This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs?
Hard to shake the feeling that this looks like one big pyramid scheme. I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering.
> I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.
It was, and is. But not universally.
If you formulate questions scientifically and use the answers to make decisions, that's engineering. I've seen it happen. It can happen with LLMs, under the proper guidance.
If you formulate questions based on vibes, ignore the answers, and do what the CEO says anyway, that's not engineering. Sadly, I've seen this happen far too often. And with this mindset comes the Claudiot mindset - information is ultimately useless so fake autogenerated content is just as valuable as real work.
* the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime,
* the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text,
* the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two,
* the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and projects, with no need for centralized offices for most knowledge work.
That was a massive undertaking with many permutations requiring lots of software written by lots of people.
But it's largely done now. Software consumes a significant fraction of all waking hours of almost everyone on Earth. New software mainly just competes with existing software to replace attention. There's not much room left to expand the market.
So it's difficult to see the value of LLMs that can generate even more software even faster. What value is left to provide for users?
LLMs themselves have the potential to offering staggering economic value, but only at huge social cost: replacing human labor on scales never seen before.
All of that to say, maybe this is the reason so much time is being spent on meta-work today than on actual software engineering.
The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software - where now the only limits are your imagination, tenacity, and ability to keep the bots aligned with your vision, is allowing incredible things that wouldn't have happened otherwise because you now don't strictly need to learn to program for a programming-involved art project to work out.
Should you learn how to code if you're doing stuff like that? Absolutely. But is it letting people who have no idea about computing dabble their feet in and do extremely impressive stuff for the low cost of $20/month? Also yes.
I don't know what the future of my job holds other than what it always had: helping people who have good ideas to get them done properly.
I can imagine all the people staring at these software projects amazed at the genius it must have taken to create them. :)
Maybe agents and AI in general will help with that. Maybe it will just make the problem worse.
Somehow I doubt that. The monkey is never satisfied.
The overwhelming majority of real jobs are not related to these things you read about on Hacker News.
I help a local group with resume reviews and job search advice. A common theme is that junior devs really want to do work in these new frameworks, tools, libraries, or other trending topics they've been reading about, but discover that the job market is much more boring. The jobs working on those fun and new topics are few and far between, generally reserved for the few developers who are willing to sacrifice a lot to work on them or very senior developers who are preferred for those jobs.
It can seem that the majority of software in the world is about generating clicks and optimising engagement, but that’s just the very loud minority.
Someone here shared an article here, recently, espousing something along the lines of "home garden programming." I see software development moving in this direction, just like machining did: Either in a space-age shop, that looks more like a lab, with a fix-axis "machining center," or in the garage with Grandpappy's clapped out Atlas - and nothing in between.
I haven't tried this myself but I'm curious if an LLM could build a scalable, maintainable app that doesn't use a framework or external libraries. Could be danger due to lack of training data but I think it's important to build stuff that people use, not stuff that people use to build stuff that people use to build stuff that....
Not that meta frameworks aren't valuable, but I think they're often solving the wrong problem.
I think with proper guardrails and verification/validation, a custom framework could be easier to maintain than sloppy React code (or insert popular framework here).
My point is that as long as we keep the status quo of how software is built (using popular tools that male it fast and easy to build software without LLMs that often were unperformant), we'll keep heading down this path of trying to solve the problems of frameworks instead of directly solving the problems with our app.
(BTW, it was your comment to my comment that inspired my comment, talk about meta! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512874 )
Not saying I personally believe in this scenario, but everything I've heard supports the idea that code is no longer for humans to consume.
Again, I am on the slow train. But this seems to be all I hear. "code optimized for humans" is marked for death.
with LLMs it spit it out amazingly fast. but does that make nextjs the framework better or worse in design paradigms, that LLM is a requirement in order to navigate?
Feels like there’s a counter to the frequent citation of Jevon’s Paradox in there somewhere, in the context of LLM impact on the software dev market. Overestimation of external demand for software, or at least any that can be fulfilled by a human-in-the-loop / one-dev-to-many-users model? The end goal of LLMs feels like, in effect, the Last Framework, and the end of (money in) meta-engineering by devs for devs.
I think the entire software industry has reached a saturation point. There's not really anything missing anymore. Existing tools do 99% of what we humans could need, so you're just getting recycled and regurgitated versions of existing tools... slap a different logo and a veneer on it, and its a product.
We still don’t have truly transparent transference in locally-run software. Go anywhere in the world, and your locally running software tags along with precisely preserved state no matter what device you happen to be dragging along with you, with device-appropriate interfacing.
We still don’t have single source documentation with lineage all the way back to the code.
We still don’t treat introspection and observability as two sides of a troubleshooting coin (I think there are more “sides” but want to keep the example simple). We do not have the kind of introspection on modern hardware that Lisp Machines had, and SOTA observability conversations still revolve around sampling enough at the right places to make up for that.
We still don’t have coordination planes, databases, and systems in general capable of absorbing the volume of queries generated by LLM’s. Even if LLM models themselves froze their progress as-is, they’re plenty sophisticated enough when deployed en masse to overwhelm existing data infrastructure.
The list is endless.
IMHO our software world has never been so fertile with possibilities.
If you step back and just look at "can this do what I wanted" without worrying about what shit storm of software makes it work.
Mind you perfectionists will always have work. That doesn't mean anything.
Don't forget App Stores. Everyone's still trying to build app stores, even if they have nothing to sell in them.
It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. Every other thing they do is a side quest or some strategic thing they think might convince analysts to make their stock price to move.
It's almost as if we lived under capitalism.
What other thing would they do? They are literally setting the Earth on fire to raise the stock price. No hostages taken.
The true alignment problem behind the ploy AGI alignment problem for prêt-à-penser SF philosophers. Or prestidigitators.
They are pretty much legally obligated to act in this manner.
Note that the system that came before it had problems too. In the 50s and 60s, the top marginal tax rate was about 90%, which meant that above a certain level it made almost no sense for a corporate executive to be paid more. This kept executive salaries to a reasonable multiple of employee salaries, but it meant that executives and high-ranking managers tended to pay themselves in perks. This was the "Mad Men" era of private jets, private company apartments, secretaries who were playthings, etc. Friedman's essay was basically arguing against this world of corporate unaccountability and corruption, where formal pay and compensation were reasonable, but informal perks and arrangements managed to privilege the people in power in a complete opaque, unaccountable way.
Turns out that power is a hell of a drug, and the people in power will always find ways to use that to enrich themselves regardless of what the laws and incentives are.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
This is because all the low-hanging fruit has already been built. CRM. Invoicing. HR. Project/task management. And hundreds of others in various flavors.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
Sure everything seems to have gotten better and that's why we now need AIs to understand our code bases - that we created with our great version control tooling.
Fundamentally we're still monkeys at keyboards just that now there are infinitely many digital monkeys.
This is definitely something that is happening with software systems. The question is: is having an AI that is fundamentally undecipherable in its intention to extend these systems a good approach? Or is an approach of slowing down and fundamentally trying understand the systems we have created a better approach?
Has software become safer? Well planes don't fall from the sky but the number of zero day exploits built into our devices has vastly improved. Is this an issue? Does it matter that software is shipped broken? Only to be fixed with the next update.
I think its hard to have the same measure of safety for software. A bridge is safe because it doesn't fall down. Is email safe when there is spam and phishing attacks? Fundamentally Email is a safe technology only that it allows attacks via phishing. Is that an Email safety problem? Probably not just as as someone having a car accident on a bridge is generally not a result of the bridge.
I think that we don't learn from our mistakes. As developers we tend to coat over the accidents of our software. When was the last time a developer was sued for shipping broken software? When was the last time an engineer was sued for building a broken bridge? Notice that there is an incentive as engineer to build better and safer bridges, for developers those incentives don't exist.
Right away I scoffed when I heard people had 20 agents running in parallel because I've been at my share of startups with 20 person teams that tend to break down somewhere between:
- 20 people that get about as much done as an optimal 5 person team with a lot more burnout and backlash
- There is a sprint every two weeks but the product is never done
and people who are running those teams don't know which one they are!
I'm sure there are better ones out there but even one or two SD north of the mean you find that people are in over their heads. All the ceremony of agile hypnotizes people into thinking they are making progress (we closed tickets!) and have a plan (Sprint board!) and know what they are doing (user stories!)
Put on your fieldworker hat and interview the manager about how the team works [1] and the state of the code base and compare that to the ground truth of the code and you tend to find the manager's mental is somewhere between "just plain wrong" and "not even wrong". Teams like that get things done because there are a few members, maybe even dyads and triads, who know what time it is and quietly make sure the things that are important-but-ignored-by-management are taken care of.
Take away those moral subjects and eliminate the filtering mechanisms that make that 20-person manager better than average and I can't help but think 'gas town' is a joke that isn't even funny. Seems folks have forgotten that Yegge used to blog that he owed all his success in software development to chronic cannabis use, like if wasn't for all that weed there wouldn't be any Google today.
[1] I'll take even odds he doesn't know how long the build takes!
I remember a lot of impressive claims from back when Yegge and Zed Shaw were what I would call "fringe contemporaries" - like all the time he spent gassing on about his unmaintainable, barely usable nightmare of a Javascript mode for Emacs. (I did like the MozRepl integration, for what that's worth.)
I don't particularly recall him talking about smoking pot, and I think I would have, if he'd been as memorably effusive there as about js2-mode. But it's been a lot of years and I couldn't begin to remember where to look for an archive of his old blog. Would you happen to have a link?
I don't need an AI to understand my code base, and neither do you. You're smarter then you give yourself credit for.
It has, but we have gotten there by stacking turtles, by building so many layers of abstraction that things no longer make sense.
Think about this hardware -> hypervisor -> vm -> container -> python/node/ruby run time all to compile it back down to Bytecode to run on a cpu.
Some layers exist because of the push/pull between systems being single user (PC) and multi user (mainframe). We exacerbated the problem when "installable software" became a "hard problem" and wanted to mix in "isolation".
And most of that software is written on another pile of abstractions. Most codebases have disgustingly large dependency trees. People keep talking about how "no one is reviewing all this ai generated code"... Well the majority of devs sure as shit arent reviewing that dependency tree... Just yesterday there was yet another "supply chain attack".
How do you protect yourself from such a thing... stack on more software. You cant really use "sub repositories/modules" in git. It was never built that way because Linus didnt need that. The rest of us really do... so we add something like artifactory to protect us from the massive pile of stuff that you're dependent on but NOT looking at. It's all just more turtles on more piles.
Lots of corporate devs I know are really bad at reviewing code (open source much less so). The PR code review process in many orgs is to either find the person who rubber-stamps and avoid the people who only bike shed. I suspect it's because we have spent the last 20 years on the leet code interview where memorizing algorithms and answering brain teasers was the filter. Not reading, reviewing, debugging and stepping through code... Our entire industry is "what is the new thing", "next framework" pilled because of this.
You are right that it got better, but we got there by doing all the wrong things, and were going to have to rip a lot of things apart and "do better".
If I engineer a bridge I know the load the bridge is designed to carry. Then I add a factor of safety. When I build a website can anyone on the product side actually predict traffic?
When building a bridge I can consult a book of materials and understand how much a material deforms under load, what is breaking point is, it’s expected lifespan, etc. Does this exist for servers, web frameworks, network load balancers, etc.?
I actually believe that software “could” be an engineering discipline but we have a long way to go
Hypothetically, could you not? If you engineer a bridge you have no idea what kind of traffic it'll see. But you know the maximum allowable weight for a truck of X length is Y tons and factoring in your span you have a good idea of what the max load will be. And if the numbers don't line up, you add in load limits or whatever else to make them match. Your bridge might end up processing 1 truck per hour but that's ultimately irrelevant compared to max throughput/load.
Likewise, systems in regulated industries have strict controls for how many concurrent connections they're allowed to handle[1], enforced with edge network systems, and are expected to do load testing up to these numbers to ensure the service can handle the traffic. There are entire products built around this concept[2]. You could absolutely do this, you just choose not to.
[1] See NIST 800-53 control SC-7 (3)
[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-testing/load-tes...
If I need a bridge, and there's a perfectly beautiful bridge one town over that spans the same distance - that's useless to me. Because I need my own bridge. Bridges are partly a design problem but mainly a build problem.
In software, if I find a library that does exactly what I need, then my task is done. I just use that library. Software is purely a design problem.
With agentic coding, we're about to enter a new phase of plenty. If everyone is now a 10x developer then there's going to be more software written in the next few years than in the last few decades.
That massive flurry of creativity will move the industry even further from the calm, rational, constrained world of engineering disciplines.
I think this vastly underestimates how much of the build problem is actually a design problem.
If you want to build a bridge, the fact one already exists nearby covering a similar span is almost meaningless. Engineering is about designing things while using the minimal amount of raw resources possible (because cost of design is lower than the cost of materials). Which means that bridge in the other town is designed only within its local context. What are the properties of the ground it's built on? What local building materials exist? Where local can be as small as only a few miles, because moving vast quantities of material of long distances is really expensive. What specific traffic patterns and loadings it is built for? What time and access constraints existed when it was built?
If you just copied the design of a bridge from a different town, even one only a few miles up the road, you would more than likely end up with a design that either won't stand up in your local context, or simply can't be built. Maybe the other town had plenty of space next to the location of the bridge, making it trivial to bring in heavy equipment and use cranes to move huge pre-fabbed blocks of concrete, but your town doesn't. Or maybe the local ground conditions aren't as stable, and the other towns design has the wrong type of foundation resulting in your new bridge collapsing after a few years.
Engineering in other disciplines don't have the luxury of building for a very uniform, tightly controlled target environment where it's safe to make assumptions that common building blocks will "just work" without issue. As a result engineering is entirely a design problem, i.e. how do you design something that can actually be built? The building part is easy, there's a reason construction contractors get paid comparatively little compared to the engineers and architects that design what they're building.
- license restrictions, relicensing
- patches, especially to fix CVEs, that break assumptions you made in your consumption of the package
- supply chain attacks
- sunsetting
There’s no real “set it and forget it” with software reuse. For that matter, there’s no “set it and forget it” in civil engineering either, it also requires monitoring and maintenance.
If something in software works and isn't internet connected it really is set and forget. And far too many things are being connected needlessly these days. I don't need or want an online washing machine or car.
It certain mission critical applications, it is treated as engineering. One example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B
This is tremendously expensive (writing two or more independent copies of the core functionality!) and rapidly becomes intractable if the interaction with the world is not pretty strictly limited. It's rarely worth it, so the vast majority of software isn't what I'd call engineered.
Neither myself nor the vast majority of other “software engineers” in our field are living up to what it should mean to be an “engineer”.
The people that make bridges and buildings, those are the engineers. Software engineers, for the very very most part, are not.
“Developers build things. Engineers build them and keep them running.”
I like the linguistic point from a standpoint of emphasizing a long term responsibility.
https://www.howtheworldbecamerich.com/
Edit-on a related note, are there any studies on the all-in long-term cost between companies that "develop" vs. "engineer". I doubt there would be clean data since the managers that ignored all of the warning of "tech debt" would probably have the say on both compiling and releasing such data.
Does the cost of "tech-debt" decrease as the cost of "coding" decreased or is there a phase transition on the quality of the code? I bet there will be an inflection point if you plotted the adoption time of AI coding by companies. Late adapters that timed it after the models and harnesses and practices were good enough (probably still some time in the near future) would have less all-in cost per same codebase quality.
In software there's a lot more emphasis on post-hoc fixes rather than up front validation, in my experience.
"Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers."
Most recently I wrote cloudformation templates to bring up infra for AWS-based agents. I don't use ai-assisted coding except googling which I acknowledge is an ai summary.
A friend of mine is in a toxic company where everyone has to use AI and they're looked down upon if they don't use it. Every minute of their day has to be logged doing something. They're also going to lay off a bunch of people soon since "AI has replaced them" this is in the context of an agency.
Of course, we use that term for something else in the software world, but architecture really has two tiers, the starchitects building super fancy stuff (equivalent to what we’d call software architects) and the much more normal ones working on sundry things like townhomes and strip malls.
That being said I don’t think people want the architecture pay grades in the software fields.
We're engineers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer#Definition
2. https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...
Maybe software tinkerer?
You should see the code that scientists write...
- Edsger Dijkstra, 1988
I think, unfortunately, he may have had us all dead to rights on this one.
Dijkstra was a mathematician. It is a necessary discipline. If it alone were sufficient, then the "program correctness" fans would have simply and inarguably outdone everyone else forty years ago at the peak of their efforts, instead of having resorted to eloquently whiny, but still whiny, thinkpieces (such as the 1988 example [1] quoted here above) about how and why they would like history to understand them as having failed.
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF [2]
[2] I will freely grant that the man both wrote and lettered with rare beauty, which shames me even in this photocopier-burned example when I compare it to the cheerful but largely unrefined loops and scrawls of my own daily hand.
But yes, I think the best rebuttal to Dijkstra-style griping is Perlis' "one can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means". That said I also believe kind of like Chesterton's quote about Christianity, they've also mostly not been tried and found wanting but rather found hard and left untried. By myself included, although I do enjoy a spot of the old dependent types (or at least their approximations). There's an economic argument lurking there about how robust most software really needs to be.
Every so often an article makes the rounds on the correctness and verification methods used for Space Shuttle avionics software and applications of similar import, or if not that then Nancy Leveson's comprehensive 1995 review of the Therac-25 accidents. [1]
Most software doesn't need to be nearly so robust, but Dijkstra constructs his argument as though all did, hinging the inversion on the obvious and frankly shocking cheat across the gap between his pages 14 and 15, ie, that paragraph beginning "But before a computer is ready to perform..." Here he casually, and without direct acknowledgement much less justification, assumes as rhetorically axiomatic that a program, not the machine that executes it, is the original artifact of computing, of which any reification merely constitutes less than perfect instantiation, which he is then free to criticize on the wholly theoretical grounds of mathematical beauty; that is, on the grounds he prefers to inhabit in all cases, whether to do so in any given example makes any sense or not.
If that's his preferred ground, fair enough; after all, he was a mathematician. But his hypocrisy in concealing the insistence by means of subtle rhetoric - mere pages after inveighing against "medieval thinking" by way of an example, his "reasoning by analogy," faulting specifically that argument made by way of specious rhetoric! - casts suspicion on all that both precedes and follows. From a layperson, I could regard it as honest error, but I have known and loved academic mathematicians, and I really can't conceive of any of them leaving intact so consequential a mistake.
Perhaps Dijkstra was different, or merely becoming old, but for someone so heavily invested in pushing a paradigm of programming with mathematical rigor at its core, it seems a remarkable flaw in what should be a crucial argument (especially in advance of a solution for the halting problem). I regret that flaw, because he isn't all wrong about what an engineering paradigm can do to the agency and optionality of programmers especially in industry - not that his one extremely privileged position therein, parallel with Feynman's time at Thinking Machines, would much acquaint him with our desiderata or our constraints - and I would like to find that point made in better company than he was able to give it.
But then, his conception never offered much in preference, did it? The labor of mathematicians is scarce and expensive: what good is a proof assistant to anyone who can't understand its output, much less give it input? And Dijkstra himself, not less strange a bird than any other mathematician, famously did all he could to avoid actually using the machines on whose correct use he here wrote. (Hence his hand, which I complimented so highly before. I also use a fountain pen, but as I said, not so beautifully - and I'm glad I know how to use a keyboard well, instead.)
There would not be more programmers or more software in a world run on such principles, I think, than in this one - on the contrary, less by far. Maybe that would be preferable, but mostly not for the reasons Dijkstra claimed.
Literally nothing else matters, and we (or at least I) have wasted a ton of time getting good at writing software.
I agree, but I'm not sure this says what you think it does.
The people on the car assembly line may know nothing of engineering, and the assembly line has theoretically been set up where that is OK.
The people on the software assembly line may also (and arguably often do) know nothing of engineering, but it's not clear that it is possible to set up the assembly line in such a way so as to make this OK.
Arguably, the use of LLMs will at least have some utility in helping us to figure this out, because a lot of LLMs are now being used on the assembly line.
> People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era.
I'm assuming you're saying these tools hurt more than help?
In that case I disagree so much that I'm struggling to reply. It's like trying to convince someone that the Earth is not flat, to my mental model.
PHP, Ruby and VB have more successful code written in them than all current academic or disproportionately hyped languages will ever have combined.
And there's STILL software being written in them. I did Visual Basic consulting for a greenfield project last week despite my current expertise being more with Go, Python, C# and C. And there's a RoR work lined up next. So the presence gap between these helpful tools and other minor, but over index tools, is still increasing.
It's easy to think that the languages one see mor often in HN are the prevalent ones but they are just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm watching a team which is producing insane amounts of code for their team size, but the level of thought that has gone into all of the details that would make their product a fit predator to run at scale and solve the underlying business problem has been neglected.
Moving really fast in the wrong direction is no help to anyone.
RoR is no longer at its peak, but is still have its marginal stable share of the web, while PHP gets the lion part[1]
Ok, Lotus Notes is really relic from an other era now. But it’s not a PL, so not the same kind of beast.
Well, also LLMs are different beast compared to PL. They actually really are the things that evocate the most the expression "taming the beast" when you need to deal with them. So it indeed as far away as possible of engineering as one can probably use a computer to build any automation. Maybe to stay in scientific realms ethology would be a better starting point than a background in informatics/CS to handle these stuffs.
Personally I think that whole Karpathy thing is the slowest thing in the world. I mean you can spin the wheels on a dragster all you like and it is really loud and you can smell the fumes but at some point you realize you're not going anywhere.
My own frustration with the general slowness of computing (iOS 26, file pickers, build systems, build systems, build systems, ...) has been peaking lately and frankly the lack of responsiveness is driving me up the wall. If I wasn't busy at work and loaded with a few years worth of side projects I'd be tearing the whole GUI stack down to the bottom and rebuilding it all to respect hard real time requirements.
1. Applied physics - Software is immediately disqualified. Symbols have no physics.
2. Ethics - Lives and livelihoods depend on you getting it right. Software people want to be disqualified because that stuff is so boring, but this is becoming a more serious issue with every passing day.
So most software developers in France are absolutely software engineers.
Many physical processes are controlled by software.
Other places were "hack it until we don't know of any major bugs, then ship it before someone finds one". And now they're "hey, AI agents - we can use that as a hack-o-matic!" But they were having trouble with sustainability before, and they're going to still, except much faster.
That's increasingly not possible. This is the first time for me in 20 years where I've had a programming tool rammed down my throat.
There's a crisis of software developer autonomy and it's actually hurting software productivity. We're making worse software, slower because the C levels have bought this fairy tale that you can replace 5 development resource with 1 development resource + some tokens.
In 18 years AI is the third or 4th tool forced upon a shop/team, I will say of those it is the forst one that is genuinely able to make me more productive overall, even with the drawbacks.
The ones who got acquired - never really had to stand up to any due diligence scrutiny on the technical side. Other sides of the businesses did for sure, but not that side.
Many of you here work for "real" tech companies with the budget and proper skin in the game to actually have real engineers and sane practices. But many of you do not, and I am sure many have seen what I have seen and can attest to this. If someone like the person I mentioned above asks you to join them to help fix their problems, make sure the compensation is tremendous. Slop clean-up is a real profession, but beware.
It feels like this takes on a whole new meaning now we have agents - which I think is the same point you were making
It's a craft.
We do the actual building of things
Just another reason we should cut software jobs and replace them with A(G)I.
If the human "engineers" were never doing anything precisely, why would the robot engineers need to?
I was interested in making a semi-automous skill improvement program for open code, and I wired up systemd to watch my skills directory; when a new skill appeared, it'd run a command prompt to improve it and cohere it to a skill specification.
It was told to make a lock file before making a skill, then remove the lock files. Multiple times it'd ignore that, make the skill, then lock and unlock on the same line. I also wanted to lock the skill from future improvements, but that context overode the skills locking, so instead I used the concept of marking the skills as readonly.
So in reality, agents only exist because of context poisoning and overlap; they're not some magicaly balm to improving the speed of work, or multiplying the effort, they simply prevent context poisoning from what's essentially subprocesses.
Once you realize that, you really have to scale back the reality because not only are they just dumb, they're not integrating any real information about what they're doing.
Software engineering is not real engineering because we do not rigorously engineer software the way "real" engineers engineer real things. <--- YOU ARE HERE
Software engineering is real engineering because we "rigorously" engineer software the way "real" engineers engineer real things.
Edit: quotes imply sarcasm.
Now I barely look at ticket requirements, feed it to an LLM, have it do the work, spend an hour reviewing it, then ship it 3 days later. Plenty of fuck off time, which is time well spent when I know nothing will change anyway. If I'm gonna lose my career to LLMs I may as well enjoy burning shareholder capital. I've optimized my life completely to maximize fuck off time.
At the end of the day they created the environment. It would be criminal to not take advantage of their stupidity.
Aren't you conveniently ignoring the fact that there were people saw through that and didn't go down those routes?
Or better yet point out the better paths they chose instead. Were they wrestling with Java and "Joda Time"? Talking to AWS via a Python library named after a dolphin? Running .NET code on Linux servers under Mono that never actually worked? Jamming apps into a browser via JQuery? Abstracting it up a level and making 1,400 database calls via ActiveRecord to render a ten item to-do list and writing blog posts about the N+1 problem? Rewriting grep in Rust to keep the ruskies out of our precious LLCs?
Asking the wrong questions, using the wrong tools, then writing dumb blog posts about it is what we do. It's what makes us us.
On one hand there's an approach to computing where it is a branch of mathematics that is universal. There are some creatures that live under the ice on a moon circling a gas giant around another star and if they have computers they are going to understand the halting problem (even if they formulate it differently) and know bubble sort is O(N^2) and about algorithms that sort O(N log N).
On the other hand we are divided by communities of practice that don't like one another. For instance there is the "OO sux" brigade which thinks I suck because I like Java. There still are shops where everything is done in a stored procedure (oddly like the fashionable architecture where you build an API server just because... you have to have an API) and other shops where people would think you were brain damaged to go anywhere near stored procs, triggers or any of that. It used to be Linux enthusiasts thought anybody involved in Windows was stupid and you'd meet Windows admins who were click-click-click-click-clicking over and over again to get IIS somewhat working who thought IIS was the only web server good enough for "the enterprise"
Now apart for the instinctual hate for the tools there really are those chronic conceptual problems for which datetime is the poster child. I think every major language has been through multiple datetime libraries in and out of the standard lib in the last 20 years because dates and times just aren't the simple things that we wish they would be and the school of hard knocks keeps knocking us to accept a complicated reality.
I'm laughing over the current Delve/SOC2 situation right now. Everyone pulls for 'licenses' as the first card, but we all know that is equally fraught with trauma. https://xkcd.com/927/
Pedanticism (or pedantry) is the excessive, tiresome concern for minor details, literal accuracy, or formal rules, often at the expense of understanding the broader context.
It isn't. Show me the licensing requirements to be a "software engineer." There are none. A 12 year old can call himself a software engineer and there are probably some who have managed to get remote work on major projects.
That's assuming the axiom that "engineer" must require licensing requirements. That may be true in some jurisdictions, but it's not axiomatically or definitionally true.
Some kinds of building software may be "engineering", some kinds may not be, but anyone seeking to argue that "licensing requirements" should come into play will have to actually argue that rather than treat it as an unstated axiom.
For the other countries, though, arguing "some countries do it that way" is as persuasive as "some countries drive on the other side of the road." It's true, but so what? Why should we change to do it their way?
As I said, "That may be true in some jurisdictions, but it's not axiomatically or definitionally true.". The law is emphatically not an axiom, nor is it definitionally right or wrong, or correct or incorrect; it only defines what's legal or illegal.
When the article raised the question of whether "building software is an engineering discipline", it was very obviously not asking a question about whether the term 'engineering' is legally restricted in any particular jurisdiction.
There is no such rigorous definition for "software engineer" which normally is just a self-granted title meaning "I write code."
Where specifically? I've been working as a "Software engineer" for multiple decades, across three countries in Europe, and 2-3 countries outside of Europe, never been sued or received a "big fine" for this, even have had presentations for government teams and similar, not a single person have reacted to me (or others) calling ourselves "software engineers" this whole time.