Comment by spiffytech
19 days ago
There's a third way things might go: on the way to "superpower for everyone", we go through an extended phase where AI is only a superpower in skilled hands. The job market bifurcates around this. People who make strong use of it get first pick of the good jobs. People not making effective use of AI get whatever's left.
Kinda like how word processing used to be an important career skill people put on their resumes. Assuming AI becomes as that commonplace and accessible, will it happen fast enough that devs who want good jobs can afford to just wait that out?
I'm willing to accept this as a possibility but the case analysis still doesn't make much sense to me.
If LLM usage is easy then I can't be left behind because it's easy. I'll pick it up in a weekend.
If LLM usage is hard AND I can otherwise do the hard things that LLMs are doing then I can't be left behind if I just do the hard things.
Still the only way I can be left behind is if LLM usage is nonsense or the same as just doing it yourself AND the important thing is telling managers that you've been using it for a long time.
Is the superpower bamboozling management with story time?
The obvious case in which you would be "left behind" is the one in which LLM usage is hard, and you cannot otherwise do the hard things that LLMs are doing (or you can do them, but much slower and/or to a lower standard of quality.)
Sure. Although all of the hard things that I need to do I have a history of doing fast and to high standards.
Unless we're talking about hard things that I have up til now not been able to do. But do LLMs help with that in general?
This scenario breaks out of the hypothetical and the assertive and into the realm of the testable.
Provide for me the person who can use LLMs in a way that is hard but they are good at in order to do things which are hard but which they are currently bad at.
I will provide a task which is hard.
We can report back the result.
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To be fair, word processing is a skill that that a majority of professionals continue to lack.
Law, civil service, academia and those who learnt enough LaTeX and HTML to understand text documents are in the minority.
Yeah and now people who can’t even write and never put in the effort to learn it are flooding the zone (my inbox) with useless 10 page memo’s.