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Not sure that's what I was getting at. People in camp 2 don't think an LLM can take over the job of a real software engineer.

It's people in camp 1 that I wonder about. They're convinced that LLMs can accomplish anything and understand a codebase better than anyone (and that may be the case!). However, they're simultaneously convinced that they'll still be needed to do the prompting because ???reasons???.

by TheGRS10 hours ago|

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One explanation is that some think we might be getting to the limits of what an LLM can reasonably do. There's a lot of functions of any job that are not easily translated to an LLM and are much more about interacting with people or critical thinking in a way LLMs can't do. I'm not sure if that's everyone's rationale but that's my personal view of the situation. Like the jobs will change but we likely won't be losing them to AI outright.

by paleotrope11 hours ago|

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I was thinking today that I need to pivot to making and selling shovels, but then other issue is is anyone going to need shovels in the future.

by georgemcbay11 hours ago|

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I was at 2) until the end of last year, then LLM/agent/harnesses had a capability jump that didn't quite bring me to be a 1) but was a big enough jump in that direction that I don't see why I shouldn't believe we get there soonish.

So now I tend to think a lot of people are in heavy denial in thinking that LLMs are going to stop getting better before they personally end up under the steamroller, but I'm not sure what this faith is based on.

I also think people tend to treat the "will LLMs replace <job>" question in too much of a binary manner. LLMs don't have to replace every last person that does a specific job to be wildly disruptive, if they replace 90% of the people that do a particular job by making the last 10% much more productive that's still a cataclysmic amount of job displacement in economic terms.

Even if they replace just 10-30% that's still a huge amount of displacement, for reference the unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 25%.