Beating humans isnt really what matters. Its enabling developers to design who cant.
Last month I had a staff member design and build a distributed system that would be far beyond their capabilities without AI assistance. As a business owner this allows me to reduce the dependency and power of the senior devs.
Why? We fully checked the design, what he built, and it was fully tested over weeks for security and stability.
Don't parrot what you read online that these systems are unable do this stuff. It's from the clueless or devs coping. Not only are they capable but theyre improving by the month.
Oh, they are definitely capable, I am using them every day, and build my own MCP servers. But you cannot test a distributed system "fully". The only test I believe in is understanding every single line of code myself, or knowing that somebody else does. At this point, I don't trust the AI for anything, although it makes a very valuable assistant.
Very soon our AI built software systems will break down in spectacular and never before seen ways, and I'll have the product to help with that.
I have no idea why you think you can't test a distributed system. Hopefully you are not in the business of software development. You certainly wouldnt be working at my company.
Secondly, people are not just blindly having AI write code with no idea how it works. The AI is acting as a senior consultant helping the developer to design and build the systems and generating parts of the code as they work together.
I'm very confused by this. I have in no way seen AI that can act as a senior consultant to any professional software engineer. I work with AI all the time and am not doubting that it is very useful, but this seems like dreaming to me. It frequently gets confused and doesn't understand the bigger picture, particularly when large contexts are involved. Solving small problems it is often helpful but I can't imagine how anyone could believe it is in any way a replacement for a senior engineer in its current form.
I can't tell on this site who has genuinely experienced radical changes in software development from dedicated LLM usage, and who is trying to sell something. But given previous hype cycles with all exciting new tech at the time, including past iterations of AI, I tend to believe it's more in the trying to sell something camp.
Well, youre right to be skeptical because the majority of "AI" going on is hype designed for the purposes of either a scam, getting easy investment funds or inflating company valuations.
But.. the capabilities (and rate of progression) of these top tier LLMs isn't hype.
Its his and his managers product, so yes. We don't care if they code it, don't code it, whether an AI builds it or a cheap Indian. Theyre still responsible.
Last month I had a staff member design and build a distributed system that would be far beyond their capabilities without AI assistance. As a business owner this allows me to reduce the dependency and power of the senior devs.