Comment by ryandrake
17 hours ago
It's gotten to the point where, when I see yet another Thought Leadership article about software development, I search the page for the word "will". If I see unqualified predictions of the future (AI will change this and Agents will do that and developers will need to do thus), I think I can safely ignore the article. Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering statements about a future nobody can see?
A local "thought leader" wrote a ridiculous piece about software leadership in a post-LLM world, when clearly they'd never actually used an LLM to build anything, or actually led a team using LLMs. Lots of hand-waving but obviously no real experience.
As gp says, there's a big difference between theory and practice here, and a lot of the things we needed when we weren't using LLMs are still needed when we are, but it takes a bit of actual practice to work this out. It's still not at the stage where an Ideas Guy can make a real working product without someone on the team actually knowing how to develop software.
At least in my experience, so far. But the world is changing fast.
The last "Thought Leader" worth listening to was put to death by Athens.
Some that came after might be worthy of the title, but those who claim it for themselves aren't.
How come all the talking heads telling us AI has made whatever we've learned or built obsolete never point the lens back at themselves? I personally thing knowledge from entrepreneurs who learned their lessons in previous decades is valuable, but if what they're spouting is true it doesn't make any sense to listen to them, i.e. these thought leaders are desperate to tell you of their irrelevance. Same thing for every CTO who tells me AI replaces developers. That's a stretch, but if we could do that, don't you think it would be trivial to replace your job?
Someone is still needed to decide what the AI should do, and to harness and manage it. A CTO can do that with existing skills, and the resulting organization should converge quickly on near-zero need or want for human SWEs.
So goes the thinking, anyway. It's why my couple decades of experience and I still occasionally get to hear from rando cold recruiters desperate to sell someone a "pivot to AI," probably thinking they can lowball me by holding my mortgage over my head in order to screw three times the work out of me that they'd pay for.
I was in this business too long.
Have you ever sweat bullets at 3 a.m.? While Claude spins in circles unable to fix production without breaking five other things?
You will!
> Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering statements about a future nobody can see?
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