Everything else in your post is so reasonable and then you still somehow ended up suggesting that LLMs should be quadrupling our output
It'll also apply to isolated-enough features, which is still a small amount of someone's work (not often something you'd work on for a full month straight), but more people will have experience with this.
I’ve also noticed that, generally, nobody likes maintaining old systems.
so where does this leave us as software engineers? Should I be excited that it’s easy to spin up a bunch of code that I don’t deeply understand at the beginning of my project, while removing the fun parts of the project?
I’m still grappling with what this means for our industry in 5-10 years…
It’s been a majority of my projects for the past two months. Not because work changed, but because I’ve written a dozen tiny, personalised tools that I wouldn’t have written at all if I didn’t have Claude to do it.
Most of them were completed in less than an hour, to give you an idea of the size. Though it would have easily been a day on my own.
This is visible under extreme time pressure of producing a working game in 72 hours (our team scores consistenly top 100 in Ludum Dare which is a somewhat high standard).
We use a popular Unity game engine all LLMs have wealth of experience (as in game development in general), but the output is 80% so strangely "almost correct but not usable" that I cannot take the luxury of letting it figure it out, and use it as fancy autocomplete. And I also still check docs and Stackoverflow-style forums a lot, because of stuff it plainly mades up.
One of the reasons is maybe our game mechanics often is a bit off the beaten road, though the last game we made was literally a platformer with rope physics (LLM could not produce a good idea how to make stable and simple rope physics under our constraints codeable in 3 hours time).