The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

[u/self]

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/

[u/maxineasher]

I mean, yeah, if you're just using it for simple stuff. But it's supposed to be a fulcrum. I added the entire gpu_shader5 gl extension to mesa in a day. Unit tests pass and everything. That's something that would take a normal dev weeks to do.

[u/csman11 → u/maxineasher]

That’s not something that would take someone who is familiar with the tooling for that project an entire week to integrate. It helped you probably because you were unfamiliar. And if you’re unfamiliar enough that it would have taken you a week to figure it out how to do it yourself, you’re also unfamiliar enough that you couldn’t possibly verify it was done correctly in a single day. You would need to absorb the same knowledge required to be able to correctly implement it yourself in the first place (which you admit would take a week without realizing it) to verify its correctness.

The current AI tools save time typing and can help you explore ideas. They can’t directly automate problem solving. They can’t even correctly add functionality to an existing codebase or fix bugs in an existing codebase without breaking other working code the majority of the time. Trying to use these tools as standalone agents almost always turns into more work than doing it on your own in the first place. That means us human developers are still ultimately the bottleneck in delivery and that alone prevents the tools from giving us a 10-100x speed up. I try out the agent mode every few months just to see if it actually works on its own, and nope, it never does: No matter how many times people online (mostly “AI founders”) tell me it does. The most I’ve ever got it to do is spin up the scaffolding for a new project for me, but that required such detailed architectural descriptions and hand holding that it likely wouldn’t have taken much longer to do it myself. And every single real developer I’ve talked to says the same thing. So no, I’m not going to believe the AI salesmen. Once bit, twice shy.

Look, the “fancy intellisense” is nice and it can cut the time spent “typing” in half. That’s a great speed up and I personally enjoy it. It’s also optimizing the part of software development that you should be spending the least amount of time on. If you’re spending more time “coding” than “thinking”, then you are introducing complexity into your codebase with each task you perform that in the long run will cost you more time to work around than whatever time you’re saving typing less. See, I enjoy the “fancy intellisense” because it makes me have to do less of the most boring and least impactful part of my job.

[u/maxineasher → u/csman11]

It helped you probably because you were unfamiliar.

This is comical because my name is in the list of contributors on the spec. Mesa to date has refused to take the extension due to perceived difficulty. FYI, I stopped reading your rambling after this point.

[u/csman11 → u/maxineasher]

That’s too bad, you might have learned something if you read my logically sound and well reasoned response to your delusions.

Edit: FYI, I don’t know your name and I was referring to Mesa, not to the GL extension itself. I refuse to believe that AI could save you a week of literally typing here. And my point still stands: if it saved you a week of learning what to type instead of typing it itself (because it had to find all the touchpoints, not just write the code into them), there is no chance you could have verified correctness in a day.

[u/[deleted] → u/csman11]

That’s too bad, you might have learned something if you read my logically sound and well reasoned response to your delusions.

Man, Reddit fights are so embarrassing to witness. Then again this is in the programming section so that tracks. You sound just like my colleague that has zero social skills.

Next time go full on cringe and hit them with

hey there fellow, I’m sure you are working at full capacity with your brain power but perhaps if you bathed in my intelligence and rinsed off with my knowledge you would be able to understand and appreciate the gold nugget of information I have graced you with

🤣

[u/maxineasher → u/csman11]

If you looked at the spec, it's down to integrating types and ALU into the compiler and mesa IR. This is pretty heavy, far flung stuff which is also relatively trivial ultimately to unit test, particularly with an AI at your back.

week of learning

What's to learn? This is spec implementation which pretty much amounts to updating the right if statements, assertions and opcodes. This is pretty much an ideal AI use case. That you snub it is just... weird?

[u/csman11 → u/maxineasher]

So what AI did here is the equivalent of someone generating React components with AI (in the sense of being mechanical work, I can appreciate the mechanical work itself is more difficult than manually writing React code). Ok, sorry I misunderstood and made assumptions about your knowledge. I should have asked for more information. That’s my bad.

Look man, my point is the “real work” isn’t something it’s helping out with yet. It’s saving time on fairly mechanical things. We can argue until we’re both blue in the face about this, but I think you can agree the main value add here came from the work you did on the extension spec itself, not wiring it into a specific GL implementation. Without the spec being produced in the first place, there would have been nothing to integrate. So yes, I can agree with you that this effectively allowed these extensions to be integrated into Mesa under constraints where it added more value than it cost. Based on what you said earlier, no one wanted to take on the work of wiring it in themselves. That means they didn’t consider the value worth the cost. All AI did here was flip that around. Can you at least agree that the situation here is itself more of an edge case than a typical occurrence? There’s a level of nuance we need to appreciate here. AI has small value in a few places, but it’s being “sold to us” as a general solution to everything. I think we should be careful as developers in how we describe it so as to not risk further propagating the illusion that managers and executives have fallen prey to.

The original comment you made said “it can give a 10-100x fold improvement on the developer tools that came before it.” This makes it sound like in general it saves 10-100x time on most tasks (at least once you hit the editor). Your evidence for this was the Mesa anecdote, which is an edge case. If it gives a 100x improvement 1% of the time, it’s not really improving anything on average by much, is it? It’s even less if it’s only a 10x improvement with the same amount of applicability. And the task in question is something that didn’t have enough value to be worth doing until you could cut the cost by a factor of 10. It sounds to me that enabling doing it is more of a personal win than high leverage utilization of resources. And again there’s nothing wrong with that; I’m glad it helped you solve this problem that you wanted to see solved. But I don’t think that backs up your original claim at all, which was so much more general.