Simon Willison’s Weblog

12th July 2024 - Link Blog

The Death of the Junior Developer (via) Steve Yegge's speculative take on the impact LLM-assisted coding could have on software careers.

Steve works on Cody, an AI programming assistant, so he's hardly an unbiased source of information. Nevertheless, his collection of anecdotes here matches what I've been seeing myself.

Steve coins the term here CHOP, for Chat Oriented Programming, where the majority of code is typed by an LLM that is directed by a programmer. Steve describes it as "coding via iterative prompt refinement", and argues that the models only recently got good enough to support this style with GPT-4o, Gemini Pro and Claude 3 Opus.

I've been experimenting with this approach myself on a few small projects (see this Claude example) and it really is a surprisingly effective way to work.

Also included: a story about how GPT-4o produced a bewitchingly tempting proposal with long-term damaging effects that only a senior engineer with deep understanding of the problem space could catch!

I'm in strong agreement with this thought on the skills that are becoming most important:

Everyone will need to get a lot more serious about testing and reviewing code.