[acureau]

I cannot understand the overwhelmingly negative sentiment in this thread. I've used LLMs every day at work for several years now, I am a firm believer they're useful. Never once have I felt that an LLM could do my job without me steering it. I know the project goals, how to structure the code, the right and wrong paths to explore, how to evaluate and test its changes, how to make good engineering decisions, and much more.

LLMs do not think. Someone has to be in the driver's seat. You're fooling yourself if you think that 99% of the population can use an LLM to write software. Or that they even have the desire to. I can cook, but I often go out to eat. I could repair a leaky sink, but a plumber will always do a better job. The specifics of our jobs are constantly changing, but our role in society will remain the same.

One-off scripts can be written with non-technical prompts, but this work was already cheap. To do anything meaningful you need to be able to reason about a hard problem as a whole and at the implementation level simultaneously. Specifying context, tasks, structure and style, data representation and control flow, these things are software engineering. You are simply writing software in natural language. It has never been about the syntax.