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pragmatic 2 hours ago

Now run that loop 1000 times.

What does the code /system look like.

It is going to be more like evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose).

It will be fascinating to watch nonetheless.

skybrian 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, if all you ask it to do is fix bugs. You can also ask it to work on code health things like better organization, better testing, finding interesting invariants and enforcing them, and so on.

It's up to you what you want to prioritize.

xtracto 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I agree but want to interject that "code organization " won't matter for long.

Programming Languages were made for people. I'm old enough to have programmed in z80 and 8086 assembler. I've been through plenty of prog.langs. through my career.

But once building systems become prompting an agent to build a flow that reads these two types of excels, cleans them,filters them, merges them and outputs the result for the web (oh and make it interactive and highly available ) .

Code won't matter. You'll have other agents that check that the system is built right, you'll have agents that test the functionality and agents that ask and propose functionality and ideas.

Most likely the Programming language will become similar to the old Telegraph texts (telegrams) which were heavily optimized for word/token count. They will be optimized to be LLM grokable instead of human grokable.

Its going to be amazing.

smashed an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have some healthy skepticism on this claim though. Maybe, but there will be a point of diminishing returns where these refactors introduce more problems than they solve and just cause more AI spending.

Code is always a liability. More code just means more problems. There has never been a code generating tool that was any good. If you can have a tool generate the code, it means you can write something on a higher level of abstraction that would not need that code to begin with.

AI can be used to write this better quality / higher level code. That's the interesting part to me. Not churning out massive amounts of code, that's a mistake.

pragmatic an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Your assuming that scrum/agile/management won't take this over?

What stakeholder is prioritizing any of those things and paying for it out of their budget?

Code improvement projects are the White Whale of software engineering - obsessed over but rarely from a business point of view worth it.

finebalance 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose)."

Oh, I absolutely love this lens.