> I'm hopeful that LLMs can provide guidance in removing useless tests or simplifying things. In an ideal future they may even help in formulating requirements or design documentation
I am very sceptical here as well. The biggest problem with formulating requirements or design documentation is translation from informal to formal language. In other words... writing programs.
LLMs are good at generating content that doesn't provide useful information (ie. have low information content). Their usefulness right now is caused by the fact that people are used to reading lot of text and distill information from it (ie. all the useless e-mails formulated in corporate language, all multi-page requirement documents formulated in human readable form). The job of a software engineer is to extract information from low information content text and write it down in a formal language.
In this context:
What I expect in the long run is that people will start to value high information content and concise text. And obviously - it cannot be generated by any LLM, because LLM cannot provide any information by itself. There is really no point in: provide short high information content text (ie. prompt) to LLM -> receive long low information content text from LLM -> extract information from long text.
I am very sceptical here as well. The biggest problem with formulating requirements or design documentation is translation from informal to formal language. In other words... writing programs.
LLMs are good at generating content that doesn't provide useful information (ie. have low information content). Their usefulness right now is caused by the fact that people are used to reading lot of text and distill information from it (ie. all the useless e-mails formulated in corporate language, all multi-page requirement documents formulated in human readable form). The job of a software engineer is to extract information from low information content text and write it down in a formal language.
In this context:
What I expect in the long run is that people will start to value high information content and concise text. And obviously - it cannot be generated by any LLM, because LLM cannot provide any information by itself. There is really no point in: provide short high information content text (ie. prompt) to LLM -> receive long low information content text from LLM -> extract information from long text.