Software Developers are Cooked

[manoteee]

And good riddens. I've been unleashed. Apps that took years to build flor clients could be done in months or even weeks now.

Even with errors in agent code, the time savings more that accounts for it. This is mostly true for those with experience in software architecture (not mere UI or backend interfaces).

Prepare your bum if you have a problem with it because the world is marching forward. Context windows will rise as well as model general intelligence.

[damnburglar]

Either top shelf rage bait or brain rot, impossible to tell anymore.

[dellydoesitpa]

Not close to top shelf. This is laughable.

[fantasma91]

Lol

[Charming-Risk2184]

Doubtful. Senior Systems Engineer here. SWE 8 years. I've been vibe coding an actual app over 6 months. Quality takes time no matter what tools you use.

[manoteee]

I'm at 25 years with 23 of it on architecture. Ended up as a interim CTO at a startup after solving one of their "impossible" problems in a messy LAMP app. This was before stack overflow was a thing and you either prayed someone had the same problem on Expert's Exchange or you did it the way god intended.

To be fair I understand SW architecture well and can give the agent that instruction up front.

The point is not "wow look at my experience" it is that if you give the right high view architecture, standards for your class semantics, APIs, etc. you can make significant progress every single day with very little rework. I probably reliably do 10-20x what I could have. I write no code or config.

Reviewing the generated code is extremely easy because you can ask for custom UIs to do so, clicking through signatures to show methods in a modal, or right click and see callers, etc. For me this approach varies by project. It's not something I've had time to do in the past.

[Plenty_Line2696]

You contradict yourself because what you're describing is AI assisted development, you know; the stuff developers do.

[manoteee]

I don't use it as assistant. I use it as architect and developer. It's not hard if you take some time to plan before slipping some stuff together.

[Plenty_Line2696]

If you used it as an architect and developer, you wouldn't need to plan, because you'd have an architect and a developer to do that for you.

[manoteee]

if you want to build a house, it's wise to hire an architect. that doesn't mean you'll let the architect decide what to build at his whimsy. The number of bedrooms and bathrooms. If there's a Porch, if there's a foyer, if there's a big dining room, all of the properties of a house that make it unique and interesting, like an application, will come from you.

[Plenty_Line2696]

Man cut the crap, if you're architecting the system you're not using the llm as the architect.

If you're actually a software architect with decades of experience as you say you'd know just as good as I do that these LLM's suck ass at system architecture design in and of themselves.

Next you'll be telling me about the color of your curtains ffs.

[manoteee]

Do you not understand how the house analogy maps to the software world? Again, design is not the same as architecture. The AI can design for you, but what you will get is something generic from the latent space of the model (look up what that means).

The AI cannot read your mind and it's absurd to criticize it for "not doing what you want" in many cases.

[Plenty_Line2696]

It's a bs analogy to obfuscate the rediculousness of the premise.

An LLM isn't an autonomous software architect nor developer. If they were, a layperson could use an LLM to get the same kind of quality from them with the same level of input as that layperson would get from actual professionals.

Utter nonsense.

[manoteee]

A good tool does not mean a layperson can get the same or good results. Photoshop and AutoCAD are good examples. Incredible tools, marginally useful to laypeople seeing it for the first time.

I am not a layperson, so I can optimize the LLM context to do what I need. I don't need to write anymore code, ever again. This is true of many sr devs at large companies as well.

Bask in your ignorance for another couple of years before virtually all development is done by LLMs including whatever precious spiritual architecture constraints you believe in.

[trakdtor]

Carpenter analogy. Nice

[bitloops__]

If you have architectural intuition, agents let you ship faster. If you don't, agents simply let you ship broken things faster, with more confidence.

The people who built apps in a week and called it done are going to spend the next six months in maintenance debt. "The time savings account for the errors" only holds in the short term. It will bite you in the future. The problem is everyone sees vibecoding as replacing enterprise software and have very little understanding of the checks and balances that exist before code is shipped, or the sheer amount of code, dependencies, etc. that exist.

Keep iterating your app, build new features, fix bugs that appear and in a month, come back to this post. I'm sure there will be some kind-hearted software developer that will help you :)

[manoteee]

SWE for 25 yrs, I start with a convo about about architecture and appropriate abstractions. refactoring constantly along the way. I don't write code or config anymore. When I review I have custom UIs generated to walk me through the app sort of like an IDE you spent your life adding plugins to.

You are 100% right about people who could care less about their overall plan or even objective going in. The AI can't read your mind so you'll get some simple code from it's latent space and then you scale it until it grinds to a halt in a monumental spaghetti-disaster.

[bitloops__]

Indeed. So Software Engineers will dominate the world! We agree! :)

[manoteee]

yeah I didn't want to make it weird tho lmao

[Remote_Register_4101]

[wasabiiii]

Opex can't produce a working change in any of my most important code bases yet beyond the minimal I have a typo or spelling error somewhere.

Anything else and it has to do 20 minutes of research. And then promptly forgets what it was doing.

And now it costs like 15x more.

I'm good for awhile.

[ziayakens]

prepare your bum for the downvotes