Neil HenningIt feels like collectively our industry is going through the five stages of grief at present with respect to LLMs.
gustav@neilhenning I wonder how it’ll turn out. While I think programmers will be in the loop for any moderately sized project (has there been any large project completely written by AI and a nontechnical person driving it?), I suspect that people like me that would rather change careers than adapt is going to have a hard time finding a job in the future.
Andre Weissflog@gustav @neilhenning I really wonder how this whole "create applications by writing a spec" will turn out in the long run, it sounds like a 1970's waterfall enthusiast's wet dream, but there's a reason that idea never quite worked.
I'm firmly on the "spec is code and code is spec" side of things, e.g. if your spec needs to be as detailed as the code implementing the spec you gain exactly nothing, because iterating on the spec will take just as much effort as interating on code.
@gustav @neilhenning ...I also wouldn't be surprised if we'll see examples of "I can replace your 1000 line specification for LLMs with those 10 lines of handwritten code" ;) Because architecture astronauts are gonna architecture-astronaut, no matter if a human bot or LLM is generating the source code for their grand ideas ;)
@floooh @neilhenning A (nonprogrammer) friend said his agents had written 5 million loc in 2 weeks as if it was a good thing. I suspect the future is going to get a lot more bloated. As with capitalism in general, efficiency and good solutions doesn’t matter as much as velocity and hype :/
@gustav @neilhenning it's a cycles thing, if I had 'believed the hype' in the 1990s (and would be 'carreer-driven') I would have gone full in on Java and databases which would have made for a very boring life ;)
Similar I hope that a younger me today would chose a different path than going full-in on LLMs. This sort of "industrialized software development" always sucked and will always suck.
@gustav @neilhenning ...maybe some young underground rebels will figure out absolutely breathtaking new ways to juggle AIs, similar to early punk, hiphop and electronic music used sampling, instead of using LLMs to generate the 1000th cookie-cutter CRUD application.
Not holding my breath though... but such a hypothetical counterculture would actually make me interested in the topic.