alt Hacker NewsSeems to me that - optimistically - this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role, and that the actual implementation is done by AI. In the same way in other areas, engineering and implementation differ and implementation can be (and is) automated.
No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “old school” techniques are having a renaissance while we figure out how to distribute load between people and AI.
Replies
Personally my experience has been that once I manage to describe a problem in good enough detail that a junior engineer would be able to solve it, it's good enough for an LLM as well.
Which creates incentives I'm not wholly comfortable with, but the fact is that I'm more productive now alone, than I used to be in a team.
> this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role
If only you knew how the civil engineering sausage was made.
The amount of yolo'ing stuff based on vibes goes up when testing is expensive/impractical. They just paper over it all with disclaimers of the sort that would get laughed at for being non-starters in the software industry.
That sounds right, but it can be superbly wrong because that presupposes that you can debug what the AI gets very confidently wrong.
There are three legs to the stool: specification, implementation, and verification. Implementation and verification both take low-level knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of how things break.