At work, I was involved in a project where a large number of individual tasks defined as declarative code had to be translated into JS based equivalents. Due to the unpredictability of each task we would have to do this pretty much manually, one by one. I would estimate at minimum 2 months of grunt work for 4 entry level engineers. Thanks to coding agents and LLMs we were able to achieve this task in a week. Quality of the end result is top notch.

If that's not a product ... then I don't know what it is.

- What was the state of AI/LLMs 5 years ago compared to now? There was nothing.

- What is the current state of AI/LLMs? I can already achieve the above.

- What will that look like 5 years down the road?

I you haven't experienced first-hand a specific task before and after AI/LLMs, I think its indeed difficult to get insight into that last question. Keep in mind that progress is probably exponential, not linear.

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hollowturtle 2 days ago | parent [-]

task automation != replacing engineers. Automating some focused specific tasks has been part of our job forever. On the other hand it's been 5 years that software devs won't be needed anymore, let's see in another 5 years, if you're so sure about your prediction please adivse on some lottery numbers, thanks

	▲	smetj 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well ... IMO this is literally replacing (entry-level) engineers, but lets agree to disagree on that. Be it as it may ... task automation is also "a product" then not? 5 years ago, this wasn't possible. Now it is, so extrapolate that to the future ... ps: If you can guarantee the Powerball lottery continues forever, I can give you a guaranteed winning combination.