If you’re in software engineering, pivot to software architecting.
fwiw, architecting feels to me easier than coding (I like doing both). I have some guesses on why it doesn’t feel like this to most people (architecting is imo somewhat taught wrong, somewhat a gated topic, has less feedback in real life), but I don’t think this will stand up to AIs for long and I would even work on building an agent that is good at architecture myself if I thought it would have a positive impact.
If o3/o4 aren’t “spontaneously” good at architecture, then I expect it’s because openAI didn’t figure out (or try to figure out) how to train on relevant data, not many people write down their thoughts as they’re planning a new architecture. What data will they use, system design interviews? but to be fair, this is a similar pushback to “there’s not much good data on how to plan the code of a computer game” but AIs can still somehow output a working computer game line by line with no scratchpad.
As someone who has been on both sides of that fence, agreed. Architecting a system is about being aware of hundreds of different ways things can go wrong, recognizing which of those things are likely to impact you in your current use case, and deciding what structure and conventions you will use. It’s also very helpful, as an architect, to provide examples usages of the design patterns which will replicate themselves around your new system. All of which are things that current models are already very good, verging on superhuman, at.
On the flip side, I expect that the “piece together context to figure out where your software’s model of the world has important holes” part of software engineering will remain relevant even after AI becomes technically capable of doing it, because that process frequently involves access to sensitive data across multiple sources where having an automated, unauthenticated system which can access all of those data sources at once would be a really bad idea (having a single human able to do all that is also a pretty bad idea in many cases, but at least the human has skin in the game).
fwiw, architecting feels to me easier than coding (I like doing both). I have some guesses on why it doesn’t feel like this to most people (architecting is imo somewhat taught wrong, somewhat a gated topic, has less feedback in real life), but I don’t think this will stand up to AIs for long and I would even work on building an agent that is good at architecture myself if I thought it would have a positive impact.
If o3/o4 aren’t “spontaneously” good at architecture, then I expect it’s because openAI didn’t figure out (or try to figure out) how to train on relevant data, not many people write down their thoughts as they’re planning a new architecture. What data will they use, system design interviews? but to be fair, this is a similar pushback to “there’s not much good data on how to plan the code of a computer game” but AIs can still somehow output a working computer game line by line with no scratchpad.
As someone who has been on both sides of that fence, agreed. Architecting a system is about being aware of hundreds of different ways things can go wrong, recognizing which of those things are likely to impact you in your current use case, and deciding what structure and conventions you will use. It’s also very helpful, as an architect, to provide examples usages of the design patterns which will replicate themselves around your new system. All of which are things that current models are already very good, verging on superhuman, at.
On the flip side, I expect that the “piece together context to figure out where your software’s model of the world has important holes” part of software engineering will remain relevant even after AI becomes technically capable of doing it, because that process frequently involves access to sensitive data across multiple sources where having an automated, unauthenticated system which can access all of those data sources at once would be a really bad idea (having a single human able to do all that is also a pretty bad idea in many cases, but at least the human has skin in the game).