LLMs cannot replace anyone, but it is clear that engineers which master LLMs usage might multiply their productivity by a lot.
The question is: If one LLM assisted engineer can work 10x faster, will companies reduce their engineer staff by 90%?
Now product will be able to use an LLM to come up with feature proposals and design docs even faster! :o
So: are you working at a company where engineering is a cost center or a revenue center? The latter wants to get more done at the same cost much more than it wants to just cut spend.
Copilot helps a lot with that. I can write `// check if em` and it will finish the comment (email is valid) and write the actual check.
It's a massive productivity boost. I'm spending less time looking stuff up (what was that function name again?) and less time fixing typos/basic syntax errors.
Copilot doesn't always know the function name, but it does more often than me. And it makes errors too, but again less often than me (also, because I'm reading the code, not typing it, I tend to see the error immediately without needing to test it).
The average AI company has like 1 employee per $25M valuation. That's around 25x fewer employees than the typical tech company.
There used to be mailrooms filled with people sorting and delivering physical envelopes. Now it's all software.
What did you think “replacing SWEs” means?