Comment by bob1029

The AI is pretty scary if you think most of software engineering is about authoring individual methods and rubber ducking about colors of paint and brands of tools.

Once you learn that it's mostly about interacting with a customer (sometimes this is yourself), you will realize the AI is pretty awful at handling even the most basic tasks.

Following a product vision, selecting an appropriate architecture and eschewing 3rd party slop are examples of critical areas where these models are either fundamentally incapable or adversely aligned. I find I have to probe ChatGPT very hard to get it to offer a direct implementation of something like a SAML service provider. This isn't a particularly difficult thing to do in a language like C# with all of the built in XML libraries, but the LLM will constantly try to push you to use 3rd party and cloud shit throughout. If you don't have strong internal convictions (vision) about what you really want, it's going to take you for a ride.

One other thing to remember is that our economies are incredibly efficient. The statistical mean of all information in sight of the LLMs likely does not represent much of an arbitrage opportunity at scale. Everyone else has access to the same information. This also means that composing these systems in recursive or agentic styles means you aren't gaining anything. You cannot increase the information content of a system by simply creating another instance of the same system and having it argue with itself. There usually exists some simple prompt that makes a multi agent Rube Goldberg contraption look silly.

> I’m basically just the conductor of all those processes.

"Basically" and "just" are doing some heroic weight lifting here. Effectively conducting all of the things an LLM is good at still requires a lot of experience. Making the constraints live together in one happy place is the hard part. This is why some of us call it "engineering".