alt Hacker News> There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing.
So true.
Since Nov 30, 2022 everything has become… more complex.
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> They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing.
It's not really news, though. Programming as Theory Building (Peter Naur) was published in the 80s, I think?
Maybe the younger entrants to this field never came across it, but even if you never came across it, it was common knowledge amongst experienced devs that understanding of the system you are about to change is crucial.
I don't know. some stuff has gotten less. Major databases now ship effective HA tooling, microservices seem on their way out, structured databases seem to be back in instead of NoSQL.
HTML and pre-rendering are back in, HTMx, liveview
The degaussing of CSS and the hacks we did, hell i was trying to explain how we debugged web pages in IE6 to a younger staff member today.
Some things are more complex, some things got good enough to make them less complex.
>Since Nov 30, 2022 BC everything has become… more complex.
FTFY
Increasing complexity is the story of mankind. It's the story of civilization.
Someone from 20,000 BC would wander around the earth trying to find food, trying not to freeze, and trying not to get eaten. Someone from 5,000 BC would be trying to grow food, hoping it rains, and hoping disease didn't wipe out the village. The second one increases the complexity from all the systems required to manage people and keep the land growing. Today the vast majority of people on earth don't grow their own food at all, and instead are busy in some way managing the complexity of a large society.
Someone from 1970-80 would think our software from pre-llm days was vastly more complex. They'd just code directly to the hardware with no abstraction layer. Now almost no one does that. We abstracted the hardware away in most cases. With cryptography libraries for the vast majority of people it's complexity is abstracted away and mostly people are told "don't try to write your own crypto because you will fuck it up".
The question now becomes, how quickly will LLMs be able to coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing?
I feel like with software, things have gotten way too complicated (just layer's upon layers upon layers). But to deal with that complexity, now we're using something that just creates WAY more complexity. I've been coding for a while, and I remember the 90s and early 00s where people could make pretty powerful applications with like visual basic or php with essentially no formal training. Those technologies weren't great, but they were really simple and easy to pick up. In contrast, if you try to pick up web development or desktop app development today, it's absolutely overwhelming. Like, something like React is useful but the amount of things you need to know to use it properly is pretty high.
I think introducing AI to deal with this is overall a mistake though. We're just adding more complexity on top of the existing complexity. At best, it's a massive waste of hardware. At worst, we'll probably have agents introducing as many bugs as they fix as they also drown in complexity, and a lot of stuff built using these techniques are going to be fragile garbage while the overall skillset of humanity diminishes because people aren't learning the skills anymore.
Fundamentally, software does not need to be this complicated and it's a solvable problem, but it does require people that care about craftsmanship.