Software Engineering is not a subset of computer science, they just intersect. And as a software engineer, your job can be summarized as gathering requirements and designing a solution, implementing and verifying said solution, and maintaining the solution in regards to changes. And the only thing AI does now is generating code snippets. In The Mythical Man Month, Brooks recommend to spend 1/3 of the schedule to planning, 1/6 to coding, 1/2 to testing components and systems (half for each). And LLMs can’t do the coding right. What LLMs add, you still have to review and refactor and it would have been faster to just do it.
False. Obviously this depends on the work, but an LLM is going to get you 80-90% of the way there. It can get you 100% of the way there, but I wouldn't trust it, and you still need to proof read.
In the best of times, it is about as good as a junior engineer. If you approach it like you're pair programming with a junior dev that costs <$20/mo then you're approaching it correctly.
> Obviously this depends on the work, but an LLM is going to get you 80-90% of the way there.
No. No it can't.
However amazing they are (and they are unbelievably amazing), they are trained on existing data sets. Anything that doesn't exist on StackOverflow, or is written in a language slightly more "esoteric" than Javascript, and LLMs start vividly hallucinating non-existent libraries, functions, method call and patterns.
And even for "non-esoteric" languages it they will wildly hallucinate at every turn apart from some heavily trodden paths.
Yes it can. When the project is yet another javascript CRUD app, 80% isn't brand new, never existed before code, but almost-boilerplate that does exist on StackOverflow, on a heavily trodden path where the LLM will get you 80% of the way there.
Nothing changed in your description compared to what I wrote. It still remains "for a well-trodden path in a well-known language with SO-level solutions it will help you, for anything else, good luck"
I'm not contradicting what you're saying, no. I'm emphasizing that the well trodden path as being the majority of the work out there, as opposed to possibly being flippant about "anything else". if I'm reading you wrong, apologies.
