From the article:
With the LLMs every time there’s a mistake, I don’t learn. I can spot the mistake because I have some experience (lucky enough to have been born 34 years ago), I can pinpoint the mistake and let the LLM fix it.This is something I realized when I became a manager of programmers rather than doing the work myself. When I write code I do it from a position of having a deep understanding of what all the moving pieces are, when someone working for me writes code I just have to trust they had that level of understanding[1].
But being a manger, the thrill of solving the puzzle was replaced by the thrill of helping some new engineer get better at the craft of writing code. They took pride in their growing skill set and I took pride in helping them grow.
Managing consultants however was very transactional. Did they deliver what was asked of them? Did they fix the flaws I pointed out? Do I still want to pay them?[2] And I could of course fire them easily and try new ones that had a reputation for being "better" at the tasks I needed done.
If history is any judge, there have been many companies over the years where some founder/leader has a "great idea" and just needed someone technical to make it real. And the typical arc for those companies was they get founded, they spend a ton of money on consultants to build their technology, something changes (fashion, systems, something) and their product is no longer a good fit for the market so they try to hire consultants to fix it, which now costs more than 2x because first the consultants had to understand what the previous consultants did, then they have to change it in a way that leadership wants. The result is a product that got more and more brittle until there wasn't enough money to or enough consultants to anneal the product back into something people would pay enough for to support the salaries of the visionary leaders who never had any idea at all of how the product they sold actually worked.
It feels like we're going to speed run that. In the LLM era.
[1] And of course that level of trust is not always warranted but that's a different comment :-)
[2] With consultants there is a velocity vs organizational expertise equation that always needs to be balanced. Dropping people into a legacy code base they've never seen is just as hard for them as dropping them into a consultant's work product that they hadn't previously seen.