LOL! The first thing that came to my head was, "I've never had a CEO that shouldn't be in jail. Well, except for the current one. He seems okay. The others committed fraud and deceit at a level that would surely have them on the wrong side of the law, if not in prison.
Kind of stems from every CEO except this latest one has been a. Some sort of mental, and b. some sort of sociopath. We can see this with our big name CEOs of course, but even these small-time CEOs have the same problem. They're lacking something human, but that is also part of what drives them, and keeps them, CEOs, I suspect. It's a job that requires you to not have any qualms about taking a group of people on a ride and then screwing them over for your benefit.
Yea, seen that too. But also seen good CEOs. Go for a smaller company, smaller companies are much more diverse (in both good and bad ways), and it's not hard to find a team with an awesome top management who does not want to screw anyone over.
The future is already here. Been working a few years at a subsidiary of a large corporation where the entire hierarchy of companies is pushing AI hard, at different levels of complexity, from office work up through software development. Regular company meetings across companies and divisions to discuss methods and progress. Overall not a bad strategy and it's paying dividends.
A experiment was tried on a large and very intractable code-base of C++, Visual Basic, classic .asp, and SQL Server, with three different reporting systems attached to it. The reporting systems were crazy being controlled by giant XML files with complex namespaces and no-nos like the order of the nodes mattering. It had been maintained by offshore developers for maybe 10 years or more. The application was originally created over 25 years ago. They wanted to replace it with modern technology, but they estimated it'd take 7 years(!). So they just threw a team at it and said, "Just use prompts to AI and hand code minimally and see how far you get."
And they did wonderfully (and this is before the latest Claude improvements and agents) and they managed to create a minimal replacement in just two months (two or maybe three developers full time I think was the level of effort). This was touted at a meeting and given the approval for further development. At the meeting I specifically asked, "You only maintain this with prompts?" "Yes," they said, "we just iterate through repeated prompts to refine the code."
It has all mostly been abandoned a few months later. Parts of it are being reused, attempting a kind of "work in from the edges" approach to replacing parts of the system, but mostly it's dead.
We are yet to have a postmortem on this whole thing, but I've talked to the developers, and they essentially made a different intractable problem of repeated prompting breaking existing features when attempting to apply fixes or add features. And breaking in really subtle and hard to discern ways. The AI created unit tests didn't often find these bugs, either. They really tried a lot of angles trying to sort it out - complex .md files, breaking up the monolith to make the AI have less context to track, gross simplification of existing features, and so on. These are smarty-pants developers, too, people who know their stuff, got better than BS's, and they themselves were at first surprised at their success, then not so surprised later at the eventual result.
There was also a cost angle that became intractable. Coding like that was expensive. There was a lot of hand-wringing from managers over how much it was costing in "tokens" and whatever else. I pointed out if it's less cost than 7 years of development you're ahead of the game, which they pointed out it would be a cost spread over 7 years, not in 1 year. I'm not an accountant, but apparently that makes a difference.
I don't necessarily consider it a failed experiment, because we all learned a lot about how to better do our software development with AI. They swung for the fences but just got a double.
Of course this will all get better, but I wonder if it'll ever get there like we envision, with the Star Trek, "Computer, made me a sandwich," method of software development. The takeaway from all this is you still have to "know your code" for things that are non-trivial, and really, you can go a few steps above non-trivial. You can go a long way not looking to close at the LLM output, but there is a point at which it starts to be friction.
As a side note, not really related to the OP, but the UI cooked up by the LLMs was an interesting "card" looking kind of thing, actually pretty nice to look at and use. Then, when searching for a wiki for the Ball x Pit game, I noticed that some of the wikis very closely resembled the UI for the application. Now I see variations of it all over the internet. I wonder if the LLMs "converge" on a particular UI if not given specific instructions?
This is the siren song of llm. "Look how much progress we made"
Effort increases as time to completion decreases. The last 10% of the project takes 90% of the effort as you try to finish up, deploy,integrate and find the gaps.
Llms are woefully incapable of that as that knowledge doesn't exist in a markdown file. It's in people's heads and you have to pry it out with a crowbar or as happens to so many projects, they get released and no one uses it.
See Google et Al. "We failed to find market fit on the 15th iteration of our chat app, we'll do better next time"
I've noticed this in my small scale tests. Basically the larger the prompt gets (and it includes all the previously generated code because that's what you want to add features to), the more likely is that the LLM will go off the rails. Or forget the beginning of the context. Or go into a loop.
Now if you're using a lot of separate prompts where you draw from whatever the network was trained on and not from code that's in the prompt, you can get usable stuff out of it. But that won't build you the whole application.
Then you're going to need to invent an android with a awesome set of secondary sexual characteristics then, cause otherwise your idea is going nowhere. Mojo Nixon has your number: https://youtu.be/jz8ea8S5UH8?si=TIKuZmpIz3f9U-cX
Just making sure there is less noise when they start (already started) using U.S.-armed U.S. forces here in the U.S. to oppress people they don't like - non-Magazis, people without white skin, non-Christians, non-straight, and the poor. It's a lot quieter to disappear people when no one can report it and there isn't anyone to appeal to anyway.
Who's going to protect you now America? Federal government, police, your Mom? Nope nope nope. You noodle armed programmer geeks need to break out your 2nd Amendment rights and get strapped.
I hope that we never have to find out how ferocious the quiet, "leave me alone", armed populous is. I feel we are on that path and grouping people as the other just fuels the fire.
It will never ever ever happen, because the nearly the entire software industry actively works against anything that inhibits pace of development.
Software is mostly created by businesses. Business want to make money above all else. Creating software needs to take the absolute minimum amount of time and money and quality, both in code and the program functioning itself, is an afterthought.
Because software isn't a tangible product, like a car or a bridge or a building, there is a prejudice against having certification for the engineers. It's not "important" like tangible objects that easily (most of the time) have their flaws exposed. Less important means less emphasis on craft, and you shouldn't need a certificate to prove you can add code to a project.
This cat has been out of the bag for so long it's just preposterous to think it will change. The current model of, "just get anything that can move the project forward," be it offshore, AI, hordes, long hours, whatever, will always be the strategy.
If you want quality write it for yourself. Early on in my career I built a carefully curated set of moonlight clients that my employer(s) did not know about. Here I wrote high quality software on my own timelines, emphasizing quality over everything else, because I am a one man team and don't have time for support. Now those clients pay me more each month than my employer. Most months I just get a check in the mail and don't have to do anything. As one said, "It just keeps working and we even forget it's there." (most of the software is integration related).
So it can be done, you just have to have the priority be different than a business that is in it for the money alone.
Let me share an anecdotal but very telling story about this attitude of more work is better work.
I have been a software developer for 30+ years now, and I have avoided working outside the 8-5 hours at every opportunity. I had bosses who very much chaffed at this, who were spending literally their entire lives working, and wish that we drones did the same.
I didn't, I just didn't show up if such a thing was expected, and made sure my work was good enough that they wouldn't think to fire me.
Now, I spent time with my kids, I stayed healthy and happy. My wife adores me for the time we spend together. The loss - nothing. I invested my income wisely, low risk, starting in my 20's, and am now sitting 9 million in assets and cash.
My bosses? One divorced, alienated from their kids, their companies sold and disassembled, and super sadly then contracting cancer because they could never give up their cigarettes with the level of stress they felt. They'll never get to enjoy the money from their sold company, they'll never get their family back.
Another, shunned by all their ex-employees, their own children (and grandchildren), suffering from the need to "get back in the game" when they're way past their prime, and when they were near useless at their job before anyway. But they worked all the time!
And another (years after I worked for them), fresh from a failed startup where they had invested all their money, and convinced their friends and family to invest, and having to lay off their entire staff after a failed pivot where they worked 24/7 for 5 years, going slightly nuts and now living in a commune in Massachusetts.
You get one life folks. I don't care if you're having the time of your life with your 24/7 job/startup you love so much. It's like taking drugs - it's great while you're doing it, but the repercussions come later in life. And they're awful.
Thanks for sharing! I think another comment pointed out, no one on their death bed ever said "I wish I had worked more."
I like working. I like making money. But I love my wife and daughter. As long as our needs are covered, and honestly, a lot of our wants, and save enough for retirement/emergency, I see no need to overwork myself.
I hope the working class just rejects this notion altogether. This is toxic for our society. If people don't push back, then companies will keep asking for more and more and it affects everyone.
Kind of stems from every CEO except this latest one has been a. Some sort of mental, and b. some sort of sociopath. We can see this with our big name CEOs of course, but even these small-time CEOs have the same problem. They're lacking something human, but that is also part of what drives them, and keeps them, CEOs, I suspect. It's a job that requires you to not have any qualms about taking a group of people on a ride and then screwing them over for your benefit.