At present its only SWE's that are benefitting from a productivity stand point. I know a lot of people in finance (from accounting to portfolio management) and they scoff at the outputs of LLMs in their day to day jobs.
But the bizarre thing is, even though the productivity of SWE's is increasing I dont believe there will be much happening in regards to lay offs due to the fact that there isn't complete trust in LLMs; I dont see this changing either. In which case the LLM producers will need to figure out a way to increase the value of LLMs and get users to pay more.
Are SWE’s really experiencing a productivity uplift? When studies attempt to measure the productivity impact of AI in software the results I have seen are underwhelming compared to the frontier labs marketing.
And, again, this is ignoring all the technical debt of produced code that is poorly understood, weakly-reviewed, and of questionable quality overall.
I still think this all has serious potential for net benefit, and does now in certain cases. But we need to be clearer about spelling out where that is (webshit, boilerplate, language-to-language translation, etc) and where it maybe isn't (research code, legacy code, large codebases, niche/expert domains).
This Stanford study on developer productivity found 0 correlation between developers assessment of their own productivity and independent measures of their productivity. Any anecdotal evidence from developers on how AI has made them more or less productive is worthless.
Yup, most progress is also confined to SWE's doing webshit / writing boilerplate code too. Anything specialized, LLMs are rarely useful, and this is all ignoring the future technical debt of debugging LLM code.
I am hopeful about LLMs for SWE, but the progress is currently contextual.
Even if LLMs could write great code with no human oversight, the world would not change over night. Human creativity is necessary to figure out what stuff to produce that will yield incremental benefits to what already exists.
The humans who possess such capability stand to win long-term; said humans tend to be those from the humanities and liberal arts.
But the bizarre thing is, even though the productivity of SWE's is increasing I dont believe there will be much happening in regards to lay offs due to the fact that there isn't complete trust in LLMs; I dont see this changing either. In which case the LLM producers will need to figure out a way to increase the value of LLMs and get users to pay more.