[stackghost]

Indeed: The act of actually typing the code into an editor was never the hard or valuable part of software engineering. The value comes from being able to design applications that work well, with reasonable performance and security properties.

[simonw]

It wasn't the hard or valuable part of software engineering, but it was a very time-consuming part. That's what's interesting about this new era - the time-consuming-but-easy bit has suddenly stopped being time-consuming.

[habinero]

It's not time consuming. It seemed slow because of all the other important parts of the job. People vastly overestimate how much time SWEs actually spend writing code lol

[rhubarbtree]

Agreed, often see cope from managers along the line of “writing the code was never the bottleneck”. Well, sure felt like it.

[LtWorf]

For most people who can type with more than 2 fingers, thinking what to type is slower than typing it.

[rhubarbtree]

Aha, and AI beats you at both.

[ok123456]

Then why did most software fail to do that even before the advent of LLMs?

[sethops1]

Because designing systems that work well is difficult. It takes years of experience to develop the muscle memory behind quality systems architecture. Writing the code is an implementation detail (albeit a large one).

[stackghost]

Because coding bootcamps and CS programs were churning out squillions of people who could type the code but had poor design and analytical skills, because there was a time where being able to implement Dijkstra on a whiteboard would get you 400k at a FAANG.

[LtWorf]

And you think these people will now produce better results with the assistance of an LLM that was trained on their work?

[stackghost]

No, that's the opposite of what I think.

Bootcamp grads are basically obsolete now. The real skill has always been the ability to make good design decisions and that's still the case in the LLM era.

[locknitpicker]

> Bootcamp grads are basically obsolete now.

I beg to differ. I know for a fact that some companies started hiring people with LLM experience, whose only expertise is spending all Copilot enterprise account tokens on their first week at the job and proceed to whine that the lack of tokens was stifling their creativity.

Say what you may about boot camps, but at least the people getting hired could do things and understand what they are doing.

[margorczynski]

> The real skill has always been the ability to make good design decisions and that's still the case in the LLM era.

For now maybe yes but the goal is totally removing the human from the decision loop regarding technical stuff.

[fxtentacle]

Are we sure it's not failing anymore after the advent of LLMs?