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I'm not talking about the transient aspects of producing software; I'm happy to accept that AI will change that, but also I feel that it will change it in ways
by zem 4d ago
I'm not talking about the transient aspects of producing software; I'm happy to accept that AI will change that, but also I feel that it will change it in ways that really aren't very hard to learn, and truth be told the more time that passes the smaller the gap will get as the agents get more capable.
what I am talking about is principles that govern what good software looks like, what properties it has to satisfy in order to be extensible and maintainable and performant and all that other good stuff, and the AIs are not going to make that knowledge obsolete any time soon.
- Seattle3503 3d ago> truth be told the more time that passes the smaller the gap will get as the agents get more capable Yup. A lot of work is going in to reducing the skill required to operate AI agents.
- fooker 3d ago> what good software looks like I think this will change quite a bit too. Code being readable is one of our core tenets. Functions fitting within, approximately, a screen of code used to be ideal. Modern AI as already past solving that problem. You can give it a million line codebase, ask where something specific is happening, and it'll tell you in less than a minute. If we can de-emphasize readability, what do we gain? Custom hand rolled containers and data structures for your use cases are somewhat frowned upon unless really needed. Well, probably not anymore. What about a manually inlined mega-function with loops unrolled that pre-empts some of the compiler's work? No way that would fly a couple of years ago. Already seeing this in performance sensitive code.