other.li Forum

@elricofmelnibone what actually happens is that the important parts of software development are starved of attention because "we can write software so easily now"

@elricofmelnibone maybe these tools save time or improve quality, maybe they don't, it probably depends on circumstances.

but my point is: it doesn't matter if you can speed up 10% of the total effort to make software by 5%; that's a rounding error.

@grepe intelligence and wisdom in a specific field does not automatically extend to other fields ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

People with thorough systems and rational thinking are relatively rare.

This might be an evolutionary thing as much as cultural/educational.

@skotchygut the only difference with the gold rush is that they’re giving away shovels for free that are paid for by the investors they’re defrauding

@jacobgorm I bet you that e.g. Visual Basic in the 1990s was a much bigger improvement on time spent coding apps than any AI agents are today.

My point isn't that it "works" (or doesn't); my point is that it is largely irrelevant because writing code isn't the bottleneck when making software.

@990000 correct

@ted Even a broken clock is right twice a day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@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).

@riley now I want to listen to Kraftwerk

@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.

@landelare Software isn’t a scarce resource (it’s very cheap to hire programmers for a long time)

@cupz code degeneration

The gist of this is that _even if code-generating LLMs work perfectly_, it doesn't have that much of an impact on how good the software works for people; which in turn means it won't matter for profits.

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".