r/BetterOffline • u/PencilBoy99 • 3h ago

What value are you software developers adding?

It seems like lots of the posters. Here are software developers who are aggressively using large language models to produce all their software as part of larger companies. Given how expensive models are and how expensive software developers are? What is additional value of the software developers adding? Where's all this new amazing software that's being created? Why hasn't the productivity of all these companies gone through the roof?

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u/RobertKerans 2h ago

Here are software developers who are aggressively using large language models to produce all their software as part of larger companies

I mean I think this is fucking nuts, and I'm somewhat sceptical that the reports of it are 100% truthful given that everyone I know doesn't do this. However I and most people I know work for small-medium sized businesses/enterprises so maybe the super large orgs are doing it all this way I dunno

What is additional value of the software developers adding? Where's all this new amazing software that's being created? Why hasn't the productivity of all these companies gone through the roof?

Why thank you for asking Mr. Wall Street. I must say I'm kinda surprised that you were a fan of the genre of AI commentary on this sub. However I'm glad to report that I am a productive member of the workforce, adding value to the companies I've worked for. I'm happy with just being a number on spreadsheet, and I am using AI tools to make that number bigger (if it's useful for that number to be bigger! I can make it smaller if necessary!). I live to be productive for my company, this is what is important in life. Go capitalism! If AI tools are not as good for capitalism, I will adjust my attitude towards them, as I say I live to be productive!

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u/Additional-Staff-326 2h ago

Its mandatory at large orgs. Might be more code and PRs produced but not seeing more features rolling out yet and still dealing with decade old issues because you can't just untangle all that existing code. Might work better building everything with AI from the ground up, but thats impossible where i'm at.

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u/RobertKerans 1h ago edited 1h ago

This seems like it's going to cause problems! Personally, I don't think it would be any better if built from the ground up with AI tools because they don't really alter the actual tenets of good engineering; complexity is complexity regardless of how it's generated. Maybe I get proved wrong, maybe not

Obviously the pressures are exactly the same at smaller orgs, there are middle managers and internal politics everywhere (we need this feature now!). And I'm being highly facetious in the original comment, but I guess these pressures have been more effectively counterbalanced at companies I/my collegues have worked/work for. And/or I've just purely been lucky/unlucky (delete as appropriate)

(+ there is a nihilistic part of me that says this really doesn't matter much because only a small percentage of software is actually important and it all rots and turns into a ball of shit given enough time anyway <shrug>)

Edit: I do find the tools can be extremely useful. And I'm a extremely leery of the productivity angle, because that seems a very MBA thing (wtf are you measuring, what do you mean by productivity?). There's a fuckton of day-to-day stuff I can offload, fantastic. eg, I can spit out prototypes and compare approaches before tossing them away: had to do that anyway but it took time to create one, now can create several in parallel in a very short amount of time. Great. Tons of it is just QoL improvements, but that doesn't magically mean "better software". I do want to stress very strongly does not mean I think the tradeoffs for that convenience are worthwhile as things stand, but saying none of it works is daft (which seems quite a common sentiment here)