coding is getting your foot in the door to software engineering, which is really like, computer systems engineering. We do so much more than code...
coding is getting your foot in the door to software engineering, which is really like, computer systems engineering. We do so much more than code...
Software engineering is more information processing engineering. Code is just the shovel with which we build the trench. Everything is about data, and we build the things that control and process the data based on various events according to some wants and needs.
LLMs are more like a trench digger with a cat's personality. It can helps in some cases, but are more likely to destroy a field. And good luck if you have some difficult terrain to pass through.
I really recommend you try LLMs again if you haven’t, the last part is really becoming less and less true every day. But I 100% agree that this does not pose a risk to the software developer for all the other points you mentioned. It will just make that trench digger more useful to the developer that needs it. And they’ll still need someone to drive the digger.
LLM is useful just like StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Web Search Engine, Manuals,… are. But automated (which is a pro) and with an hallucination problem (which is a core problem).
The others also may contain wrong information, but the risks are lower and not being automated means the risks are not compounded.
I personally believe we need more trustable source of information rather than automated way to transform it. Especially for the low hanging fruit of coding, which still require to presolve the problem and put us back at the real reason to have a developer.
And one thing that people seems to forget is the wealth of pre-LLM tools to speed up coding. No one uses notepad (from Windows 7) to write code, which is what they keep brandishing as the alternative to their agents and what not.
The hallucination problem has dropped exponentially in recent times in code generation. I can’t even recall a time any of the modern models I’ve used have done it in my recent usage. It’ll still do it in cheap/fast models and in places outside of code generation, but the good models write frankly incredible code, especially if you set them up with feedback loops.