There are still significant limitations, no amount of prompting will get current models to approach abstraction and architecture the way a person does. But I'm finding that these Gemini models are finally able to replace searches and stackoverflow for a lot of my day-to-day programming.
I find this sentiment increasingly worrisome. It's entirely clear that every last human will be beaten on code design in the upcoming years (I am not going to argue if it's 1 or 5 years away, who cares?)
I wished people would just stop holding on to what amounts to nothing, and think and talk more about what can be done in a new world. We need good ideas and I think this could be a place to advance them.
Can you point to _any_ evidence to support that human software development abilities will be eclipsed by LLMs other than trying to predict which part of the S-curve we're on?
I too use multiple LLMs every day to help with my development work. And I agree with this statement. But, I also recognize that just when we think that LLMs are hitting a ceiling, they turn around and surprise us. A lot of progress is being made on the LLMs, but also on tools like code editors. A very large number of very smart people are focused on this front and a lot of resources are being directed here.
If the question is:
Will the LLMs get good at code design in 5 years?
I think the answer is:
Very likely.
I think we will still need software devs, but not as many as we do today.
I’m not even talking about large codebases. It struggles to generate a valid ~400 LOC TypeScript file when that requires above-average type system knowledge. Try asking it to write a new-style decorator (added in 2023), and it mostly just hallucinates or falls back to the old syntax.