Just because we'd love to have fully intelligent, automatic agents, doesn't mean the tech is here. I don't work on anything that generates content (text, images, code). It's just slob and will bite you in the ass in the long run anyhow.
But it generates mistakes like say 1 in 10 times and I do not see it getting fixed unless we drastically change the LLM architecture. In future I am sure we will have much more robust systems if the current hype cycle doesn't ruin its trust with devs.
But the hit is real, I mean I would hire a lot less If i were to hire now as I can clearly see the dev productivity boost.. Learning curve for most of the topics are also drastically reduced as the loss in Google search result quality is now supplemented by LLMs.
But thing I can vouch for is automation and more streamlined workflows. I mean having normal human tasks being augmented by an LLM in a workflow orchestration framework. The LLM can return its confidence % along with the task results and for anything less than ideal confidence % the workflow framework can fall back on a human. But if done correctly with proper testing, guardrails and all, I can see LLM is going to replace human agents in several non-critical tasks within such workflows.
The point is not replacing humans but automating most of the work so the team size would reduce. For e.g. large e-commerce firms have 100s of employees manually verifying product description, images etc, scanning for anything from typos to image mismatch to name a few. I can see LLMs going to do their job in future.
the truth is that we stop thinking when we code like that.
If done right we all code through spec written in English, not code.
Not everyone has that opinion. I am not talking about non programmers jumping on the bandwagon but real technologists using it in real world programming [1].
> our brain goes into "watching TV mode"
How many people would have thought the same when calculator came? We can either think like - oh this tool is making kids dumb or you can think like the new tool can make them faster and efficient.
I am talking from my point of view. I am quite experienced and know what I'm doing in a lot of areas, having 18 years of experience. I am faster without agents, produce better code, know the code and can guarantee maintainability and less bugs. Why on earth would I change that? That it's going to get better in the future is a hypothetical which needs to be proven yet.
It is not a calculator tho. So stop with that nonsensical comparison already. You know exactly what I'm talking about and you're not arguing against my point. That's why I'm saing that your comment ins tangental. LLMs are not a calculator. My point is that LLMs make us neither faster nor more efficient. You trade quality and maintainability (slob) against quality. That's a different trade off and makes the two outcomes uncomparable.
I wrote a little about one such task, getting agents to supplement my markdown dev-log here: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/a...