AI replacing software engineers is something I think...

AI replacing software engineers is something I think about a lot because the recent advances with LLMs have made them quite capable of writing code. " "" "That said, for real applications (and not little demos), writing the code isn't really where effort is spent. The hardest part is always fixing an esoteric issue in an existing codebase or performing a migration for some dependency that had been working just fine for years. " "" "AI will be able to help in those domains, too, but we are far from that. AI, as it's thought of today, is just a massive LLM that's ingested what's publicly out there on the Internet. The vast majority of real work happens in private spaces and networks, though, meaning that today's LLMs don't have access to this data. " "" "So, while it's frustrating, companies restricting access to LLMs at work does make sense to me, but finding the right balance is tricky because LLMs are absolutely productivity boosters. Trust will continue to play a massive role because companies will need to trust another company telling them their LLM will not record and train on the data being passed through, or we'll need ways to validate that in some technical way (which sounds very hard). " "" "I'm excited to code less and hand off more of that to LLMs over time, but as of today, there's still a ton of guidance I need to provide, and I don't see that exponentially decaying as the models get exponentially better. My head may be in the sand, though.

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Original post on LinkedIn