> This is the million dollar we'll see answered in our lifetime. Software engineering exists to automate work, are we arrogant to think we are not destined to the same fate? Is this truly a job befitting of a human over an agent?

There is a fine distinction here that I believe is often glossed over, so the two things it's delineating get muddled together. One of those two things is coding—the rote, mechanical encoding of meaning into computer instructions. It can be argued the LLM is fit to take this out of hands hands almost entirely, and it's almost indisputable the LLM is better at this in at least a certain sizeable subset of coding tasks.

But the other thing is the choosing, determination, specification of the intended meaning itself. This I think is squarely the job of the human, because letting this fall through to the AI means it is no longer the human that is making the decisions. This then becomes not merely automating work but ceding control. This, ultimately, is a bad thing.

So if we accept the premise that the specification of the intended meaning is the job of the human, the question is how you do that. Today many of us do it somewhat half-assedly, by writing lots of natural language text at the LLM and hoping it sticks. It is our hope that the text, given that there is a lot of it, will drive the stochastic machine in a sufficiently correct direction. This works to a degree—meaning we've ceded some control but not the majority of it—not least because we still read (most) of the code but cannot work in the limit, if code reading ceases.

A more proper way to specify the intended meaning is to specify (or "model") your system formally in a system that is mechanically verifiable. Then the final artefact produced by the LLM can be validated by verifying that it aligns with the specification. However this type of high-assurance specification looks a lot like a certain type of programming. In my opinion, writing this kind of specification is the future of human software engineering.

I do not accept the approach of simply rolling the dice and hoping the machine knows better than us, though I'm sure that church is also going to have its acolytes.