Comment by binarymax
21 days ago
So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project? What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?
21 days ago
So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project? What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?
What I'm most excited about is allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks.
Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and complex problems.
>Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and complex problems.
Where does the most come from? There's a certain sense of satisfaction in knowing I've tested a piece of code per my experience in the domain coupled with knowledge of where we'll likely be in six months. The same can be said for documentation - hell, on some of the projects I've worked on we've entire teams dedicated to it, and on a complicated project where you're integrating software from multiple vendors the costs of getting it wrong can be astronomical. I'm sorry you feel this way.
He does not feel that way, he's just salespitching for Microsoft here
one of the other important points about writing unit tests isn't to just to confirm the implementation but to improve upon it through the process of writing tests and discovering additional requirements and edge cases etc (tdd and all that)
i suppose its possible at some point an ai could be complex enough to try out additional edge cases or confirm with a design document or something and do those parts as well... but idk its still after-the-fact testing instead of at design-time its less valuable imo...
But isn't writing tests and updating documentation also the areas where automated quality control is the hardest? Existing high quality tests can work as guardrails for writing business logic, but what guardrails could AI use to to evaluate if its generated docs and tests are any good?
I would not be surprised if things end up the other way around – humans doing the boring and annoying tasks that are too hard for AI, and AI doing the fun easy stuff ;-)
> allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks.
I get paid for the mundane, boring, annoying tasks, and I really like getting paid.
But would you rather get paid to spend your time doing the interesting and enjoying work, or the mundane and boring stuff? ;) My hope is that agents like Copilot can help us burn down the tedious stuff and make more time for the big value adds.
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What about developers who do enjoy writing for example high quality documentation? Do you expect that the status quo will be that most of the documentation will be AI slop and AI itself will just bruteforce itself through the issues? How close are we to the point where the AI could handle "tricky dependency updates", but not being able to handle "most interesting and complex problems"? Who writes the tests that are required for the "well tested" codebases for GitHub Copilot Coding Agent to work properly?
What is the job for the developer now? Writing tickets and reviewing low quality PRs? Isn't that the most boring and mundane job in the world?
I'd argue the only way to ensure that is to make sure developers read high quality documentation - and report issues if it's not high quality.
I expect though that most people don't read in that much detail, and AI generated stuff will be 80-90% "good enough", at least the same if not better than someone who doesn't actually like writing documentation.
> What is the job for the developer now? Writing tickets and reviewing low quality PRs? Isn't that the most boring and mundane job in the world?
Isn't that already the case for a lot of software development? If it's boring and mundane, an AI can do it too so you can focus on more difficult or higher level issues.
Of course, the danger is that, just like with other automated PRs like dependency updates, people trust the systems and become flippant about it.
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If find your comment "AI Slop" in reference to technical documentation to strange. It isn't a choice between finely crafted prose versus banal text. It's documentation that exists versus documentation that doesn't exist. Or documentation that is hopelessly out of date. In my experience LLMs do a wonderful job in translating from code to documentation. It even does a good job inferring the reason for design decisions. I'm all in on LLM generated technical documentation. If I want well written prose I'll read literature.
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Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates
So they won’t like working on their job ?
You know exactly what they meant, and you know they’re correct.
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What will you be most excited about when the most interesting and complex problems are out of the Overton window and deemed mundane, boring or annoying as well, or turn out to be intractable for your abilities?
Do you think you're putting yourself or your coworkers out of work?
If/when will this take over your job?
The thought here is problem “well … I’ll obviously never get replaced”. This is very sad indeed
I'm honestly surprised that Microsoft (and other similarly sized LLM companies) have convinced or coerced literally hundreds of thousands of employees to build their own replacement.
If we're expected to even partially believe the marketing, LLM coding agents are useful today at junior level developer tasks and improving quickly enough that senior tasks will be doable soon too. How do you convince so many junior and senior level devs to build that?
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Thanks for the response… do you see a future where engineers are just prompting all the time? Do you see a timeline in which todays programming languages are “low level” and rarely coded by hand?
That's a completely nonsensical question given how quickly things are evolving. No one has a five year project timeline.
Absolutely the wrong take. We MUST think about what might happen in several years. Anyone who says we shouldn’t is not thinking about this technology correctly. I work on AI tech. I think about these things. If the teams at Microsoft or GitHub are not, then we should be pushing them to do so.
He asked that in the context of an actual specific project. It did not make sense way he asked it. And it's the executive's to plan that out five years down the line.. although I guarantee you none of them are trying to predict that far.