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0 pointsLeCompteSftware2mo ago0 comments

The point of the article is that sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis. The reason US/EU manufacturing was "the old ways" is that people could make easier money with financial engineering, an insight that extended all the way to Raytheon.

COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write a lot of C you really don't need to know assembly.... until you stumble across a weird gcc bug and have no clue where to look. If you write a lot of C# you don't really need to know anything about C... until your app is unusably slow because you were fuzzy on the whole stack / heap concept. Likewise with high-level SSGs and design frameworks when you don't know HTML/CSS fundamentals.

As the author says maybe AI is different. But with manufacturing we were absolutely confusing "comfortable development" with "progress." In Ukraine the bill came due, and the EU was not actually able to manufacture weapons on schedule. So people really should have read to the end of "building a C compiler with a team of Claudes":

  The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

At least with Opus 4.6, a human cannot give up "the old ways" and embrace agentic development. The bill comes due. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

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5 comments · 3 top-level

anonzzzies2mo ago· 2 in thread

But these are hard IT things a human programmer really struggles with as well. What % of software written is that? Very very low. Most software is dull and requires business vagueness to be translated into deterministic logic and interfaces; LLMs are pretty great at that as it is. If humans use their old ways to fix complex problems and llms do the rest, we still only need a handful of those humans. For now.

LeCompteSftwareOP2mo ago

"For now" is sort of the entire point of the article :)

Even in the Before Times, it was much cognitively cheaper to write code than it is to read someone else's code closely, or manage lots of independent code across a team, or to make a serious change to existing code. It's so much easier to just let everyone slap some slop on the pile and check off their user stories. I think it will take years to figure out exactly what the impact of LLMS on software is. But my hunch is that it'll do a lot of damage for incremental benefit.

With the sole exception of "LLMs are good at identifying C footguns," I have yet to see AI solve any real problems I've personally identified with the long-term development and maintenance of software. I only see them making things far worse in exchange for convenience. And I am not even slightly reassured by how often I've seen a GitHub project advertise thousands of test cases, then I read a sample of those test cases and 98% of them are either redundant or useless. Or the studies which suggest software engineers consistently overestimate the productivity benefits of AI, and psychologically are increasingly unable to handle manual programming. Or the chardet maintainer seemingly vibe-benchmarking his vibe-coded 7.0 rewrite when it was in reality a lot slower than the 6.0, and he's still digging through regression bugs. It feels like dozens of alarms are going off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

anonzzzies2mo ago

These are good point and I am not overestimating; we are simply seeing the productivity boost in our company and the rise in profitability. We practice TDD, but only at integration level, so we have tests upfront for api and frontend and the AI writes until it works. SOTA models are simply good enough not to do;

function add(a,b) = c // adds two numbers

test: add(1,2)=3

to implement

function add(a,b) return 3

So when you have enough tests (and we do), it will deliver quality. Having AI write the tests is mostly useless. But me writing the code is not necessarily better and certainly not faster for most cases our clients bring us.

tjwebbnorfolk2mo ago

> sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis.

yes of course. that's why I said > If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost.

This is all known, because it's always been this way. You can't hire a blacksmith, you need to first REMAKE the blacksmith if you really need one. It's always been this way, and it will continue. There is a cost to resurrecting old processes. This cost is a fact of life and needs to be planned for.

It cannot be avoided except by maintaining some kind of "strategic reserve" of thousands or millions people who sit around building things nobody wants on the off chance they might be needed again -- which a democracy will not long have the patience to continue paying for.

tjwebbnorfolk2mo ago

Many things we must know to do our jobs are themselves artifacts of historical decisions made in a time and place that no longer makes sense, but we have to know them to do our jobs.

Claude has allowed me to jettison many useless (IMO) skills I've developed over the years. I'm quite happy to let my bank of CSS and regex trivia expire from the cache, never to be reloaded again. I will never have to write another webpack.config.js as long as I live. So much time in programming is spent looking up SDK operations that I basically know, I just can't remember whether the dang method is called acquire_data() or load_data() .... etc

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5 comments · 3 top-level

anonzzzies2mo ago· 2 in thread

LeCompteSftwareOP2mo ago

"For now" is sort of the entire point of the article :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

anonzzzies2mo ago

function add(a,b) = c // adds two numbers

test: add(1,2)=3

to implement

function add(a,b) return 3

tjwebbnorfolk2mo ago

> sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis.

yes of course. that's why I said > If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost.

tjwebbnorfolk2mo ago

Many things we must know to do our jobs are themselves artifacts of historical decisions made in a time and place that no longer makes sense, but we have to know them to do our jobs.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse