What if Transformers Were Never Invented?

Imagine it's 2016. No GPT. No Copilot. No Cursor. No Windsurf. No ChatGPT. No LLMs at all.

You're still a developer. Still building. But everything takes longer. And feels heavier.

I’ve been thinking seriously about this lately—not the future potential of LLMs, but the actual impact they’ve already had on software engineering.

Here’s what I think we’d lose if they were gone:

You used to open 6 tabs to figure out how to use a new API. Now you just ask. In your context. In your stack.

No SEO blog spam. No broken Stack Overflow threads. Just signal. Fast.

Need to scaffold a Fastify server with tRPC + Postgres? You don’t start from scratch. LLMs generate the boring parts—accurately.

You tweak the logic, not the plumbing.

Remember configuring webpack? Or setting up Cypress in a monorepo?

Now it’s a prompt and a 2-minute edit. Not a 2-hour pain spiral.

LLMs are your persistent junior dev:

Never tired of dumb questions

Never annoyed you asked again

Always explaining in plain English (or code)

This has real impact. Juniors level up faster. Seniors aren’t stuck unblocking all day.

You used to need 5 people: Dev, PM, designer, DevOps, QA.

Now? You can ship a polished demo solo in 48 hours.

That’s why everyone’s trying side projects again. The illusion of scale became real.

So What Did LLMs Actually Give Us?

Time compression from idea → prototype → live

Knowledge unblocking without waiting for a teammate

Freedom to experiment without fear of “wasted” time

Leveling up without gatekeepers

Creative autonomy, even in unfamiliar stacks

And this isn’t a theory about what’s coming. It’s what’s already changed.

We used to spend hours searching, wiring up infra, or translating vague docs. Now we build. And ship. Faster than ever.

Take away LLMs, and software engineering slows down 2x–3x overnight.

Not because we can’t code. But because we’d lose leverage.