Even before recent AI capabilities, writing software was (now is) table stakes.
Deep domain knowledge and expertise is essential. Until you actually work at the coal face in a given industry you don't know the complexity nor the opportunities for improvements. Talking to the workers is good, but you never get the complete picture.
LLMs are really good at classical programming because they have plenty of examples to go off of. But what about quantum languages? What if those languages require drastially different syntaxes that we can't reasonable generate from primatives of classical computer languages. Won't we need a human to be trained and generate them?
Programming died back in the '90s; I haven't written any actual code in decades. All I do most of the time is write high-level, abstract prompts for the software agents which generate the code that actually runs.
Well, just let it make a transpiler, e.g. from Oberon90 to C99. I gave this task to Devin and after two days of round-tripping and the LLM increasingly entangling in special cases and producing strange code with more and more redundancy, I stopped the exercise, went back to square one and wrote it myself based on what I already had.
I might be convinced by predictions like the posted one as soon as an LLM is indeed able to independently and correctly solve such a problem, or even add a code generator for yet another target to my compiler, and produce decent code, without my permanent guidance and testing.
It might be true that industry requires less software engineers some day, but it might also well be that they continue to need as much engineers or even more than today, and these people generate ten to hundered times more output together with LLMs than today. Who knows.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 22.0 ms ] threadDeep domain knowledge and expertise is essential. Until you actually work at the coal face in a given industry you don't know the complexity nor the opportunities for improvements. Talking to the workers is good, but you never get the complete picture.
Somehow I still get paid for this.
I might be convinced by predictions like the posted one as soon as an LLM is indeed able to independently and correctly solve such a problem, or even add a code generator for yet another target to my compiler, and produce decent code, without my permanent guidance and testing.
It might be true that industry requires less software engineers some day, but it might also well be that they continue to need as much engineers or even more than today, and these people generate ten to hundered times more output together with LLMs than today. Who knows.