Between last April and now, swe-bench scores have gone up from 25%-70%.
Sure, they're being overfitted to the dataset. But with most performing similarly across even the hardest of 3rd party benchmarks, think frontier math back in Nov and now, we're closer than ever to a specialisation shift.
Hard to say at what % but once code reviews get better its likely 2025 is the last year SWE is a sought after job * demand and supply both
SWE bench scores, like a lot of other metrics for LLMs, are pretty divorced from reality IMO. It's a lot like only learning to pass tests vs actual understanding.
Once GenAI companies stop hiring SWEs, I'll believe the doomers.
I help hire for a few clients as well as for my own small organization. We are already seeing impact of these tools on our hiring. For the same responsibilities and tasks we are already requiring lesser resources. For clients with less complex problems we are able to manage similar work with 60% of the resources planned. And that's when most of our work is mathematical modelling, heuristics, constraint programming and such. However, I don't foresee at least for the next few years we would ever get to a scenario where we don't hire developers. Given that most hiring has shifted to only senior developers.
being able to do more things with fewer resources (which lowers costs) always increases demand enough to make up for the reduction of labor caused by the automation
Analogy: when the chainsaw was invented, we didn't stop having lumberjacks, they just learned to use chainsaws
Vertical software won because GUIs were scarce. General LLMs are winning because context is abundant.