The difficult part of software development has always been the continuing support. Did the chatbot setup a versioning system, a build system, a backup system, a ticketing system, unit tests, and help docs for users. Did it get a conflicting request from two different customers and intelligently resolve them? Was it given a vague problem description that it then had to get on a call with the customer to figure out and hunt down what the customer actually wanted before devising/implementing a solution?
This is the expensive part of software development. Hiring an outsourced, low-tier programmer for almost nothing has always been possible, the low-tier programmer being slightly cheaper doesn’t change the game in any meaningful way.
While I do agree that management is genuinely important in software dev:
If you can rewrite the codebase quickly enough, versioning matters a lot less. Its the idea of “is it faster to just rewrite this function/package than to debug it?” but at a much larger scale. And while I would be concerned about regressions from full rewrites of the code… have you ever used software? Regressions happen near constantly even with proper version control and testing…
As for testing and documentation: This is actually what AI-enhanced tools are good for today. These are the simple tasks you give to junior staff.
Conflicting requests and iterating on descriptions: Have you ever futzed around with chatgpt? That is what it lives off of. Ask a question, then ask a follow up question, and so forth.
I am still skeptical of having no humans in the loop. But all of this is very plausible even with today’s technology and training sets.
Just to add a bit more to that. I don’t think having an AI operated company is a good idea. Even ignoring the legal aspects of it, there is a lot of value to having a human who can make irrational decisions because one customer will pay more in the long run and so forth.
But I can definitely see entire departments being a node in a rack. Customers talk to humans (or a different LLM) which then talk to the “Network Stack” node and the “UI/UX” node and so forth.
The difficult part of software development has always been the continuing support. Did the chatbot setup a versioning system, a build system, a backup system, a ticketing system, unit tests, and help docs for users. Did it get a conflicting request from two different customers and intelligently resolve them? Was it given a vague problem description that it then had to get on a call with the customer to figure out and hunt down what the customer actually wanted before devising/implementing a solution?
This is the expensive part of software development. Hiring an outsourced, low-tier programmer for almost nothing has always been possible, the low-tier programmer being slightly cheaper doesn’t change the game in any meaningful way.
While I do agree that management is genuinely important in software dev:
If you can rewrite the codebase quickly enough, versioning matters a lot less. Its the idea of “is it faster to just rewrite this function/package than to debug it?” but at a much larger scale. And while I would be concerned about regressions from full rewrites of the code… have you ever used software? Regressions happen near constantly even with proper version control and testing…
As for testing and documentation: This is actually what AI-enhanced tools are good for today. These are the simple tasks you give to junior staff.
Conflicting requests and iterating on descriptions: Have you ever futzed around with chatgpt? That is what it lives off of. Ask a question, then ask a follow up question, and so forth.
I am still skeptical of having no humans in the loop. But all of this is very plausible even with today’s technology and training sets.
Just to add a bit more to that. I don’t think having an AI operated company is a good idea. Even ignoring the legal aspects of it, there is a lot of value to having a human who can make irrational decisions because one customer will pay more in the long run and so forth.
But I can definitely see entire departments being a node in a rack. Customers talk to humans (or a different LLM) which then talk to the “Network Stack” node and the “UI/UX” node and so forth.
Absolutely true, but many direction into implementing those solution with AIs.
Which is why plenty of companies merely pay lip service to it, or don’t do it at all and outsource it to ‘communities’