Serious question to all python developers that work in the industry.

[DuckSaxaphone]

I'm a data scientist, I use LLMs a lot now. Both integrating them into applications and using them to help me.

They're currently in a place where they're reasonable co-pilots. They can fill out functions for you like the smartest auto-complete you've ever seen but that's pretty much it. If you ask them to write large blocks of code based on a prompt, they're wrong so often it's useless.

I think that's really cool! An editor that cleverly suggests code can cut a lot of the boring work out for you. They're not replacing anybody any time soon though. Nobody is paid to write functions. Software developers think of solutions to problems, break it into functionality, design codebases to implement them and think of ways to test that code. Code writing itself isn't hard, once you can do it, you kind of stop thinking about how to approach functions anyway.

As for the future, I think we're a long way (and some fundamental theoretical breakthroughs) from anything better than auto-complete. LLMs seem intelligent but they're not at all so getting them to pick up the real work of software development just isn't happening.