We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine.
> I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down.
At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.
Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet
The only difference is that there is now a new high-throughput, high-error (at least for now) component editing the software.
Perhaps that’s what lead to a decline in accountability and quality.
They might of course accelerate it if used unwisely, but the solution to that is arguably to use them wisely, not to completely shun them because "think of the craft and the jobs".
And yes, in some contexts, using them wisely might well mean not using them at all. I'd just be surprised if that were a reasonable default position in many domains in 5-10 years.
That's obvious. It's a matter of which makes it more likely
Is Good Engineering possible with LLMs? I remain skeptical.