[ilaksh]

The SOTA models can absolutely create system designs very effectively. Have you even tried that?

Like literally, let's get someone to randomly propose a few specs. Then we get some developers to try to create a system design. Some have Claude 3.5 Sonnet or o1-preview to help them work on it. Some of them have you to help. Each group has one hour.

Then we have another group that evaluates the system designs on some number of objective criteria. Feasibility, completeness, robustness, etc.

I'm willing to bet that a significant percentage will prefer the system designs made with the AI as an aid rather than your help. Because they will be better.

That's today. The LLMs continue to get better every few months.

It's true that we still can use human engineers for "awhile". But that is probably only a few more years.

[ilkhan4]

I have not tried that, no. I'm not even sure what a SOTA model is (which is my other issue with AI right now: the fragmentation). Sure, the AI design can be done quicker and may be "better" by some objective measure. However, can it present its model to upper management in a coherent way to justify the budget it is about to be given? Can it translate this design into a series of tasks for (surely AI) engineers to implement? Can it deal with late-breaking changes to the design based on new requirements? You'll tell me it probably can, or shortly will be able to. The thing is, as long as humans are making the ultimate decisions, they'll probably want another human in the loop somehow, at least within this generation.

I mean, look, there's no one who wants to stop having to write code more than me. Our industry is full of make-work and pointless drudgery for no reason and I'd love to see that be made pointless by AI. But there's the old quote about overestimating the short term progress and underestimating the long term progress that applies here. Your version of "awhile" is probably pretty similar to the "awhile" of people excited about past technologies. As another comment pointed out, we engineers have been trying to automate ourselves out of a job for quite a while now and I don't see this being much different. I'm old enough to remember the 4GL fad and people were just as breathless then that you didn't need those pesky engineers anymore and soon you'd be able to do similar things as AI is promising. Low-code was a thing recently too. These things gradually chip away at the skills you need to make things happen, but something has to ultimately be responsible for the results and that's where humans come in.