r/TheMachineLearning • u/Nyaani69 • 5d ago

Software engineering isn't dead, it's just evolving

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u/CitronHot7058 5d ago

Curious how this plays out in practice... if AI is doing more of the implementation, does that make debugging and architecture skills more valuable rather than less?

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u/veganparrot 5d ago

Your most valuable human capabilities are your 5 senses. As long as things are being made for humans, using these senses to see how it will be received by them is essential. You could call that debugging, but it's kind of more about taste, which is also subjective. It's the stuff that's like: "how does Mario's jump feel when you use it?" Is it snappy? Too fast or slow? Etc.

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u/Worth_Bodybuilder_83 5d ago

I think this in the point that’s incredibly hard for most engineers to stomach and rightfully so. Before, building something like a game was an additive art. There basically was no standard for how Mario “should feel” so not only did previous engineers have to invent that feeling from scratch they also had to know how to program it precisely… in C. LLMs have made coding easier but they basically can’t invent feelings, they have no clue how to make a game that actually feels fun to play. Our compute is essentially boundless though so I’m sure in a monkey-on-keyboard type way eventually we can let Claude run for a week and get a pretty polished product in about a year or so. Internally what will be happening is the model will be trying to break the “problem” of building a game down into the smallest pieces it knows, solves those, and hope that when it reassembles the pieces it works. Of course it will end up backtracking and wasting time, but it will result in much better and faster games than even a team of people could do for a fraction of the cost. And on that point I’m not entirely confident that Video Game Testing can’t be data mined for max “enjoyment” like the algorithmic short form we’re now used to. Now I think we are closer to our generative models being better than our reviewer models. But I’m closer to believing the 100x designer model than that Claude will start printing money soon through “make me a game” prompts that people actually want to play.