The consumer grade 3D printing is just now closing with the factory-level quality. Still not completely there. Is the quality difference similar vs. comparing human made software and LLM generated?
LLMs still do not have proper contextual understanding of their solutions. Just couple days ago I was using GPT 5.5 with xhigh to vide code some application, and yet it defaulted for sorting dates from new to old by using plain string comparison. Just one of the many bugs.
This absolutely fascinates me. I had a friend who needed subtitle files generating for audio and using in CapCut yesterday yet none of the available stuff was suitable, so he asked if I could adapt some of my software to export subtitles.
2 hours later he's got a fully working piece of local software that does exactly what he wants, yet yours is not able to even sort dates correctly. Feel free to download it if you want to see for yourself, I didn't even do any UI tweaks as this was just a tool for him to use:
> How can there be such a massive gap in what can be produced?
What I was doing looks really nice and mostly works on the surface, but it is all about the corner cases where these bugs appear. In another day I was able to generate Frida script with LLM help that bypasses Dart certificate pinning/validation and proxies all the traffic by injecting the runtime binaries. With the latest Flutter/Dart version on Android when doing security analysis.
Ahhh ok I totally understand what you mean. Yea the edge cases are absolutely where you start to feel the pain and things look good on the surface until you dig in. I think even in the age of LLMs the adage of 90% of the time is spent of the last 10% will ring true.
Sure an app can be built and spun up in an afternoon, but are you willing to spend another 6 months ironing out all those little bugs, tuning it a bit, testing, tweaking, testing etc.
There truly is not. Software engineering is not different in any meaningful way. Sure 30 years ago in waterfall land we were emulating the project management of engineering, with miserably expensive results. But it's all the same now. It's like differentiation between coding and programming, it's different in everyone's head.
If there is no difference, then it is just the result of everyone inflating the term in their CVs/LinkedIn etc.
Software developer typically is the one which builds typical CRUD app, front-end, back-end with database and something around that. Their main job is to make the software to apply clear business requirements on software level, while the software itself is not likely revolutionary. Or they are not the responsible ones to make it revolutionary. They provide code in demand.
Then there are engineers that may apply math problems to software and optimise and develop new algorithms, compilers etc. The software itself might be revolutionary and the business.
In a landscape like that, good luck proving to a hyper-cautious employer that you actually are a skilled software engineer and not just a larping ticket shuffler. In the near future, I fear the person who will decidedly be able to prove that with Olympiad placements or a swarm of unique side projects is the kind of person who might as well just go on and start his own tech startup. Most of us here at least have some track record of employment and seniority, I suspect brilliant junior engineers will be hopping from internship to internship like they do in top-level finance.
“Software developers” and “software engineers” distinction has the same energy when one uses to pat oneself on a back when they call themselves “expat” instead of an “immigrant”. You write code, all the huff and puff around “architecturing”, and “alignment”, and “knowing what to build” is just vapor. I’ve never met “software developer”, outside of online forums, who did “coding” and none of the latter.
Yep. "Developer" was already an inflation over "programmer".
Sometime in the late 2000s/early 2010s people started saying, oh, a programmer means you just type in the code to implement requirements, a developer actually understands and can create the requirements to meet the business needs! Like that wasn't what people were already doing for decades and calling "programming".
edit: I guess it was offshoring that encouraged the self-marketing as a "developer" (not one of those programmers you can get anywhere for cheap) just as AI is doing the same thing with "engineer"
Just changing words and saying (perhaps) that one is “just about code” and the other is about “architecture” rings hollow. LLMs can think (like submarines can swim) so the only question is how well.
And many of the papers in medical area are published with closed data because collecting that data is so expensive and everyone wants to hold onto it. Nobody can verify the results. Yet they are marked as "peer reviewed".
> The handful of megacorps that have access to the compute and troves of stolen IP to train their secret models on have no incentive to contribute back.
Meta and Anthropic both trained on pirated books and there were not required to destroy their models. I simply don't get it. It just encourages to do things first and see later what happens. Regulations are just a small business cost.
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