> If you can only afford to hire one analyst, and the analyst's time is only spent on cleaning data and generating basic sums, then that's all you'll get. But if the analyst can save a lot of time with LLMs, they'll have time to handle more complicated statistics using those counts like forecasts or other models.
That applies to so many other jobs.
My productivity as a single IT developer, making a rather large and complex system mostly skyrocketed when LLM's became actually useful (around GPT4 era).
Work where i may have spend hours dealing with a bug, being maybe 10 minutes because my brain was looking over some obvious issue that a LLM instantly spotted (or gave suggestions that focused me upon the issue).
Implementing features that may have taken days, reduces to a few hours.
Time taken to learn things massive reduces because you can ask for specific examples. Where a lot of open source project are poorly documented or missing examples or just badly structured. Just ask the LLM and it puts you in the right direction.
Now, ... this is all from the perspective of a 25+ year experienced dev. The issue i fear for more, is people who are starting out, writing code but not understanding why or how things work. I remember people before LLM's coming in for Senior jobs, that did not even have basic SQL understanding, because they non-stop used ORM's. But they forgot that some (or a lot) of this knowledge was not transferable to different companies that used SQL or other ORM's that may work different.
I suspect that we are going to see a generation of employees that are so used to LLMs doing the work but not understanding how or why specific functions or data structures are needed. And then get stuck in hours of LLM loop questioning because they can not point the LLM to the actual issue!
At time i think, i wish this was available 20 years ago. But then question that statement very fast. Was i going to be the same dev today, if i relied non-stop on LLMs and not gritted by teeth on issues to develop this specific skillset?
I see more productivity from Senior devs etc, more code turnout from juniors (or code monkies), but a gap where the skills are a issue. And lets not forget the potential issue of LLM poisoning with years of data that feeds back on itself.