Comment by NotAnOtter
6 days ago
The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors
With that as a metric, 1 Senior + 4 juniors cannot build the company with the scope you are describing.
A 50-eng company might have 1 CTO, 5 staff, 15 Seniors, and 29 juniors. So the proposition is you could cut the company in ~half but would still require the most-expensive aspects of running a company.
Even if you have one trillion juniors, you're not going to get them to spit out 1000 lines of code in a matter of seconds, after you give them an assignment, like LLMs do, so this is a faulty comparison.
Also often it takes a senior dev _more_ time to _explain_ to a junior what needs to be done than it takes to do it himself. What LLMs give us is the ability to generate a feature about as fast as we can type up the instructions we would have, pre-AI, given to a junior dev.
> The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors
This is such an outlandish claim, to the point where I call it plain bullshit.
LLMs are useful in a completely different way that a Junior developer is. It is an apples and oranges comparison.
LLMs does things in some way that it helps me beyong what a Junior would. It also is completely useless to perform many tasks that a Junior developer can.
I disagree that they are so different you can't compare them.
Imagine a senior IC staffed with 4 juniors, and they spend 2 hours with each every day. Then the junior is left with 6 hours to think through what they were taught/told. This is very similar to LLM development except instead of context switching 3 times each day, the senior can skip over the 6 hours of independent time the junior required to absorb the changes. But it still takes the same amount of time to deliver the 4 separate projects.
I find the existence of LLM development deeply troubling for a long list of reasons. But refuting the claim that an LLM is similar in many ways to a junior dev is unsubstantiated
>It also is completely useless to perform many tasks that a Junior developer can.
And there are many things one junior could be helpful with that a different junior would be useless at.
> Imagine a senior IC staffed with 4 juniors, and they spend 2 hours with each every day. Then the junior is left with 6 hours to think through what they were taught/told. This is very similar to LLM development except instead of context switching 3 times each day, the senior can skip over the 6 hours of independent time the junior required to absorb the changes.
This is not how Juniors work. I don't know what else to say. It is just not true.
I don't give juniors a prompt and let them to implement code for a few hours. They work as any other developer, just generally in features and/or tickets of more limited scope. At least initially. This is not what LLMs do
> But refuting the claim that an LLM is similar in many ways to a junior dev is unsubstantiated
I sometimes get the feeling I talk to people who never worked in a real professional setting.
A LLM can do things that Juniors can't. When I bounce around ideas for implementing a certain feature, when I explore libraries or frameworks I am unfamiliar with, when I ask it to review pieces of code looking for improvements, when I get it to generate boring glue code, scaffolding, unit tests. All those things are helpful, and make LLMs an excellent code assistant in a way that Juniors are not.
But it is completely unable to properly do things without me giving very precise instructions of what it needs to code. The less precise I am, the worse its output. It is very happy to generate completely bullshit code that kinda looks like it does what I need but not really. I constantly need to tweak what it generates, and although it saves my time as it outputs a lot of code in little time, the results are very unreliable to meaningfully act with any sort of independence.
> And there are many things one junior could be helpful with that a different junior would be useless at
Which completely fails to address the point I am making.
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