Comment by mjburgess
6 days ago
Great, let's see it. If it works, it works.
For the first 10 years of my career I was a contractor walking into national and multinational orgs with large existing codebases, working within pre-existing systems not merely "codebases". Both hardware systems (e.g., new 4g networking devices just as they were released) and distributed software systems.
I can think of many daily tasks I had across these roles that would not be very significantly speed-up by an LLM. I can also see that there's a few that would be. I also shudder to think what time would be wasted by me trying to learn 4g networking from LLM summarisation of new docs; and spending as much time working from improperly summarised code (etc.).
I don't think snr software engineers are so scepticial here that they're saying LLMs are not, locally, helpful to their jobs. The issue is how local this help seems to be.
I worked on debugging modem software at Qualcomm in 2011, also prerelease 4G networking. I believe that LLMs would have dramatically improved my productivity across nearly all tasks involved (if they would allow me to use an LLM from inside the faraday cage).