Hopefully everyone? Else your job could have been outsourced or replaced by a junior with access to Google and StackOverflow way before LLMs (it just wasn’t due to zero interest rates and proliferation of bullshit jobs in tech companies).
Humans have goal seeking behavior. LLMs don’t. You could maybe call the combination of LLMs and the RL-based harnesses somewhat “intelligent” in aggregate, but the problem is that it’s not “general” intelligence like these labs want to argue, since it’s by definition only good for the set of problems the RL part has been trained to solve, which is a subset of programming problems.
> Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.
You’re going to have to define productivity as it applies to software engineering. With LLMs we’ve primarily seen the number of PRs over time being discussed as a proxy for LoC, as well as the speed of bootstrapping a small project. None of these have a known correlation with economic output. They just feel good, to the programmer, their manager, or both.
> Using it daily for Chinese-English translation. Significantly better than pre-LLM translation software. Also, great at teaching grammar, nuances, etc.
Yes dealing with language is the one area LLMs are actually designed for. But what’s the TAM for machine translation?
> General Q&A. Like "Googling" but much faster. This is probably the most common use case for me.
And now you’re missing any kind of traceability for the information that you “learn,” since it all gets spaghettified and then recombined into a pile of plausible slop with no attribution. Where before you had to do slightly more work to find the information you needed, now it’s available faster but you’re at complete mercy of literally 3 American companies plus the CCP for the accuracy of that information. Most people somehow seem happy with this arrangement.
> You’re going to have to define productivity as it applies to software engineering.
I meant it in a colloquial way. I just get more done, faster.
> And now you’re missing any kind of traceability for the information
Modern LLM assistants provide sources and references. While it can sometimes be just "slightly faster", it can genuinely save hours of research on complex ones. Also the "slightly faster" can add up to hours saved with frequent use.
> The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking.
That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022.
It’s also a poor take in general, buying very much into the narrative propagated primarily by OpenAI and, especially, Anthropic, who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.
And it's probably worse than it looks because phantom job postings are a real thing.
> ...who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.
Tech companies have laid off over 200,000 people since the beginning of 2025. Even putting aside the fact that (from what I understand) over half of Anthropic and OpenAI's employees are in non-engineering roles, if you assumed every employee was an engineer, Anthropic and OpenAI could triple their staffing levels and it still wouldn't even fill a quarter of the void.
Yes that’s the right source. There would be no recovery in SWE market after the higher interest rates killed it if LLMs had any major impact on SWE employability.
Back in the day, you couldn’t ask stack overflow about your specific business or project. You were forced to build at least some level of understanding of what you were doing on the job or risk your lack of knowledge being obvious (and obviously holding you back).
What we’re seeing now is industrial grade ignorance that can only be observed in in-person or video meetings.
> We can debate as to how successful we’ve been toward the two goals above, but I think it’s misguided to say that the majority of people think LLMs should produce lower quality code.
Guessing you’re not at FAANG or similar company. For the last 6 months at least there’s been tremendous pressure from leadership (including highly experienced IC engineers) to let AI take the reigns, assumption being that future AI assistants will be able to deal with any level of complexity and tech debt created today.
Given that everyone agrees that reviewing all AI-generated code is impractical (if you let the agents rip at maximum available bandwidth), and that “harness engineering” is at best immature and at worst complete snake oil when it comes to ensuring system stability, maintainability, and quality, I do believe that it’s fair to claim that most engineers are, in fact, supportive of low quality code generated by LLMs.
Fwiw I do see pushback here and there, but only from the lowest rungs on the career ladder - ICs with enough experience to see where this train is headed, but no ability to save it. Management needs to see the results of their policies first, and that will take months or even years to fully play out.
Can someone explain these complaints about boilerplate to me? What are y’all doing where boilerplate is the majority of your code? Am I the only one mostly writing concise business logic where most lines are important in one way or another?
The problem is that organizations are inefficient in such a way that extra output from white collar workers doesn't translate to improved org-wide performance in a positively correlated, linear fashion.
When the org is misaligned, mismanaged, has poor customer feedback loops, bad product market fit, too much bureaucracy, etc etc no amount of AI slop is going to make a meaningful impact on its bottom line. In fact, it will likely do the opposite through combination of exponentially increasing complexity, combined with worker force deskilling, layoffs, and rising token prices. Real bottleneck is and always has been communication & alignment.
It might make the employees _happier_ in the interim though, which, I believe, is what we're predominantly seeing during this AI mania. People fed up with the bullshit jobs of rewriting the same service for the 5th time in 2 years or creating TPS reports weekly just for their manager to throw them directly in the trash are absolutely giddy that they no longer have to do this manually. I think we need to question the economic value of these jobs in the first place, though.
I've worked at big tech prior to LLMs becoming a thing, and consistently saw projects of 20-50 people carried by 2-3 individuals that actually understood what needed to be done. I don't think this ratio will be any better with genAI, and I also don't think that tokenmaxxing has any meaningful correlation with impact. Bullshit jobs (and questionable personal projects) just get done faster now. Yay, I guess.
In the long run these highly inefficient firms are going to get destroyed by people who have a vision and can do what 100+ firms are doing and package it together as one solution that is far superior on dimensions that matter to firms.
If only it was that simple. The reason these inefficient companies continue to exist is due to regulatory capture and monopolistic behavior. Competing with them doesn't just require better efficiency.
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