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> A business leader can though. If a 'business leader' is prompting out software through their agents, ensuring it works, maintaining it, and taking accountabi

• rdevilla 6mo ago
  By this definition, pre-LLM "business leaders" circa 2008 with not even an understanding of Excel were already "software engineers" this whole time - just prompting out software through their meatspace agents, instead of their silicon ones. Dismissal of arguments as "just semantics" is high school level argumentation.
  • ej88 6mo ago
    clearly not the same when they were abstracted from the realities of building software and.. directly taking accountability for it! by semantics, i mean the definition and pool of tasks, responsibilities, and outcomes a job is comprised of is shifting so fast that the borders of what is a 'software engineer' and 'business person' are melding together. software engineers are business people in their own way
    • rdevilla 6mo ago
      I don't understand why humans abstract a business leader away from the realities of building software, while LLMs do not. If the rhetoric is to be believed, the set of responsibilities falling to the role of "software engineer" is shrinking to zero, and all engineers are being forcibly "promoted" to the managerial class of shepherding around agents.
      • ej88 6mo ago
        i would say theres more nuance than that (disclaimer: dont have a crystal ball) software engineers who are comfortable doing business work - managing, working with different stakeholders, having product and design taste, being sociable, driving business outcomes are going to be more desired than ever likewise, business leads who can be technical, can decompose vague ideas into product, leverage code to prototype and work with the previous person will also be extremely high value. i would be concerned if i was an engineer with no business acumen or a business lead with no technical acumen (not counting CEOs obviously, but then again the barrier to starting your own business as a SWE has never been lower)
• nradov 6mo ago
  It's funny, that's why COBOL was originally developed in 1960: so that business people could write software themselves without needing software engineers. And it sort of worked, to an extent. History repeats itself.
  • doubled112 6mo ago
    Between then and now, what ever happened to "no code development" or whatever they called it, where all of the world's APIs could be connected with lines in a diagram?
    • seniorThrowaway 6mo ago
      low code / no code, and it's been around in one form or fashion since the 1990's, at least.