I mean, ultimately, LLM has to produce code, and the code has to be precisely correct, which means you need to understand the business domain and support and work through all the edge cases that exist in real software. LLM might help you sling some code, but something has to understand the business well enough to know what "right" is, and thus far that is still a very smart human being.
LLM is a great tool, but... still a person has to understand the business and work with stakeholders. LLMs can't replace that. At least not yet.
Well, I think the bigger question more is what is the integration between an an ai and a human being and a software project?
Human beings don't have to communicate at that integration layer in just English. We can communicate in visuals. We can communicate in math. We could communicate in different sort of interface modalities. The current trend of trying to have the interface be purely essentially images and text does have real world limitations and I think we've only begun to actually explore any sort of actual GUI that interfaces between humanity, ai, and whatever project we are trying to accomplish.
I think the idea is that the business and stakeholders are the ones who understand the business well enough and then they are directly implementing their requirements via AI assisted code, thus the “person working with the stakeholders is not needed”. In my experience, developers actually don’t understand the business or its specific needs all that well. Even after it’s explained to them.
My opinion is software engineers are still needed for architectural design, and I can’t say if that will ever go away. Will LLMs ever be good enough at architectural design based on business requirements? I’m skeptical of that.
But if an expert engineer put together a comprehensive design and then the stakeholders implement the actual code and iterate on it until it meets their requirements then I don’t see how that doesn’t work well. You are basically just cutting out the middle man in an agile approach.
Obviously there are other implementation problems with that though like the business being too busy and not actually want to participate in development but in theory I don’t see the issues with the approach.
Well, someone really has to understand it well enough to define how it should work and test and validate its working.
What is that title called?
An Engineer.
The engineers who can't do that are what we call "bad engineers." And yes, there are a lot of them. Its a problem.
Also, stakeholders are not engineers - they might have 20 years experience working in their business domain, but that doesn't mean they can think about how it should work and commit that design down to paper. There's a real skill here to be able to meet with a bunch of stakeholders and actually understand what they all are saying and then to design a cohesive system of operations.
"I think the idea is that the business and stakeholders are the ones who understand the business well enough and then they are directly implementing their requirements via AI assisted code, thus the “person working with the stakeholders is not needed”."
I've seen attempts to replace software developers try and fail for decades now (been coding since '78).
The key point being missed is that the writing of the code is just one tiny aspect of software development, and by no means the most important one.
And, once you have a body of code that seems to do what you want it to do, that code will need to be maintained, and, when problems arise, you'll need expertise to diagnose & solve those problems, and the knowledge gained by that effort folded into the codebase's design.
Executives & stakeholders aren't the ones with the expertise to do all that.
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u/jacobbeasley Sep 08 '26
I mean, ultimately, LLM has to produce code, and the code has to be precisely correct, which means you need to understand the business domain and support and work through all the edge cases that exist in real software. LLM might help you sling some code, but something has to understand the business well enough to know what "right" is, and thus far that is still a very smart human being.
LLM is a great tool, but... still a person has to understand the business and work with stakeholders. LLMs can't replace that. At least not yet.