I’ve used ChatGPT for writing landing pages for my own websites, and as you say, it does a “good enough” job. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a house decorated in knick knacks from Target. For whatever reason, we have had a cultural expectation that websites have to have this material in order to look respectable, but it’s not business-critical beyond that.
By contrast, software remains business-critical. One of the key points that’s being made again and again is that many business applications require extremely high levels of reliability. Traditional software and hardware engineering can accomplish that. For now, at least, large language models cannot, unless they are imitating existing high-reliability software solutions.
A large language model can provide me with reliable working code for an existing sorting algorithm, but when applications become large, dynamic, and integrated with the real world, it won’t be possible to built a whole application off a short, simple prompt. Instead, the work is going to be about using both human and AI-generated code to put together these applications more efficiently, debug them, improve the features, and so on.
This is one reason why I think that LLMs are unlikely to replace software engineers, even though they are replacing copy editors, and even though they can write code: SWEs create business-critical high-reliability products, while copy editors create non-critical low-reliability products, which LLMs are eminently suitable for.
I’d say marketing is business-critical, and the difference between phone-it-in, good, great, and stellar content is important to bottom lines (depending on industry/product/service). That said, if the general point is that grammar issues on a site will have a lesser negative effect than buggy code that crashes that site, I agree. I’d also agree that unless you’re a marketing or content agency, marketing and content may be part of your business but they’re not the core of it. In contrast, almost every business in every industry runs on software today...
Still, I don’t know how long things like scale, complexity, and strategy will be meaningful hurdles for LLMs and other AI technology (nobody does), but it feels like we’re accelerating toward an end point. Regardless, software engineering seems like a good aptitude to add to the toolbox, and it’s good to hear that I may not be too late to the game.
I’ve used ChatGPT for writing landing pages for my own websites, and as you say, it does a “good enough” job. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a house decorated in knick knacks from Target. For whatever reason, we have had a cultural expectation that websites have to have this material in order to look respectable, but it’s not business-critical beyond that.
By contrast, software remains business-critical. One of the key points that’s being made again and again is that many business applications require extremely high levels of reliability. Traditional software and hardware engineering can accomplish that. For now, at least, large language models cannot, unless they are imitating existing high-reliability software solutions.
A large language model can provide me with reliable working code for an existing sorting algorithm, but when applications become large, dynamic, and integrated with the real world, it won’t be possible to built a whole application off a short, simple prompt. Instead, the work is going to be about using both human and AI-generated code to put together these applications more efficiently, debug them, improve the features, and so on.
This is one reason why I think that LLMs are unlikely to replace software engineers, even though they are replacing copy editors, and even though they can write code: SWEs create business-critical high-reliability products, while copy editors create non-critical low-reliability products, which LLMs are eminently suitable for.
I’d say marketing is business-critical, and the difference between phone-it-in, good, great, and stellar content is important to bottom lines (depending on industry/product/service). That said, if the general point is that grammar issues on a site will have a lesser negative effect than buggy code that crashes that site, I agree. I’d also agree that unless you’re a marketing or content agency, marketing and content may be part of your business but they’re not the core of it. In contrast, almost every business in every industry runs on software today...
Still, I don’t know how long things like scale, complexity, and strategy will be meaningful hurdles for LLMs and other AI technology (nobody does), but it feels like we’re accelerating toward an end point. Regardless, software engineering seems like a good aptitude to add to the toolbox, and it’s good to hear that I may not be too late to the game.