> Are you trying to use LLMs to fool yourself into thinking this still isn't the game of humans needing to understand what's going on?
This is a key question. If you look at all the anti-AI stuff around software engineering, the pervading sentiment is “this will never be a senior engineer”. Setting aside the possibility of future models actually bridging this gap (this would be AGI), let’s accept this as true.
You don’t need an LLM to be a senior engineer to be an effective tool, though. If an LLM can turn your design into concrete code more quickly than you could, that gives you more time to reason over the design, the potential side effects, etc. If you use the LLM well, it allows you to give more time to the things the LLM can’t do well.
Fully agree. In my own usage of AI (which I came to a bit late but have tried to fully embrace so I know what it can and can't do) I've noticed a very unusual side effect: I spend way more of my time documenting and reviewing designs than I used to, and that has been a big positive. I've always been very (maybe too) thoughtful about design and architecture, but I usually focused on high-level design and then would get to some coding as a way of evaluating/testing my designs. I could then throw away v0 using lessons learned and start a v1 on a solid track. Now however, I find myself able to get a lot further in nailing down the design to the point I don't have to build and throw away v0. The prototype is often highly salvageable with the help of the LLM doing the refactoring/iterating that used to make "starting over" a more optimal path. That in turn allows me to maintain the context and velocity of the design much better since there aren't days, or weeks, or even months between the "lessons learned" that then have to go back and revise the design.
The caveat here though, is if I didn't have the decades of experience writing/designing software by hand, I don't think I'd have the skills needed to reap the above benefit.
This is a key question. If you look at all the anti-AI stuff around software engineering, the pervading sentiment is “this will never be a senior engineer”. Setting aside the possibility of future models actually bridging this gap (this would be AGI), let’s accept this as true.
You don’t need an LLM to be a senior engineer to be an effective tool, though. If an LLM can turn your design into concrete code more quickly than you could, that gives you more time to reason over the design, the potential side effects, etc. If you use the LLM well, it allows you to give more time to the things the LLM can’t do well.