Comment by copemaxxxing

4 hours ago

People who build software factory are in for a disappointing future. Spoken as someone who uses AI day to day for job and personal projects, I've came across a few super gnarly bugs already, ranging from frontend React apps (yes, believe it or not, frontend is far from solved) to embedded that Claude can't solve. Those bugs are feature breaker. My primary skillset is fullstack/frontend leaning, not embedded. Granted, I might be out of depth in embedded/RTOS but I am very qualified to do frontend. Yet I found bugs in those areas that Claude Opus high can't even solve for hours.

I pointed Claude at those for hours and hours, didn't fucking work, ended up creating more and more slop. Until I stepped in and fixed it in a few lines of code. Thankfully with all my AI assisted work, I took time to understand everything so I was able to debug and fix.

The problem for software factory is, that up to a certain point, you'll encounter some nasty bugs that are really important for your features, but you can't ship it because while the AI deals with the 90%, turns out that last remaining 10% are the one that make or break your project. And you need to deal with that remaining 10%. But how can you deal with the remaining 10% if you don't understand that 90% or majority of it?

Also, don't listen to influencers like Kent Dodds or Uncle Bob or Steve Yegge, who advocated for software factory walk away from the code kinda thing. They are already rich, and they sell teaching content, but most importantly, their time in this industry has passed. They are not in the weeds doing enterprise software development anymore.

Their first and primary concern is trying to be relevant to sell courses. They don't care about you. Yes I used to listen to them (though not often), but now not anymore. The world doesn't get better or worse whether they choose to sip margarita on a beach or spin yet another "so many words to say absolutely nothing" video/blogs.

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copemaxxxing

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tcdent  4 hours ago

What most people leave out of the conversation is the element of time. We are early. The technology continues to improve.

Is it perfect now? Absolutely not. Will it continue to get better at a surprising pace? Absolutely yes.

So, just adjust your framing from "we're there" to "we're getting there" and all of your concerns go away.

  • jagenabler2  1 hour ago

    On the other end of it, people regularly leave out the "why" and "how". Why do software factories not work at scale right now? What are the pieces of building software that agents don't excel at? Is it possible that the 10% that it can't get right, it'll never get right? Is the technology actually improving in the direction that makes this a possible future or we at a local maxima?

    I won't admit to knowing the answers, but more discussion needs to happen around the meta of software engineering before anyone can make conclusions about whether we're actually getting there.

    My intuition tells me that there's too much nuanced complexity that goes unnoticed for automation to truly take place.