Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I’ll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don’t believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of “vibe-coding”, but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can’t spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What’s even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would’ve taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn’t a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It’s a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don’t know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don’t think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
The worrying part for me is how the fuck do we keep people knowing good code and architecture and able to review the output without practicing the art for a couple — or three — decades, first? It just won’t happen, and then the new generations of “devs” won’t have done any coding, basically, and they won’t have learned anything the hard way. Security issues are going to be a nightmare in the future, no?
I’ll comment here, rather than the other discussion we were having.
To answer your question here, you don’t. Here’s why:
Do you farm everything you eat? Do you weave the textiles that make your clothes? Do you smith the shoes that go on your horse? Do you form the bricks that made your house yourself? Do you harvest fire wood to cook your food? Do you tan leather to make belts and shoes? Do you
No. And why? Because technological improvements made the artisinal version of that work unnecessary to be largely done by artisans. Not that we don’t still have artisans doing these things. And not that we have every single article of clothing on Earth made by machines.
Coders are in the same plight that cobblers were in 100+ years ago. And I’ve been to a cobbler in the last year! But only because I really love this one pair of great boots that can be resoled. I don’t go there for running shoes and flip flops.
The part that feels like betrayal to coders is that the LLMs came from their own kind.
I don’t farm what I eat, but the people that do have to have that knowledge of how to do that.
That’s the difference here. LLMs are creating “developers” that need to have the knowledge to be able to audit the code produced, but they won’t have that knowledge. That is the problem. Not the “paradigm shift”.
This is where Idiocracy becomes real. People won’t know how to do the things to make sure they’re done right. I’d say it’s like history where jobs that used to exist no longer do because they were replaced by something better, faster, and cheaper…but those were individual jobs and not what LLMs are being shoehorned into essentially overnight - the programming framework that runs civilization.
Definitely been getting Idiocracy vibes the last decade or so, holy shit is it tangible right now.
This feels similar to the shift from writing everything from scratch to the use of massive libraries and frameworks. We were shifting from a paradigm with a single developer likely knew every line of code to three years ago when developers wrote the glue that holds frameworks together, but relied on the framework devs to support and test a large amount of the code base.
The difference here is that the devs are still responsible for AI’s code instead of the support of another company. What we’re going to see are more tools to certify the safety of AI developed software. Not only will software be tested against requirements, but also a stringent default set of tests to certify it against security risks.
The next 3 years are going to be a paradigm shift in software development. Things will be a bit messy in the interim. On the other side will be a new type of developer working with very different tools.
And diesel-gate tells us exactly how that’s going to turn out.