Technology

Good take

I thought by this point everyone would know how computers work.

That, uh, did not happen.

The problem with this take is the assertion that LLMs are going to take the place of secretaries in your analogy. The reality is that replacing junior devs with LLMs is like replacing secretaries with a network of typewriter monkeys who throw sheets of paper at a drunk MBA who decides what gets faxed.

I wrote a comment about this several months ago on my old kbin.social account. That site is gone and I can't seem to get a link to it, so I'm just going to repost it here since I feel it's relevant. My kbin client doesn't let me copy text posts directly, so I've had to use the Select feature of the android app switcher. Unfortunately, the comment didn't emerge unscathed, and I lack the mental energy to fix it due to covid brain fog (EDIT: it appears that many uses of I were not preserved). The context of the old post was about layoffs, and it can be found here: https://kbin.earth/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/12147

I want to offer my perspective on the Al thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. happily generate string- templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I've had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people's systems? I've had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.

I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they're going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don't have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I've personally felt no need to use them, since spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.

Now, do the higher-ups think the way that do? Absolutely not. I've had senior management ask me about how I'm using Al tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don't feel the need for it and what feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so absolutely agree that it's likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.

Basically, I think LLMs can be helpful for some folks, but my experience is that the use of LLMs by junior developers absolutely increases the workload of senior developers. Senior developers using LLMs can experience a productivity bump, but only if they're very critical of the output generated by the model. I am personally much faster just relying on traditional IDE auto complete, since I don't have to change from "I'm writing code" mode to "I'm reviewing code mode."

There is no reason to believe that LLM will disrupt anyone any time soon. As it stands now the level of workmanship is absolutely terrible and there are more things to be done than anyone has enough labor to do. Making it so skilled professionals can do more literally just makes it so more companies can produce quality of work that is not complete garbage.

Juniors produce progressively more directly usable work with reason and autonomy and are the only way you develop seniors. As it stands LLM do nothing with autonomy and do much of the work they do wrong. Even with improvements they will in near term actually be a coworker. They remain something you a skilled person actually use like a wrench. In the hands of someone who knows nothing they are worth nothing. Thinking this will replace a segment of workers of any stripe is just wrong.

It'll have to improve a magnitude for that effect. Right now it's basically an improved stack overflow.