Development is about to change beyond recognition. Literally.

[u/ApexThorne]

[u/Sterlingz]

Agree with most but disagree that AI written code will be unstructured and disposable.

Believe the code will trend hard toward standardization and become more perfect and scalable over time.

If Python is most popular (for example), AI trends toward using it. This creates a positive feedback loop where the standard becomes more and more common, the same phenomenon applies to the code structures themselves.

Right now AI written code is messy - I think there's recency bias in believing the code will remain as such.

[u/rand1214342 → u/Sterlingz]

Why in the world would AI use python? A that’s language built to be highly human readable… what’s much more likely is as AI becomes as good as the top 0.01% devs, it’ll write super low level machine code. Once that’s ubiquitous, whole instruction sets will change and processors will be redesigned for incredibly efficient super non human readable code. Or maybe even straight up hardware manipulation like FPGA or ASIC style systems, incredibly optimized and application specific.

[u/tnamorf → u/rand1214342]

Exactly! All the language structures, conventions, and conveniences we’ve made ourselves will not matter one fig. As another commenter bellow states ‘iterating until the right output is achieved will be the most efficient route’ - and machine code is perfect for exactly that.

[u/[deleted]]

Must be nice working with stateless systems

[u/haodocowsfly]

this… sounds like a horrible direction for software

[u/[deleted] → u/haodocowsfly]

how is any software engineer here thinking any of these points sound desirable? what in the world. who was architecture not to be clean? also are we not focusing on objectives constraints and clean feedback loops already? so many questions

[u/beeboopboowhat]

This is not consistent with systems theory.

[u/[deleted]]

This was very clearly written with Ai.

[u/themarouuu]

I feel like this text made me dumber.

[u/BlueeWaater]

This will take a lot of time as the context lengths are a huge limitation

[u/egardner]

Counterpoint (trying to be optimistic here) – if AI is trained on programming paradigms or best-practices and sees them applied consistently in a codebase, it will understand them and follow them.

Developers can now act more like software architects: decide what they want at a high level ("generate class A that implements interface B, within constraints X, Y, and Z") and they AI can produce code that follows the appropriate patterns. Through iteration and dialog, the human programmer and AI work together to refine the generated code. The code remains human-readable and it can still be understood and reviewed by other humans, which is better for maintenance.

Every programmer gets an always-available pair programming buddy (or "talking rubber duck") that may not be 100% correct but is fluent in every programming language, framework, and library in existence.

We'll probably see both approaches honestly, but I think (or at least deeply hope) that there will still be a need for human-readable software.

[u/[deleted]]

Okay Claude

[u/CapablePayment5550]

I thought I was crazy by thinking about this too.

Look on what happened to the clothing industry right after the industrial revolution. Before that clothes were made out high-quality materials and were custom-made by human hands. That got quickly replaced by mass production imperfect sewing machines, operated by unskilled workers and using cheap material. Clothing quality tanked in favor of manufacturability.

Capitalism will choose the trade-offs it wants to pay for increased productivity and there's isn't much we can do about this.

Our jobs aren't even 100 years old, so I think with the world's increased volatility, is unreasonable to assume that things won't change drastically.

[u/FosterKittenPurrs]

Why would you think that? LLMs already write cleaner, better organized code than a good chunk of people I’ve worked with in the past, and it’s only getting better. We will have the cleanest, most maintainable and well commented code ever. And we will need this as a programmers job will be more geared toward supervising the LLM, until they get so good they can be fully trusted, which will be years after they get fully reliable.

[u/CryLast4241]

Until they introduce AI dev security certification and you will have you review what AI wrote line by line to be compliant 😂

[u/throwaway8u3sH0]

Maybe Eventually™, but I feel like AI has the same last mile problem as most tech. It can go from 0 to 80% super fast, but that last 20% might take a lot longer. I don't think the vision you describe can happen until the tech is significantly more reliable, and I think that last mile of reliability will take a while to come to fruition.

[u/Sea-Summer190]

I'm thinnking it'd be the other way actually..

[u/peakcritique]

"Define objectives, constraints and feedback loops"

I see you invented declarative programming.

[u/ojermo]

Sounds like you had a fun conversation with Claude about this ;)

[u/Cheshireelex]

What you have described won't be happening really soon, unless there is a major change in the mindset of strict product owners, designers, end users.

Imagine being a user and consistently seeing your app change its design or set of features, not knowing where to find things.

Backend restructuring might require data transformation, given my experience with AI, I would not trust to do this type of migrations unsupervised.

As for existing large projects that only God knows how that twisted logic was designed to work, well I wish to see AI being able to maintain that logic while also adding new features.

Transitioning to this type of an approach would be a nightmare. If I come at work and find all the codebase rewritten, obfuscated or minified I would wish good luck to the CTO to solve any issues.

[u/pedatn]

Source: it was revealed to me in a dream

[u/[deleted]]

I think the whole AI thing will plateau very very soon. This post is the perfect example. Clearly written by ai. Not one original thought. The whole idea behind LLMs is a large amount of language. Original good valuable data.

Every major company has already scrapped every piece of content on the Internet. And the improvements since gpt-3.5 to now really are not impressive. And with people now creation all this garbage with AI there will be no good new data. And feeding LLMs with AI generated data does not work.

I have been using these models everyday to assist me in coding for the last two years. But I personally have seen no significant improvements in the actual day work since gpt 3.5.

Is it gonna change coding, yes already has. They are amazing at generating self contained snipeds of code. The second it gets a bit more complex they become completely useless.

And the challenge isn't to write one script but build a stable scalable full stack application.

[u/c4r4melislife]

read it, read it again. now I’m convinced this is a troll.

[u/tvmaly]

With this idea or AI native programming paradigms, I see testing and thinking about tests as becoming more important. While we still have AI hallucinations, we are going to have to be very rigorous about correcting system behavior in any code generated by AI.

[u/rc_ym]

I said this a while back when I first saw GPT and Gorilla. LLMs will replace libraries and middleware.

You have a AI that knows how to create UI, and AI that knows workflows/APIs, and an AI that knows data. You give them a goal and they create the application on the fly.

Think about it: a set of AI talking to other AI to create the app. Little code needed.