How can non-technical people tell what's "best"? You need to know what you're doing at this point, look for the right pitfalls, inspect everything in detail... this right here is the entire counter-argument for LLMs eliminating SWE jobs...
I'm not sure a tool that positions itself as a "programmer co-worker" is aiming to be useful to non-technical people. I've said it before, but I don't think LLMs currently are at the stage where they enable you to do things you have 0 experience in, but rather can help you speed up working through things you are familiar with. I think people who claim LLMs will completely replace jobs are hyping the technology without really understanding it.
For example, I'm a programmer, but never done any firmware flashing with UART before via a USB flasher. Today I managed to do that in 1-2 hours thanks to ChatGPT helping me out understanding how to do it. If I'd do it completely on my own, I'm sure it would have taken me at least the full day to do so, instead of the time it took. I was able to see when it got mislead, and could rewrite/redirect from there on, but someone with 0 programming experience, probably wouldn't have been able to.
That's where I see AI-written software going, write-once. Some talented engineer gets an AI system to create a whole k8s cluster to run an application and if any changes need to be made, bugs fixed, it will take another talented engineer to come in and have an AI write a replacement and throw out the old one.
Reminds me of this blog, The real value isn’t in the code [0], we're heading for a world that is only code and no one who knows what it does. But maybe it won't matter.
[0] https://jonayre.uk/blog/2022/10/30/the-real-value-isnt-in-th...
You don't. Unless the person is super brilliant I just don't think the industry needs many more new people, there are enough for the next 1-2 decades and after that humans will probably not be needed at all.
People should go where the demand is - medicine, education, policing or whatever it may be.
'Where' is becoming an increasingly small niche with ever higher educational requirements.
I don't see the corporate path being the best way given the circumstances.
holy gaslighting Christ have some links, lots of people think that
https://www.reddit.com/r/ITCareerQuestions/comments/126v3pm/...
https://medium.com/technology-hits/the-death-of-coding-why-c...
https://medium.com/@TheRobertKiyosaki/are-programmers-obsole...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2024/09/21/the-auto...
and on and on, endless thinkpieces about this. Certainly SOMEONE, someone with a lot of money, thinks software engineers are imminently replaceable.
> until the singularity curve starts looking funny.
well there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that we've made any progress to bringing about Kurzweil's God so I think regardless of what Sam Altman wants you to believe about "general AI" or those thinkpieces, experts are probably okay.
Coding/engineering/etc is all problem solving in a strucutred manner.
That skill is not going anywhere
I wouldn't have to listen to people talk about it all the time if nobody thought it was true
To them, it seems LLMs are also perfectly capable of typing odd sequences of characters.
The idea that SWEs do actual structured problem solving is mostly native to industry insiders.
The verb you use when you only need to produce boilerplate.
> Prompt™
The verb you use when it's time to innovate.