You're right. We need to keep tabs on the culture for new hires for the reasons you mentioned. LLMs are really good at many onboarding tasks, but the social ones.
I think done right it is a superior onboarding experience. As a new hire, you no longer have to wait for your mentor to be available to learn some badly documented tech things. This is really empowering some of them. The lack of building human context / connections etc is real, and I don't think LLMs can meaningfully help there. Hence my skepticism for the horse analogy.
I've also noticed that LLMs are really good at speeding up onboarding. New hires basically have a friendly, never tired mentor available. It gives them more confidence in the first drafted code changes / design docs. But I don't think the horse analogy works.
It's really changing cultural expectations. Don't ping a human when an LLM can answer the question probably better and faster. Do ping a human for meaningful questions related to product directions / historical context.
What LLMs are killing is:
- noisy Slacks with junior folks questions. Those are now your Gemini / chat gpt sessions.
- tedious implementation sessions.
The vast majority of the work is still human led from what I can tell.
I think done right it is a superior onboarding experience. As a new hire, you no longer have to wait for your mentor to be available to learn some badly documented tech things. This is really empowering some of them. The lack of building human context / connections etc is real, and I don't think LLMs can meaningfully help there. Hence my skepticism for the horse analogy.