[EthanHeilman]

Even if you are going green field, you need to build it the way it is likely to be used based a having a deep familiarity with what that customer's problems are and how their current workflow is done. As much as we imagine everything is on the internet, a bunch of this stuff is not documented anywhere. An LLM could ask the customer requirement questions but that familiarity is often needed to know the right questions to ask. It is hard to bootstrap.

Even if it could build the perfect greenfield app, as it updates the app it is needs to consider backwards compatibility and breaking changes. LLMs seem very far as growing apps. I think this is because LLMs are trained on the final outcome of the engineering process, but not on the incremental sub-commit work of first getting a faked out outline of the code running and then slowly building up that code until you have something that works.

This isn't to say that LLMs or other AI approaches couldn't replace software engineering some day, but they clear aren't good enough yet and the training sets they have currently have access to are unlikely to provide the needed examples.