What exactly is left when we remove coding from software engineering? Could it be handled by a manager? Or perhaps by a single senior SWE who could now perform the work of an entire team using these rapidly advancing AI coders?
for a lot of tasks that aren't as cut & dry, i often find myself having to provide it pseudo code, which it can then one-shot to working code.
don't get me wrong, it's still a massive upgrade from the pre-sonnet era, but i still don't think it can take a high-level requirement and convert it into a working project... yet
(1) Sure, it can tell you how to write new code in response to a prompt about your current local problem, but
(2) can it reason about an entire code base of known and unknown problems, and use that basis to figure out solutions to the unknowns such that you delete code and collapse complexity.
The software equivalent of realising that if you subtract xy from this:
x2 + 3xy + y2
You can turn it into a much neater version:
(x + y)2 + xy
…but doing that with 100k tokens of code instead of a handful of algebra tokens.
p1esk|1 year ago
findjashua|1 year ago
don't get me wrong, it's still a massive upgrade from the pre-sonnet era, but i still don't think it can take a high-level requirement and convert it into a working project... yet
gorgoiler|1 year ago
(1) Sure, it can tell you how to write new code in response to a prompt about your current local problem, but
(2) can it reason about an entire code base of known and unknown problems, and use that basis to figure out solutions to the unknowns such that you delete code and collapse complexity.
The software equivalent of realising that if you subtract xy from this:
You can turn it into a much neater version: …but doing that with 100k tokens of code instead of a handful of algebra tokens.lukasb|1 year ago