[aocallaghan17]

Reminds me of this article: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...

Software engineers are definitely in a bit of a bubble here. Are we just early adopters who see the value sooner, or does it uniquely benefit software engineering, or do we just like cool automation and we're deluding ourselves that this adds value beyond the cost?

[targafarian]

Yes I believe software benefits uniquely, just like building tooling and automating software have long been easier in software than other domains. Humans defined all the rules of the world you live in, humans wrote strict rules in methodically parsable formats.

The moment you have to interact with the physical world or humans (psychological, imaginative, aesthetic, etc), there are often undiscovered or changing rules—or no rules at all. Or systems are subject to perturbations beyond a defined scope.

The other thing I believe is software developers are experts at doing the things that allow them to make doing those very things easier and more automated. And they do this in public, perfectly documented online.

Both because of the things I described above and because software developers have created the largest machine-accessible training set for plying their trade of any trade, ML—that is ultimately interpolating massive datasets to do things—is unsurprisingly uniquely successful for software tasks.

[demorro]

It surprises me when people think engineering, software or no, isn't about the physical world of humans, psychological, imaginative, aesthetic or otherwise. Everything I do uses "human stuff" as a base foundation of value. Engineering effort is malformed and invalid without such a thing, and I spend a lot of my time as a technical leader pushing back on people trying to "perform engineering" without connecting to these things.

[Robin_Message]

I've been thinking about this, and I think software is uniquely knowledge work that has the most defined structure and least personally interaction. Hell, some of the software I write is for machine to talk to other machines. It's not surprising such a closed system is so amenable to AI, and other knowledge workers are not getting the same benefits.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Software has huge and detailed code repositories ripe for training use. There's just enough inference in current models to remix that code in useful ways for the most popular languages.

The less popular a language, the more models struggle.

Writing, UI, and presentations have similar knowledge bases.

Outside of those, quality becomes much more hit and miss. If you ask for a recipe you may get something good, or you may get something completely inedible and random.

"Domain specific knowledge" really means "strong foundations and relevant abstractions" and LLMs just don't do that reliably.

[gambiter]

That's a decent article. My only issue is it seems heavily biased at the end, or at least he seems to misunderstand what the 'A.I. types in Silicon Valley' are doing.

> Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea.

I've been in software a long time, and I do sort of see this trend, but I think it's because these are tools that build other tools. The interface has always been a 'best I can do for now' thing, with the focus on doing things that are useful. Computers were just calculators in the beginning, which led to more complex calculators, instruction sets, programming languages, operating systems, GUIs, interconnectivity, etc.

What people are doing today is experimenting, like they always have. They're putting their experiments out there so that others can use them and build on them. Some will use those tools to build other tools, and some won't. But over time, the experiments that work will get distilled and turn into real products that people who 'do not yearn for automation' will still want to use, so it seems like the value is there.

I guess the real question is whether they will create value that offsets the near-term costs, because I don't think the billions in investments are sustainable, and I'm not convinced the centralized data center paradigm is the right way.

[bigstrat2003]

Software engineers aren't even all using AI, contrary to frequent claims here that they are. There are very many who have tried it, found it didn't add value to their work, and aren't using it unless FOMO-driven managers force them to.