I feel like you might know where I'm coming from being confused at people's reaction to this stuff. This is science fiction. I think it's just not sinking in with people. If I could bet on this, I would bet everything I could on "skill with LLMs" being the high order bit of being an effective software developer 5 years from now.
I don't deny that, under the right circumstances, these tools can produce results that feel indistinguishable from magic, or like science fiction as you put it. But I don't think it's worth the costs. To me, the two most concerning costs are the unreliability, and the massive amounts of stolen training data and underpaid labor (the RLHF process) required for these models. I'm not comfortable relying on a tool built on such foundations.
My bet, and I realize this might just be wishful thinking, is that the high order bit for being an effective software developer in the near future will be skill at using more reliable and non-exploitative automation tools, such as programming languages with powerful macro systems and other high-level abstractions, to stay competitive with developers who sling LLM-generated code. So I'd better get started developing that skill myself.
