> developer somewhere between junior and mid-level

Why the insistence on anthropomorphizing what is just a tool? It has no agency, does not 'think' in any meaningful manner, it is just pattern matching on a vast corpus of training data. That's not to say it can't be very useful - as you seem to have found - but it is still just a tool.

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layer8 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This isn’t necessarily anthropomorphizing, as from a company’s point of view, or uncharitably even from a tech leads point of view, developers are also just tools. The point being made is that LLMs (supposedly) fulfill those developer roles.

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bdcravens 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's less about what the tool is, and more about the kind of work we often assign to less experienced developers. Pattern matching in meatspace is still pattern matching.

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AlecSchueler 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not anthropomorphising though, is it? It's just a comparison of the tool's ability. Like talking about the horsepower of an engine.

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somewhereoutth 3 days ago | parent [-]

But we didn't do this with spreadsheets or word processors - and those tools really did replace small armies of clerical and secretarial workers.

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lubujackson 3 days ago | parent [-]

The difference is AI is closing on doing the EXACT work with the EXACT info as a junior dev. Give an LLM a Jira ticket and a codebase and it can push a PR. Spreadsheets are great, but that was a tool that minimized effort but didn't remove it. LLMs can directly replace a remote junior with no visible difference already.

	▲	somewhereoutth 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Give an LLM a Jira ticket and a codebase and it can push a PR Not really though can it, unless that codebase and Jira happens to pattern match correctly somewhere. I'd say that the difference is just that LLMs have a natural language interface (for good or for ill).