I operate in a bit of a niche, in terms of my clients. They're all typically people I've worked for full time in the past, or closely related. There are some fundamentals of that business I worry about, but I'm able to do things they can't, and I'm looking alright for the year. That's as good as I can generally wish for.
Longer term, I don't know. I'd happily take something more secure if it came along, as long as it's not childminding for an agent. Super busy and bored out my mind the last few weeks, the worst sort of work.
Ignoring the obvious math problem here, I think the broader scope is important. Some of the point from preceding comments is that overall longterm output is not changing. So if somebody is oneshotting a week of work in an hour, but has the same annual output... where are you losing all the normal productivity that should have happened the rest of the week/year?
If one week of work can be reduced to an hour, then you should be able to complete a year's worth of work in 50 hours. If you break that into two 25-hour weeks (because a 40x dev earns the right to loaf?), what is that dev doing for the other 50 weeks in the year? What is making them so incredibly unproductive 50 out of 52 weeks in a year?
That’s also not possible in “skilled” hands. My output is roughly the same. It does the scaffolding, but I need to rewrite almost every line, because it introduces footguns around that often. And before I had about 20000 LOC it failed even with scaffolding, ie architecture. And it wasn’t taste, just footguns all around, architecture ones. Nowadays for example still introduce mutability or completely unnecessary complexity where it shouldn’t, even when the example code which does almost the same is pristine. Many times it’s like StackOverflow, when a question doesn’t need 90% of the accepted answer, but people happily copy it brainlessly.
This is especially bad with new, or quickly improving frameworks, like Android Compose. LLMs use completely outdated, deprecated APIs all the time, when they are not completely supervised. Or at least, I hope so that the framework causes it. Because if that’s not the case, then your products are fucked.
Also even with the best prompts it could never produce more working code in an hour than what I can produce in a day. Regardless of quality, just “working somehow”. Not even with an uninterrupted session. If that’s the case for some, then there is definitely also a developer skill issue. And so would definitely not trust anything coming out of their “supervision” of an LLM.
Put it another way, the issue is that resources are not shared more equitably. This is especially egregious considering that LLMs are trained on all human knowledge. We've all been contributing to this enterprise, and what we may end up getting in return is unemployment.
My dev skills had atrophied long ago, my career felt like it was at a weird dead-end. I was still very aware of various technologies, but didn't know the syntax of every latest framework.
I still had b2b product ideas, but was never able to raise funding. I built an MVP in 2 weeks, got a co-founder to pay for my beans and rice for the year spent building, getting feedback, and refining. We now have paying users.
This is it. Great job. I'm in same boat having been a tech pm in the '01 era but having moved over to business side after. Now having fun building tech stuff again!
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