Comment by GuB-42
6 hours ago
It is, but software engineers have a much broader understanding of the problem, they also ask questions, and if they are good, they ask the right questions, something LLMs still have a problem with.
Personal example of what LLMs can't do, but I could: I made a script to update some version numbers in some files, based on some other files. Simple stuff, and one of my colleagues told me "ask the AI, it will take 5 minutes". Well, no, because the files sit on different machines, and extracting the files from one machine and putting the result on the other machine requires knowledge of the infrastructure. Again, simple stuff, but the AI doesn't know, and we certainly are not going to let it run wild in our network. I know all this because I talked to the team, attended meetings, and did a bit of careful exploration. I am trusted with resources to do my work in a way the AI doesn't, I am sure it is mostly because I can take the blame me if I misuse them.
> they also ask questions, and if they are good, they ask the right questions, something LLMs still have a problem with.
Sure, but LLMs do ask some questions already, and there is no reason to think they can’t keep getting better at knowing the right questions to ask.
Humans also often fail to do this well, and I think we all have experience with developers who do a very poor job at understanding what is actually being asked of them.
Maybe LLMs will never become as good as an expert developer at being able to suss out what someone is actually trying to do when they make a request, but it is certain LLMs will become better at it, and there is no reason to currently believe they couldn’t eventually become as good as the best humans eventually.