Software Engineering at the Tipping Point(io.google) |
Software Engineering at the Tipping Point(io.google) |
I wonder if the public appetite for the inevitable quality crash is there, though.
All with marginal value add and having more to do with fashion than with actual innovation.
Real innovation is synonymous with problem solving. The only problem tech industry is solving nowadays is keeping its bloated valuation afloat.
The primary difference I've noticed, however, is that the AI evangelists also have a flair for painting a picture where everyone's jobs are eliminated, while many CEOs are already using it as an excuse for layoffs.
I can see no reason why there'd be any negativity about AI.
I mean, yes, LLMs are an innovation. But outside of the tech industry, they are not having anywhere near the impact on people's lives as many other inventions.
They'd revolt en-masse if their TV had the downtime of github, of if their computer had the number of successful supply chain attacks that npm enjoys.
The quality may not have been good, but the market had stabilised on what the public would accept. AI changes this substantially.
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People who have never coded, for who we now need to spend an insane amount of time validating their design, asking questions they don't even have the answers to, figuring out if the code written was needed for the prompt or whether it was just thrown in there because ... the AI had it as part of the tokens.
Remember, their design isn't built from the ground up, it's focussed on the outcomes, like the movie Bedazzled.
And then you spend time validating their code, you give them review feedback, instead of internalizing it they just shove it into the AI and let it fix it, meaning they don't learn.
Next PR will have the same issues.
This reads like a bunch of marketing speak that says nothing.
I generally dislike HN cynical tone but I don’t see how not becoming a cynic myself when that’s the quality of presentation from a Principal Engineer on Google IO stage. Even at 2x speed that felt not worth the time
It feels like Kubernetes? Yes, it allowed more complex setups but a decade later the leaky abstractions have become apparent and there are constant tradeoffs to be made with the problems it brings vs the problem it solves. But the awkward point is why was Kubernetes not a trillion dollar unicorn if it unlocked so much productivity gains?
Case in point: GitHub.
ask anyone that has been in the industry for awhile and they will tell you the same thing. a lot of crowd on HN write as if human-written code is any good and while there are always exception, on average, most software is shitty. if I had a dollar for every time I met someone writing software for “X” saying “dude, if you knew what I know you’d never use/do/… X” I’d be a very rich man