[peab]

How can you say it has "nothing to do with software engineering" with a straight face?

I think you might be in serious denial.

Of course writing code isn't the only task of a software engineer, but it's an important one.

There wouldn't be so much controversy if it wasn't the case

[zozbot234]

"Writing code" as a task of its own is called cowboy coding. It's neat that AI can do this now, but that has nothing to do with proper software engineering which always starts from a careful, human-led design.

[philwelch]

Yes and every AI-first development workflow worth its salt does exactly this, and it does it much more thoroughly than I’ve ever seen a team of meatbags do it.

My workflow, at a high level, is:

1. I write a high level spec. Not as high level as a single-sentence prompt, but high level enough to capture my top requirements.

2. I prompt the AI to interview me about the spec to clear up any ambiguity or open questions, then when I’m satisfied, the AI writes a longer spec, which I then review.

3. Then I prompt the AI to write an implementation plan based on the spec. I might just skim this, and by this point I might be asking the LLM more questions than it’s asking me.

4. Now I hand it off to the implementer agent.

This isn’t cowboy coding, it’s not even agile. It’s waterfall. The problem with doing waterfall was that it’s too slow, especially with the deserialization/serialization cost of routing all of this documentation through meatbrains. The LLM is doing just as much work, true, but faster.

The thing I found surprising was that, while LLM’s are still pretty awful at writing as an art form, they are better technical writers than I have the time to be, especially when writing for an audience of other LLM’s.

[skydhash]

Is this project in production and for how long? How many users?

[peab]

"has nothing to do with proper software engineering"

So you're saying software engineers don't write code? Just because there are other things that SWEs do, does not mean it has nothing to do with it.

It's arguably a pretty important part. Would you really hire a software engineer who can't code?

[shimman]

Writing code and copying the output of an LLM is absolutely not the same.

You wouldn't call someone an author that takes LLM outputs and shoves it in a book. IDK why this distinction doesn't apply to devs too.

[peab]

You call someone an author when they use a ghostwriter. They're giving inputs that are core to the output, even though they aren't doing all the writing. Same thing.

[shimman]

I can assure you a sizable amount of people in the writing community look down on "authors" that only use ghostwriters.

Why do tech workers act shock that people hate this junk being force fed to them that they are now resorting to violence to reject said junk?

You think telling humans with specialized crafts that they don't matter is good politics? Good grief.

[peab]

Of course.

I'm not surprised at all that devs are upset.

>You think telling humans with specialized crafts that they don't matter is good politics? Good grief.

Yeah, of course not. There are lot's of historical examples of this. That being said, those historical examples don't play out well for the craftsmen, either.

Look, I'm a SWE myself. I see my job drastically changing right in front of my eyes. I know there's nuance to it, too, that's hard to articulate in these comment threads.

But I think a lot of people here are biased against thinking that they are irreplaceable - I've definitely been in that camp. I don't think that it's wise, however.

[QuercusMax]

Or even more appropriate: a movie director is almost never on-screen but the actors aren't the ones determining the shots to use or writing the script.

[fernandotakai]

>You call someone an author when they use a ghostwriter.

i don't know about you, but i absolutely don't. either you write the book yourself or you are not the author.

as kendrick lamar wrote:

I can dig rappin', but a rapper with a ghostwriter?

What the fuck happened? (Oh no)

[jf22]

What's a good example of human-led design?