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Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

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Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#471

After reading the comments, the themes I'm seeing are: - AI will provide a big mess for wizards to clean up - AI will replace juniors and then seniors within a short timeframe - AI will soon plateau and the bubble will burst - "Pshaw I'm not paid to code; I'm a problem solver" - AI is useless in the face of true coding mastery It is interesting to me that this forum of expert technical people are so divided on this (…

The biggest surprise to me (generally across HN) is that people expect LLMs to develop on a really slow timeframe. In the last two years LLM capabilities have gone from "produces a plausible sentence" to "can generate a functioning web app". Sure it's not as masterful as one produced by a team of senior engineers, but a year ago it was impossible. But everyone seems to evaluate LLMs like they're fixed at today's capa…

"In the last two years LLM capabilities have gone from "produces a plausible sentence" to "can generate a functioning web app". Sure it's not as masterful as one produced by a team of senior engineers, but a year ago it was impossible."

Illegally ingesting the Internet, copyrighted and IP protected information included, then cleverly spitting it back out in generic sounding tidbits will do that.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#472

I don't worry about it, because: 1) I believe we need true AGI to replace developers. 2) I don't believe LLMs are currently AGI or that if we just feed them more compute during training that they'll magically become AGI. 3) Even if we did invent AGI soon and replace developers, I wouldn't even really care, because the invention of AGI would be such an insanely impactful, world changing, event that who knows what the…

1) Maybe.

2) I do see this, given the money poured into this cycle, as a potential possibility. It may not just be LLM's. To another comment you are betting against the whole capitalist systems, human ingenuity and billions/trillions? of dollars targeted at making SWE's redundant.

3) I think it can disrupt only knowledge jobs, and be some large time before it disrupts physical jobs. For SWE's this is the worst outcome - it means you are on your own w.r.t adjusting for the changes coming. Its only "world changing" as you put it to economic systems if it disrupts everyone at once. I don't think it will happen that way.

More to the point software engineers will automate themselves out before other jobs for only one reason - they understand AI better than other jobs (even if objectively it is harder to automate) and they tend not to protect the knowledge required to do so. They have the domain knowledge to know what to automate/make redundant.

The people that have the power to resist/slow down disruption (i.e. hide knowledge) will gain more pricing power, and therefore be able to earn more capital taking advantage of the efficiency gains made by jobs being redundant from AI. The last to be disrupted has the most opportunity to gain ownership of assets and capital from their economic profits preserved. The inefficient will win out of this - capital rewards scarcity/people that can remain in demand despite being inefficient relatively. Competition is for losers - its IMV the biggest flaw of the system. As a result people will see what has happened to SWE's and make sure their industry "has time" to adapt particularly since many knowledge professions are really "industry unions/licensed clubs" who have the advantage of keeping their domain knowledge harder to access.

To explain it further even if software is more complicated; there is just so much more capital it seems trying to disrupt it than other industries. Given IMV software demand is relatively inelastic to price due to scaling profits, making it cheaper to produce won't really benefit society all that much w.r.t more output (i.e. what was good economically to build would of been built anyway in an inelastic demand/scaling commodity). Generally more supply/less cost of a good has more absolute societal benefits when there is unmet and/or elastic demand. Instead costs of SWE's will go down and the benefit will be distributed to the jobs/people remaining (managers, CEO's, etc) - the people that dev's think "are inefficient" in my experience. When it is about inelastic demand its more re-distributive; the customer benefits and the supplier (in this case SWE's) lose.

I don't like saying this; but we gave AI all the advantage. No licensing requirements, open source software for training, etc.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#474
post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Other people were wrong about something else so that invalidates your argument" Why are half the replies like this?

The cognitive dissonance of seemingly educated people defending the LLMs when it comes to writing code is my top mystery for the entirety of 2024. Call me if you find a good reason. I still have not.

but that’s thing, right? it is not “seemingly” there are A LOT of highly educated people here telling you LLMs are doing amazing shit for them - perhaps a wise response should be “lemme go back and see whether it can also become part of my own toolbox…”

I have spent 24 years coding without LLMs, cannot fathom now spending more than a day without it…

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#475

It depends on whether you think they are a paradigm change (at the very least) or not. If you don't then either you will be right or you will be toast. For those of us who do think this is a revolution, you have two options: 1. Embrace it. 2. Find another career, presumably in the trades or other hands-on vocations where AI ingress will lag behind for a while. To embrace it you need to research the LLM landscape as i…

"For those of us who do think this is a revolution"

Revolutions come, revolutions go, it's why they're called revolutions. Nothing interesting comes out of most revolutions.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cognitive dissonance of seemingly educated people defending the LLMs when it comes to writing code is my top mystery for the entirety of 2024. Call me if you find a good reason. I still have not.

but that’s thing, right? it is not “seemingly” there are A LOT of highly educated people here telling you LLMs are doing amazing shit for them - perhaps a wise response should be “lemme go back and see whether it can also become part of my own toolbox…” I have spent 24 years coding without LLMs, cannot fathom now spending more than a day without it…

I have tried them a few times but they were only good at generating a few snippets.

If you have scrutable and interesting examples, I am willing to look them up and try to apply them to my work.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#478

I just copied the html from this thread into Claude to get a summary. I think being very realistic, a lot of SWE job requirements will be replaced by LLMs. The expertise to pick the right tool for the right job based on previous experience that senior engineers poses is something that can probably be taught to an LLM. Having the ability to provide a business case for the technology to stakeholders that aren't technol…

"The expertise to pick the right tool for the right job based on previous experience that senior engineers poses is something that can probably be taught to an LLM."

AI is just ML Machine Learning which isn't about learning at all. It's about absorbing data, then reiterating it to sound intelligent. Actual learning takes human beings with feelings, hopes, dreams, motivations, passions, etc.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#479

After reading the comments, the themes I'm seeing are: - AI will provide a big mess for wizards to clean up - AI will replace juniors and then seniors within a short timeframe - AI will soon plateau and the bubble will burst - "Pshaw I'm not paid to code; I'm a problem solver" - AI is useless in the face of true coding mastery It is interesting to me that this forum of expert technical people are so divided on this (…

To be honest, HN is about this with any topic. In the domain of stuff I know well, I've seen some of the dumbest takes imaginable on HN, as well as some really well-reasoned and articulated stuff. The limiting factor tends to be the number of people that know enough about the topic to opine.

AI happens to be a topic that everyone has an opinion on.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cognitive dissonance of seemingly educated people defending the LLMs when it comes to writing code is my top mystery for the entirety of 2024. Call me if you find a good reason. I still have not.

but that’s thing, right? it is not “seemingly” there are A LOT of highly educated people here telling you LLMs are doing amazing shit for them - perhaps a wise response should be “lemme go back and see whether it can also become part of my own toolbox…” I have spent 24 years coding without LLMs, cannot fathom now spending more than a day without it…

Which needs does it fulfil that you weren't able to fulfil yourself? (Advance prediction: these are needs that would be fulfilled better by improvements to conventional tooling.)
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