[ex-aws-dude]

Even if we assume extreme case where coding is only done by 99% LLMs in the future

Who is the best possible person you could hire to operate the LLM?

Who has a good mental model of what its doing underneath and has the best expertise to direct/guide it?

IMO no one is better positioned to use these tools than software engineers

[atleastoptimal]

What if the best "person" to operate an LLM is an LLM itself, or more precisely an agentic loop driven by an LLM? DO you believe this won't be the case?

[ex-aws-dude]

The CEO of the company is not going to be directing the LLM

At minimum you at least need CEO -> product person -> LLM

There can any number of agents/loops after that but someone has to translate the requirements to the LLM and monitor/verify the results.

What I'm saying is in the extreme case the SE evolves to become the product person.

If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-fi

[atleastoptimal]

> The CEO of the company is not going to be directing the LLM Why not? Many CEOs are prompting LLMs and coding agents directly. What happens when the CEO -> LLM interaction is more efficient than CEO -> product person -> LLM?

> If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-fi

Why couldn't a software company be completely automated with sufficiently powerful LLM-run agents? What fundamentally is the barrier, if the models are intelligent enough?

[bdangubic]

https://noqta.tn/en/news/polsia-ai-autonomous-company-30m-fu...

:-)

[ex-aws-dude]

Because then you're just describing AGI not LLMs, which in the short term is obviously not happening

Long term maybe but its not a very interesting conversation to talk about things that far out.

[atleastoptimal]

what are your definitions of “long term” and “short term” with respect to number of years

[mejutoco]

The barrier is who gets legally liable if things go wrong. An llm cannot go to prison.

[Copemaxxing]

"IMO no one is better positioned to use these tools than software engineers"

Yes.1 where there used to be 1000.And they are the cream of the crop.Their time is precious because their skills are equally so.

Are you out coding the LLM's even now, or do they already do what took you weeks, in hours?

While you are scoping out the scene and hesitating whether to tell the boss you will have it in two or three weeks, LLM got it done 5 minutes ago.

Now off to the other massive LLM Super Code Reviewer.

The off to the Mega Brain Ultra talented human coding team of one or a handful for the human touch.

Are you the cream of the crop?

If not, start making contingencies ...or cope harder.

Wake up!

[8b16380d]

My goal is to cope until retirement

[ex-aws-dude]

Lol where can I read this sci-fi book?

But seriously my whole team is using LLM tools and not a single person has been layed off.

Productivity doesn't even feel that much higher in terms of number of features shipped.

I think the reason is Amdahl's Law

Probably 40% of my job is actually writing code, so even if you speed that up by double its still a fraction of a fraction.