It will suck to babysit LLMs as a job. In one sense perhaps it will be nice to have models do the chores. But I fear we’ll be 90% babysitting. Today I was in an hour long chat with ChatGPT about a problem when it circled back to its initial (wrong) soliton.

I have very little fear for my own job no matter how good models get. What happens is that software gets cheaper and more of it is bought. It’s what happened in every industry with automation.

Those who can’t operate a machine though (in this case an AI) should maybe worry. But chances are their jobs weren’t very secure to begin with.

Baby sitting LLMs is already my job and has been for a year. It's kind of boring but honestly after nearly 20 years in the game I felt like I was approaching endgame for programming anyways.

one more thing - you won't get a "job" .. on-demand temps can fill the roles, and are much cheaper for the company. It is happening already.

All the project/product managers that think they are the ones responsible for team success are going to get a rude awakening. When they try to do the job of an entire team, it's going to come apart pretty quickly. LLMs are a tool, nothing more, they don't magically imbue the user with competency.

They're not going to try to do the job, they're going to hire cheaper, worse SWEs to manipulate AI... and then things will come apart pretty quickly :) But they'll still have someone else to blame.

> LLMs are a tool, nothing more, they don't magically imbue the user with competency.

Not a good take though, IMO. They're literally a tool that can teach you how to use them, or anything else.

> > LLMs are a tool, nothing more, they don't magically imbue the user with competency.

> Not a good take though, IMO. They're literally a tool that can teach you how to use them, or anything else.

I disagree. In their current incarnation, LLMs require a human subject matter expert to determine if the output is valid. In the project manager team lead example, the LLM won't tell you if the database is sized correctly, or if you even need a database.

>they're going to hire cheaper, worse SWEs to manipulate AI

This is 100% the play.

Right now you can hire 5 devs in India to do the job of 1 competent US dev and save 30-40% on total cost.

Add in AI and it will only take 3 devs in India to do the same work, and can now save 50-60% on total cost.

They will ensure that before that happens that won't occur; I'm sure they will cover their bases. AI is great for PM's/Product/C-Suite types (i.e. the decision makers). Bad for the do'ers/builders long term IMO.

I don't care. I swore to myself that if the time comes my skills will no longer be needed, I'd gracefully ride into the sunset and do some other thing.

Sounds nice until you actually have to find some other thing, especially with the bar for entry being high for most interesting and well compensated jobs. It will be even worse when you have huge numbers of other devs also looking for a new job.

This is really the only answer. Be water my friend.

Incompressible, freeze around 0°C, corrosive to metal, got it.

side-step flamebait like winnie the poo

Oh, bother

Hopefully that some other thing puts bread on your table.

I've taken up a new career as an AI influencer.

Give IBM a trillion dollars and they couldn't threaten a 7 year olds lemonade stand business, I think we'll be safe lol

That’s their goal, no doubt. And I’m sure a lot of zombie projects will be blindly turned over to this type of agent and left to rot. But in practice, these agents will never replace humans, because someone will have to oversee them, and that human will probably just be the “developer” that was “replaced” by them. The work will suffer, the quality will suffer, the enjoyment of the human will suffer, the costs will increase, but some salesperson and some mid level exec will be able to claim they sold and deployed AI and get a bonus.

Developers are not going to go away, but the cushy high salaries likely will. Skill development follows a logarithmic curve where an AI boost to junior devs will be much more than the boost given to senior devs. This discrepancy will pull down the value of devs as you will get "more band for you buck" from lower tier devs, since the AI is comparatively free.

Although I also wonder about the development of new languages that may be optimized for transformers, as it seems clumsy and wasteful to have transformers juggle all the tokens needed to make code readable by humans. That would be really interesting to have a model that outputs code that functions incredibly but is indecipherable by humans.

Junior devs don't always understand enough to know why something should or shouldn't be done.

I don't think junior devs are going to benefit; if anything, the whole role of 'junior' has been made obsolete. The rote / repetitive work a junior would traditionally do, can now be delegated wholesale to a LLM.

I figure, productivity is going to be increased a lot. We'll need less developers as a result. The duties associated with developers are going to morph and become more solutions / architecture orientated.

What you say could be true too (or a combo), the outcome will still be the same though as more devs compete for fewer positions.

at some point, this will explode in a giant mess when your Codebase is littered by AI generated trash.

There’s still a huge gulf to cross to get to “instead of”.

Easy fix, start publishing public repos on github with incorrect code so the AI is trained on it.

bring it on lol

time to start a consultancy that specializes in unfucking the mess made by generative AI

I run a startup accelerator with a law firm partner (but not a legal accelerator) - and some of the stuff I hear in the lunchroom is wild. No doubt the firm is going to do extremely well un-fucking gen AI legal mess.

not only AI, we have one 'guru' who sounds like he is reading copilot on remote audio only meetings.

Thank you for a great career idea.

great minds think alike. remote consulting looks within the reach now.

AI is the new bottom-of-the-barrel outsourced contractor.

Reminds me of fixing all the half-baked vendor's work my company pays good money for.

Let the AI write all the code and programmers will do the fixes.