Only in the sense that ultimately everyone's days are numbered. LLMs can suggest bits of code but there's no reason to believe that it can undertake large-scale, novel software engineering projects. In fact the lack of an underlying mental model makes me doubt that the LLM paradigm will ever get to that point.
For the forseeable future I think there will always be a role for the person who can turn around and say "I see what you're getting at, but it just doesn't fit conceptually with the system. What are you actually trying to achieve? What if we did it this way instead?".
Copilot can absolutely do the jobs of Data Scientists who got hired based on some minimal skills that were considered valuable even three years back.
I have tried applying Copilot to my own work where it spews- garbage. But I use Copilot a lot to generate some example data, or write repetitive code- I needed a basic Flask frontend and I used Copilot to do 70% of the job. But it cannot yet solve Vision tasks.
> " I think there will always be a role for the person who can turn around and say"
These roles, if and when they start to exist, will exist in extremely tiny numbers. And they will all likely be hired from Stanford/Oxbridge/MIT/Caltech, and they will have PhDs.
If this scenario plays out, then, I am afraid for my future, too.
Only in the sense that ultimately everyone's days are numbered. LLMs can suggest bits of code but there's no reason to believe that it can undertake large-scale, novel software engineering projects. In fact the lack of an underlying mental model makes me doubt that the LLM paradigm will ever get to that point.
For the forseeable future I think there will always be a role for the person who can turn around and say "I see what you're getting at, but it just doesn't fit conceptually with the system. What are you actually trying to achieve? What if we did it this way instead?".
I could well be wrong!