> Being a manager of software developers has always been a non-deterministic form of software engineering.

I disagree. Being a manager of programmers requires that you trust your programmers and have some way of occasionally verifying the correctness and efficacy of what they build to make sure that that trust is still properly placed.

But on top of that, the user of an LLM isn't really akin to a manager of programmers. Human programmers are responsible for what they write [0], and even the ones that only cost ~50% of a senior's total comp [1] are still going to be able to fairly reliably explain to you why they made the decisions they did, and fairly reliably be able to follow instruction. LLMs just aren't there yet, and the major LLM providers may never care to get them there.

A programmer who's using LLMs is a programmer who's using LLMs... not a manager of other programmers. I'm not going to say that the tech will never advance to that point, but it's simply not there yet.

[0] Unless management decides otherwise, of course.

[1] Nvidia's CEO recently mentioned that he'd be "deeply alarmed" if senior staff aren't spending at least half of their total compensation [2] on LLM providers, so I'm going to use that as my benchmark for "expected annual LLM spend".

[2] ...meaning that each senior programmer costs their employer at least 50% more than their total compensation....