I started a company with a combination of no-code tools and LLMs to help me program some of the rest.
I’ve got a degree in CS, but haven’t programmed professionally in 15 years.
These new tools have allowed me to create something even larger teams would struggle with on my own in a matter of months.
I’m astonished at the progress I’m able to make without much assistance.
There is often something I’ll need to sit and debug or figure out the name for if I want to ask Google or the LLM helping me code, but that’s about it.
As far as I’m concerned, that means I haven’t needed to hire at least 2-3 full time engineers, be fully bootstrapped, and profitable from day 1 at launch.
Maybe I’ll hire people in the future, but so far the LLMs have replaced engineers, copywriters, designers, and customer support roles. I can handle it all on my own or have the LLM (in the case of customer support) do a decent enough job that I don’t even have to do it anymore.
It has been masked by layoffs. It's really hard to actually tell. Companies are still in lean hiring mode. Is that because of lack of work to do or productivity rising to the point that no extra people are needed?
ChatGPT works really well if you are doing something that is mainstream and well understood.
For example - I've been writing a presentation on image processing and needed a whole bunch of examples. OpenCV has a ton of blog posts, documentation, stack overflow content for it to have learnt from. So it's been great. I can just ask it for some python code to demonstrate some particular algorithm and it can give me really helpful code and suggestions.
I'm also working on a Rails app at work, again, very mainstream, lots of source material for it to have learnt and generalised from. It's a fantastic pair programmer to talk to about how to approach things. And to be honest, I could not use things like ActiveAdmin without it.
Also, I can't stress enough, if you are using 3.5 and not 4 then you really can't comment on how good ChatGPT is.
Senior devs profit heavily from ChatGPT since they can tell bullshit apart from correct answers and know how and what to ask. Otherwise i don’t see much of an impact on the headcount. It helps being already an expert in the subject matter.
0 impact
The powers that be are just as reluctant to give us staff as ever.
I think my peers have started to rely on it too much, so much of my time is battling ideas that hold absolutely no water
I am excited about AI / machine learning, and I do think ChatGPT is a really cool engineering feat, but in it's current state I don't see it displacing too many jobs.
Basically right now it's a fairly accurate assistant that you can communicate with via text only. I just don't know how many jobs can be replaced with that.
It’s just another variation of “do more with less”
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Worth noting that copilot has been in active use by many devs I know before ChatGPT and that doesn't appear to have eliminated jobs. Fundamentally your job is to understand - not just type characters into a terminal. I think you might be shocked how bad things would get for a person who lacks any understanding of what they're doing if they just concatenate ChatGPT output indefinitely.