Comment by surgical_fire
1 year ago
I use LLMs in coding. There are Junior Devs in my team.
If you think LLMs operate at "junior dev" capacity you either don't work with junior devs and is just bullshitting your way around here, or you just pick pretty awful junior devs.
LLMs are alright. An okay productivity tool, although its inconsistencies many times nullify productivity gains - By design they often spit out wrong results that look and sound very plausible. A productivity blackhole. Its mistakes are sometimes hard to spot, but pervasive.
Beyond that, if your think that all a dev does is spit out code, and since LLMs can spit out code it can replace devs in some imaginary timeline, you are sorely mistaken. The least part of my work is actually spitting out code, although it is the part I enjoy the most.
I honestly feel way nore threatened by economic downturns and the looming threat of recession. The only way LLMs threaten me is by being a wasteful technology that may precipitate a downturn in tech companies, causing more layoffs, etc nd so forth.
The value of developers is not the code they output. It's the mental models they develop of the problem domain and the systems they build. LLMs can output code without developing the mental models.
Code is liability. The knowledge inside developers' heads is the corresponding asset. If you just produce code without the mental models being developed and refined, you're just increasing liability without the counterpart increase in assets.
If you define "junior" based mostly on age, then LLM's aren't yet at the level of a good "junior".
If you base it on ability, then an LLM can be be more useful to a good developer than 1 or more less competent "junior" team members (regardless of their age).
Not because it can do all the things like any "junior" can (like make coffee), but because the things it can do on top of what a "junior" can do, more than makes up for it.
>> If you think LLMs operate at "junior dev" capacity you either don't work with junior devs and is just bullshitting your way around here, or you just pick pretty awful junior devs.
I’ve hired lots of junior devs, some of them very capable. I’ve been in this industry for more than 15 years. LLMs operate at junior dev capacity, that’s pretty clear to me at this moment.
I sincerely doubt both your experience and your ability to hire decent devs.
I sincerely doubt your ability to use LLMs well.
I know, it's an highly unpopular opinion among devs. Let's revisit this comment in 5 years...