I think of it as an enabler that reduces my dependency on junior developers. Instead of delegating simple stuff to them, I now do it myself with about the same amount of overhead (have to explain what I want, have to triple check the results) on my side but less time wasted on their end.
A lot of micro managing is involved either way. And most LLMs suffer from a severe case of ground hog day. You can't assume them to remember anything over time. Every conversation starts from scratch. If it's not in your recent context, specify it again. Etc. Quite tedious but it still beats me doing it manually. For some things.
For at least the next few years, it's going to be an expectation from customers that you will not waste their time with stuff they could have just asked an LLM to do for them. I've had two instances of non technical CPO and CEO types recently figuring out how to get a few simple projects done with LLMs. One actually is tackling rust programs now. The point here is not that that's good code but that neither of them would have dreamed about doing anything themselves a few years ago. The scope of the stuff you can get done quickly is increasing.
LLMs are worse at modifying existing code than they are at creating new code. Every conversation is a new conversation. Ground hog day, every day. Modifying something with a lot of history and context requires larger context windows and tools to fill those. The tools are increasingly becoming the bottleneck. Because without context the whole thing derails and micromanaging a lot of context is a chore.
And a big factor here is that huge context windows are costly so there's an incentive for service providers to cut some corners there. Most value for me these days come from LLM tool improvements that result in me having to type less. "fix this" now means "fix the thing under my cursor in my open editor, with the full context of that file". I do this a lot since a few weeks.
A lot of micro managing is involved either way. And most LLMs suffer from a severe case of ground hog day. You can't assume them to remember anything over time. Every conversation starts from scratch. If it's not in your recent context, specify it again. Etc. Quite tedious but it still beats me doing it manually. For some things.
For at least the next few years, it's going to be an expectation from customers that you will not waste their time with stuff they could have just asked an LLM to do for them. I've had two instances of non technical CPO and CEO types recently figuring out how to get a few simple projects done with LLMs. One actually is tackling rust programs now. The point here is not that that's good code but that neither of them would have dreamed about doing anything themselves a few years ago. The scope of the stuff you can get done quickly is increasing.
LLMs are worse at modifying existing code than they are at creating new code. Every conversation is a new conversation. Ground hog day, every day. Modifying something with a lot of history and context requires larger context windows and tools to fill those. The tools are increasingly becoming the bottleneck. Because without context the whole thing derails and micromanaging a lot of context is a chore.
And a big factor here is that huge context windows are costly so there's an incentive for service providers to cut some corners there. Most value for me these days come from LLM tool improvements that result in me having to type less. "fix this" now means "fix the thing under my cursor in my open editor, with the full context of that file". I do this a lot since a few weeks.