[hoppp]

One reason to write by hand is to have intellectual property, since it was ruled that AI generated code is in the public domain by default, so licensing is hard.

Another thing is competitive edge, if you use claude and your competitors use claude then nothing really gives you an edge. AI is a commodity, not competitive edge.

The competitive pressure should drive human work because it's unique.

[danielbln]

The competitive edge lies with the higher attraction layer, not the nitty gritty implementation detail (any more). Is that still software programming? The human work lies in the what and why and in broad strokes how

[hoppp]

That's not always the case imho. Think about advances in running inference, any innovation will happen in the details. Higher layer can stack gpu's but the implementation can still be improved.

Often small technical changes like "making a service 5% faster" are worth millions for large companies. That's all implementation.

[danielbln]

I don't see why a strong model wouldn't significantly outperform any human in this sort of low level optimization work. We don't hand optimize assembly either.

[hoppp]

It's about the competitive edge. If a public model can do it, everyone has access to it so nobody has advantage.

If you want LLMs to be your advantage you can train your own, that's completely valid.

Let's say you want to have a company that runs inference 5% faster, if everyone can do it your business model is worthless.