LLMs will fundamentally change software engineering | the scapegoat dev

There is one side of the hype around these technologies that I come across pretty often, which is that these technologies are bad for some $reason ("they are stochastic parrots", "they create bullshit", "they can't reason", "they make up facts", "they might replace junior developers, but they will not replace senior developers"), which, while technically true, is missing a much bigger point: if you are in the business of writing software, these things work.

In fact, they work so well that I think we are on track to see a fundamental shift in how software is built. This is going to have a drastic impact on pretty much everything. The irony of the situation is that programming is probably one of the jobs that can most easily be replaced by these technologies. This article is mostly directed at programmers among my readers: we are at a pivotal moment where we programmers need to understand and appropriate these technologies, on our own terms, before capitalism does it for us.

I have written about how I am convinced that LLMs are a paradigm shift for the pragmatic programmer and started giving more detailed insight into what I have been using these models and the applications around them for. I have also written about my budding ethical stance around this technology, and won't get into that aspect in this post.1

Leave a Comment