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Comment by rnd33 | Hacker News Reader

Great article. I feel most people, even great software engineers, seem to lack the intuitive understanding that building software is essentially modeling a system, and that every model faces the same limit: the number of interactions between its part grows combinatorially as the system grows. If some of those parts or interactions produce no value (bloat), then complexity is added for no gain. This is true regardless of who created the model or wrote the code.

Instead they seem to think that AI can someone work around what is essentially laws of nature.

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Yes, I don't think many software devs have a proper conception of what it is they are actually doing. They view their job mostly as "make computer do thing" and not "model and represent some aspect of reality as a system of computable functions". Yes I know it sounds overly academized and pedantic but there actually is a huge difference in these perspectives and imo it's only when you adopt something closer to the latter that engineering really happens.

Software _engineering_ disappeared quite a long time ago.

Enough don't realise they shouldn't write to certain folders unless a framework constrains them.

What do you mean your users don't have admin access?

If anything I’ve seen AI become a multiplier. The low initial cost to add new features eliminates the only brake many organizations have on accumulation of bloat.

Laziness is a feature and a very important filter to have in a software engineer. Imagine having in the team a lot of eager (AI) developers that are able to implement in seconds the most overcomplicated or ultimately useless features that will still have to be tested and maintained for years, with no cost-benefit analysis ever made. All it takes is a project manager to have a random idea on a whim, to have to drag it along forevermore.

We're gonna see a bloat epidemic in software like never before.

Perhaps we already are seeing it. I know that we of the orange website get excited at how fast we can churn out work product nowadays. But when the non-tech people in my life have anything to say about it, it’s that they wish it would stop. They see the constant churn as annoying change for the sake of change, and there’s a general sense that lately computers have been getting harder to use.

The worst developers to have on your project produce shitty code quickly.

Spoiler alert: Laziness is one of the most important factors for driving the creation of coherence. We have a deep biological desire to do things faster/better/lazier. Will be digging into this more in Open Capital.

There's also the way AI itself tends to work: In my experience it very rarely refactors existing code when it's adding something new.

AI tends to layer new code on top and you get a steaming mess very quickly if you aren't careful.

I’ve used a harness that had no compunctions about deciding for itself when to refactor existing code. It was not a better experience.

And migrating from one system-model to another is an additional system-model - the building of which is an even rarer skillset.

> Instead they seem to think that AI can someone work around what is essentially laws of nature.

There's a lot of magical thinking about AI's present and future capabilities.

In a team, the contributor thinks of the value of his own feature, but not the complexity it adds to the whole. A reviewer needs to do that. Preferably at the planning stage. It is a tough to tell people not to add a feature, but it has to be done.

When I'm reviewing AI code I worry about complexity more than anything; correctness is relatively easier to assure, whereas complexity is a value judgment.

> Instead they seem to think that AI can someone work around what is essentially laws of nature.

I am not. I am just assuming that whatever approximation humans can build, a robot could do better.

Ex falso quodlibet.

(note that your comment uses present tense)

How does that apply here?

Saying that a robot could get closer to the limit than a human is not saying the limit doesn't exist?

I'm not heavy pro-ai but I don't see how its a contradiction.

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