Comment by petcat
8 hours ago
> Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands
If that's actually the future of humans in software engineering then that sounds like a nightmare career that I want no part of. Just the same as I don't want anything to do with the gigantic mess of Cobal and Java powering legacy systems today.
And I also push back on the idea that llms can't troubleshoot and fix things, and therefore will eventually require humans again. My experience has been the opposite. I've found that llms are even better at troubleshooting and fixing an existing code base than they are at writing greenfield code from scratch.
My experience so far has been they are somewhat good at troubleshooting code, patterns, etc, that exist in the publicly viewable sphere of stuff it's trained on, where common error messages and pitfalls are "google-able"
They are much worse at code/patterns/apis that were locally created, including things created by the same LLM that's trying to fix a problem.
I think LLMs are also creating a decline in the amount of good troubleshooting information being published on the internet. So less future content to scrape.