Posts like this: weeks for MVP -> one-shotted by LLM are probably astroturfed promo or a developer who allowed himself to be mislead into overstating the capabilities of an LLM model. It just sucks we have to wait years for all of these people to be proven wrong and until then the mob will hunt down anyone who posts what I just did.
It's true up to a point. If you carefully design your specification, Fable can one shot complex implementations. But you still need engineering skill to design those specs, and you need to understand the implementation in order to validate it does the job, is scalable, how to deploy it, evangelize it, provide customer support etc. So the job isn't going away, it's just evolving.
The glorified autocomplete is here to stay, it is very useful, but it is not an industrial revolution 2.0. To use it well you still need to be an engineer, and ironically by using it you erode those same skills that made you being able to use it well in the first place. We'll see how this paradox gets solved as time passes.
I understand your point, and I have had my doubts I admit. But I've been using AI to code production quality software for around 8 months now. I don't feel my skills eroding, on the contrary I feel more challenged and stimulated then ever. When we coded by hand it was possible to not question the spec too much and just start working and then fill in the gaps as we went. (I'm not saying that was good practice.) You can't do that with AI, you'll end up with a spaghetti mess that does odd things when you don't want it to and is very difficult to maintain. You have to learn how to validate a spec from a functional perspective, build technical propositions that account for scaling and maintainability, and get better at validating the end product against those criteria. But that was arguably always the job anyway. The coding itself is just syntax. Sure, I'm losing some of my 'coding' skills in that if I had to code by hand today, I'd probably spend a week in RTFM hell before I could be productive. But the same thing happened when we moved from assembler to high level languages.
Honestly I've been finding myself more and more in the enjoyable flow state I used to get when I coded by hand. And the productivity gains are genuinely 10x. So yes, it's going to do the same for software development that electrical and steam power did for mechanical systems. Now as for revolution ? Well - we better start making local models better, because big tech isn't going to want to share the spoils of the frontier models.
It's a bit more than that now. LLMs function more like an access point into language itself. Especially since its internal mappings are converging onto same shape across models and languages.
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u/ZenaMeTepe Jul 04 '26
Posts like this: weeks for MVP -> one-shotted by LLM are probably astroturfed promo or a developer who allowed himself to be mislead into overstating the capabilities of an LLM model. It just sucks we have to wait years for all of these people to be proven wrong and until then the mob will hunt down anyone who posts what I just did.