zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to be generating text or artwork which fools humans into thinking it has coherent meaning as our minds love to fill gaps and spot patterns even where there are none. It’s also pretty good at reproducing things it has seen with variations - that can be useful.

So far in my experience watching small to medium sized companies try to use it for real work, it has been occasionally useful for exploring apis, odd bits of knowledge etc, but overall wasted more time than it has saved. I see very few signs of progress.

The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own.

>>grey-a+ba
The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors

With that as a metric, 1 Senior + 4 juniors cannot build the company with the scope you are describing.

A 50-eng company might have 1 CTO, 5 staff, 15 Seniors, and 29 juniors. So the proposition is you could cut the company in ~half but would still require the most-expensive aspects of running a company.

>>NotAnO+Ue
> The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors

This is such an outlandish claim, to the point where I call it plain bullshit.

LLMs are useful in a completely different way that a Junior developer is. It is an apples and oranges comparison.

LLMs does things in some way that it helps me beyong what a Junior would. It also is completely useless to perform many tasks that a Junior developer can.

>>surgic+Wg
I disagree that they are so different you can't compare them.

Imagine a senior IC staffed with 4 juniors, and they spend 2 hours with each every day. Then the junior is left with 6 hours to think through what they were taught/told. This is very similar to LLM development except instead of context switching 3 times each day, the senior can skip over the 6 hours of independent time the junior required to absorb the changes. But it still takes the same amount of time to deliver the 4 separate projects.

I find the existence of LLM development deeply troubling for a long list of reasons. But refuting the claim that an LLM is similar in many ways to a junior dev is unsubstantiated

>It also is completely useless to perform many tasks that a Junior developer can.

And there are many things one junior could be helpful with that a different junior would be useless at.