| > Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. I think the statement is generally true, but I also think there are specific tools that do vastly increase dev time for something that follows that specific pattern. Program templates and also code generation have been used forever to simplify and speed up specific types of programs, like all of the CRUD programs in an ERP system for maintaining the hundreds to thousands of different master data like Customers, etc. Those approaches can speed a specific activity that follows a specific pattern by some multiplier (e.g. 4x or 10x). But the trade-off is time to build the template or code gen vs number of instances it will be used. I think where "no silver bullet" has the strongest case is for something completely new where the patterns and templates have not been established. When I think about LLM's and compare to past templates and code gen, I wonder what exactly is the nature of the LLM trade-off in the broad sense. For a template, it's pretty clearly up front design+dev compared to number of instances of usage of the template. LLM's are more general and more broadly applicable, but still not the same as a human. Is the trade-off purely cost that was sunk into the model and tool that now needs to be recouped by the AI company? (e.g. charging the actual $1,000 to $1,500 that it really costs instead of $200 Or are the big trade-offs and costs going to show up in the future: the dwindling of human expertise due to reliance on the tool and the loss of understanding of complex systems. |