My solution has been to work with LLMs and being on the one side of the industry trying to replace the other. I switched focus fairly early on in the "AI hype" era mainly because I thought it looked like a lot of fun to play with LLMs. After a few years I realized I'm quite a bit ahead of my of my former coworkers that stayed still. I've worked on both the product end and closer to the hardware, and as more and more friends ask for help on problems I've realized I do in fact have a lot of understanding of this space.
A lot of people in this discussion seem to be misunderstanding the way the industry will change with LLMs. It's not a simple as "engineers will be automated away" in the same sense that we're a long way away uber drivers disappearing from self driving cars.
But the impact of LLMs on software is going to be much closer to the impact of the web and web development on native application development. People used to scoff at the idea that any serious company would be run from a web app. Today I would say the majority of software engineers are, directory or indirectly, building web-based products.
LLMs will make coding easier, but they also enable a wide range of novel solutions within software engineering itself. Today any engineer can launch a 0-shot classifier that's better performing than what would have taken a team of data scientists just a few years ago.
A lot of people in this discussion seem to be misunderstanding the way the industry will change with LLMs. It's not a simple as "engineers will be automated away" in the same sense that we're a long way away uber drivers disappearing from self driving cars.
But the impact of LLMs on software is going to be much closer to the impact of the web and web development on native application development. People used to scoff at the idea that any serious company would be run from a web app. Today I would say the majority of software engineers are, directory or indirectly, building web-based products.
LLMs will make coding easier, but they also enable a wide range of novel solutions within software engineering itself. Today any engineer can launch a 0-shot classifier that's better performing than what would have taken a team of data scientists just a few years ago.