Matt Garman sees a shift in software development as AI automates coding, telling staff to enhance product-management skills to stay competitive.

  • captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    25 days ago

    In a leaked recording, Amazon cloud chief admits he doesn’t understand software development, also doesn’t understand the current AI offerings’ capabilities, and just wants the Amazon stock price to rise so he can buy a bigger boat.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    25 days ago

    Fucking hell, 80% of my job is finding out what the requirements are. 20% is then using a specialized language to write down all these requirements and the thousands of decisions I make on how to meet them.

    If AI somehow replaces those 20% coding,

    • I still have to do 80% of my job, and
    • I still have to tell the AI all this shit, just this time in natural language, which is awful for codifying requirements.

    How is this guy a manager, but has no idea what a software engineer does all day?

    • astrsk@fedia.io
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      25 days ago

      This is why engineering managers need to come from engineering. If they couldn’t help out in the codebase in an emergency situation, they shouldn’t be making decisions like this. It’s not unreasonable for ELT to ask questions about this but if their reporters are not telling them the truth, the whole structure is broken.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        25 days ago

        But without ignorant, self-congratulating MBAs to artificially reduce productivity to maintain the illusion of constant growth, companies would make safer products with greater care and understanding of the entire process holistically, and you can’t pay your shareholders in understanding.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      25 days ago

      Why maintain code? Just describe the program you want in a query and then every time it might need maintenance, you just tell it to generate anew.

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        25 days ago

        You can add “Don’t have bugs” to the prompt to ensure the application continues to run smoothly.

  • mashbooq@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    25 days ago

    The only person in my company using AI to code writes stuff with tons of memory leaks that require two experienced programmers to fix. (To be fair, I don’t think he included “don’t have memory leaks” in the prompt.)

    • Repple (she/her)@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      25 days ago

      I’m amazed how overstated llm ability to program is. I keep trying, and I’ve yet to have any model output so much as a single function that ran correctly without modification. Beyond that it has made up APIs when I’ve asked about approaches to problems, and I’ve given it code to find bugs and memory issues I think are fairly obvious and it fails every time.

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        25 days ago

        It really depends on the domain. E.g. I wrote a parser and copilot was tremendously useful, presumably because there are a gazillion examples on the internet.

        Another case where it saved me literally hours was spawning a subprocess in C++ and capturing stdin/out. It didn’t get it 100% right but it saved me so much time looking up how to do it and the names of functions etc.

        Today I’m trying to write a custom image format, and it is pretty useless for that task, presumably because nobody else has done it before.

        • Repple (she/her)@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          25 days ago

          This makes sense, I’ve largely been trying to use it for things I do regularly, and I’m pretty senior, having been in the industry for some time, so I tend not to be asking the questions that will have a million examples out there. But then again, these are the sorts of things that it will need to be able to do to replace people in industry.