|
As a self taught developer, LLMs can help you learn, it can help you explore ideas, and it can even build up a syllabus for you. It will also encourage you at every step to let it make decisions for you, paper over anything you don't explicitly call out, and be able to actually build mental models for you - your brain needs to do that work. You will have to find a learning style that works for you and is effective. > what's fine to just learn enough to supervise, and what can honestly just stay AI's job It depends what "fine" means. If your goal is to build more things quickly, LLMs can help. If you want something that is more complex than few-weekend project that is doing something bespoke, or things that others will work on, or that is in a critical area where defects kill the value or reputation, the less you will be able to lean on AI design. Simply put - if you don't develop a skill for determining quality, your projects will balloon in complexity until they grind to a halt, as I'm sure as you've seen as a director. This opinion is not shared widely and certainly runs counter to LLM enthusiasts, but for your situation I think it might be more true than say an experienced developer who's seen things go wrong. > Problem is anything I find is stale within months given how fast this moves. My opinion is that this is an illusion from AI marketing. Prompt/context engineering is slippery because whats in and whats out day to day moves fast, but the actual practice of software is old. There are still quite relevant talks and books and resources from the 90s (nearly 30 years ago!) available. If you center LLMs and AI as the cornerstone of your practice, as almost all AI marketing would have you do, you will find it difficult to do anything, and you will forever be a passenger to LLMs - and as someone who uses them daily, you should trust them about as much as you trust a self driving car to navigate a dirt road. I'd recommend a few short real actual books: The Pragmatic Programmer and Code Simplicity (Oreilly). They can help introduce you to the world of tradeoffs that is the core of building software. |