Comment by agumonkey
3 days ago
Aren't you afraid it's gonna be a race to the bottom ? the software industry is now whoever pays gemini to deploy something prompted in a few days. Everybody can, so the market will be inundated by a lot of people, and usually this makes for a bad market (a few shiny one gets 90% of the share while the rest fight for breadcrumbs)
I'm personally more afraid that stupid sales oriented will take my job instead of losing it to solid teams of dedicated expert that invested a lot of skills in making something on their own. it seems like value inversion
Anything that can be done in 2 days now with an LLM was low hanging fruit to begin with.
I'll also argue that level of skill depends on what one can make in those two days... it's like a mirror. If you don't know what to ask for, it doesn't know what to produce
I really wonder what long term software engineering projects will become.
‘Why were they long term?’ is what you need to ask. Code has become essentially free in relative terms, both in time and money domains. What stands out now is validation - LLMs aren’t oracles for better or worse, complex code still needs to be tested and this takes time and money, too. In projects where validation was a significant percentage of effort (which is every project developed by more than two teams) the speed up from LLM usage will be much less pronounced… until they figure out validation, too; and they just might with formal methods.
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anything nontrivial is still long term, nothing has changed
Yes, I worry about this quite a bit. Obviously nobody knows yet how it will shake out, but what I've been noticing so far is that brand recognition is becoming more important. This is obviously not a good thing for startup yokels like me, but it does provide an opportunity for quality and brand building.
The initial creation and generation is indeed much easier now, but testing, identifying, and fixing bugs is still very much a process that takes some investment and effort, even when AI assisted. There is also considerable room for differentiation among user flows and the way people interact with the app. AI is not good at this yet, so the prompter needs to be able to identify and direct these efforts.
I've also noticed in some of my projects, even ones shipped into production in a professional environment, there are lots of hard to fix and mostly annoying bugs that just aren't worth it, or that take so much research and debugging effort that we eventually gave up and accepted the downsides. If you give the AI enough guidance to know what to hunt for, it is getting pretty good at finding these things. Often the suggested fix is a terrible idea, but The AI will usually tell you enough about what is wrong that you can use your existing software engineering skills and experience to figure out a good path forward. At that point you can either fix it yourself, or prompt the AI to do it. My success rate doing this is still only at about 50%, but that's half the bugs that we used to live with that we no longer do, which in my opinion has been a huge positive development.
My prediction is that software will be so cheap that very soon, economy of scale gives way to maximum customization which means everyone writes their own software. There will be no software market in the future.
Possibly which means devs will have to pivot ... I dont know where though since it would mean most jobs are over and a new economy must be invented
I think everyone worries about this. No one knows how it's going to turn out, none of us have any control over it and there doesn't seem to be anything you can do to prepare ahead of time.