What does it mean to be a software engineer? You know the syntax, standard library, and common third party libraries of your domain. You know the runtime, and

What does it mean to be a software engineer? You know the syntax, standard library, and common third party libraries of your domain. You know the runtime, and the orchestration around multiple instances of your runtime. You know how to communicate between these instances and with third-party runtimes like databases and REST APIs. A large model knows all of this as well. We already rely on generative language model conversations to fill in the knowledge gaps that Googling for documentation (or “how do I do X?” stackoverflow answers) filled. What’s harder is debugging. A lot of debugging is guesswork and action taking, note-taking, and brain-storming for possible ideas as to why X crashes on Y input. Bugs that boil down to isolating a component and narrowing down what’s not working are hard. Being able to debug them could be the moat that will protect us SWEs from redundancy. Alternatively, pioneering all the new ways of getting reproducible builds and reproducible environments will be the route to eliminating this class of bug entirely, or at least being able to confidently say that some bug was probably due to bad memory, bad power supplies, or bad luck.