I know there are people who don't think that LLMs, even at their current level, will radically affect development.
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I know there are people who don't think that LLMs, even at their current level, will radically affect development. I just don't understand how it's possible to still have that view.
Steve Yegge has written on "The Death of the Junior Developer"
The Death of the Junior Developer
LLMs are putting pressure on junior tech jobs. Learn how to stay ahead.
Sourcegraph (sourcegraph.com)
You could say he's talking his book here, but this stuff really does work. Follow @simon as an example
Forest Bazell commentary on it "The death of the [modified] developer" https://newsletter.goodtechthings.com/p/the-death-of-the-modified-developer is also good
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@fatrat @simon I find it amazing that he gets to the end of this and his advice for juniors is “get good fast”. Like, how will they eat whilst doing this? Have rich parents?
I am far from being a junior so this won’t affect me directly. However you don’t need to be a genius to work out how breaking the junior -> senior development path will be bad long-term for the industry.
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@mike_moran @fatrat Charity Majors wrote a fantastic piece about that a few months ago https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/12/generative-ai-is-not-going-to-build-your-engineering-team/
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@fatrat @simon @dahukanna “Copilot, Cursor, etc can get anyone conversant enough with .NET to be productive in an afternoon”
The only extent to which this is true is that one can produce code which seems to work for the case at hand, which one does not understand the tradeoffs or failure modes of.
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@donaldball @fatrat @dahukanna “… as long as you’ve done enough other programming that you know what to prompt.”
I think that’s key here: the vast majority of humans won’t get usefully productive with .NET in an afternoon, but experienced software engineers now can where previously it would have taken them weeks to get to the same point
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@kevinriggle @fatrat Charity Majors wrote a fantastic argument for exactly that a couple of months ago https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/10/generative-ai-is-not-going-to-build-your-engineering-team-for-you/
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@simon @donaldball @fatrat @dahukanna I’m honestly skeptical. With an LLM I can generate a week’s worth of code in an afternoon, but I could already spin up on the language in an afternoon, and I’ll still need a week to debug the resulting mess
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@simon @donaldball @fatrat @dahukanna and nothing can automate you out of the need to understand the problem you’re solving
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@kevinriggle @donaldball @fatrat @dahukanna agree with that - the idea that software developers are obsolete because anyone can build an app by prompting a chatbot is absurd, because there is so much more depth to software development than just churning out code