What does it mean to be productive? If you work in software development that generally means shipping code, or at least changes to code. There’s always been a tension in how to measure the output of a software developer though, and that’s partly due to the at least partially creative nature of the work we do.
So when a tool comes along and promises to make you more productive, how do you assess that?
Yes, this is a talk about LLMs. It’s a talk about the effects of LLMs and what they mean for people in the software development industry. We feel like there’s a discussion to be had around what the role of a software developer was, what it is now, and what it could look like in the future.
Productivity is a term that is used a lot but that has a meaning that can be hard to pin down. LLMs make some people more productive. They make other people less productive. They make other people feel more productive even when they aren’t. We’ll be talking less about the LLMs themselves, and more about their relationship to how software engineers work or are expected to work, and what it is we’re actually meant to produce.
Join us for a discussion of what it means to be productive, not just to us as software engineers but to everyone.
Benno is widely known as someone with opinions and a (possibly over-)willingness to share them. He has been working with computers professionally for over 30 years (unprofessionally for longer) and takes particular joy in examining how computers, the Internet, and all that surrounds all of these intersects with the humanity that it is meant to help.
Daisy is a software developer based in Narrm/Melbourne and previously Tarntanya/Adelaide. She was the Conference Director of PyCon AU 2023 and PyConline AU 2020, Track Organiser of DjangoCon AU 2018-19, and has presented talks at PyCon AU, Kiwi PyCon, Linux.conf.au, and CampJS. She is passionate about well-designed APIs and dresses with pockets, and is more afraid of you than you are of her.
