Been thinking about this question more and more in the context of AI automation. A lot of SWE (apart from design and org politics) is just chaining calls to APIs.
Analysis is just calling APIs to get data. We use that to drive a decision and then we write code and use APIs to deploy it. We close the loops with the same data/metric APIs to verify our code achieved an outcome.
I wonder if this is why SWE seems so susceptible to automation - LLMs are great at chaining together calls to APIs.
Just a thought - I know there's a lot of diversity in SWE and this may not apply everywhere. I can think of holes in this line of reasoning (ex. we make decisions about the product during this process) but want to hear others' opinions.
Analysis is just calling APIs to get data. We use that to drive a decision and then we write code and use APIs to deploy it. We close the loops with the same data/metric APIs to verify our code achieved an outcome.
I wonder if this is why SWE seems so susceptible to automation - LLMs are great at chaining together calls to APIs.
Just a thought - I know there's a lot of diversity in SWE and this may not apply everywhere. I can think of holes in this line of reasoning (ex. we make decisions about the product during this process) but want to hear others' opinions.