If this will be future of software in 20 years nobody will understand what the hell software actually does. If nobody will things will get to implode quickly.
(author here) I agree that it's super important to understand what software actually does--that's part of the whole reason we made mngr in the first place!
I believe we can use these types of tools to make software more understandable, and mngr is an example of how to do that.
In our case study, we're using AI to increase our test coverage, and if you look at it, I would argue that we are making it more understandable--now instead of just having 100's of tests, we simply have a document that describes how the software is supposed to work, and the tests are linked to that document, and checked to ensure that they conform.
That means that anyone--not just the author of the software--is now able to read through the high level tutorial description of how the commands work in order to understand what the program should do!
And as for the tests themselves, we've been able to make nice testing infrastructure--like the transcripts and recordings that were highlighted in the post--to make it even easier for us to verify the behavior of the software.
We also have an incredibly detailed style guide and set of tests and guidelines to ensure that the entire code base is consistent, and high quality. You can drop into any of the code and pretty quickly understand what is happening. And if not, claude will do an excellent job of describing how any given component works, and how it relates to the others.
Finally, mngr itself is designed to be fully transparent when it is running--you can literally attach to the coding agent you are running and see exactly what is happening, and the program makes extensive log outputs for everything it does (feel free to open a PR if you'd like to see more!)
It's not perfect formal verification, but it does feel like we're making meaningful progress on making it easier to understand software--not harder.
And it is great! Really! Reading your post I was thinking if I could not do the same to write tests in an automated way in project I am working on. It would be awesome!
Though in an other hand we are living in a corporate, capitalistic, and a lot inhumane economic system. If this way of automation would work and deliver consistent output in a way of working software for 2 or 3 years, how long it would take to C-level suits to figure out that it is way better to have 2 or 3 Product Owners and maybe one Designer to write description of the entire programme and then just feed it to one of those automation pipeline? If tech giants will price product like that reasonably and it will work actually, how long it will be till it will cause entire industry to collapse and you will be able to produce software by paying to those tech giants? And it there will be like 5 of those only in the entire world - because nobody else will have enough GPUs. How soon till they came to agreement and split the world in areas of monopoly:
- if your company is in Asia you can either buy your application from Google or Alibaba.
In a world when everything is done in a computer via the software, such concentration of power would be bad for everyone.
Of course I doubt it will come that, simply because this would be very hard to achieve with our level of technology and some human involment will be necessary. But maybe I am kiding myself and I will loose my job entirely in few years along with tens of thousands other Software Engineers in a few years.
These are real problems, and I think you nailed it: the concentration of power is the core issue.
I don't have a simple, perfect solution. We're just trying to make it possible for individuals and smaller companies to have access to the same kinds of tooling that the largest companies already have access to, and hopefully equalize the playing field at least a little bit...
If anyone has better ideas, I'd love to hear them!
Billions of years of evolution and we increasingly understand what the genome does. And that's about as random as it gets.
I think we'll be fine.
This feels more like Y2K panic than grounded in truth. Senior software engineers guide these systems effectively today without creating a mess. I'm sure in some years agents will fill the role of maintainability engineer too. We are not special or irreplaceable.
It's not like we won't be spending an incredible amount of energy to overcome issues with understandably and maintenance. The sheer economic forces will absolutely will this problem solved. It must be solved, because trillions of dollars urgently want it to be solved. That's evolutionary pressure if I've ever seen it.
Also, we ceremoniously ascribe too much value to the software we create. With the exception of a few places, almost all of it gets replaced before our careers are over. At the end of the day, business automation is value creation. It's not sacred. It has a finite life, and then it too dies.
The software artifact just needs to facilitate economic/interest flux long enough to be useful, then it can be replaced with something better or more relevant.
I think we are talking about different timespans. I am talking about change in the world after decades of something like that happening. How those Senior Engineers will know how good software looks like if they would never write it themeselves? Imagine looking at someone driving a car for 20 years. Will it be enough for you to drive a car yourself?
Thinking about that always makes me think about Foundation, The Merchant Princess. Mallow travels to the edge of the Empire to look how things are on one of those worlds. He learns that there is the cast of the tech priests and those people have absolutely no idea how those devices actually work.
He said:
> The machines work from generation to generation automatically, and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burned out
It was a sign of severe decline of the entire empire. People had no idea how devices work and they would not be able to reproduce it or even repair if one would broke.
It was recurring premise of civilisation decline in the series: no proper maintaince and people loosing interests and knowledge how things are done and how they work.
I just wondering if this is not the same thing starting to happining know with our civilisation.
And evolution? Evolution means mass extinction of species and its normal. I am not sure about you but I would rather avoid any mass extinction regarding humanity.
> I think we are talking about different timespans. I am talking about change in the world after decades of something like that happening. How those Senior Engineers will know how good software looks like if they would never write it themeselves?
How will we know what good software looks like if we no longer write assembler?
> Imagine looking at someone driving a car for 20 years. Will it be enough for you to drive a car yourself?
You don't have to drive stick to be able to drive.
Whatever the economically important functions are, the miracle of capitalism will find a way to staff it and solve it.
People fill all the gaps. No problem goes uninvestigated, no opportunity goes ignored.
At the end of the day we're delivering value. We'll be judged on value creation, and that'll map itself to whatever the tools of the day happen to be.
I believe we can use these types of tools to make software more understandable, and mngr is an example of how to do that.
In our case study, we're using AI to increase our test coverage, and if you look at it, I would argue that we are making it more understandable--now instead of just having 100's of tests, we simply have a document that describes how the software is supposed to work, and the tests are linked to that document, and checked to ensure that they conform.
That means that anyone--not just the author of the software--is now able to read through the high level tutorial description of how the commands work in order to understand what the program should do!
And as for the tests themselves, we've been able to make nice testing infrastructure--like the transcripts and recordings that were highlighted in the post--to make it even easier for us to verify the behavior of the software.
We also have an incredibly detailed style guide and set of tests and guidelines to ensure that the entire code base is consistent, and high quality. You can drop into any of the code and pretty quickly understand what is happening. And if not, claude will do an excellent job of describing how any given component works, and how it relates to the others.
Finally, mngr itself is designed to be fully transparent when it is running--you can literally attach to the coding agent you are running and see exactly what is happening, and the program makes extensive log outputs for everything it does (feel free to open a PR if you'd like to see more!)
It's not perfect formal verification, but it does feel like we're making meaningful progress on making it easier to understand software--not harder.