Software engineers have become overreliant on models to build applications, and it’s time to put humans more firmly in the loop, the AI Engineer World’s Fair was told on Tuesday.
The term software engineering was first used in a 1968 NATO conference, which was called to discuss the problems of building large-scale, reliable applications at speed. It was suggested that applying industrial manufacturing to code creation would help speed this process up, but with larger and larger amounts of code now being machine generated, the cracks are starting to show in reliability.
“We are all racing to put AI coding into production, and there's been lots said about loop engineering, and we should probably write more loops,” argued Dex Horthy, the impressively mustachioed co-founder of HumanLayer.
“I'm here to convince you today that this is, in fact, not a joke, and that no amount of harness engineering or loops maxing can solve what is fundamentally a model training issue.”
The problem, he said, is that developers have become overreliant on badly trained models. While some agents are great at some parts of the development cycle, they are lousy at others. As a result, pull requests are up, code breaks are multiplying, and customers — and the companies supplying them — are losing out.
