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
@ajsadauskas @technology lol you don’t need LLMs to end up in that mess … seen it everywhere
@zenkat @technology Totally agree.
But.
It’s a surefire way to get yourself in that mess in rapid time, when you otherwise wouldn’t.
@ajsadauskas @technology AI: do more stupid stuff faster!
@ajsadauskas @technology …and they’ll find themselves lapped by those who didn’t drink the LLM Kool-Aid.
If quality trumped speed and convenience how does McDonald’s stay in business?
@BrianTheeBiscuiteer McDonald’s actually puts a burger on the bun. Not the best, but adequate for a quick bite. General LLMs put bullshit into the ether.
They will conclude that they did not actually save money by replacing human developers with LLMs.
The next CTO might realize that. If there hasn’t been a change in upper-level management, they’ll just double down and blame the few remaining human developers for the mess.
CTO’s are incapable of self-reflection.
@TootSweet @ajsadauskas They’ll just completely rewrite it from scratch using a newer LLM and that will be considered normal. In those 5yrs the percentage of developers who remember the idea of code having longevity will be tiny.
A fellow had just been hired as the new CEO of a large high tech corporation. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. “Open these if you run up against a problem you don’t think you can solve,” he said.
Well, things went along pretty smoothly, but six months later, sales took a downturn and he was really catching a lot of heat. About at his wit’s end, he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, “Blame your predecessor.”
The new CEO called a press conference and tactfully laid the blame at the feet of the previous CEO. Satisfied with his comments, the press – and Wall Street - responded positively, sales began to pick up and the problem was soon behind him.
About a year later, the company was again experiencing a slight dip in sales, combined with serious product problems. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, “Reorganize.” This he did, and the company quickly rebounded.
After several consecutive profitable quarters, the company once again fell on difficult times. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope.
The message said, “Prepare three envelopes.”
Stolen from reddit
I haven’t seen any talk of wholesale replacement of developers with LLMs in my organisation. What has happened is that these tools have been made extensively available to developers. I think right now they are basically being assessed in terms of how much they help developer productivity. Not sure about other places though, I agree with the idea that it’s not really feasible to just straight up replace devs with an LLM.
They’ll outsource to cheaper offshore LLMs.