This is not my experience at all, the AI agents are many many many times faster than what I can do. What anyone can do. It's crazy how quick I can create stuff these days.
If it's not something very common LLMs could end up generating random code.
Also if you work on something performance critical, you can get inspiration from LLMs, but they often don't write fast code.
Niche is more like "ISO26262 compliant, response time under 50ms, measured with a oscilloscope with at least 40MHz bandwidth, failure rate less than 10^-7, proven with maths and soak tests". It gets more niche the closer you get to hardware.
Next word prediction will get you laughed out of the room.
In my experience performance of LLMs can be surprisingly good on things that are not mainstream, like database engineering, and surprisingly bad at mainstream categories approached in an unconventional way.
That said, I'm amazed that you have 50 years of experience and still able to have the mental flexibility to adapt to new development paradigms.
As you imply, this stuff isn't simple to pick up, and is completely different on how we have done our job without AI.
This is the root of age discrimination in technology fields.
Just to clarify, I meant to share admiration toward a fellow engineer.
I do not think that age implies any hard assumption, usually brings cultural diversity which is good.
The approach to get there is the differentiate factor. If you are to tell a probabilistic tool to be 99.9999999% correct it would just be silly.
But do you never need a specific change (e.g. bugfix), that even describing in English is slower than just doing it? Especially in vim where editor movements are fast.
All you need to do now, is sign off the code and adjust the agent so it would do these as you would.
I'd be curious how one gets to the error rate where they don't think they need feedback loops. Anyone can learn to touch type because the physics are deterministic and can expand from that to touch edit in something that isn't hopelessly WYSIWYG only.
I tried them a bit and often they can infer immense amount of ideas from the immediate source context and suggest paragraph patches semantically close to what I had in mind from just one word.
Saying this as a vi/emacs user who liked to automate via macros, snippets, dynamic overlay inserts and what not.. I still enjoy being sharp on a keyboard and navigating source / branches swiftly but LLM can match and go beyond it seems. (not promoting them, feel free to stay in good old vi command sequences if that's fun for you)
Unfortunately they’re sunsetting it, ironically apparently because people aren’t using it. I think it’s strange this hasn’t been posted to HN. They say they will release an open-source local version; otherwise I’ll have to figure out an alternative, because it really saves time and effort…
P.S. Software developers aren't being paid to be "fast". In fact, being "fast" is called "technical debt" and you're usually punished for it as a software developer.