This is what I was telling my programmer friends 5 years ago.
They were saying one cannot replace programmers because any such attempt has led to something as complicated as code, and thus needed programmers.
I was telling them that the same way managers give them vague instructions and they turn out with code, managers could give LLMs vague instructions and they output code.
This is not strictly speaking true though. I don’t want programmers to turn vague instructions into code. I want programmers to turn vague instructions into context and context into code, often gathering context from sources that aren’t easily obtained.
As a manager I often don’t have enough information to prompt an LLM. That’s what the engineer is for.
> I was telling them that the same way managers give them vague instructions and they turn out with code, managers could give LLMs vague instructions and they output code.
I look at those kind of statements and wonder if there’s any kind of programming experience behind them. Managers give vague instructions because they have vague ideas and evaluate implementations vaguely. The people closest to the implementation are the users and the developers. The former needing the help of computers and the latter making the computer able to help the users. The manager is an accidental complexity to the situation.
How does one create a product like SolidWorks, Blender, or Excel? They didn’t came from vague instructions from managers. The users have very specific needs and the developers provide solutions for those needs. Nothing there is vague.
By "vague", I meant natural language, since it is not as precise as code or formal specification.
Now those mangers claim they have programmed.
No real difference. Programmer makes the widgets; manager gets the credit. In the future, people will think a human manually typing out code was like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Glen_Bec...