As an engineer I've spoken to a couple of different designers who are building out prototypes of their startup ideas using LLM assistance with the coding.
While no actual engineer is involved at that stage, if they got funded then I'm sure their next step will be to hire a real engineer to do it all properly.
<insert manic laughter>
I mean that might happen, but why get funding? Why not move to market immediately? Without debt. Get in the thick of it. Just do. You want a wage or do you want a product that does the thing. Because sometimes, with the llm, you can just build the thing. The marketing, the compliance, you might hire for that, or you might also out-source to the llm.
Why would you hire? Either it works- in the sense of does the job and is cost effective- or it is not.
Is there a situation where paying 100's of k of wages makes a thing suddenly a good idea? I have doubts.
Let's see if your little app can handle millions of daily users without an actual engineer. Your average application will fall over before that.
It'll be some time before an AI will be able to handle this scenario.
But by then, your job, my job and everyone else's job will be automated, it's entirely possible the current economic system will collapse in this scenario.
While no actual engineer is involved at that stage, if they got funded then I'm sure their next step will be to hire a real engineer to do it all properly.