Plus there’s the problem of a limited context window. Real software projects are spread across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of files. Then they are deployed, sometimes compiled, run on a variety of devices and clients, and need to meet a couple dozen criteria to be acceptable, even more to be great. The AI can’t track all of that and your request too, its context window is far too small. It can barely track a single file and your request, plus request changes. Tracking all of this from day-to-day, over months and years is just one part of an engineer’s job, and it’s going to be a long time before an AI can do that one small part of the job. Ask an AI why some part of the project was changed 12 months ago. Just try it. It’ll evaluate the code, try to reason, and make something up. Ask a person and they’ll remember the exact reason why, both in the context of the requested change and the coding project limitations.
“Ask a person and they’ll remember the exact reason why, both in the context of the requested change and the coding project limitations.”
Or if it’s something that they don’t directly know, they’ll know who will know. There’s a knowledge accountability chain that evolves out of pragmatic necessity and AI simply can’t replace that
I’m sure some day someone will build a complete system with a change request log and all that, but it’s not there yet, and I hope it doesn’t get here before I’m retired, or me and my family might be in big trouble.
Plus there’s the problem of a limited context window. Real software projects are spread across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of files. Then they are deployed, sometimes compiled, run on a variety of devices and clients, and need to meet a couple dozen criteria to be acceptable, even more to be great. The AI can’t track all of that and your request too, its context window is far too small. It can barely track a single file and your request, plus request changes. Tracking all of this from day-to-day, over months and years is just one part of an engineer’s job, and it’s going to be a long time before an AI can do that one small part of the job. Ask an AI why some part of the project was changed 12 months ago. Just try it. It’ll evaluate the code, try to reason, and make something up. Ask a person and they’ll remember the exact reason why, both in the context of the requested change and the coding project limitations.
Or if it’s something that they don’t directly know, they’ll know who will know. There’s a knowledge accountability chain that evolves out of pragmatic necessity and AI simply can’t replace that
I’m sure some day someone will build a complete system with a change request log and all that, but it’s not there yet, and I hope it doesn’t get here before I’m retired, or me and my family might be in big trouble.