Only the seniors who know their systems are keeping the lights on today by keeping bs commits out.
Once they burnout and quit, nobody will have a freaking clue what the LLMs have done and why services are down.
I have a similar concern, though. To do my job, I need to understand "the thing". I could outsource the understanding process to AI, but then if I'm asked a question by a developer or tester then I'm essentially stumped / useless because I didn't spend the time to understand the thing, I handballed it.
So I then ask the LLM the question I was asked, and pass the answer back (they could have done this themselves though, so where does that leave me? I'm either an AI wrangler, or replaced by someone else who wrangles AI replacing mutliple people in my role). Does my personally understanding the thing actually add value - do the seniors who know their systems add value - in the age of AI/LLM?
Does "LLMs all the way down" solve the problems?
With the existence of hallucinations I lean towards 'no', but again is that solved by adding layer(s) of LLMs to check for hallucinations?
One added value I see in senior knowing how things work is simple - in case of outage or business incidents (caused by incorrect logic produced by LLMs from even worse prompts or incomplete spec) senior can act faster and answer difficult questions live. Now we are going to have bunch of kids looking at „Hallucinating…” and „Crashing the prod…” status bar in CC CLI.
Maybe this is what’s gonna be acceptable and it’s just new world.
Layoffs pushed over the cliff the company. Both due to engineering (content is now trash), and product (lost most of the ad revenue)