Software Engineers Are Facing an Existential Crisis As They Drown In Horrendous AI Code (Futurism, 6/25)

[Disaffected]

8. That doesn't surprise me.

Producing a computer program/sw is much more than just coding - coding is often the easiest part. The more demanding parts are:

1. defining the functionality of the program i.e. what it is supposed to accomplish. We used to call that the BSD (Business System Design) and was always completed & approved before any "programming" was performed.

2. the System Analysis portion i.e. defining the program logic, computer resources required etc.

3. after the coding, the testing and debugging then follow (the testing and debugging being as important as any other stage).

4. documentation, both user and programming - often neglected but equally important.

As an example, I developed a browser app (HTML coding) that turned out to be about 5,000 lines of code. The AI agent Claude Opus produced that code in far less time that it would have taken me to even type it in. And, after a bit of enhancing & debugging, it worked fine. I was literally amazed at how well it worked - it even made a number of useful suggestions for improving the app. And it was dirt cheap - I cost about $20.