Comment by johnyzee
2 days ago
You heard it from someone with no experience developing software. A lot of AI hype comes from that, even (or especially) from people in the actual business of developing software - a surprising amount of managers and adjacent or supporting roles in the field actually have very little clue about software development.
It's cool that 'regular' people can now create solutions to many small problems, and automate stuff - genuinely a step forward. Like Excel, only vastly better. But for bigger projects, real software engineers know that what LLMs do today is only a tiny part of development. And it solves it in a way that might well make the rest of the lifecycle a lot harder. It's like that saying about tools that make easy things easier and hard things impossible.
IMO it doesn’t replace software engineers, but it certainly changes the job. The problem lies with VPs and executives that rose to their positions through managing phones and printers and shit who don’t appreciate all of the work that isn’t “write code”, and those people are the majority outside of big tech in my experience.
Currently in a re-org justified by AI, AI changing the roles people will need to play. It’s disturbing how much content in the materials about the new org structure and roles and whatnot is clearly ai generated and contradictory. We’re laying off about half of 500 people.
At my employer (a reasonably well known company) every internal communication appears to be AI generated, from emails to slide decks.
It gets better: The internal AI gateway chat thingy where you can ask questions has AI autocomplete that pops up after your write more than 10 characters. What the fuck!?
Who are these "real" software engineers and what are they working on? Among software developers I know, the biggest users of LLMs are the seniors. I don't think any of them would agree that its usage is a tiny part of development.