alt Hacker NewsMaybe, but I'm not really convinced. LLMs make some aspects of the job faster, mainly I don't have to type anymore. But... that was always a relatively small portion of the job. Design, understanding constraints, maintaining and operating code, deciding what to do, what not to do, when to do it, gaining consensus across product, eng, support, and customers, etc. I do all of those things as an engineer. Coding faster is really awesome, it's so nice, and I can whip up POCs for the frontend etc now, and that's accelerating development... but that's it.
The reality is that a huge portion of my time is spent doing similar work and what LLMs largely do is pick up the smaller tasks or features that I may not have prioritized otherwise. Revolutionary in one sense, completely banal and a really minor part of my job in many others.
I think the core issue (evidenced by constant stream of debates on HN) is the everyone’s experience with LLMs is different. I think we can all agree that some experiences are like yours while there are others that are vastly different than yours. Sometimes I hear “you just don’t know how to use them etc…” as if there is some magic setup that makes them do shit but the reality is that our actual jobs are drastically different even though we all technically have same titles. I have been a contractor for a decade now and have been on projects that require real “engineers” doing real hardcore shit. I have also been on projects where tens of people are doing work I can train my 12-year old daughter to be proficient in a month. I would gauge that percentage of the former is much smaller than later