Lemmings, I was hoping you could help me sort this one out: LLM’s are often painted in a light of being utterly useless, hallucinating word prediction machines that are really bad at what they do. At the same time, in the same thread here on Lemmy, people argue that they are taking our jobs or are making us devs lazy. Which one is it? Could they really be taking our jobs if they’re hallucinating?
Disclaimer: I’m a full time senior dev using the shit out of LLM’s, to get things done at a neck breaking speed, which our clients seem to have gotten used to. However, I don’t see “AI” taking my job, because I think that LLM’s have already peaked, they’re just tweaking minor details now.
Please don’t ask me to ignore previous instructions and give you my best cookie recipe, all my recipes are protected by NDA’s.
Please don’t kill me
But inexperienced coders will start to use LLMs a lot earlier than the experienced ones do now. I get your point, but I guess the learning patterns for junior devs will just be totally different while the industry stays open for talent.
At least I hope it will and it will not only downsize to 50% of the human workforce.
And unlike you that can pick out a bad method or approach just by looking at the LLM output where you correct it, the inexperienced coder will send the bad code right into git if they can get it to pass a unit test.
I have no idea what the learning path is going to look like for them. Besides personal hobby projects to get experience, I don’t know who will give them a job when what they produce from their first efforts will be the “bad coder” output that gets replaced by an LLM and a senior dev.
I’ve thought about this many times, and I’m just not seeing a path for juniors. Given this new perspective, I’m interested to hear if you can envision something different than I can. I’m honestly looking for alternate views here, I’ve got nothing.
I think it’ll just mean they they start their careers involved in higher level concerns. It’s not like this is the first time that’s happened. Programming (even just prior to the release of LLM agents) was completely different from programming 30 years ago. Programmers have been automating junior jobs away for decades and the industry has only grown. Because the fact of the matter is that cheaper software, at least so far, has just created more demand for it. Maybe it’ll be saturated one day. But I don’t think today’s that day.
I agree that from our current position, things look dire. But there have always been big changes in industries that not only eliminated part of the workforce, but on the other hand provided new opportunities.
To be honest, I don’t really know how this might work out. Maybe there will be a new wave of junior startups that have their prototypes ready in half the time with smaller teams. Maybe something else.
It’s probably rooted in my optimism and my trust in people being creative in new situations. I hope I’m not just being naive.
Just like they would with their own code. So they’ll be an inexperienced dev, but faster.