1. Some industries safety-critical (like mine, aerospace) have a mixture of bureaucracy, process, and protocols that will result in it being much longer before a nondeterministic neural network system takes over the human engineer jobs. I'm not going to prattle on about the details here, but suffice it to say there are substantial regulations about using automated tools to generate and/or test avionics software, and adoption of new technologies is a slow, meticulous matter.
2. Even once we start using LLMs and such for some aspect of safety-critical software development, we're unlikely to use it for everything. E.g., if we let an LLM write code, we probably won't use an LLM to also review and test the code. So humans are still needed there, and they have to be competent enough to usefully review the code.
3. In my own role as a principal engineer, I find myself more interested in the bigger picture of software design and customer satisfaction. I write less code already, delegating to others, and I'm okay with that. The idea of having a tool that could write code for me, even if not 100% of it, leaving me more time to plan new features and products, seems appealing. (Even if I personally can't actually use the tool myself yet, due to (1), the idea in concept sounds good, and can be leveraged in other industries sooner.)
4. I think it really remains to be seen to what extent LLMs will be able to completely take over the software development process. From my own world, if I were to ask an LLM to "write flight management software suitable for a Cessna Citation X", well, I don't expect usable results at this point. I would anticipate that I would have to break the problem down into sufficiently small, well-understood chunks that we probably wouldn't really be eliminating that many humans from the process. There's a big difference, I think, between writing a 1000-line program that is heavily influenced by numerous examples of well-known, well-documented code, and writing a 1,000,000-line program that does things that are more obscure.
5. I hear lots of software developers talk about how awesome LLMs in relation to getting answers from StackOverflow. It sounds to me like some of these folks spend a lot of time snarfing StackOverflow to do their job. I personally have barely ever found the answers to my work problems on StackOverflow. My own first-hand experiences with LLMs so far suggest that they could help me reduce some boring boilerplate code, and help me to discern some poorly-written API documentation, but most of what I work on I just don't see it helping me with so far. I suppose that how much LLMs can replace one's job may depend on to what extent one's job actually is copy-pasting from StackOverflow.
2. Even once we start using LLMs and such for some aspect of safety-critical software development, we're unlikely to use it for everything. E.g., if we let an LLM write code, we probably won't use an LLM to also review and test the code. So humans are still needed there, and they have to be competent enough to usefully review the code.
3. In my own role as a principal engineer, I find myself more interested in the bigger picture of software design and customer satisfaction. I write less code already, delegating to others, and I'm okay with that. The idea of having a tool that could write code for me, even if not 100% of it, leaving me more time to plan new features and products, seems appealing. (Even if I personally can't actually use the tool myself yet, due to (1), the idea in concept sounds good, and can be leveraged in other industries sooner.)
4. I think it really remains to be seen to what extent LLMs will be able to completely take over the software development process. From my own world, if I were to ask an LLM to "write flight management software suitable for a Cessna Citation X", well, I don't expect usable results at this point. I would anticipate that I would have to break the problem down into sufficiently small, well-understood chunks that we probably wouldn't really be eliminating that many humans from the process. There's a big difference, I think, between writing a 1000-line program that is heavily influenced by numerous examples of well-known, well-documented code, and writing a 1,000,000-line program that does things that are more obscure.
5. I hear lots of software developers talk about how awesome LLMs in relation to getting answers from StackOverflow. It sounds to me like some of these folks spend a lot of time snarfing StackOverflow to do their job. I personally have barely ever found the answers to my work problems on StackOverflow. My own first-hand experiences with LLMs so far suggest that they could help me reduce some boring boilerplate code, and help me to discern some poorly-written API documentation, but most of what I work on I just don't see it helping me with so far. I suppose that how much LLMs can replace one's job may depend on to what extent one's job actually is copy-pasting from StackOverflow.