Comment by cmiles74
4 hours ago
Indeed! In the article Bob is an astrophysicist.
I think the difference between the workflow you describe and the description of Bob's is that you have a pretty good idea of what a working solution would look like. In my reading if the article Bob does not.
In my opinion, the software developer analogue of Bob would be someone who would often reach for the LLM as it's nearby and easy. Maybe at first they would be careful about reading and vetting the model's output. Over time they might grow comfortable and overly confident with the model's output and pay less and less attention. As they take on more complex tasks they begin to understand less and less about the LLM tooling output but they don't really notice, it all looks good and tests are passing. Eventually we see a production problem, maybe even an outage. When we narrow down the issue to a PR with Bob's name on it and ask him how it led to the production issue, Bob tries to be helpful but struggles to understand his own PR.
Yeah, I'm very much a "production" person, so that's my lens.
For me, I started off with Machine Code, but these days, I have no idea what's going on, below the compiler. I know enough to be dangerous, looking at a stack dump, but that's about it. My days of hex keypads are long gone.
I still get stuff done, that I could only dream of, back then. LLMs are really just another step on the evolutionary ladder.
I'm old enough to remember when calculators were banned in the classroom, for just about exactly the same reasons that people are complaining about LLMs.
Anyway, the die is cast. We'll have to see how things turn out.