This is how every product manager feels every day.
If you're an LLM prompter shipping products, you're outputs are more akin to a product managers, not an software engineer's.
If you're an LLM prompter shipping products, you're outputs are more akin to a product managers, not an software engineer's.
It's hard to hold an LLM accountable for anything.
You can try model all you like, but eventually you have to go argue with finance because you work at Snowflake and your new SaaS product needs a new SKU and is slightly different than this other offering because it has enhanced security on larger storage.
Don’t forget there is a new manual process for troubleshooting this because it overlaps with another feature potential that we found in testing. You need to go make sure your Customer success team is aware of this and has at least some internal documentation.
Ah crap your sales director says they had 2 other competing features that take priority over your feature to train up Sales Engineers to cross sell. So you have meet with existing customers to try and garner interest and also work with comms to make another product release post with higher visibility.
Oops do forget to grab your next ticket for next sprint that just started from Jira, since you are a dev too.
Software engineers are always responsible for their code except now they have to be responsible for Claude's code
Which is - of course - absurd. Accepting responsibility without demanding the corresponding authority is a fool's game.
I have never been much of an advocate for unionisation in the software development industry. I didn't think it was necessary to protect the interests of the workers because for most of the industry's history the workers have largely been able to stand up for themselves anyway. Likewise I've never been a big believer in accreditation and licensing practitioners in our field - because who is qualified to judge someone else worthy in such a young industry with so little hard data about what works or doesn't work? I find my views on these subjects are evolving now.
It's not about protecting jobs if they truly aren't needed any more or protecting people working in the industry who refuse to move with the times. The Luddite philosophy isn't going to get us anywhere here. And besides - if AI is as effective as its advocates have been claiming then there should soon be more demand for capable developers to take advantage of the new opportunities. (The Jevons Paradox is relevant here.) But it is about protecting standards. If the tools aren't doing a good enough job then expecting professional developers to ship the code produced by those tools even though they know it's junk is something that needs to be challenged. And if developers are being expected to ship anything important without having the slightest idea whether it even works then that's even worse.
We had a lot of silliness going on when the very low interest rates and huge amounts of VC funding were propping up ideas and practices that would never have survived otherwise. Today we have a different kind of funny money distorting the industry but it's still propping up ideas and practices that we wouldn't normally support or perhaps even tolerate. And just like before no individual is going to be able to hold back the tide and it's going to have to be a collective effort to push back - hence my evolving views on topics like unionisation and accreditation. We've all seen the drop in quality across much of the industry and we all know why it's really happening because we see how the sausage is now being made.