Comment whoa this thread (Score 2) 72
Clearly the programmers haven't woken up yet :)
The hypothesis is probably a correct one, although I am still wondering exactly where AI will land in the grand scheme of things.
It's obvious the intention of management types is to replace highly skilled engineers with lower paid vibe coders. The MBAs would love nothing more than that. But as the author hypothesized, I'm guessing the most high folks will be the entry level positions. Exactly where that lands, I'm not sure. Is it a 10% replacement? 5%? 25%? Will we ultimately not change the number of engineers needed and just their overall output goes up by a few points? My guess is the latter, and definitely not this promised utopia of "we can finally not hire all of these overpaid software engineers!". Just like this ultimately didn't happen with the cloud + BYOD shift in the 2010s. The largest push for cloud, devops, and BYOD was to get rid of both on-prem datacenters AND to get rid of IT folks. But what ultimately happened is that software development organizations realized that IT operations is a distinct set of skills, so instead they created the "SRE"--which is a fancily-renamed operations person in a software development org. Oh, and the average SRE makes 2-3x as much money as the IT ops folks they replaced.
Given the way LLMs work I highly doubt wholesale replacing entire large chunks of software engineers is going to be a thing anytime soon. Most interestingly is the fact that LLMs can only know what we have already put out there, and we'll basically need to continually train newer models with more information. As technology changes, give it another 5-10 years, and today's LLMs may be in fact completely useless. Particularly as sites like Stack Overflow's knowledge becomes more obsolete.
I liken LLMs to the know-it-all at a bar. They speak like they know everything about everything, but you're just trying to get drunk in a bar and don't feel like correcting them. They might have most of the answers to that night's trivia game, but if you deep dive any particular area they're going to make up a bunch of bullshit to avoid saying "I don't know." Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the world doesn't run on such people. Jim Bob's trivia knowledge doesn't architect and engineer buildings, bridges, roads, nor would you trust him for the bar's financials. You don't ask Jim Bob how many drinks you sold in a night, "oh around 1000 or so" when your livelihood depends on knowing that you actually sold 1315 drinks. And the rest of the world isn't going to let you use Jim Bob's guesstimates to pay your taxes, "Well Jim Bob said we sold around 1000 drinks so we paid taxes on 1000 drinks worth of income!"
There's going to be *some* AI impact, but I doubt it'll be as revolutionary as the smart phone.
The hypothesis is probably a correct one, although I am still wondering exactly where AI will land in the grand scheme of things.
It's obvious the intention of management types is to replace highly skilled engineers with lower paid vibe coders. The MBAs would love nothing more than that. But as the author hypothesized, I'm guessing the most high folks will be the entry level positions. Exactly where that lands, I'm not sure. Is it a 10% replacement? 5%? 25%? Will we ultimately not change the number of engineers needed and just their overall output goes up by a few points? My guess is the latter, and definitely not this promised utopia of "we can finally not hire all of these overpaid software engineers!". Just like this ultimately didn't happen with the cloud + BYOD shift in the 2010s. The largest push for cloud, devops, and BYOD was to get rid of both on-prem datacenters AND to get rid of IT folks. But what ultimately happened is that software development organizations realized that IT operations is a distinct set of skills, so instead they created the "SRE"--which is a fancily-renamed operations person in a software development org. Oh, and the average SRE makes 2-3x as much money as the IT ops folks they replaced.
Given the way LLMs work I highly doubt wholesale replacing entire large chunks of software engineers is going to be a thing anytime soon. Most interestingly is the fact that LLMs can only know what we have already put out there, and we'll basically need to continually train newer models with more information. As technology changes, give it another 5-10 years, and today's LLMs may be in fact completely useless. Particularly as sites like Stack Overflow's knowledge becomes more obsolete.
I liken LLMs to the know-it-all at a bar. They speak like they know everything about everything, but you're just trying to get drunk in a bar and don't feel like correcting them. They might have most of the answers to that night's trivia game, but if you deep dive any particular area they're going to make up a bunch of bullshit to avoid saying "I don't know." Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the world doesn't run on such people. Jim Bob's trivia knowledge doesn't architect and engineer buildings, bridges, roads, nor would you trust him for the bar's financials. You don't ask Jim Bob how many drinks you sold in a night, "oh around 1000 or so" when your livelihood depends on knowing that you actually sold 1315 drinks. And the rest of the world isn't going to let you use Jim Bob's guesstimates to pay your taxes, "Well Jim Bob said we sold around 1000 drinks so we paid taxes on 1000 drinks worth of income!"
There's going to be *some* AI impact, but I doubt it'll be as revolutionary as the smart phone.
