Your Job is to Integrate
You felt it. The shift. That your role has fundamentally changed thanks to LLMs. It first entered your subconscious when you realized how easily you can now crank out PRs. You felt it more concretely (and less enthusiastically), as a reviewer when you opened your laptop one morning and noticed your review queue was double what it normally is thanks to everyone else cranking out PRs. And you feel this pervasive, general sense of friction.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where this friction is coming from.
Depending on the repository size and CI setup, it will be slightly different
for everyone. It might involve longer review times or slipping review
standards. You might be noticing more merge conflicts and merge related CI
failures. Perhaps there are more failures sneaking through to main or CI is
taking longer to give you results. You almost certainly feel the grind.
People are on edge, tired; developers are pulling in opposite directions.
Here’s what LLMs shifted. The bottleneck is no longer producing code. The bottleneck is integrating it. The friction we’re feeling is a result of more PRs, more ideas, more reviews, more disagreements all made possible thanks to LLMs. In short, the problem can best be summarized by Figure 1:
But we’re living in a moment where many folks haven’t realized this yet, and are still under the impression that their job is to produce code.
It’s not. Your new job is to integrate it.
Why Does It Matter?
Your first instinct might be to dig in and go about your work as usual. This is a very rational response, after all LLMs certainly aren’t the first major disruption to rock the tech industry, and this strategy has worked well in the past. But it also comes with some pretty big risks. CEOs across the industry have also felt the shift. And they’re certainly taking action, by cutting jobs 123 to be precise. After all, there’s no point in producing code faster than you can ship it.
So what can you do about it? It’s not possible to turn the tides against LLMs, but you can control what’s inside your sphere of influence. And that starts with an honest reflection on your new role, and how to thrive within it. Producing code is no longer the scarce resource it once was, what’s scarce now is the ability to integrate it.
What is Integration?
Your new role is to integrate changes. That means getting changes through the pipeline as efficiently as possible, while still maintaining a high bar of quality. This can encompass work that happens before, during or after actually implementing the changes.
Before implementation you have to draft a plan and advocate for it. You need to work with stakeholders to negotiate the terms and priorities. You need to coordinate with other teams to make sure you aren’t pulling in different directions. For more complex changes, you need to design and architect the solution at a high level.
During implementation you need to guide the LLM down the correct path. You need to help it come up with an acceptable implementation and understand its tradeoffs. You need to review the LLM’s output as it gets generated. You need to test, validate and understand the changes well enough to explain them to another reviewer. If necessary, you need to be ready to course correct and shift the implementation down a completely different path.
And afterwards you need to actually merge the change. Monitor CI and metrics, debug and fix issues. You need to be able to identify issues quickly and back out the regressing changes.
Adapting to the New Reality
In this new reality, process and pipelines will be king. Companies will put a premium on DevOps / Platform Engineering type teams as they try to increase their velocity. The bottleneck has moved from actually producing the code to planning, coordination, review, CI and deployment.
The shape of that bottleneck will be different at every organization, but the outcomes are the same. Wherever your team feels the most pain, whether it’s code review, or unclear direction, or lower quality, that’s where LLMs have outpaced your tools and process. That’s where the work is.
The engineers who thrive in this new age are the ones who can identify and fix those bottlenecks. That could mean writing better tooling, setting clearer standards or being the person who keeps changes moving through the pipeline efficiently.
The shift has happened. Now integrate it.