LLMs’ reshaping of people, processes, products, and society in software development: a qualitative exploration with early adopters
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly reshaping software development, but their impact across the full software development lifecycle is underexplored. Existing work tends to focus on isolated activities such as code generation or testing, leaving open questions about how LLMs affect developers, processes, products, and the broader software ecosystem. We address this gap through semi-structured interviews with sixteen early-adopter software professionals who integrated LLM-based tools into their day-to-day work in early to mid-2023. We treat these interviews as early empirical evidence and compare participants’ accounts with recent work on LLMs in software engineering, noting which early patterns persist or shift. Using thematic analysis, we organize our findings around four dimensions: people, process, product, and society. Developers reported substantial productivity gains from reducing mundane tasks, streamlining search, and accelerating debugging, but also described a productivity-quality paradox: they frequently discarded generated code and shifted effort from writing code to critically evaluating and integrating it. LLM use was highly phase-dependent, with strong uptake in implementation and debugging but limited influence on requirements gathering and collaborative work. Participants developed new competencies to use LLMs effectively, including prompt engineering strategies, multi-layered verification, and security-conscious integration to protect proprietary data. They also anticipated changes in hiring expectations, team practices, and computing education, while emphasizing that human judgment and foundational software engineering skills remain essential. Our findings, consistent with evidence from large-scale studies, offer actionable implications for developers, organizations, educators, and tool designers seeking to integrate LLMs responsibly into professional software practice.