In five years time, some CTO will review the mysterious outage or technical debt in their organisation.
They will unearth a mess of poorly written, poorly -documented, barely-functioning code their staff don’t understand.
They will conclude that they did not actually save money by replacing human developers with LLMs.
#AI #LLM #LargeLanguageModels #WebDev #Coding #Tech #Technology @technology
I don’t disagree, but I’ve heard this before. Assembly devs complaining about compiled languages. C/c++ devs complaining about every newer language. Traditional devs complaining about web developers. Backend web developers complaining about blogs/cms tools. Nearly everyone complaining about electron.
And honestly I think those folks had a point. The old stuff written when the tools were simple and memory scarce were almost works of art. The quality of software development (especially with regard to optimization) has been going downhill for decades. What ever the llms do will just be part of this trend.
Yep. This is the old school way of thinking that leads to things being shitty and not improving. “Why change if it’s not broke?” Cue Uber, Google, Netflix any tech company that replaced the old guards.
Which have all descended, or are in the process of descending, into suckitude because of business issues rather than technical ones. And trying to replace programmers with LLMs is fundamentally a business issue.
They may be failing but they have replaced the industry so it’s irrelevant.
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Do you use Yahoo or AltaVista to search?
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Do you still use taxis?
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Do you use Blockbuster or subscribe to a standard cable package?
I’d wager you say no to all of them. So while the old may be right, it’s irrelevant because they were still outperformed and no longer exist or are just not as competitive.
Again, people get hung up on the best or right way to do things when the reality is that’s not how business works.
The use of LLMs though is more similar to outsourcing than it is to a new technology. No one is talking a out changing how we program, we’re talking about changing who does the programming.
While outsourcing has had its ups and downs, I think most companies have found that skilled technical people can’t really be outsourced easily/cost money everywhere. I suspect we’ll see a similar thing here with LLMs because the core compentcy that makes programmers/engineers expensive is knowing what to do, not how to do it.