The big problem with LLMs as a "staff engineer" is that LLMs are precisely suited to the kind of tasks that I would normally assign to a junior engineer or cooperative engineering student.
That's bad because it makes "not training your juniors" the default path for senior people.
I can assign the task to one of my junior engineers and they will take several days of back and forth with me to work out the details--that's annoying but it's how you train the next generation.
Or I can ask the LLM and it will spit back something from its innards that got indexed from Github or StackOverflow. And for a "junior engineer" task it will probably be correct with the occasional hallucination--just like my junior engineers. And all I have to do for the LLM is click a couple of keys.
That's bad because it makes "not training your juniors" the default path for senior people.
I can assign the task to one of my junior engineers and they will take several days of back and forth with me to work out the details--that's annoying but it's how you train the next generation.
Or I can ask the LLM and it will spit back something from its innards that got indexed from Github or StackOverflow. And for a "junior engineer" task it will probably be correct with the occasional hallucination--just like my junior engineers. And all I have to do for the LLM is click a couple of keys.