2 ms·

But now we introduce a junior engineer into the mix: _their_ job is none of those things, it's just to take the issues as filed, and implement them. They don't

But now we introduce a junior engineer into the mix: _their_ job is none of those things, it's just to take the issues as filed, and implement them. They don't get the hard problems to solve, they get both the task and the acceptance criteria, and for them a future version of CodeGPT or whatever it'll be called will completely replace their programming skills. And then, 10 years later, they'll be the senior engineer. And then what? Because today's seniors will be retired in a decade or two, and as they get replaced by people who actually benefited from automatic code generation, the concept of "coding" will (if this trend keeps up) absolutely become a thing that old timers used to do before we had machines to do it for us.

creesch 3y ago
These junior engineers still will need to validate that whatever the LLM implemented works and fits the requirements. If it doesn't work they need to figure out why it doesn't work. It might not be in the same way of current day developers, but I don't foresee a near future where developers don't learn to understand code to some degree. For example, I know a lot of people who work in the low-code development sphere of things. A lot of the developers there barely see any code if any. Yet, when you talk with them they talk about a lot of the same issues and problem-solving but in slightly different terms and from a slightly different perspective. But, the similarities are very much there as the problems are fundamentally the same. With generated code I feel like this will also be similarly true.