Sure, maybe step 2 can eventually be replaced by AI. But step 1? Why would the AI even conceive of the idea of doing a rewrite in the first place?

And rewriting is just an example. There are tons of architectural decisions that need to be made every day in the building of advanced software. This is no "correct" way to do it that the AI can know in advance, it's a technical decision to be made by an engineer.

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satvikpendem a day ago | parent [-]

Maybe it sees a bunch of segfaults in the Zig codebase and decides a memory safe language is better, just as the human did in Bun's rewrite. I'm not sure why you think it wouldn't have been able to conceive a rewrite.

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znnajdla a day ago | parent [-]

Such an AI would be unusable in production because there is no bound on the work that can be created and external side effects that could happen. All projects have real world constraints and side effects, budget, customer requirements, etc. Imagine a non-technical person prompting the AI "make the app faster and fix all the bugs" and the AI autonomously decides to rewrite the whole production app and all its dependencies in Rust that is live and serving thousands of users. Doing a full rewrite would take days to execute, and have all sorts of side effects on the actual users during deployment (even if it was done 100% correctly, work has to be paused, affairs need to be coordinated with real customers, etc.). Even if the AI has that capability (and I do believe it is possible, even with today's models), that's not what a business owner wants. You don't want to use an AI which, if you gave it a 3 word prompt, it could suddenly decide on its own to rewrite your whole entire business. An AI that had that much autonomy could just decide on its own to pivot your whole startup and sell something else. A business owner wouldn't even want to use such an AI which could have such large unbounded side effects.

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dogcomplex 20 hours ago | parent [-]

You are essentially describing an over-eager developer having to run decisions up the chain of command to senior devs / product owners / company execs. I assure you, every one of those roles is being trained on to balance their own wide breadth of concerns, and is unlikely to advise something like a live rewrite of a production app or an entire product pivot - unless it actually made sense from an economics/management perspective. Every step bounded by its role and responsibilities.

Turtles all the way up, and all the way down. AI getting this good at coding means it's a hop skip and a jump away from being this good at every white collar role.

	▲	znnajdla 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but the entire point is, you can't have a reasonable chain of command or any kind of sensible decision process without human judgement that has engineering expertise, so no, engineers are not going to be entirely replaced. The reason human judgement is necessary is not because it's "better". It's because the entire reason the business exists is to execute the human's judgement. There is no "right or wrong" way to build a startup if different paths are all profitable, but the human decides what they want to do. Could Bun have survived and done well even if they didn't rewrite the codebase in Rust? Yes, it would've been fine. But the human decided they wanted Rust, that's a different path they chose with different tradeoffs. The AI has no skin in the game , no ownership, it doesn't belong to the AI. The AI only exists to serve the human. And if the human wants to make good decisions, inevitably they need engineering expertise (or an engineer) to weigh the decision.