Five years later: Why can’t I find any senior developers? Shocked pikachu face.
There is obviously a lot of potential here, but there is also a lot of solution looking for a problem.
My current red flag is if an argument hinges on a trademark breathless frisson for the growth potential. Statements like "models are getting smarter every month" that hasn't been true for a year. If your excitement over AI is based not on what we can do today, but a presumed future expansion for which we have no evidence, that's silly.
But what they can do today is cool. We worked for a long time to get computers to understand natural language intent, and LLMs demonstrably solve this problem.
2004 both Salesforce, Google, and Blackboard (they were big then!) IPO, and Facebook comes screaming onto the scene. Greenspan monetary policy had already made capital nearly free, and the 2008 financial crisis kicked us into 0% interest rate territory. It costs us nothing to invest in talent, so why not? If we invest in 100 startups, each with 100 employees at $150K salaries, and just two of those unicorn exit, we've made our money back, and it costs financiers nothing to wait.
2004 kicked off the simultaneous rise of "software as a service" and "social media," both of which were highly lucrative. But not only that - SaaS allowed traditional (think General Mills or Procter and Gamble) to have high-quality, cutting-edge software products without needing to employ a lot of engineers to run them. They could just pay a line item to Salesforce and let them concentrate the devs.
Just like in 2004, I think we will have a major industry shift that unlocks jobs for lots of these junior folks. I don't think it will be AI - just feels too obvious. I suspect it'll be something to do with climate change.
But of course there are newer things to build, buy that is largely affected by 0% interest rate.
I have a genuine query. Are any software engineers getting sane code out of LLM ?
I struggle to conjure good unity or kotlin code from both paid and self hosted solutions.
For me, the sweet spot is simple but time consuming tasks where the execution is very clear, or the result is very clear but I have to first read a ton of d3.js docs before implementing it. This stuff LLMs do faster than me typing it. Anything more involved where I myself don't know the final result yet, it's faster to figure out the problem while coding instead of trying to figure it out by describing to an LLM.
[0] https://wakatime.com/blog/58-chatgpt-prototyped-our-new-feat...
While this somewhat seems like pitch for 'Cody', I don't think it is, it's just what the author is familiar with from his own company. Doesn't hide that it is a wrapper on other tools.
"Cody Pro lets you use both GPT-4o and Claude (and others), so you can spot-check all your work with another LLM."
I like some of his earlier writing but this is a straight up sales pitch. From the clickbait title sowing fear to the fact that he describes a system of using these models that just happens to coincide with what his tool does. And he's also such a nice guy he's going to start educating people on how to follow his system.
Just another person trying to cash in on the LLM hype. And he's doing so at the expense of aspiring developers that don't know enough to spot the BS.
Pretty appalling behavior.
Aren’t interns and junior engineers paid on their potential rather than the work they produce?
Doesn’t it take a while (like 6 months - 1 year) for any associate to start contributing significantly to the organisation’s output?
A lawyer might delegate the same task to ChatGPT rather than a junior but is the purpose of delegation primary to get the task completed or to give an opportunity for junior to learn the specifics of the task?
Imagine the engineer going oncall for the code this mediocrity generation tool produced. Are they gonna reason with chatgpt “why the duck did you write it this way?” or are they gonna zoom the person whose name git shows on commit during the incident?
The tool is getting better every day, although it will not replace the operator.
As for the rest...
> You remember that big manufactured drama, right, about the new OpenAI "4o" GPT model supposedly having Scarlett Johansson's voice? That's the one. That model changed everything about programming overnight.
> ...
> You can quibble over the numbers, but it's clear that programmers using CHOP with these new models are getting a turbo boost.
I just don't think this is true. I think its a bit hyperbolic at this rate. And I don't think other people think its true which casts some doubt on part of this narrative.
> Things are changing fast. I'm an optimist, and I generally think, or at least hope, that as companies become more productive in the coming months and years, they simply get correspondingly more ambitious.
Again I really don't think we've seen any real productivity boost yet to companies. Maybe a few individuals, but not companies. And I am suspicious that we will, given the nature of things.
> All I can tell you is this: Get there early.
I actually think the opposite! You can safely ignore most of the AI hype cycle and tools right now. You don't have to play with them that much. You can wait a few more years and when they are more polished, use them more if you like them. There's really not a big rush.
I take umbrage with the style of this article, trying to convince of its point by using conspiratorial tones while gesturing towards movies. Maybe its amusing to some, but it feels like a crunch in its convincing-ness of the central arguments.
Which makes this seem like a cynical, if long and winding, sales pitch.
If that sounds like a terrible idea then consider switching to a different field, the trades are booming right now.
But... that's what code review is for. Has the author of this article never heard of the concept?
As a side note: I use Cody and the Sourcegraph core search product at work. I recommend both (I particularly like Cody’s context building using repos). I also think they are in a competitive hard spot, because their own tools will get commoditized by the big bruisers in the space (GitHub, Gitlab, and Codewhisperer).
I could not find anything of substance in this article, and was disappointed, because I feel this is a topic in dire need of discussion.
I'm biased in his favor, but I recognize that brevity is not among his virtues.
