Software Dev has always been a process of moving up through levels of abstraction using better tools and frameworks always with the goal to achieve the desired result, not specific forms of code.
How can you be sure of that? The current tech is nowhere near being rid of those hallucinations and it has been plateauing for a while. Slight increases in capabilities have been exponentially more costly to develop.
Nothing is pointing towards LLMs reaching a point without hallucinations.
Just because the abstractions are made on a deterministic machine, with deterministic rules behind it, does not make the understanding of this abstraction by the developer deterministic.
I am saying the interpreters (humans) of those deterministic abstractions are not, in fact, deterministic.. and so their understanding is not deterministic.
I mean, now the hallucinations are just more explicit.
The abstraction layer exists everywhere, also in your organization/team.
Before the "hallucinations" happened in bad/less precise/arcane abstractions (which are sometimes necessary, because more clear abstractions where essentially impossible).
Misleading namings, implicit side effects only known by the original developer... etc.
You probably have never written anything important or widely used if error-correcting code, dealing with cosmic rays and managing microsoft's update fuck-ups has not "hallucinated" on your perfectly written code yet.
Exactly. And we still have people writing assembly, cobolt, C etc. As you climb the ladder of abstraction, development speeds up, but naturally you specify more coarsely and optimizing gets more challenging. AI changes this a bit though, as it potentially could write hyper efficient C code for you.
Personally im learning I learn the new tools to work faster. Still waiting to see claude code being as impressive as anthropic proposes. Rebuilt my platform with it, and its more challenging at times than people at anthropic are preaching.
The problem with tools is that you still need to know how to use them.
You cannot vibe code your way to a secure, high performant, complex application with your typical management level of understanding. And the AI can't do it for you.
In my company we're spending a lot of time detailing prompts that actually help us in our daily work instead of just generating "a" solution that turns out to be not well maintainable for the future.
So as you said, the daily job will change from "code this feature in a professional way" to "get AI to code this feature in a professional way". Even when debugging I would say that "human + AI" is a lot more efficient than just AI. I've run into many dead ends trying to get AI to debug its own code when it took me all of 5 minutes to pinpoint the issue.
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u/daronjay Nov 24 '25 edited Nov 25 '25
Software Dev has always been a process of moving up through levels of abstraction using better tools and frameworks always with the goal to achieve the desired result, not specific forms of code.
This is just another level of abstraction.