The recurring dream of replacing developers

I worked for Percy for 4 years. We were “stuck” with imagemagik to do diffing (I’m sure they still might). I was able to build my own differ with Claude/LLM help.

That special enough for you? Or?

The first thing that comes to mind when I see this as a counterargument is that I've quite successfully built enormous amounts of completely functional digital products without ever mastering any of the details that I figured I would have to master when I started creating my first programs in the late 80s or early 90s.

When I first started, it was a lot about procedural thinking, like BASIC goto X, looping, if-then statements, and that kind of thing. That seemed like an abstraction compared to just assembly code, which, if you were into video games, was what real video game people were doing. At the time, we weren't that many layers away from the ones and zeros.

It's been a long march since then. What I do now is still sort of shockingly "easy" to me sometimes when I think about that context. I remember being in a band and spending a few weeks trying to build a website that sold CDs via credit card, and trying to unravel how cgi-bin worked using a 300 page book I had bought and all that. Today a problem like that is so trivial as to be a joke.

Reality hasn't gotten any less detailed. I just don't have to deal with it any more.

Of course, the standards have gone up. And that's likely what's gonna happen here. The standards are going to go way up. You used to be able to make a living just launching a website to sell something on the internet that people weren't selling on the internet yet. Around 1999 or so I remember friend of mine built a website to sell stereo stuff. He would just go down to the store in New York, buy it, and mail it to whoever bought it. Made a killing for a while. It was ridiculously easy if you knew how to do it. But most people didn't know how to do it.

Now you can make a living pretty "easily" selling a SaaS service that connects one business process to another, or integrates some workflow. What's going to happen to those companies now is left as an exercise for the reader.

I don't think there's any question that there will still be people building software, making judgment calls, and grappling with all the complexity and detail. But the standards are going to be unrecognizable.

That being said, someone took the idea of you saying LLM's might be good at subsets of projects to consider we should use LLMs for that subset as well

But I digress because (I provided more in depth reasoning in other comment as well) because if there is an even minute bug which might slip up past LLM and code review for subset of that and for millions of cars travelling through points, we assume that one single bug in it somewhere might increase the traffic/fatality traffic rate by 1 person per year. Firstly it shouldn't be used because of the inherent value of human life itself but even from monetary sense as well so there's really not much reason I can see in using it

That alone over a span of 10 years would cost 75 million-130Million$ (the value of life in US for a normal perosn ranges from 7.5 million - 13 million$)

Sir I just feel like if the point of LLM is to have less humans or less giving them income, this feels so short sighted because I (if I were the state and I think everyone will agree after the cost analysis) would much rather pay a few hundred thousand dollars to even a few million$ right now to save 75-130 Million$ (on the smallest scale mind you, it can get exponentially more expensive)

I am not exactly sure how we can detect the rate of deaths due to LLM use itself (the 1 number) but I took the most conservative number.

And that is also the fact that we won't know if LLM's might save a life but I am 99.9% sure that might not be the case and once again it wouldn't be verifiable itself so we are shooting things in the dark

And we can have a much more sensitive job with better context (you know what you are working at and you know how valuable it is/can save lives and everything) whereas no amount of words can convey that danger to LLM's

To put it simply, the LLM might not know the difference between this life or death situation machine's code at times or a sloppy website created by it.

I just don't think its worth it especially in this context at all even a single % of LLM code might not be worth it here.

Yes, but it’s not why there are fewer adults in the workforce.