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.
Keep holding on. LLMs are still in the operate-at-a-loss-to-control-the-market stage. Once they start charging the real cost, human software engineers will be more in demand. That and refocus. All of human history is careers reinventing themselves as new tools become available.
There is no chargeable “real cost”. Chinese companies are making highly effective distilled models that can run on any decent hardware. The second the AI companies start cranking up the cost, methods of using the free models will come forward.
So basically we have a technology that puts everyone out of a job and doesn’t even make any money for the producers. Stunning.
Perhaps? Can anyone think of an example of expensive software being market dominant when free/inexpensive options exist? Perhaps go look out your Windows at some Adobe walls. Maybe this will be the case where the 3rd neurons of C-suite types activates. Though I can hear someone who has never had a real day of work in their life saying “it’s too expensive and we’re not going to [spend less money for a permanent solution, probably stated as though it’s an impossible task because they don’t understand it], go back to the old ways and we’ll give ourselves promotions for correcting this SUPER INTELLIGENCE boondoggle we created.”
Huh? Both the “decent hardware” and electricity to run the models are chargeable costs. I sincerely don’t understand your argument.
The hardware to run them on an individual level is relatively cheap, the required passthrough for anthropic/openAI is that they reclaim their training costs.
There are already industries balking at having to pay for the chatbot tokens even while the chatbot companies are still hemorrhaging money. It will quickly become non-viable for almost every industry.
The only ones that should continue to worry are the entertainment industry. If companies can get the copyright laws changed to be able to own chatbot content, they will go hard into making it impossible for actual people to make money in the arts.
Then again you have industrialism and the slave labor that took a century of labor unionizing to cut down to a modest 8 hours excluding bathroom breaks and weekends and then you got robber barons and magnates and political meddling and bribery and HEYYYY
That was just us poors getting stuff. Spending money on LLMs cuts into the owners bottom line, so it will be correctly promptly.