I’m curios as to why you think the hype isn’t warranted. If you go through my history (you don’t have too I’ll sum it up), you’ll see that I’m not impressed by the capabilities of LLM to actually do my work. Not for a lack of trying, but because ChatGPT simply tells too many lies. We’ve yet to get it to really do anything that wasn’t fairly basic, or solved a billion times on the internet anyway. Similarly we’ve stopped using co-pilot because it takes too much time to make it go away when it’s being bad to make up for the good it does.

Or to put it differently in SWE the LLM seem very bad at building things. What they are good at, however, is helping us build things. I’m not sure I’ll ever need to write JSDoc again on anything that isn’t too sensitive to share. Which is a significant efficiency and quality improvement on the work I do. I think of them as Swagger generators, but instead of being for an OpenAPI standard they are for everything. I imagine they’ll become very good at automating testing as another example, which will again be a further improvement on the work a single developer does.

In terms management might understand. I think you can view LLMs similarity to the way we’ve seen frameworks and tooling reduce the team size needed to build an application significantly over the previous 30 years. If you wanted to build a web-portal for asset management in 1999 you’d need a large team to do what a single developer and a good PO can do today. Maybe we won’t see the same reduction manpower, but instead an increase in quality.