alt Hacker NewsThis essay, like so many others, mistakes the task of "building" software with the task of "writing" software. Anyone in the world can already get cheap, mass-produced software to do almost anything they want their computer to do. Compilers spit out new build of any program on demand within seconds, and you can usually get both source code and pre-compiled copies over the internet. The "industrial process" (as TFA puts it) of production and distribution is already handled perfectly well by CI/CD systems and CDNs.
What software developers actually do is closer to the role of an architect in construction or a design engineer in manufacturing. They design new blueprints for the compilers to churn out. Like any design job, this needs some actual taste and insight into the particular circumstances. That has always been the difficult part of commercial software production and LLMs generally don't help with that.
It's like thinking the greatest barrier to producing the next great Russian literary novel is not speaking Russian. That is merely the first and easiest barrier, but after learning the language you are still no Tolstoy.
Replies
I also wonder about the process.
I've worked for a lot of people involved in the process happily request their software get turned into spaghetti. Often because some business process "can't" be changed, but mostly because decision makers do not know / understand what they're asking in a larger scheme of things.
A good engineer can help mitigate that, but only so much. So you end up with industrial sludge to some extent anyway if people in the process are not thoughtful.
> It's like thinking the greatest barrier to producing the next great Russian literary novel is not speaking Russian.
The article is very clearly not saying anything like that. It's saying the greatest barrier to making throwaway comments on Russian social media is not speaking Russian.
Roughly the entire article is about LLMs making it much cheaper to make low quality software. It's not about masterpieces.
And I think it's generally true of all forms of generative AI, what these things excel at the most is producing things that weren't valuable enough to produce before. Throwaway scripts for some task you'd just have done manually before is a really positive example that probably many here are familiar with.
But making stuff that wasn't worth making before isn't necessarily good! In some cases it is, but it really sucks if we have garbage blog posts and readmes and PRs flooding our communication channels because it's suddenly cheaper to produce than whatever minimal value someone gets out of hoisting it on us.
> It's like thinking the greatest barrier to producing the next great Russian literary novel is not speaking Russian. That is merely the first and easiest barrier, but after learning the language you are still no Tolstoy.
And what do you feel is the role of universities? Certainly not just to learn the language right? I'm going through a computer engineering degree and sometimes I feel completely lost with an urge to give up on everything, even though I am still interested in technology.
I have for a long time been saying software is a new form of literacy - and I really need to finish writing the book !
You're getting caught up on the technical meaning of terms rather than what the author actually wrote.
Theyre explicitly saying that most software will no longer be artisianal - a great literary novel - and instead become industrialized - mass produced paperback garbage books. But also saying that good software, like literature, will continue to exist.