What exactly is left when we remove coding from software engineering? Could it be handled by a manager? Or perhaps by a single senior SWE who could now perform the work of an entire team using these rapidly advancing AI coders?
for a lot of tasks that aren't as cut & dry, i often find myself having to provide it pseudo code, which it can then one-shot to working code.
don't get me wrong, it's still a massive upgrade from the pre-sonnet era, but i still don't think it can take a high-level requirement and convert it into a working project... yet
> but i still don't think it can take a high-level requirement and convert it into a working project.
It cannot, you need to hand-hold it, as in, to make something larger than a (albeit good looking) to do app, you don't need to write code , but you do need to be able to review and debug code and take the architectural decisions. It'll simply loop forever otherwise.
(1) Sure, it can tell you how to write new code in response to a prompt about your current local problem, but
(2) can it reason about an entire code base of known and unknown problems, and use that basis to figure out solutions to the unknowns such that you delete code and collapse complexity.
The software equivalent of realising that if you subtract xy from this:
x2 + 3xy + y2
You can turn it into a much neater version:
(x + y)2 + xy
…but doing that with 100k tokens of code instead of a handful of algebra tokens.
What exactly is left when we remove coding from software engineering? Could it be handled by a manager? Or perhaps by a single senior SWE who could now perform the work of an entire team using these rapidly advancing AI coders?
for a lot of tasks that aren't as cut & dry, i often find myself having to provide it pseudo code, which it can then one-shot to working code.
don't get me wrong, it's still a massive upgrade from the pre-sonnet era, but i still don't think it can take a high-level requirement and convert it into a working project... yet
> but i still don't think it can take a high-level requirement and convert it into a working project.
It cannot, you need to hand-hold it, as in, to make something larger than a (albeit good looking) to do app, you don't need to write code , but you do need to be able to review and debug code and take the architectural decisions. It'll simply loop forever otherwise.
It’s a good question. I would ask…
(1) Sure, it can tell you how to write new code in response to a prompt about your current local problem, but
(2) can it reason about an entire code base of known and unknown problems, and use that basis to figure out solutions to the unknowns such that you delete code and collapse complexity.
The software equivalent of realising that if you subtract xy from this:
You can turn it into a much neater version: …but doing that with 100k tokens of code instead of a handful of algebra tokens.I haven't had much luck with architecture stuff. Maybe I'm holding it wrong.