.
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
-
None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs The HPBs have been trying to take the progammers out of programming for decades. Programmers are not cheap for a reason, it takes skill and experience to do it well. Businesses often hate paying for programmers becuase they aren't easily/quickly replacible.
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@thomasfuchs I'm not disagreeing, but I don't think I got the intended meaning of "there is no software scarcity". I thought there was a lot of demand, which is why managers always jump on *anything* that promises more+cheaper, and often end up being essentially legally scammed one way or another. What did you mean by it?
This is dependent on what we think of as “software”, yes? It’s pretty cheap* to get many many lines of code that might have something to do with my problem.
It’s very expensive to get code that reliably solves my problem in a way its users understand. One of the expenses is — getting rid of a lot of the cheap code!
* plenty of worthy orgs do not have even cheap programmer money. Anywhere built around nurses’ aide salaries, for example.
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@thomasfuchs thank you for posting this!
you expressed my feelings about the current push for coding assistants with better words and clarity than i could.
one more problematic thing is that this technology mimics human interaction so well that even many smart people i know genuinely believe it is more than just technology. they believe "AI" actually can come up with original solutions and be creative in solving complex problems... or, when confronted with the reality of it being just an algorithm, even think less of human creativity itself.
@grepe Yeah, though those specific people are probably already prone to believe in magical thinking (more prone to everything spanning from being religious to pseudo-science to racism; not saying they believe in any of this, just that they're more susceptible to it).
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@jg This is a good argument—as a silver lining it may force programmers into systems thinking and learn about systems design instead of just blindly hacking on low-level stuff.
Otoh without knowing low-level stuff inside-out you can’t do higher level thinking properly.
I wonder how many programmers actually have the discipline to do this properly.
@thomasfuchs The devs Ive worked with who think in systems never had to be forced. I think it's more about identity than discipline. Some people see themselves as "i write code" and some see themselves as "I solve problems". The first group will struggle with systems thinking regardless of skill level. The second group has been waiting for it.
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None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
@thomasfuchs also see “No silver bullet” by Fred Brooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet#Brooks1986, https://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/86-020.pdf
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@thomasfuchs I generally agree with you, but I don't think I ever expected to see OOP framed as a tool for the suits to get us to work faster.
@ted Even a broken clock is right twice a day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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this is spot on. I've watched companies spend millions on 'AI solutions' that are just fancy wrappers around APIs anyone can call. The real value is in the data moat and workflow integration, not the model itself
@SergiuDinIT What I have yet to see is a discussion of agents’ reliance on schema-less, non-deterministic api (not sure how else to describe natural-language based prompts), which is an even bigger problem when a single request involves orchestrating multiple agents. With these type of interfaces it is hard to do testing (esp. considering variability intrinsic to this type of “api”), hard to detect failures, and the responsibility/accountability for resulting errors is diffused; with most of the risk is shifted to whoever is being subjected to the output of such a system (I have a story about such a system being developed by a medical claim processor).
