> As you say, I find the act of writing code is hardly the bottleneck to my productivity.
When people claim ChatGPT can replace software engineers because it can sort of code is always puzzling to me. 20 years into this career, and writing code is only a minor part of my day-to-day activities.
A part I do enjoy doing, but still minor part nonetheless.
> What if you design an organization so that coding is the bottleneck? How transformative would LLMs be?
The funny thing is that although ChatGPT has been an amazing coding assistant tool, it can't meaningfully write code beyond boilerplate to me. I use it more as search engine on steroids, rather than actually relying on the code it writes.
A few times it even got into a hallucination loop going through different flavors of uncompilable code when I asked "how to do X using library Y", and refining the question was getting nowhere.
ChatGPT is an amazing tool that provides me value beyond the 20 bucks per month I pay. But still has far too many limitations. It's sort of funny to see people LARPing that it will kill knowledge jobs in the near term.
What amazes me when I talk to people that work in "non-tech" companies is how common boilerplate work is actually out there. Man-millennia of effort to move data from one system to another, or generate a report, or trigger something. The first AI MuleSoft or similar platform is going to kill it.
Design Patterns are said to compensate for features missing in a language (e.g. Visitor for multiple dispatch). ChatGPT is sounding similar - solving accidental complexity that "shouldn't" be there in the first place.
No doubt chatGPT can't replace coder's yet. If current pace of improvement continues (a big if!), it defnly will be able to in a couple of years. Honestly I expect it to happen.
Though I don't expect software dev job to go away. It'll just change in nature. Less typey typey, more managing the LLM.
To me it looks like the rate of change has already slowed having played around with gpt2 and used copilot a fair amount, chatgpt, and now chatgpt with gpt4.
There's also not orders of magnitude more existing data we can feed it anymore.
When people claim ChatGPT can replace software engineers because it can sort of code is always puzzling to me. 20 years into this career, and writing code is only a minor part of my day-to-day activities.
A part I do enjoy doing, but still minor part nonetheless.
> What if you design an organization so that coding is the bottleneck? How transformative would LLMs be?
The funny thing is that although ChatGPT has been an amazing coding assistant tool, it can't meaningfully write code beyond boilerplate to me. I use it more as search engine on steroids, rather than actually relying on the code it writes.
A few times it even got into a hallucination loop going through different flavors of uncompilable code when I asked "how to do X using library Y", and refining the question was getting nowhere.
ChatGPT is an amazing tool that provides me value beyond the 20 bucks per month I pay. But still has far too many limitations. It's sort of funny to see people LARPing that it will kill knowledge jobs in the near term.