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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?

#551

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

pdimitar wrote: post #458
richardw wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those less confident: U.S. (and German) automakers were absolutely sure that the Japanese would never be able to touch them. Then Koreans. Now Chinese. Now there are tariffs and more coming to save jobs. Betting against AI (or increasing automation, really) is a bet against not against robots, but against human ingenuity. Humans are the ones making progress, and we can work with toothpicks as levers. LLM's are ou…

In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day. LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be ea…

> LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars and config files for modifying its behavior)... and even more important traits.

I'm totally conflicted on the future of computing careers considering LLM impact, but I've worked at a few places and on more than a few projects where few/none of these are met, and I know I'm far from the only one.

I'd wager a large portion of jobs are like this. Majority of roles aren't working on some well-groomed Google project.

Most places aren't writing exquisite examples of a canonically "well-authored" codebase; they're gluing together enterprise CRUD slop to transform data and put it in some other database.

LLMs are often quite good at that. It's impossible to ignore that reality.

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

#552

Post by cle »

shiveenp wrote: post #487
pdimitar wrote: post #459

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.

In my opinion people that harp on about how LLMs have been game changer for them are the people that put themselves as never actually having built anything sophisticated enough that a team of engineers can work and extend on for years.

This back and forth is so tiring.

I have built web services used by many Fortune 100 companies, built and maintained and operated them for many years.

But I'm not doing that anymore. Now I'm working on my own, building lots of prototypes and proof-of-concepts. For that I've founding LLMs to be extremely helpful and time-saving. Who the hell cares if it's not maintainable for years? I'll likely be throwing it out anyway. The point is not to build a maintainable system, it's to see if the system is worth maintaining at all.

Are there software engineers who will not find LLMs helpful? Absolutely. Are there software engineers who will find LLMs extremely helpful? Absolutely.

Both can exist at the same time.

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

#553

Post by MantisShrimp90 »

I fundamentally disagree. Or atleast, LLMs are a development tool that will fit right in with LSPs, databases, and any other piece of infrastructure. A tool that you learn to apply where possible, but those with wisdom will use better tools to solve more precise problems.

LLMs can't reason, and they never will be able to. Don't buy into the AI hype wagon it's just a bunch of grifters selling a future that will never happen.

What LLMs do Is accelerate the speed for your wisdom. If you know how to make a full-stack application already, it can turn a 4 hour job into a 1 hour job yes. But if you didn't know how to make one in the first place, the LLM will get you 80% of the way there but that last 20% will be impossible for you because you lack the skill to implement the actual work.

That's not going away and anybody who thinks it is is living in a fantasy land that stops us from focusing on real problems that could actually put the LLMs to use in their proper context and setting

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

#554

Post by lubujackson »

taylodl wrote: post #25

Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a craze called CASE - Computer-Aided Software Engineering. The idea was humans really suck at writing code, but we're really good at modeling and creating specifications. Tools like Rational Rose arose during this era, as did Booch notation which eventually became part of UML. The problem was it never worked. When generating the code, the best the tools could do was create…

This is more or less my take. I came in on Web 1.0 when "real" programmers were coding in C++ and I was mucking around with Perl and PHP.

This just seems like just the next level of abstraction. I don't forsee a "traders all disappeared" situation like the top comment, because at the end of the day someone needs to know WHAT they want to build.

So yes, less junior developers and development looking more like management/architecting. A lot more reliance on deeply knowledgable folks to debug the spaghetti hell. But also a lot more designers that are suddenly Very Successful Developers. A lot more product people that super-charge things. A lot more very fast startups run by some shmoes with unfundable but ultimately visionary ideas.

At least, that's my best case scenario. Otherwise: SkyNet.

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

#555

Post by throw4847285 »

I am not afraid of companies replacing Software Engineers with LLMs while being able to maintain the same level of quality. The real thing to worry about is that companies do what they did to QA Engineers, technical writers, infrastructure engineers, and every other specialized role in the software development process. In other words, they will try to cut costs, and the result will be worse software that breaks more often and doesn't scale very well.

Luckily, the bar has been repeatedly lowered so that customers will accept worse software. The only way for these companies to keep growing at the rate their investors expect them to is to try and cut corners until there's nothing left to cut. Software engineers should just be grateful that the market briefly overvalued them to the degree that did and prepare for a regression to the mean.

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

#556

Post by bccdee »

fragmede wrote: post #400
IshKebab wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code. Yeah for simple examples, especially in web dev. As soon as you step outside those bounds they make mistakes all the time. As I said, they're still useful because roughly correct but buggy code is often quite helpful when you're programming. But there's zero chance you can just say "write me an driver for the nRF905 using Embassy and embedded-hal" and get som…

The question is, how long would it take you to get as far as this chat does when starting from scratch? https://chatgpt.com/share/6760c3b3-bae8-8009-8744-c25d5602bf...

How confident are you in the correctness of that code?

Because, one way or another, you're still going to need to become fluent enough in the problem domain & the API that you can fully review the implementation and make sure chatgpt hasn't hallucinated in any weird problems. And chatgpt can't really explain its own work, so if anything seems funny, you're going to have to sleuth it out yourself.

And at that point, it's just 339 lines of code, including imports, comments, and misc formatting. How much time have you really saved?

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

#557

Post by [deleted] »

dbetteridge wrote: post #382
throwaway_43793 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code quality does not affect final product quality IMHO. I worked in companies with terrible code, that deployed on an over-engineered cloud provider using custom containers hacked with a nail and a screwdriver, but the product was excellent. Had bugs here and there, but worked and delivered what needs to be delivered. SWEs need to realize that code doesn't really matter. For 70 years we are debating the best archite…

It doesn't matter.. Until it does. Having poor quality code makes refactoring for new features harder, it increases the time to ship and means bugs are harder to fix without side effects. It also means changes have more side effects and are more likely to contain bugs. For an MVP or a startup just running off seed funding? Go ham with LLMs and get something in front of your customers, but then when more money is avai…

[deleted]

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

#558

Post by JeremyNT »

rybosworld wrote: post #85
simianparrot wrote: post #80

Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…

> Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I am constantly surprised how prevalent this attitude is. ChatGPT was only just released in 2022. Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test This is ego speaking.

Yeah I feel like this is just the beginning.

I'm in my 40s with a pretty interesting background and I feel like maybe I'll make it to retirement. There are still mainframe programmers after all. Maintaining legacy stuff will still have a place.

But I think we'll be the last generation where programmers will be this prevalent and the job market will severely contract. No/low code solutions backed by llms are going to eat away at a lot of what we do, and for traditional programming the tooling we use is going to improve rapidly and greatly reduce the number of developers needed.

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

#559

Post by th0ma5 »

ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote: post #100
simianparrot wrote: post #80

Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…

Hard to believe anyone is getting contacted more now than in 2020. But I agree with the general sentiment. I'll do nothing and if I get replaced then I get replaced and switch to woodworking or something. But if LLMs do not pan out then I'll be ahead of all the people who wasted their time with that.

The sanest comment here.

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

#560

Post by furyofantares »

Learn how to use them to write software, and learn how to write software that uses them.

I don't think you need to stop on a dime. But keep an eye out. I am very optimistic in two ways, under the assumption that this stuff continues to improve.

Firstly, with computers now able to speak and write natural language, see and hear, and some amount of reasoning, I think the demand for software is only going up. We are in an awkward phase of figuring out how to make software that leverages this, and a lot of shit software is being built, but these capabilities are transformative and only means more software needs be written. I suppose I don't share the fear that only one software needs to be written (AGI) and instead see it as a great opening up, as well as a competitive advantage for new software against old software, meaning roughly everything is a candidate for being rewritten.

And then secondly, with computers able to write code, I think this mostly gives superpowers to people who know how to make software. This isn't a snap your fingers no more coding situation, it's programmers getting better and better at making software. Maybe someday that doesn't mean writing code anymore, but I think at each step the people poised to get the most value out of this are the people who know how to make software (or 2nd most value, behind the people who employ them.)

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