Comment by sublinear
2 hours ago
Can you elaborate on how someone would get "left behind"? Isn't the whole point of LLMs that they use natural language and require less effort?
If they're so easy to use, wouldn't the opposite be true? i.e. people who over rely on LLMs become weaker at the core competency? Nobody gives a rat's ass if you did something in an hour or took all night. The deadline is still next week because of all the meetings. What's the point? Anyone at any point in human history can tell you that doing too much too early has extremely high odds of failure. You're much better off thinking about the business concerns at hand instead of getting lost in the weeds playing with the code.
There's also zero chance of the cadence speeding up because software engineers were never the bottleneck, and LLMs don't work so well for everyone else's job.
If you can't pull rabbits out of hats when the time is right without an LLM, you're already at a disadvantage compared to everyone else who can (anyone who isn't a junior dev today).
> people who over rely on LLMs become weaker at the core competency
What if what people become weaker at, is no longer the core competency? Then people who maintain their skills at what used to be the core competency, at the expense of what is actually the core competency, will be left behind.
The rest of your comment, re: nothing taking less than a week because of meetings and software never being the bottleneck, is not something generally true across the industry. I'm sorry that that has been your experience; it does not sound pleasant.
I'd like to see evidence of this reality you're conveniently imagining to sow doubts among the uninitiated.
You're correct that the focus is no longer just writing code after a few years of experience, but it doesn't change the fact that being held accountable for the code means it is one of your core competencies.
You cannot seriously believe anyone is going to throw the baby out with the bathwater by giving away their power to "AI". Why else do you think a dev is in all those meetings? Why do they get paid to "hurry up and wait"? That's not inefficiency. That's the real work.
Those who find this reality unpleasant have always been the ones to switch careers (and then realize all careers are the same). I'm not sure what you're trying to say other than you'd like to muddy waters because you really like AI and are allergic to code and accountability. Do not be so naive.
> Why else do you think a dev is in all those meetings
Piss-poor management by scleratic and top-heavy organizations, mainly.
You're trying to start a fight by casually accusing me of stances I didn't take, mixed in with insults. There are healthier ways to deal with your insecurities.
Nothing I said is incompatible with devs being responsible for what they produce. Though you seem to be saying that someone should be fired because their code managed to hit a nondeterministic compiler bug? Why didn't they double check the assembly? They should take accountability.