In my opinion people that harp on about how LLMs have been game changer for them are the people that put themselves as never actually having built anything sophisticated enough that a team of engineers can work and extend on for years.
I have built web services used by many Fortune 100 companies, built and maintained and operated them for many years.
But I'm not doing that anymore. Now I'm working on my own, building lots of prototypes and proof-of-concepts. For that I've founding LLMs to be extremely helpful and time-saving. Who the hell cares if it's not maintainable for years? I'll likely be throwing it out anyway. The point is not to build a maintainable system, it's to see if the system is worth maintaining at all.
Are there software engineers who will not find LLMs helpful? Absolutely. Are there software engineers who will find LLMs extremely helpful? Absolutely.
Both can exist at the same time.
What are the likely impacts over the next 1, 5, 10, 20 years. People getting into development now have the most incredible technology to help them skill up, but also more risk than we had in decades past. There's a continuum of impact and it's not 0 or 100%, and it's not immediate.
What I consider inevitable: humans will keep trying to automate anything that looks repeatable. As long as there is a good chance of financial gain from adding automation, we'll try it. Coding is now potentially at risk of increasing automation, with wildcards on "how much" and "what will the impact be". I'm extremely happy to have nuanced discussions, but I balk at both extremes of "LLMs can scale to hard AGI, give up now" and "we're safe forever". We need shorthand for our assumptions and beliefs so we can discuss differences on the finer points without fixating on obviously incorrect straw men. (The latter aimed at the general tone of these discussions, not your comment.)
My issue is with people claiming LLMs are undoubtedly going to remove programming as a profession. LLMs work fine for one-off code -- when they don't make mistakes even there, that is. They don't work for a lot of other areas, like code you have to iterate on multiple times because the outer world and the business requirements keep changing.
Works for you? Good! Use it, get more productive, you'll only get applause for me. But my work does not involve one-off code and for me LLMs are not impressive because I had to rewrite their code (and to eye-ball it for bugs) multiple times.
"Right tool for the job" and all.
But what you'll probably find is that people that are skilled communicators are currently getting a decent productivity boost from LLMs, and I suspect that the difference between many that are bullish vs bearish is quite likely coming down to ability to structure and communicate thoughts effectively.
Personally, I've found AI to be a large productivity boost - especially once I've put certain patterns and structure into code. It's then like hitting the N2O button on the keyboard.
Sure, there are people making toy apps using LLMs that are going to quickly become a unmaintainable mess, but don't be too quick to assume that LLMs aren't already making an impact within production systems. I know from experience that they are.
Strange perspective. I found LLMs lacking in less popular programming languages, for example. It's mostly down to statistics.
I agree that being able to communicate well with an LLM gives you more results. It's a productivity enabler of sorts. It is not a game changer however.
> don't be too quick to assume that LLMs aren't already making an impact within production systems. I know from experience that they are.
OK, I am open to proof. But people are just saying it and leaving the claims hanging.
I also have no idea what your comment here had to do with LLMs, will you elaborate?
You're essentially saying "the programming to do basic arithmetic and physics took only a year" as if that's remotely impressive compared to the complexity of something like Microsoft Teams. Simultaneous editing of a document by itself is more complicated than anything an Apollo program had to do