[HN Gopher] Software Development in the Time of New Angels
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Software Development in the Time of New Angels
Author : calosa
Score : 25 points
Date : 2025-11-03 19:10 UTC (9 days ago)
(HTM) web link (davegriffith.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (davegriffith.substack.com)
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Ah.. you got me. Put (AI) in the title or something.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The bit about Knight Capital implies that the software engineers
| were bad, which is notably untrue.
|
| "A bad [software engineer] can easily destroy that much value
| even faster (A developer at Knight Capital destroyed $440 million
| in 45 minutes with a deployment error and some bad configuration
| logic, instantly bankrupting the firm by reusing a flag
| variable). "
| hinkley wrote:
| There were decidedly shitty engineering decisions behind that
| dumpster fire.
|
| The biggest being that the only safe way to recycle feature
| flag names is to put ample time separation between the last use
| of the previous meaning for the flag and the first application
| of the new use. They did not. If they had, they would have
| noticed that one server was not getting redeployed properly in
| the time gap between the two uses.
|
| They also did not do a full rollback. They rolled back the code
| but not the toggles, which ignited the fire.
|
| These are rookie mistakes. If you want to argue they are
| journeyman mistakes, I won't fight you too much, but they
| absolutely demonstrate a lack of mastery of the problem domain.
| And when millions of dollars change hands per minute you'd
| better not be Faking it Til You Make It.
| charlieflowers wrote:
| Both the article's examples there are bogus -- yet in both
| cases the underlying points are true.
|
| Google generates a lot of revenue per employee not because the
| employees are good (though many of them are of course), but
| because they own the front door to the web. And the Knight
| Capital story has many nuances left out by that summary.
|
| In both cases the author needed a hard hitting but terse
| example. But as I said, both the claims are true, so in the
| voice of the courtroom judge, "I'll allow it."
| hdivider wrote:
| Here's what I don't understand.
|
| Developers who get excited by agentic development put out posts
| like this. (I get excited too.)
|
| Other developers tend to point out objections in terms of
| maintainability, scalability, overly complicated solutions, and
| so on. All of which are valid.
|
| However, this part of AI evolves very quickly. So given these are
| known problems, why shouldn't we expect rapid improvements in
| agentic AI systems for software development, to the point where
| software developers who stick with the old paradigm will indeed
| be eroded in time? I'm genuinely curious because clearly the
| speed of advancement is significant.
| vages wrote:
| Anecdotally, I find early mover advantage to be overrated (ask
| anyone who bought Betamax or HD-DVD players). It is
| significantly cheaper - on average - to exploit what you
| already know and learn from the mistakes of other, earlier
| movers.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| This is a very insightful article:
|
| "You might be expecting that here is where I would start
| proclaiming the death of software development. That I would start
| on how the strange new angels of agentic AI are simply going to
| replace us wholesale in order to feast on that $150/hour, and
| that it's time to consider alternative careers. I'm not going to
| do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Agentic AI means
| that anything you know to code can be coded very rapidly. Read
| that sentence carefully. If you know just what code needs to be
| created to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you
| that code at the cost of a prompt or two. The trouble comes in
| that most people don't know what code needs to be created to
| solve their problem, for any but the most trivial problems. Who
| does know what code would be needed to solve complex problems?
| Currently that's only known by software developers, development
| managers and product managers, three job classifications that are
| going to be merging rapidly."
| amflare wrote:
| This. AI is not replacing us, it is pulling the ladder up
| behind us.
| williamstein wrote:
| If I hired a software developer a few years ago, I might expect
| them to do roughly what Claude Code does today on some task (?).
| If I hired a dev today I would expect much more from them than
| what Claude Code can currently do.
| scuff3d wrote:
| The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on
| a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true.
| Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these
| things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't
| address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily
| basis.
|
| Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The
| current prices aren't sustainable long term and they don't have
| any viable path to reducing costs. If anything the cost of
| operations for the big company are going to get worse. They're in
| the "get 'em hooked" stage of the drug deal.
| simonw wrote:
| Completely agree on your first point: software development is
| _so much more_ than writing code. LLMs are a threat to
| programmers for whom the job is 8 hours a day of writing code
| to detailed specifications provided by other people. I can 't
| remember any point in my own career where I worked with people
| who got to do that.
|
| There's a great example of that in the linked post itself:
|
| > Let's build a property-based testing suite. It should create
| Java classes at random using the entire range of available Java
| features. These random classes should be checked to see whether
| they produce valid parse trees, satisfying a variety of
| invariants.
|
| Knowing what that means is worth $150/hour even if you don't
| type a single line of code to implement it yourself!
|
| And to be fair, the author makes that point themselves later
| on:
|
| > Agentic AI means that anything you know to code can be coded
| very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just
| what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the
| angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt or two.
| The trouble comes in that most people _don 't_ know what code
| needs to be created to solve their problem, for any but the
| most trivial problems.
|
| On your second point: I wouldn't recommend betting against
| costs continuing to fall. The cost reduction trend has been
| reliable over the past three years.
|
| In 2022 the best available models was GPT-3 text-davinci-003 at
| $60/million input tokens.
|
| GPT-5 today is $1.25/million input tokens - 48x cheaper for a
| _massively_ more capable model.
|
| ... and we already know it can be even cheaper. Kimi K2 came
| out two weeks ago benchmarking close to (possibly even above)
| GPT-5 and can be run at an even lower cost.
|
| I'm willing to bet there are still significantly more
| optimizations to be discovered, and prices will continue to
| drop - at least on a per-token basis.
|
| We're beginning to find more expensive ways to _use_ the models
| though. Coding Agents like Claude Code and Codex CLI can churn
| through tokens.
| scuff3d wrote:
| I get your point, but I don't think the pricing is long term
| viable. We're in the burn everything to the ground to earn
| market share phase. Once things start to stabilize and there
| is no more user growth, they'll start putting the screws to
| the users.
|
| I said the same thing about Netflix in 2015 and Gamepass in
| 2020. It might have taken a while but eventually it happened.
| And they're gonna have to raise prices higher and faster at
| some point.
| facundo_olano wrote:
| Willing to accept AI agents can replace programmers
|
| Not willing to accept ex-US devs can do a comparable job at half
| the price
| simonw wrote:
| It took me a while to get into it, but this is really good. You
| need to make it past the anecdote about building a property-based
| testing suite with Claude Code though, the real meat is in the
| second half.
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