| LLMs are too new, and too much in flux, to answer this question well. I can give an answer now, and in two months it might be obsolete. So all I can do is say something generic like: It's a productivity tool that will find it's place alongside similar tools like intellisense and linting. Just like those tools it will change the way people code - they will need to hold less info in their mind, and that can potentially allow them to reach greater heights, or learn faster. Or, it could potentiate laziness instead. That's down to the individual (and applies to more than just coding, LLMs are equally used in fields like art, translation, marketing, copyrighting etc.). As for my personal usage. Here's a couple of thoughts that might be obsolete in two months: * It's awesome for looking up basic algorithms like sorts * It's pretty great for doing simple things with well established code bases (e.g. React) * It's even better for doing those things if you are already an expert so that you know how to guide it * It's pretty terrible for doing anything with more obscure/recently released code bases, whether you are an expert or not * I have heard it suggested this will make people want to avoid working with less well known libraries. This remains to be seen I guess Thoughts on what this means in a "professional" career: 1. If your professional career brings you down well trodden paths (e.g. writing React apps) it will probably be a big part of your work 2. If your professional career leads you to working on obscure systems, or even writing those systems, it won't be as useful for you except as a reference for algorithms, or for writing comments (this is where I have been recently). However, if someone can figure out how to retrain the models constantly on new info so that even the newest of releases becomes a part of the training data just as fast as they would show up on a Google search, that will change things a lot. Likewise, if it can be trained on a your own personal obscure codebase (I think this might already be possible?) that would be a big deal. Finally, as for stigma. I don't think so. There are privacy issues but these can be worked around by running a local LLM and these are getting better and better. If you have a graphics card with 16gb of RAM I think there's already models that you can run locally that are similar to GPT3.5 performance. |