Software has, with precious few exceptions, almost always been held together with duct tape and a prayer.

hugeBirb 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes I know. There's no nuance on HN. I was using it as a metaphor to show that this person has no idea what they're doing. Which is a huge difference from someone deeply knowing the codebase and tech it'll sit on to make an educated tradeoff. I've seen the duct-tape in real codebases and I knew the engineers who put it there and why. That doesn't exist when your senior engineer is a nebulous "idea of an engineer" that resets its memory every few hours.

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cybrox 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The issue is not duct tape, the issue is having someone you can rely on to know what to tape.

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ghusto 4 hours ago | parent [-]

People in the know are not suggesting engineers are no longer needed, but that they need to adapt.

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ducktective 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Please explain this "adapting". The LLM sellers' holygrail is * you just need to crank our model bro *. With this mindset, there is no adaptation needed, save a couple of weeks of getting up to speed with nuances of using the models, the / commands and integration of their APIs into your workflow.

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simonw 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You gotta ignore what the LLM sellers are saying and listen to the people who don't have a financial incentive to sell a particular message.

	▲	ducktective 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not just corpo talk. The ultimate goal in LLM and AI progress is "replacement" of professional knowledge workers. In the march of the 9s of the accuracy of the generated LLM output, the engineers role would matter less and less. It's asking engineers to "adapt" to being efficient in filling out the last 10% then 1% then 0.1% then 0.01%.