Non-SWE person here. In the past year I've been able to use LLMs to do several tasks for which I previously would have paid a freelancer on Fiverr.
The most complex one, done last spring, involved writing a Python program that I ran on Google Colab to grab the OCR transcriptions of dozens of 19th-century books off the Internet Archive, send the transcriptions to Gemini 1.5, and collect Gemini's five-paragraph summary of each book.
If I had posted the job to Fiverr, I would have been willing to pay several hundred dollars for it. Instead, I was able to do it all myself with no knowledge of Python or previous experience with Google Colab. All it cost was my subscription to ChatGPT Plus (which I would have had anyway) and a few dollars of API usage.
I didn't put any full-time SWEs out of work, but I did take one job away from a Fiverr freelancer.
That being said I’m very bullish on AI being able to handle more and more of this very soon. Cursor definitely does a great job giving us a taste of cross codebase understanding.
The agent I'm working on (RA.Aid) handles this by crawling and researching the codebase before doing any work. I ended up making the first version precisely because I was working on a larger monorepo project with lots of files, backend, api layer, app, etc.
So I think the LLMs can do it, but only if techniques are used to allow it to hone in on the specific information in a codebase that is relevant to a particular change.
I think this is the nuance most miss when they think about how AI models will displace work.
Most seem to think “if it can’t fully replace a SWE then it’s not going to happen”
When in reality, it starts by lowering the threshold for someone who’s technical but not a SWE, to jump in and do the work themselves. Or it makes the job of an existing engineer more efficient. Each hour less work needed spread across many tasks that would have otherwise gone to an engineer eventually sum up to a full time worth of an engineer. If it’s a Fiverr dev you eliminated the work of, that means the Fiverr dev will eventually go after the work that’s remaining, putting supply pressure on other devs
It’s the same mistake many had about self driving cars not happening because they couldn’t handle every road. No, they just need to start with 1 road, master that, and then keep expanding to more roads. Until they can do all of SF, and then more and more cities
The nuance your 'gotcha' scenario miss is that displacing fiverr, speeding up small side project, making scripts fo non-SWE, creating boilerplate, etc is not the trillions of dollars disruption that is needed by now.
Who would use LLM anyway these days. Interesting when Fiverr will add non-human freelancers. Something similar to algorithmic traders. Passive income.
The latter case enables more people to program to a certain extent, similar to what spreadsheets did, while we still need full SWEs in the first case, as you pointed out.
Most people can use a keyboard, but the majority of non-technical people type at a speed which is orders of magnitude less than a professional typist.
Another comment here mentions how they used colab while not being a SWE, but that is already miles ahead of what average people do with computers.
There's people who have used computers for decades and wouldn't be able to do a sum in a spreadsheet, nor know that is something spreadsheets can do.
> The Registered Skilled Reporter (RSR) is NCRA's new designation that will recognize those stenographic professionals who are looking to validate their beginning level of competency.
> You have to pass three five-minute Skills Tests (SKT), which evaluate your skills level in three areas: Literary at 160 wpm, Jury Charge at 180 wpm, Testimony/Q&A at 200 wpm.
https://www.ncra.org/certification/NCRA-Certifications/regis...
Note also that the speeds listed are described as beginning level. Contrast this with the speed contest(1) featuring literary (i.e., a speech or some kind of governmental literature or something to that effect) read at 200-220 WPM, jury charge (instructions) read at 200-260 WPM, and Q&A ([witness] testimony) read at 280 WPM.
These are the kind of speeds that have been typical of stenographers pretty much as long as it's been a thing, even when it was done with a pen rather than a steno machine -- well, back into the 19th century at least; I personally can't speak to the performance of the earlier shorthand systems off the top of my head.
Those "beginning" speeds are about at the top of what most of the best longhand typists can do at any serious length (see, for example, hi-games.net typing leaderboard for a 5-minute(2) vs 10-second(3) test).
As to the WPM cutoff to be considered a "typist"? I mean, it's not like it's a professional credential or anything. Anyone can be a typist if they're typing, I suppose, or if they choose to take it seriously enough. Even the de facto standards of job requirements are nothing much to go by: The typing speeds listed as required in the job postings for nearly all customer service, tech support, general office, and other such jobs, quite frankly, range from underwhelming to laughable. Even transcriptionists (longhand, as in not steno, and offline, as in not real-time) don't need to type more than about 80 WPM to find work in the field, if even that much. In my view, 80 WPM is still an awfully tedious sort of speed, but I understand it's more commonly considered a respectable one, and more than adequate for most tasks, so I guess I'd be fine with that number if I had to pick one.
I'll also throw in with jb-wells above and say that anyone who's touch-typing (and preferably making progress into the triple digits, or so far as their own ability will allow) might as well be considered a typist -- or anyone who managed to convince someone to pay them to type things at any speed.
1. https://www.ncra.org/home/the-profession/Awards-and-contests...
My mom went to a secretary/business assistant school in the '70s and the typing class (on a typewriter!) required using ten fingers and touch typing. The expectation was you'd be fast enough to transcribe someone dictating (they learned to use stenography for faster situations).
or learn to use something like Bubble
Also, as an aside, re "not a real programmer" salt: If we suppose, as I've been led to believe, that the "true essence" of programming is the ability to granularize instructions and conceptualize data flow like this, and if LLMs remain unsuitable for coding tasks unless the user can do so, this would seem to undermine the idea that someone can only pretend to be a programmer if they use the LLMs.
Anyway, I used Copilot in VSCode to "Fix" this "code" (it advised me that I should "fix" my "code" by . . . implementing it, and then helpfully provided a complete example):
# Take a URL from stdin (prompt)
# If the URL contains "www.reddit.com", replace this substring with "old.reddit.com"
# Curl the URL and extract all links matching /https:\/\/monkeytype\.com\/profile\/[^>]+/ from the html;
# put them in a defaultdict as the first values;
# for each first value, the key is the username that appears in the nearest previous p.tagline > a.author
# For each first value, use Selenium to browse to the monkeytype.com/profile url;
# wait until 'div[class=\'pbsTime\'] div:nth-child(3) div:nth-child(1) div:nth-child(2)' is visible AND contains numbers;
# assign this value as the second value in the defaultdict
# Print the defaultdict as a json object