hard24

I field a small team of experts who are paid upwards of a million GBP in cold-hard cash in London. Not stock. Cash.

You sound like a bozo, I can sniff it through my screen.

"No one cares about handcrafted artisanal code as long as it meets both functional and non functional requirements"

Speak for yourself. I don't hire people like you.

Indeed. My view as a CEO is, if you are still reviewing the code yourself then what use is it that you can produce a bunch of text at a faster rate?

I'd prefer people wrote good quality code and checked it as they went along... whilst allowing room for other stuff they didn't think of to come to the front. The production process of using LLMs is entirely different, in its current state I don't see the net benefit.

E.g. if you have a very crystalised vision of what you want, why would I want an engineer to use an LLM to write it, when the LLM can't do both raw production and review? Could this change? Sure. But there's no benefit for me personally to shift toward working that way now - I'd rather it came into existence first before I expose myself to incremental risk that affects business operations. I want a comprehensive solution.

Also when you are writing code yourself you are implicitly checking it whilst at the back of your mind retaining some form of the entire system as a whole.

People seem to gloss over this... As a CEO if people don't function like this I'd be awake at night sweating.

This is incredibly circular lol...

"So will it turn out that actually writing code was never the time sink in the first place?"

Of course it wasn't! Do you think people can envision the right objects to produce all the time? Yeah.. we have a lot of Steve Jobs walking around lol.

As you say, there's 'other stuff' that happens naturally during the production process that add value.

I think as long as having to review code stays around, the 'artistry' of writing code isn't going away.

Think about it - how do you increase the speed at which one can review code? Well first it must be attractive to look at - the more attractive the faster you review/understand and move through the review. Now this won't be the case everywhere - e.g. in outsourced regions the conditions will force people to operate a certain way.

Im not a SWE by trade, I just try to look at things from a pragmatic stand-point of how org's actually make incremental progress faster.

My prediction is a concorde-like incident is going to shatter trust and make people re-think their expectations of the capabilities of LLMs and their abilities of the present.

Essentially something big has to happen that affects the revenue/trust of a large provider of goods, stemming from LLM-use.

They wont go away entirely. But this idea that they can displace engineers at a high-rate will.