For the first 10 years of my career I was a contractor walking into national and multinational orgs with large existing codebases, working within pre-existing systems not merely "codebases". Both hardware systems (e.g., new 4g networking devices just as they were released) and distributed software systems.
I can think of many daily tasks I had across these roles that would not be very significantly speed-up by an LLM. I can also see that there's a few that would be. I also shudder to think what time would be wasted by me trying to learn 4g networking from LLM summarisation of new docs; and spending as much time working from improperly summarised code (etc.).
I don't think snr software engineers are so scepticial here that they're saying LLMs are not, locally, helpful to their jobs. The issue is how local this help seems to be.
I worked on debugging modem software at Qualcomm in 2011, also prerelease 4G networking. I believe that LLMs would have dramatically improved my productivity across nearly all tasks involved (if they would allow me to use an LLM from inside the faraday cage).
For the first 10 years of my career I was a contractor walking into national and multinational orgs with large existing codebases, working within pre-existing systems not merely "codebases". Both hardware systems (e.g., new 4g networking devices just as they were released) and distributed software systems.
I can think of many daily tasks I had across these roles that would not be very significantly speed-up by an LLM. I can also see that there's a few that would be. I also shudder to think what time would be wasted by me trying to learn 4g networking from LLM summarisation of new docs; and spending as much time working from improperly summarised code (etc.).
I don't think snr software engineers are so scepticial here that they're saying LLMs are not, locally, helpful to their jobs. The issue is how local this help seems to be.