Theoretically a PM could say "the code is disposable and obsoleted by the next deployment. let's just document our prompts."

I don't know if that's a good idea but a lot of people are going to try it.

> As you say, by the time you specify everything, you've written the code

Sadly not when it’s a 2000 page word document with a million formatting quirks and so many copy-paste versions you don’t know if you should trust “reqs_new25”, “reqs_new25v1” or the x number of other copies floating around.

Someone should come up with a tex2fortran conversion LLM.

I think this erratic manner of trying to find the correct way is the issue. I am currently nearing my 2nd year at a company A in my industry, and while I did know they all kinda suck in their own special way, I honestly had no idea it was this bad until I had to try to make this craziness somehow work for us. Even if there are standards, I do not see people following them. Last year, the one girl, who did seem to try to follow some common sense approach, got fired for effectively using common sense against big boss wishes.

What I am saying it is a mess from beginning to end and I am honestly not sure if there is one factor that could solve it..

That was awesome.

You don't need a tool for that. "You're going to assist me in writing a detailed software spec in markdown. At each step adjust the document to incorporate new information. Suggest improvements and highlight areas which have been ignored so far. Initial description: ..."

If you have multiple of those, you can tell it about required sections / format, or provide a good past example.

In my experience, directly hiring (or hiring through a local company) developers in a “low-income country” - in my experience, Eastern Europe and Latin America - goes a lot better than just contracting out a body of work to a third party. Especially if your company is already fully remote, you’re able to get developers who integrate onto your team just like American devs, and are just as good at coding.

> Have we stopped, really?

No, when I was at a large, well-known company a year ago, job listings were 2:1 off-shore (India, South America) vs on-shore. There was also an increasing amount of contractors used, even for public-facing stuff you wouldn't expect.

The problem with outsourcing is on holding people accountable for a written specification. It's not on the location of the developers.

I don’t think this addresses the comment you’re replying to.

It’s sad you’re getting downvoted by gatekeepers. It’s absolutely a good thing that more people have access. Maybe not for inflated costal salaries and egos, however.

> it's just a matter of who can step back to see it

I’m not sure why those fully bought into the AI hype so often dismiss anyone who’s less bullish as simply too small-minded to see the writing on the wall.

That aside, while I do think software is going to change, I’m not sure that I agree with your particular version. What examples of apps with 100k, 500k+ LoC codebases are going to get decimated? The biggest successes in software today have moats around inventory or network effects. Are people going to make their own Netflix or Uber? Even at a smaller level, is the idea that local gym owners are going to replace gym management software with their own mini apps? Or restaurants are going to do their own point of sales apps? Unless AI can make the cost of maintaining software something close to zero time, which is a really tall order, why would business owners waste time on something outside of their core business. And if this is such an untapped opportunity why didn’t we see the start of it with the no-code movement?

Will a big chunk of the software market fall off and be replaced by custom mini apps that the layperson crafts with AI? Maybe? But I don’t see how one justifies the level of confidence I see from these predictions.

You are absolutely right

Because, as we all know, what is important about coding is outputting lines of code.

This is the main difficulty, this is were IA will change the game forever.

Thinking about the code you write, that's worthless, do not do that. Improving a large code base ? Again, no need to think to do that. Just inject random lines of code and it will do the trick.

Of course, in a world where your code has no value because it's just a copy/paste from elsewhere that has a low lifetime expectancy, IA is shinning.

But if you want something a bit more useful, a bit more clever, a bit more adapted to your use case, IA sucks. Because IA do not think.

IA is a threat to dev that do not think. Good ridance, they won't be missed.

Complexity is going up rather than down. Companies already solve simple problems with spreadsheets.