That is where a lot of people in tech believe things are headed, executives in particular. Fully autonomous AI-driven codebases. “Dark factories.” One agent generating a plan, one writing the code, one responsible for testing and validating, and one to orchestrate the rest.
The idea is software development will follow in the footsteps of physical manufacturing and eventually become fully automated. I think one huge flaw with this belief/comparison is that the automated assembly line is deterministic. LLMs and AI agents are not. Every Tacoma made on the Toyota assembly line is made from the same blueprint. There are no robots deciding on-the-fly whether to use a laser weld or an adhesive, what material to use for a specific component, etc. Now think about how LLMs build software. No matter how strict a harness or detailed spec you give it, it will always make decisions. That is what makes it “agentic” after all.
Writing code without an LLM is akin to cooking a meal yourself, as opposed to something in between hiring a private chef and pulling a slot machine lever. When I cook a meal for myself or my loved ones, I become deeply familiar with the ingredients and the recipe. I am a good cook. Every decision, small and large, I make myself. Using feedback, I can tweak the components and the process.
However, if I order food and call it my own creation, I’ll be speechless when my nut-allergic friend asks me if I used peanut oil or olive oil. And does it taste good? The end result is subjective, not binary, like your three similes. What if the food sucks? Must I now micromanage the chef? I don’t want to make them cook it again and again, hoping each time it’ll taste little more like how I want it to. I’d rather just cook it myself; I am a good cook, afterall.
I find very little joy in trying to wrangle the blackboxes that are LLMs. The undeterministic nature of them frustrates me, and feels nothing like the software engineering I know and love. However, I know I’m in the minority here, as almost everyone else in the industry I’ve talked to seems to love using them.
Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.
And there’s good reason for that. Anthropic, OpenAI, Salesforce, and so on have aggressively marketed LLMs as better than humans at working. It’s no surprise when we find out something is build using an LLM, we expect it to match the marketing.
Do you have a source for your “millions” claim? Every source I can find says there are somewhere between 60 and 70 thousand immigrants currently in detention centers, based on internal ICE data. That’s still a fuck-ton of people to cage up, there’s no need to hyperbolize.
Unfortunately I think we’ll see more and more of this as companies continue to encourage their employees to use LLMs everywhere and for everything. Eventually they will have to come to terms with the cost of such mandates, and it’s either ask your employees to “use AI less,” or it’s let some percentage go and continue to let the rest burn tokens.
Your comment reminded me that this still happens in the NBA. At 43 years old, Udonis Haslem seldom played minutes towards the end of his 20 year career with the Heat. But they kept him on as a “player-coach,” in that he was a mentor to the younger players and assisted in their coaching. Kyle Lowry is another current example of this “player-coach” role, currently on the Sixers.
LLMs have lowered the bar for the unskilled person to create shit software. I have used Opus 4.6 on a number of projects, and it still spits out buggy, and sometimes, flat out broken code. I was actually surprised when it completely hallucinated the names of query params for an HTTP request in my code, when in the prompt I had explicitly given it the exact names it needed to use. I thought these frontier models were supposed to be game changing.
I hope that commenter was being hyperbolic. I have heard of headphones making visible impressions or “dents” in the soft tissue and msucle after long periods of use (Google Tyler1 headphone dent if you don’t believe me), but such a dent would disappear within minutes or hours. An actual deformation of the skull due to headphone-wearing would definitely be strange.
RuneScape private servers used to bring in tons of money. I helped manage one when I was in my early teens, and I can confirm the owner (who was only a few years older than I) was bringing in mid six-figures annually.
Then of course there was the rampant gambling. The founders of online casino Stake and streaming platform Kick both started their “careers” in RuneScape gambling. IIRC they invented “staking” which was a method of gambling gold against other players, before they were banned. But the gambling economy in RuneScape used to IRL mint millionaires for sure.
I think it’s critically important to mention that the VA provided all this data to Ancestry.com years ago. According to the newletter op linked, Ancestry.com charges $300/year for access to this data. This unfairness is what prompted the lawsuit and ultimate release of data.