It's going to look similar to the trend of off-shoring developer jobs to the lowest bidder over seas. I made my career cleaning up the webs of technical debt that many companies accrued.
LLM code assistants in the hands of a skilled developer are a productivity multiplier. In the hands of a novice, they bloom technical debt like cancer. Expect rapid cost cutting, followed in about a year or two my panicked recruiting of expensive contractors to fix the unmaintainable mess, making the whole endeavor a loss (which looked good enough on the books for enough time to earn raises and bonuses for managers).
I've been following developments since OpenAI's 2020 announcement with exactly this in mind.
My intent is to understand
- how these tools are being hyped for programming
- the kinds of things inexperienced or poor programmers are using the tools for
- the errors and failure modes typically resulting from naive usage or misuse
- mitigation strategies derived from well-known techniques of dealing with legacy systems, applied to the particulars of AI-generated code and systems.
LLM code assistants in the hands of a skilled developer are a productivity multiplier. In the hands of a novice, they bloom technical debt like cancer. Expect rapid cost cutting, followed in about a year or two my panicked recruiting of expensive contractors to fix the unmaintainable mess, making the whole endeavor a loss (which looked good enough on the books for enough time to earn raises and bonuses for managers).