Flutterby™! : Let’s talk about LLMs

Two really good ones today. That AI Great Leap Forward that I linked earlier, and Let’s talk about LLMs, talking about what software development really is, and a deep dive into how churning out code is not, in fact, going to give you an order of magnitude of productivity gain.

Via James Bennett @ubernostrum@infosec.exchange, the author

Edit: Lobste.rs summary by the author:

tl;dr

• Fred Brooks' No Silver Bullet was correct.
• No Silver Bullet applies to LLMs the way it applied to other things, and empirical evidence on LLM coding impact sure seems to agree.
• You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature.
• If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens.

The full post is me saying these things much more thoroughly and with citations.