this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
41 points (91.8% liked)
Programming
18694 readers
105 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The only thing AI will replace is small, standalone scripts/programs. 99% of stuff companies actually write is highly integrated with existing code, special (sometimes obsolete) frameworks, open and closed source. The things they throw at you in interviews is generic scripts because they aren't telling you to read through 6k lines of korn shell scripts to actually understand and write their code. And they won't have you read and understand millions of lines of code, configs and makefiles to implement something new, in the interview.
He basically cheated on his little brother in Mario Kart and thinks he can now beat Verstappen on the real track. Bro needs to get a reality check in an actual work environment. Especially in a large company.
For now. Eventually, I'd expect LLMs to be better at ingesting the massive existing codebase and taking it into account and either planning an approach or spitting out the first iteration of code. Holding large amounts of a language in memory and adding to it is their whole thing.
They can context and predict contextually relevant symbols, but will they ever do so in a way that is consistently meaningful and accurate? I personally don't think so because an LLM is not a machine capable of logical reasoning. LLMs hallucinating is just them making bad predictions, and I don't think we're going to fix that regardless of the amount of context we give them. LLMs generating useful code in this context is like asking for perfect meteorological reports with our current understanding of weather systems in my opinion. It feels like any system capable of doing what you suggest needs to be able to actually generate its own model that matches the task it's performing.
Or not. I dunno, I'm just some idiot software dev on the internet who only has a small amount of domain knowledge and who shouldn't be commenting on shit like this without having had any coffee.
I don't think they necessarily need logical reasoning. Solid enough test cases, automated test plans, and the ability to use trial & error rapidly means that they can throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and release whatever sticks.
I've already seen some crazy stuff setup just with a customized model connected to a bunch of ADO pipelines that can shit out reasonably functional code, test, and release it autonomously. It's front-ended by a chatbot, where the devs can provide a requested tweak in plan English and have their webapp updated in a few minutes. Right now, there's a manual review/approval process in place, but this is using commodity shit in 2025. Imagine describing that scenario to someone in 2015 and tell me we can accurately predict the limitations there will be in 2035, '45, etc.
I don't think the industry's disappearing anytime soon, but I do think we'll see AI eating up some of the offshore/junior/mid-level work before I get to retire.