GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom

Personally, I define the job of a software engineer as transform requirements into software. Software is not only code. Requirements are not only natural language. At the moment I can't manage to be faster with the AI than manually. Unless its a simple task or software. In my experience AI's are atm junior or mid-level developers. And in the last two years, they didn't get significant better.

Most of the time, the requirements are not spelled out. Nobody even knows what the business logic is supposed to be. A lot of it has to be decided by the software engineer based on available information. It sometimes involve walking around the office asking people things.

It also requires a fair bit of wisdom to know where the software is expected to grow, and how to architect for that eventuality.

I can't picture an LLM doing a fraction of that work.

I think that's my problem with AI. Let's say I have all the requirements, down to the smallest detail. Then I make my decisions at a micro level. Formulate an architecture. Take all the non-functionals into account. I would write a book as a prompt that is not able to express my thoughts as accurately as if I were writing code right away. Apart from the fact that the prompt is generally a superfluous intermediate step in which I struggle to create an exact programming language with an imprecise natural language with a result that is not reproduce-able.