Post

It is a little weird doing software development for a living these days. On the one hand I know the complexity of keeping software running, safe, and useful in a big organization full of politics, and I navigate that with my team every day. On the other hand... (1/n)

...my LinkedIn and all meet ups I see is chock full of middle management bragging about the toy applications they vibe coded, and the LLM salesmen everywhere bragging about their completely unsafe agents that they say are taking over coding... and the math is not mathing for me. R

Real life software development is so complex because people are complex and organizations are complex and the business itself is complex and laws are complex and security is complex and build pipelines are complex and technical debt is complex... And these effing LLMS suck at all of that!

It feels like living in the fairytale of the Emperors' new clothes. I don't see the pathway where this stuff takes over software development. It's a tool. It has its place. Some things it can do. But there's really a lot of things it should not.

0 reposts0 likes

The sausage salesmen are always gonna tell you their sausage is good for you. Sam Altman is a great sausage salesman. Doesn't mean every chef in the world is gonna lose their job. Typing the damn code is not the hard part of software development.

Also, us humans have an amazing advantage over LLMs when it comes to complexity; we can look at the problem and say "I don't know how to solve this. Let's try to break it down" instead of generating a trillion tokens of bullshit.

I tell the you’re-gonna-lose-your-job AI zealots that my job is coding in the same sense that their job is making PowerPoint presentations.