IMO, it's already happening. I had to change some personal information on a bunch of online services recently, and two out of seven of them were down. One of them is still down, a week later. This is the website of a major utilities company. When I call them, they acknowledge that it's down, but say my timing is just bad. That combined with all the recent outages has left me with the impression that software has been getting (even more) unreliable, recently.
So of course it’s going to generate code that has non-obvious bugs in it.
Ever play the Undefined Behaviour Game? Humans are bad at being compilers and catching mistakes.
I’d hoped… maybe still do, that the future of programming isn’t a shrug and, “good enough.” I hope we’ll keep developing languages and tools that let us better specify programs and optimize them.
Obviously if it's anything even minorly complex you can't trust the LLM hasn't found a new way to fool you.
For a junior in the learning phase that can be useful time spent. Then again, I agree that at times certain menial code tasks are not worth doing and llms are helpful.
It's a bit like a kid not spending time memorizing their time tables since they can use a calculator. They are less likely to become a great mathematician.
But a junior engineer would never find/anticipate those issues.
I am a bit concerned. Because the kind of software I am making, a llm would never prompt on its own. A junior cannot make it, it requires research and programming experience that they do not have. But I know that if I were a junior today, I would probably try to use llms as much as possible and would probably know less programming over time.
So it seems to me that we are likely to have worse software over time. Perhaps a boon for senior engineers but how do we train junior devs in that environment? Force them to build slowly, without llms? Is it aligned with business incentives?
Do we create APIs expecting the code to be generated by LLMs or written by hand? Because the impact of verbosity is not necessarily the same. LLMs don't get tired as fast as humans.