[jmull]

The lesson I've learned from our new AI age is how little a large number of people who've worked in software development their entire careers understand software development.

I suppose all the money floating around AI helps dummify everything, as people glom on to narratives, regardless of merit, that might position them to partake.

What we actually have now is the ability to bang out decent quality code really fast and cheaply.

This is massive, a huge change, one which upends numerous assumptions about the business of software development.

...and it only leaves us to work through every other aspect of software development.

The approach this article advocates is to essentially pretend none of this exists. Simple, but will rarely produce anything of value.

This paragraph from the post gives you the gist of it:

> ...we need to remove humans-in-the-loop, reduce coordination, friction, bureaucracy, and gate-keeping. We need a virtually infinite supply of requirements, engineers acting as pseudo-product designers, owning entire streams of work, with the purview to make autonomous decisions. Rework is almost free so we shouldn’t make an effort to prevent incorrect work from happening.

As if the only reason we ever had POs or designers or business teams, or built consensus between multiple people, or communicated with others, or reviewed designs and code, or tested software, was because it took individual engineers too long to bang out decent code.

AI has just gotten people completely lost. Or I guess just made it apparent they were lost the whole time?

[evolve-maz]

All the talking points and techniques are those which were used when pushing outsourcing: give better specs, write detailed tests, accept bad code because it works so who cares, we can just rewrite from scratch later, and my favorite "they will get better with more exposure to your code base". None of these takes is wrong, but what they neglect is doing all that work is way more effort than if I wrote the original code myself.

Using an LLM to one shot a small function (something i would do with a very specific search on Google or SO) is handy. Giving it a harness and free access to a code base leads to some terrible code, and doubling down with more instructions and agents in the loop means more time writing the rube Goldberg orchestration rather than just opening up an editor and writing code.

[dasil003]

Yeah this article is in a real uncanny valley for me where it has some insight, but it also throws out some wild ideas that don't pass the sniff test for me.

To me what AI is doing is changing the economics of human thought, but the change is happening way faster than individuals, let along organizations can absorb the implications. What I've seen is that AI magnifies the judgment of individuals who know how to use it, and so far it's mostly software engineers who have learned to use it most effectively because they are the ones able to develop an intuition about its limitations.

The idea of removing the human from the loop is nonsense. The question is more what loops matter, and how can AI speed them up. For instance, building more prototypes and one-off hacky tools is a great use of vibe coding, changing the core architecture of your critical business apps is not. AI has simultaneously increased my ability to call bullshit, while amplifying the amount of bullshit I have to sift through.

When the dust settles I don't really see that the value or importance of reading code has changed much. The whole reason agentic coding is successful is because code provides a precise specification that is both human and machine readable. The idea that we'll move from code to some new magical form of specification is just recycling the promise of COBOL, visual programming, Microsoft Access, ColdFusion, no-code tools, etc, to simplify programming. But actually the innovations that have moved the state of the art of professional programming forward, are the same ones that make agentic coding successful.

[vinnymac]

I appreciate your insights in a sea of psychosis comments. I find it strange how many people think we have achieved the likes of Y2K flying cars 20 years ago, or the dream of having every car on the road be an electric fully self driving car by now (a promise made at least over a decade ago by several of these types).

The point I’m making is that we give the spotlight to people who are making absurd claims. We have not achieved the ability to remove the human from the loop and continually produce value-able outputs. Until we do, I don’t see how any of the claims made in this article are even close to anything more than simply gate-keeping slop.

[ninalanyon]

And if we do remove the human from the loop? What then, what are humans for? Do we get Keynes' idea that we only need to work a few hours a week or do we get a continuation and intensification of what we already have: a few high 'earners' and a sea of people struggling to make ends meet?

[andrekandre]

  > What then, what are humans for?

why, to make money for the boss of course!