Brain dump on LLMs and sw development

In the past years we've heard all kinds of statements on LLMs and sw development: from AI will replace developers to AI lowers code quality.

I think it's a bit of both, and the reality most organizations will face is that they'll need BOTH humans and AI. The optimistically proclaimed cost-savings from replacing humans with AI will most likely not materialize in the long term.

By following Simon Willison blog in the past two years, I came to the conclusion that the most effective humans are those that can bend and craft their own AI tools and are willing to go to the extreme extent of completely reworking their coding workflow to suit this new technology. For example, see Harper Reed's LLM workflow or Simon's Willison own setup.

Everybody else who's "just" relying on the IDE integration of chat will reap limited benefits, because this approach is tailored for the human and not the LLM.

I would also argue that platform, integration and helpdesk/support teams might also be the teams that (right now) stand to benefit the most from LLMs, because LLMs can help quickly fill gaps in their knowledge and provide ideas, starting points, or MVPs to resolve a problem.

Pure product teams might take longer to benefit (unless LLMs evolve rapidly), as their knowledge tends to be more deep and narrow, whereas LLMs "reasoning" tends to be more broad and shallow.

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