I think this can be extended (but not necessarily fully mitigated) by working with non-SWE agents interacting with the same codebase. Drafting product requirements, assess business opportunities, etc. can be done by LLMs.

It's just the frontier getting pushed slowly but surely. The headline missed the keyword `yet`.

True. AI might not have a soul, but it’s become an absolute lifesaver for me.

To really get the most out of it though, you still need to have solid knowledge in your own field.

Many human devs can code, but few can build software.

Making it absolutely lovely for people who can build software, but can’t code

Every time I see a "build an app with just one English sentence" hype, I turn away immediately

Give it a year or two...

Quit saying AI can code. AI can't do anything that wasn't done by actual humans before. AI is a plagiarism machine.

I still can't believe my own eyes that when I show an LLM my codebase and I tell it what functionality I want to add in reasonable detail, it can produce perfect looking code that I could have written myself.

I would say that AI is better at coding than most developers. If I had the option to choose between a junior developer to assist me or Claude Code, I would choose Claude Code. That's a massive achievement. Cannot be understated.

It's a dream come true for someone with a focus on architecture like myself. The coding aspect was dragging me down. LLMs work beautifully with vanilla JavaScript. The combined ability to generate code quickly and then quickly test (no transpilation/bundling step) gives me fast iteration times. Add that to the fact that I have a minimalist coding style. I get really good bang for my bucks/tokens.

The situation is unfortunate for junior developers. That said, I don't think it necessarily means that juniors should abandon the profession; they just need to refocus their attention towards the things that AI cannot do well like spotting contradictions and making decisions. Many developers are currently not great at this; maybe that's the reason why LLMs (which are trained on average code) are not good at it either. Juniors have to think more critically than ever before; on the plus side, they are freed to think about things at a higher level of abstraction.

My observation is that LLMs are so far good news for neurodivergent developers. Bad news for developers who are overly mimetic in their thinking style and interests. You want to be different from the average developer whose code the LLM was trained on.

I definitely disagree. I'm a software engineer, but have been heavily using AI the last few months and have gotten multiple apps to production since then. I have to guide the LLM along, yes, but it's perfectly capable of doing everything needed up to and including building the cloudformation templates for Fargate or whatever.