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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?

#561

Post by RealityVoid »

cle wrote: post #552
shiveenp wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyw…

I agree with you and I don't think OP disagrees either. The point if contention is the inevitable and immediate death of programming as a profession.

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

#562

Post by crystal_revenge »

irunmyownemail wrote: post #463
crystal_revenge wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> never provide code that pass my sniff test Unfortunately it won't be your sniff test that matters. It's going to be an early founder that realizes they don't need to make that extra seed round hire, or the resource limited director that decides they can forgo that one head count and still deliver the product on time, or the in house team that realizes they no longer need a dedicated front end dev because, for their…

"Personally, the team I lead is able to ship much faster with AI assistants than without, which means in practice we can out compete much larger teams in the same space." So, you're giving away your company's IP to AI firms, does your CEO understand this?

Appreciate the snark, but yes my CEO and I did have a good chat about that. My team's work is 100% open source, so if anyone wants to borrow that code I'm more than happy to share! (obviously not from a pseudonymous account, but I don't mind the API sniffing).

But there's plenty of fantastic open models now and you can increasingly run this stuff locally so you don't have to send that IP to AI firms if you don't want to.

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

#563

Post by tptacek »

jcranmer wrote: post #193
rybosworld wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is at least the third time in my life that we've seen a loudly-heralded purported the-end-of-programming technology. The previous two times both ended up being damp squibs that barely mention footnotes in the history of computing. Why do we expect that LLMs are going to buck this trend? It's not for accuracy--the previous attempts, when demonstrating their proof-of-concepts, actually reliably worked, whereas wit…

I wonder how programmers of the time felt when spreadsheets got popular.

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

#564

Post by crystal_revenge »

manquer wrote: post #450
dogman144 wrote: post #378

The last fairly technical career to get surprisingly and fully automated in the way this post displays concern about - trading. I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt. Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was: - How complex the job was - How high a…

> LLMs can pass CFA III. Everyone cites these kind of examples as LLM beating some test or other as some kind of validation. It isn’t . To me that just tells that the tests are poor, not the LLMs are good. Designing and curating a good test is hard and expensive. Certifying and examination bodies often use knowledge as a proxy to understanding or reasoning or any critical thinking skills.they just need to filter enou…

> To me that just tells that the tests are poor, not the LLMs are good.

I mean the same is true of leetcode but I know plenty of mediocre engineers still making ~$500k because they learned how to grind leetcode.

You can argue that the world is unjust till you're blue in the face, but it won't make it a just world.

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

#565

Post by boogieknite »

rozap wrote: post #337
IshKebab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? I definitely expect them to improve. But I also think the point at which they can actually replace a senior programmer is pretty much the exact point at which they can replace any knowledge worker, at which point western society (possibly all society) is in way deeper shit than just me being out of a job. > This is ego speaking. It definitely isn't. LLMs ar…

> I definitely expect them to improve. But I also think the point at which they can actually replace a senior programmer is pretty much the exact point at which they can replace any knowledge worker, at which point western society (possibly all society) is in way deeper shit than just me being out of a job. Agree with this take. I think the probability that this happens within my next 20 years of work is very low, bu…

im also expecting this outcome. my thoughts are that once devs are completely replaced by ml then were going to finally have to adapt society to raise the floor because we can no longer outcompete automation. im ready to embrace this, but it seems like there is no plan for mass retirement and were going to need it. if something as complicated as app and system dev is automated, pretty much anything can be.

earnest question because i still consider this a vague, distant future: how did you come up with 20 years?

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

#566

Post by fragmede »

pdimitar wrote: post #470
jayd16 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer is they're trying to sell it.

Agreed, but I can't imagine that everybody here on HN that's defending LLMs so... misguidedly and obviously ignoring observable reality... are financially interested in LLMs' success, can they?

Orrrrr more simpler than imagining a vast conspiracy is that your observations just don't match theirs. If you're writing, say, C# with some esoteric libraries using CoPilot, it's easy to see it as glorified auto-complete that hallucinates to the point of being unusable because there's not enough training data. If you're using Claude with Aider to write a webpage using NextJS, you'll see it as a revolution in programming because of how much of that is on stack overflow. The other side of it is just how much the code needs to work, vs has to look good. If you're used to engineering the most beautifully organized code before shipping once, vs shipped some gross hacks you're ashamed of shipping, and the absolute quality of the code is secondary to it working and passing tests, then the generated code having an extra variable or crap that doesn't get used isn't as big an indightment of LLM-assisted programming that you believe it to be.

Why do you think your observable reality is the only one, and the correct one at that? Looking at your mindset, as well as the objections to the contrary (and their belief that they're correct), the truth is likely somewhere in-between the two extremes.

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

#567

Post by wewtyflakes »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #535
dogman144 wrote: post #378

The last fairly technical career to get surprisingly and fully automated in the way this post displays concern about - trading. I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt. Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was: - How complex the job was - How high a…

> LLMs don't have to be "great," they just have to be "good enough." NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!! It may be that some random script you run on your PC can be "good enough", but the software the my business sells can't be produced by "good enough" LLMs. I'm tired of my junior dev turning in garbage code that the latest and greatest "good enough" LLM created. I'm about to tell him he can't use AI tools anymore. I'm so than…

You're fighting the tide with a broom.

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

#568

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

wewtyflakes wrote: post #567
9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs don't have to be "great," they just have to be "good enough." NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!! It may be that some random script you run on your PC can be "good enough", but the software the my business sells can't be produced by "good enough" LLMs. I'm tired of my junior dev turning in garbage code that the latest and greatest "good enough" LLM created. I'm about to tell him he can't use AI tools anymore. I'm so than…

You're fighting the tide with a broom.

No, I'm fighting for the software I sell my customers to be actually reliable.

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

#569

Post by margalabargala »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #399
margalabargala wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, GPT-2 was released in 2019. Five years is not "almost ten years". Secondly, LLMs are objectively useful for coding now. That's not the same thing as saying they are replacements for SWEs. They're a tool, like syntax highlighting or real-time compiler error visibility or even context-aware keyword autocompletion. Some individuals don't find those things useful, and prefer to develop in a plain text editor tha…

> Secondly, LLMs are objectively useful for coding now. No, they're subjectively useful for coding in the view of some people. I find them useless for coding. If they were objectively useful, it would be impossible for me to find them useless because that is what objectivity means.

I do believe you stopped reading my comment at that quote, because I spent the remainder of my comment making the same distinction you did...

It's useless to your coding, but useful to the industry of coding.

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

#570

Post by habosa »

Maybe the best thing to do is just continue practicing the art of writing code without LLMs. When you're the last person who can do it, it might be even more valuable than it is today.

(this is my naive tactic, I am sure sama and co will find a way to suck me down the drain with everyone else in the end)

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