'If you can't build a TODO list app using only punchcards, then you can't do your job...'
Obviously our ambitions expand due to better tools. I now commit to and deliver much more work than before LLMs, and — before then — ditto for frontend frameworks, generation 4 languages etc.
There are projects I now start without thinking twice that I never would have considered a few years ago.
That's what productivity looks like, and it makes you more valuable, and your job more secure (up until the ASI kills us all...).
It makes you less valuable and your job less secure because as LLMs improve, the level of knowledge/skill required goes down, thus putting more people at the level of "good enough", which is generally what companies optimize for over time with regards to hiring (least amount for good enough).
> There are projects I now start without thinking twice that I never would have considered a few years ago.
I'm sick of seeing this argument because it's not as persuasive as you think. If you were incapable of doing it before, why would I ever trust that you could properly evaluate the result? Even if I did, it's still like saying, "I never would've been able to do this project without a subordinate that knew how to do it, now look at me!" Okay? So why would I choose you when it sounds like I could pick anyone with basic programming knowledge to manage the subordinate since I clearly don't need someone with the know-how to do the thing, just someone capable of wrangling a coding agent? Might as well get the cheapest college CS graduate I can find.
Most people making this argument aren’t saying they were incapable of doing the project without AI, they’re saying the cost benefit equation was unfavorable because it would take too long.
I'm fairly sure that if a compiler stops working or has a bug, the expectation is that an engineer is capable of handling it in some way. I don't think any stakeholder will have much sympathy for "compiler stopped working, we can't do our jobs now" argument.
Is that wrong? My assembly programming sucks, but I can do it (slowly) if I need to. I'd expect most serious developers to have that level of knowledge.
I would not. I know a handful of folks who can kinda sorta make their way through hello world in assembly with the docs open, and a handful more who could maybe implement some of the simplest coreutils like cat, maybe. But most devs I know have never seriously written a line of amd64 or aarch64 assembly. It’s just not commonly practical knowledge- even if it is very cool knowledge and helps one understand why things work (or don’t work) under the hood.
Even knowledge of how to drop to C is fairly rare in much of development, and you know what? That’s okay. We all specialize in our own areas of this beast of a field.
What if I can do everything the AI can like read, interpret, and implement code(and not in a likely copyright-breaking way) but also reason about it better.
why not? if he's hired to do the task he's supposedly an expert in, and that is now done by AI, what's stopping the company from replacing him with any other person at a lower cost that operates the same AI?
Obviously our ambitions expand due to better tools. I now commit to and deliver much more work than before LLMs, and — before then — ditto for frontend frameworks, generation 4 languages etc.
There are projects I now start without thinking twice that I never would have considered a few years ago.
That's what productivity looks like, and it makes you more valuable, and your job more secure (up until the ASI kills us all...).