I guess it's important who one hears this from.

I just spoke to a fried who is a headhunter and who's been trying to automate his processes for a while (he likes to fiddle and certainly has skills, but he's not an engineer). He kept trying, but it just wasn't good enough.

Now he said with GPT Work and Sol, it worked, but the key point is: all of it suddenly worked.

The problem was one of reliability, of handling edge cases. All previous attempts / model-harness-combinations were too brittle and needed too much observation and fiddling - cheaper to do it yourself.

Now he says "I don't know why I would ever hire a recruiter [the folks doing the cold outreach] again. I can focus on the candidate screening and acquiring projects, everything else is fully automated".

This doesn't come from an engineer or an AI lab, but a technically inclined power user, and I think this is where things get interesting.

You heard it from someone with no experience developing software. A lot of AI hype comes from that, even (or especially) from people in the actual business of developing software - a surprising amount of managers and adjacent or supporting roles in the field actually have very little clue about software development.

It's cool that 'regular' people can now create solutions to many small problems, and automate stuff - genuinely a step forward. Like Excel, only vastly better. But for bigger projects, real software engineers know that what LLMs do today is only a tiny part of development. And it solves it in a way that might well make the rest of the lifecycle a lot harder. It's like that saying about tools that make easy things easier and hard things impossible.

Then it just becomes a new baseline (everyone have access to the same LLMs), and recruiting moves up the philosophical ladder where human can add more value. What will it be? I don't know, I'm not a recruiter.

Again I've heard this since 2022 when gpt3.5 came out.

This is like microprocessors in the 80s. Sure they double in capability every 18 months but the start is so pathetic it will be 30 years before they are good enough for everyday tasks.