At its heart that all engineering principles exist to do. Allow us to extract useful value, and hopefully predictable outcomes from systems that are either poorly understood, or too expensive to economically characterise. Engineering is more-or-less the science of “good enough”.
There’s a reason why computer science, and software engineering are two different disciplines.
> Software engineering is the application of an empirical, scientific approach to finding efficient, economic solutions to practical problems in software.
> The adoption of an engineering approach to software development is important for two main reasons. First, software development is always an exercise in discovery and learning, and second, if our aim is to be “efficient” and “economic,” then our ability to learn must be sustainable.
> This means that we must manage the complexity of the systems that we create in ways that maintain our ability to learn new things and adapt to them.
That is why I don't care about LLMs per se, but their usage is highly correlated to the wish of the user to not learn anything, just have some answer, even incorrect, as long as it passes the evaluation process (compilation, review, ci tests,..). If the usage is to learn, I don't have anything to say.
As for efficient and economical solutions that can be found with them,...
I’ve personally found them extremely useful to test and experiment new ideas. Having an LLM throw together a PoC which would have taken me an hour to create, in less than 5mins, is a huge time saver. Makes it possible to iterate through many more ideas and test my understanding of systems far more efficiently than doing the same by hand.
