For a long time, I am thinking about writing something on this topic, but since I was not sure about my thoughts and how to formulate them, I kept silent. The last few months things are getting clearer in my mind, so here I am to express my opinion on current AI development and its influence on software engineering industry and everyday tasks of one developer. I am writing this post in hope that my experience of more than one year actively using LLMs and agents in coding could help someone who is struggling with the entire idea behind.
Productivity Fallacy
We all heard big announcements on how AI is boosting productivity of developers by 20% - 30% and once when something is in public space as the mainstream idea, it is not so convenient to speak against it. Main industry drivers are making fortune based on that assumptions and it is not popular to be against the idea, or, like in my case, to be less for it as the main narration suggests. I would say that, even, it is not so hard as it is meaningless having in mind that your opinion won’t make any difference.
LLMs are indeed helping to write code, or better said, to generate text. This is in the end the idea of large language models -> meaningful text generation. The main trap here is that, as a developer, you get a sense of large productivity because suddenly you are generating large amount of code in seconds. Having this metric in the head, productivity percentage from the beginning of the last paragraph is definitely true. What is important here is that the same code needs to be read and proven if it is working as it should.
