Posted by azhenley 3 hours ago
This seems cognitively dissonant with the AI upheaval resulting in the industry needing fewer developers. Maybe they want cheaper developers?
If we freeze AI models at their current stage of development, then yes. If not, given the rate at which models are improving (compare Claude today to Claude 1 year ago), in 3 to 5 years software development could be fully automated.
If you need to be told what to do, it's a short step to your AI replacement being told what to do; money will ensure it. If your job is to discover and capture new things in an exploding possibility space, that's a career.
Schools should teach hacking, but it doesn't seem that's what this program is doing.
Basically still just a prompt jockey but knows the difference between outputs that are good and bad.
2024 me would be shocked at current me saying this.
What value would an architect provide that a SOTA LLM can't?
But is that workflow enough in a competitive world anyway, or will there be an edge for people who do more than "outline the end-user requirements" like it's the waterfall 70s?
Quite simply, I'm more mentally drained at the end of a day working with AI than I am a normal day of coding. There is still a lot of energy and thought that needs to go into what needs to be written.
Anecdotally, I find my final mood often depends on whether I know the origin and trustworthiness of the stuff in front of me, ex:
1. [Good] I know what I wanted, I have a concept of what "correct" looks like. I use the LLM to generate an output, and I check it. Even if it's annoyingly wrong, I can fix it up.
2. [Bad] Someone else had a concept, and they put it through an LLM to generate something (Ticket, PR, review comment.) However the provenance is lost, I have to guess which parts of the thing are "real" and which are nonsense the human never actually intended or even noticed.
I think some of the latter drain comes from how reading means inferring/simulate the mind of the writer, but LLM output is wrong enough that little warning flags never stop popping up.