> Llama 3.1 405B can currently replace junior engineers
lol
lol
At the moment it looks like an experienced engineer can pressure LLM to hallucinate a junior level code.
Of course, that means you won't be able to train them up, at least for now. That being said, even if they "only" reach the level of your average software developer, they're already going to have pretty catastrophic effects on the industry.
As for automated fixes, there are agents that _can_ do that, like Devin (https://devin.ai/), but it's still early days and bug-prone. Check back in a year or so.
LLMs seem to be accelerating the trend
Companies don’t want to train people ($) because employees with skills and experience are more valuable to other companies because retention is also expensive.
We are not training AND retaining talent.
It remains to be seen if juniors can obtain the necessary institutional / "real work" experience from that, but given the number of self-taught programmers I know, I wouldn't rule it out.
It’s not about learning for most.
Just because a small subset of intelligent and motivated people use tools to become better programmers, there is a larger number of people that will use the tools to “cheat”.
Learn to do something manually and then learn the technology.
Do you want engineers who are useless if their calculator breaks or do you want someone who can fall back on pen and paper and get the work done?
I get the argument, it’s just silly. Calculators don’t “break”. I would rather have an engineer who uses highly reliable tools than one who is so obsessed with the lowest levels of the stack that they aren’t as strong at the top.
I’m willing to live with a useless day in the insanely unlikely event that all readily available calculators stop working.
...and that's just as asinine of a claim as the original one