How many developers are doing little more than writing boilerplate? Those are the the kinds of jobs best automated. A few years ago behavior-driven development tried to take this as far as possible, taking stories and then turning them into runnable tests. LLMs can already do a pretty good job of being fed inputs and some context and create running code (for example, give ChatGPT a class file and tell it to write a unit test. It does a pretty good job of it)
> How many developers are doing little more than writing boilerplate?
Before you go down the road of what can be automated, let's try to answer this. I'm sure there's actual research, but I cannot find it.
Anecdotal, but with 20+ years of professional development under my belt, at startups, ngos, enterprise, goverment etc: "insignificant amounts".
Yes, some embed-images.sh or some invoice-extractor/src/main.rs - side projects related to a job. Every week some boilerplate like this.
But the vast bulk of my work is:
- finding out what customers/a spec/stakeholder really mean. And how important it really is (and encoding that in executable specs, preferably)
- keeping the old stuff somewhat up-to-date. Fiddling with old Ruby runtimes, Pipenv/pyenv/ or whatever todays flavor is. Nodejs, npm juggling. Docker. Cargo. Deprecations. Security patches. CIs, infra, crashing on updates etc etc.
- muddling through codebases with 10+ years of accumulated horrors. Touched by 100+ random freelancers, employees, most lost to the time. Crippling technical debt. Undocumented decisions everywhere. Crucial business requirements encoded only in these three LoCs amongst thousands of lines inside this update_user_projects() function.
- Trying to get this old project running again on todays OS/runtimes/etc.
The way I see it, LLMs-code-gens currently are little more than unpredictable but advanced compilers. Compiling instructions into instructions that computers can execute. BDD could be a good language to write these instructions. And works for new stuff, and much less for existing stuff. "Maintaining existing stuff" is the vast majority of most developers' work, I'd thing. - but cannot back up -.
