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AI chatbots were tasked to run a tech company. They built software in under seven minutes — for less than $1.
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Technology
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The difficult part of software development has always been the continuing support. Did the chatbot setup a versioning system, a build system, a backup system, a ticketing system, unit tests, and help docs for users. Did it get a conflicting request from two different customers and intelligently resolve them? Was it given a vague problem description that it then had to get on a call with the customer to figure out and hunt down what the customer actually wanted before devising/implementing a solution?
This is the expensive part of software development. Hiring an outsourced, low-tier programmer for almost nothing has always been possible, the low-tier programmer being slightly cheaper doesn't change the game in any meaningful way.
Yeah, I'm already quite content, if I know upfront that our customer's goal does not violate the laws of physics.
Obviously, there's also devs who code more run-of-the-mill stuff, like yet another business webpage, but those are still coded anew (and not just copy-pasted), because customers have different and complex requirements. So, even those are still quite a bit more complex than designing just any Gomoku game.
Haha, this is so true and I don't even work in IT. For me there's bonus points if the customer's initial idea is solvable within Euclidean geometry.
Now I am curious what the most outlandish request or goal has been so far?
Well, as per above, these are extremely complex requirements, so most don't make for a good story.
One of the simpler examples is that a customer wanted a solution for connecting special hardware devices across the globe, which are normally only connected directly.
Then, when we talked to experts for those devices, we learnt that for security reasons, these devices expect requests to complete within a certain timeframe. No one could tell us what these timeframes usually are, but it certainly sounded like the universe's speed limit, a.k.a. the speed of light, could get in our way (takes roughly 66 ms to go halfway around the globe).
Eventually, we learned that the customer was actually aware of this problem and was fine with a solution, even if it only worked across short distances. But yeah, we didn't know that upfront...