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mattlondonlast Wednesday at 4:29 PM3 repliesview on HN

"Coding" might be solved, but there is more to software engineering than just churning out code - i.e. what should we build? What are the requirements? Are they right? Whats the other dependencies we want to use - AWS or GCP for example? Why those and not others - whats the reason? How does this impact our users and how they use the system? What level of backwards/forwards compatibility do we want? How do we handle reliability? Failover? Backups? and so on and so on.

Some of these questions change slightly, since we might end up with "unlimited resources" (i.e. instead of having e.g. 5 engineers on a team who can only get X done per sprint, we effectively have near-limitless compute to use instead) so maybe the answer is "build everything on the wish-list in 1 day" to the "what should we prioritize" type questions?

Interesting times.

My gut is that software engineers will end up as glorified test engineers, coming up with test cases (even if not actually writing the code) and asking the AI to write code until it passes.


Replies

proof_by_vibeslast Wednesday at 4:55 PM

Testing in general is quickly being outmoded by formal verification. From my own gut, I see software engineering pivoting into consulting—wherein the deliverables are something akin to domain-specific languages that are tailored to a client's business needs.

static_voidlast Wednesday at 5:58 PM

Indeed, reasoning in the small and reasoning in the large are different skills. Architecture abstracts over code.

ldjkfkdsjnvlast Wednesday at 6:31 PM

Generally the product decisions are not given to the engineers. But yeah, engineers will be tuning, prodding, and poking ai systems to generate the code to match the business requirements.