LLMs are clearly giving the broader tech workforce an existential crisis. Which I think is understandable.
If you view your job as solving issues for business as quickly as possible by way of writing code; then yeah you're generally not going to fare well against a machine.
I think things become more interesting when the frame shifts from "the output is code" to "the output are systems". IMO writing the code has never been the hard part of building systems.
Now granted: what us practitioners believe generally matters less than what the people controlling the purse strings believe. If the tech job market contracts, it affects all of us.
But I think there's going to be a through-line here. If producing code becomes cheap, then planning and review become more important. Which can be rephrased as: "specification and verification will become more important"
— "What should we do?" and "Did we in fact do that?"
To keep posting this assorted collection of thoughts that I'm trying to pass off for a thread:
I believe that LLMs lower the bar for fucking around. And in doing so it increases the amount of finding out.
That can be taken as either good or bad. Because one person’s “slop by the bucket” is another person’s “exploratory programming”.
@yosh I don’t trust this argument because I hear it often in my own workplace, and yet the real effect of LLM coding has been the opposite.
Now that you don’t have to go via, and get feedback from, opinionated developers who may slow you down, we’re seeing a kind of “first idea best idea” pattern play out. Exec level folks can much more easily and quickly create artefacts that they inevitably get attached to, or even ship.
It’s “my daughter drew this logo idea” but for an entire code base.
Yeah, that's sort of what I mean tho. Clearly the exec doesn't understand the value of the dev team and is happy to try and move past you.
And that's going to work out *fine* at first – all the way until it doesn't. At which point people who can actually build and maintain systems will need to step in.
Which sucks and is why I'm saying that this has an element that's out of the control of practitioners, and in the hands of capital.
yosh
Paddy Duke