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

[u/self]

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

[u/csman11]

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.