Shills and luddites say AI is capable of replacing SWE
Haha. I imagine Security and biology are the garlic and herbs that drive away the vampires and then the vampires sends their lesser minions to do their job.
> there was a time when men handed their thinking
Reminds me of the "knowing where to tap" story. Some already know where and how to tap and only delegate the tapping part. Some start from scratch and expect the machine to tell them where to tap.
The management, like the ship owner thinks that they don't need to call anyone. That's not the main risk though, it's the majority not caring enough to learn about the ship.
only the clueless, stupid ones
I spent most of the early 2010s rewriting systems that had been outsourced to budget offshore coding shops in the 2000s. The software looked a lot like this: no code reuse, no system architecture, just copy pasta over and over.
The client didn't care about this of course, they weren't reading the code. What made them eventually fire the outsourcing shop and hire a guy like me was the bugs that wouldn't get fixed, and the request to fix a bug that caused three more bugs to get introduced.
I'd rewrite the software and it'd be functionally complete with 1/5th the code, and it'd be faster and have fewer bugs, as well as being maintainable.
I actually developed a sick enjoyment about reading through their code and understanding what they were doing. From what I can tell the guys were being put under pressure to produce code and close tickets. I would find big chunks of dead code that I think was to fool their SLOC counters.
Changing schema on one project required a change order and migrations submitted to DB folks so these guys discovered that mysql booleans were actually integers and they could stick whatever number they wanted in there, and ended up using existing boolean fields to store unrelated data! Of course this broke the original functionality in difficult to track down ways!
I have trouble believing software engineers that have been in the space for more than five, maybe ten years are seriously convinced of your former point. The latter is of course just a fact (demonstrable and observable in practice), so discussing it also makes no sense.
What I wish would happen is that there was more discussion about things that are actually interesting: in what way is the underlying tech being advanced? Most of the news around this and most of the discussion is about the fiftieth slop software doing something tedious instead of actual novelty. I really enjoyed reading about the early tweaks that for example forced even very simple models to emit correct json based on a schema. It was creative and back then very hard. Why is all this breathless vapid hype so effective on most people?
On the other hand, many people claim that machine-generated software STINKS. That it is extremely verbose, that it reimplements similar methods over and over again. That it would rather cut corners at a low level than build high-level abstractions. That it pulls in libraries and makes serious security mistakes. That it writes tests that are basically incomplete. That it is unable to synthesize and keep context. In short, it has the same flaws as humans.
I think these are binary points of view, and both are right. We have vampires that are incredibly fast, super-strong, super-intelligent and super-agile, that suck your blood (your money), and that die as soon as the sunlight of security or complexity hits them.
There has to be another way. Nobody questions the versatility LLMs provide, or the boldness they give you to take on new projects. But I am not convinced that programmers or software engineers are going to disappear. I am not convinced that a manager can ship a new feature in a couple of afternoons and then lay off, or skip hiring, a junior or senior developer. There is a line near the beginning of Dune that goes something like this: "there was a time when men handed their thinking over to machines in the hope of being freed, but that only allowed other men with machines to enslave them."
We need to find a new path between smartphone addiction and being dumbed down by LLMs.