Comment by a2ff6eeb0
11 hours ago
Making software is no longer very hard. It's becoming a few steps up from burger flipping. Maybe somewhere around line chef.
There's still some skill involved, but the skill is mostly in manual testing, and accurately phrasing what went wrong. The AI is better at debugging than people are, and the code isn't great, but perfectly adequate for pretty much everything. And it's even fine at system design these days.
It's interesting realizing how mind numbingly thoughtless my job has become.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind it if this was skilled work, but it just isn't.
Interesting take. Can you link us to your (correct, maybe even formally correct) AI-generated software? Given how general this post is, I assume you wouldn't mind if I extend this to, Idk, aviation or spaceflight, so mind linking to any GH repos you have where you've written code to work in environments like that? I ask because all you said was "making software" and didn't say what kind of "software" we're talking about.
Since you apparently work on this kind of software, here's a challenge for you: take the last several bugs that were reported and paste them into Fable, pointing it at your code.
How long does it take? Does it find the issue? In more or less time than the engineers took?
Ask it to review your code for design and cohesiveness issues. How does it do?
Fun example I've had (some weeks ago), Agent completely dismissed the lack of strong consistency in our db system, this tiny bug would have caused a massive problem in the future.
A bug that is not immediately obvious, no syntax error, logic is sound, works as expected on local and QA envs. But let it run in prod for 2 months and you have a massive problem.
I'm not dismissing LLM's here btw, just pointing out that there is probably a lot of things that go into the category "you don't know what you don't know". These kinds of issues may or may not be a problem depending on the business you are in.
Most of the time the latest models perform better than I expect.
2 replies →
Sorry, but we aren't talking about me here. You were the one who made the claim that AI pretty much makes making software trivial nowadays. Specifically, you wrote:
> Making software is no longer very hard. It's becoming a few steps up from burger flipping. Maybe somewhere around line chef.
You did acknowledge that "some" skill was required:
> There's still some skill involved, but the skill is mostly in manual testing, and accurately phrasing what went wrong. The AI is better at debugging than people are, and the code isn't great, but perfectly adequate for pretty much everything. And it's even fine at system design these days.
All I asked was for you to back this up, since the burden of proof is on you to prove your claim, not on me to prove it for you.
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Can you link us to your git repo(s) and/or other artifacts that demonstrate this take? I and many other here I think won't agree, and we mostly love being taught.
Nope. I don't code for fun, and my employer will be very unhappy if I start sending people private repos.
/s