alt Hacker NewsThe same could be said of Software. Instead of giving up on creating novel projects and instead just taking other peoples ideas and porting them to Rust, we could be embracing AI to push software and computers farther.
Im not sure how that will work, but im convinced the current paradigm of just pushing agents into codebases for not much reason other than you can is going to make building software incredibly boring and push creative people away from the field and stagnate progress.
My prediction is software gets boring and building hardware projects will be the new frontier for creative engineers looking to push computing further. Which is probably a good thing.
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I was about to comment the same.
People wrote many books about software engineering, all from valuable experience from buildng expensive software systems. But in the age of AI, is there still anything learnable from generated code?
Personally I always ask AI to summarize its findings and lessons in a .md file. And I always learn something from it.
But could AI utilize some new patterns and paradigms I wasn't aware of? Very likely. Because we only learn from our personal grave mistakes, a summary from others gets neglected and forgotten
> same could be said of Software
Sort of. An elegant proof is useful beyond what it shows. It hints at new mathematics, and can prompt discovery in applied fields. I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.
I do agree with you, although I think that there may be still some advancement available in software in terms of programming languages or novel architecture design. But frontier is much more around hardware, just thinking about computing power, electrical transmission, material constraints on power, connectivity, insulation. I would definitely advise kids to study physics and materials engineering than CS.
But these days hardware is software. One microcontroller replaces so much electronics. Software is eating the world, as the man said.
Models have limits too, I don't think software will become boring. I think it'll become more interesting, in the not so distant future one software engineer will be able to do so much more than today.
What new things are even left to discover in software? You can still use C for all the backend stuff and I don’t think all the endless stream of front end frameworks and libraries are all that innovative. I think the only tangible innovations we’ve made over the last few decades have been in infrastructure management. All heavy lifting is done by mathematics anyways.
Originally the word computer described a person doing the act of computation.
I believe in the future, we're going to see a similar shift in "programmer" - instead of a human programming the computer, you'll give the ai an idea and it will spit out a program.
And just like how automating the act of computation revolutionized what we could compute, automating the act of writing code will change the act of programming - hopefully, as you described, allowing us to do things that simply were not practical in the past.