[soco]

Food for thought: let's say AI (some day) delivers a working application, will it still matter which framework it is written? AI writes it, we complain about a problem, AI fixes it, we programmers are out of jobs (at least web application programmers) and the users get updates and finally working applications. I know we are not there yet, but at that imaginary later point, I think frameworks will be a thing of the past.

[DaiPlusPlus]

We are there - right now - and it’s about as predictably awful (or awfully predictable?) and exactly as the hype-men said: paraphrased, that it means everyone can now have their own Junior/Intern/Subcontractors to delegate “menial” programming work to.

Regrettably I don’t have the link saved on my iPad I’m using right now, but there’s a public GitHub repo where all commits are made by sone LLM-based agent with zero human intervention - IIRC its a React+NodeJS app (cliche as it is) - all commits are made in response to Issues/Tasks filed by human users but humans can’t touch the code themselves - I couldn't tell it it was/is a genuine experiment - or a glorified arts project…

But if it is a demonstration of what the state-of-the-art is, then from what I could tell it was a strange kind of managed-chaos: from what I remember seeing the codebase was a complete dog’s dinner: LLMs are great at dropping-in dozens of lines of code to a new - or existing method/class/function, but utterly hopeless at keeping the codebase coherent - and LLMs (just like so many subcontractors I’ve dealt with myself) never push-back against bad ideas. Even if an LLM/agent did decide to do some kind of code-cleanup, it’s easy to see how a jumble of glorified copilot addendums results in .js/.ts files far larger than their context-window could take).

…but the miracle was that this repo had tests - and the tests all passed! (I think, perhaps, any test-failures triggered an automatic prompting of LLMs to fix the tests? So that’s to be expected).

Now assuming that repo was actually using “real AI” (as opposed to Amazon’s retail computer-vision AI: “Actually Indians”) I don’t know what technique they used to stop hallucinations of nonexistent APIs from breaking everything.

If anyone else knows that repo, I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

[goatlover]

Who is instructing the AI to make an application, fix bugs and issue updates? Is the customer doing all this or the manager taking time out of their day? Are either of those really fit to figure out whether the app actually meets what the customer needs?

Seems like the software engineering role is still needed at the higher level, and that would still likely require some sort of framework to help make sense of what the AI is generating, so you can instruct it accordingly.

[DaiPlusPlus]

75% of the time PMs don’t know or understand what the customer wants or needs either; at least an LLM roleplaying aa a product-owner would have been trained on a corpus including research-output on product-development and usability.