Old Man Yells at Cloud
People (not just old men) are yelling at LLMs to build the thing they have in their head. No longer hindered by not knowing how to build a website or set up a server, they are speaking into existence exactly what they imagined. Vibe coding. Proompts engineered.
This is exactly why everyone hired engineers in the past and now they free from requirements documents, technical specifications, meetings, humans. The role of software engineer and perhaps even wider swaths of the organization can be replaced.
But Seriously
Why did the company founder hire that first engineer, and then a whole team of them? Was it to take words and make them working product? Yes, this is table stakes for a software engineer. Was it only that? No. Here are a few scenarios they hired that software engineer for:
- It’s 11:19pm on a Thursday and for some reason the website stops responding.
- A new feature on the landing page makes the contact link stop working.
- Customers are confused by the purchase page and fail to finalized their purchase.
In short, they solve problems. And they solve problems in real time, in the context of the company culture, product, and constraints. They don’t need constant meetings with the CEO to do it. They are professional software engineers who have seen similar problems before, seek to understand their customers and products, and deliver solutions in a way that AI is still not able to do.
Future generations
Companies are helping train better LLMs for future use (and purchase) rather than training junior engineers in the craft of solving software and product problems. There is no guarantee that your junior engineer won’t move on to another company after you have invested in them but there is certainly not a guarantee that Devin.ai will give you a discount next month because you help build their model. However, centralizing on a handful of LLMs consolidates control of price, creates single sources of failure and in many other ways puts all your eggs in one big opaque basket going forward.
Training the next generation of software engineers alongside your most senior engineers, who can see LLMs as another tool in their tool belt, will pay dividends across the entire landscape of software and product development. It will provide the diversification of skills required for your particular business at exactly the right time. Not with a pricey one-size-fits-all solution but with a real human being who is passionate about their craft and has been trained for exactly this purpose.