For founders it’s great. You don’t need a ton of startup capital to actually start something. Easier than ever. I think this means there will be less of a supply of goood early stage deals. And if VC can’t get in on the ground floor it becomes harder to get the multiples they sell to their investor. It also means that the good companies will be able to get to finance their own growth which means that whatever is left in the later stage just won’t be as compelling. As an LP you know have to look at potentially other asset classes or find investors who are going to adapt to still find success. Otherwise I think AI is most disruptive here now to the VC and by implication their capital markets. I think late stage financing and ipo market should not change substantially.
Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
591–600 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#592The 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…
The key difference between trading and coding is that code often underpins uncritical operations - think of all the CRUD apps in small businesses - and there is no money involved, at least directly.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#593As a systems administrator now SRE, it's never really been about my code... if code at all. Where I used to be able to get by with babysitting shell scripts that only lived on the server, we're now in a world with endless abstraction. I don't hazard to guess; just learn what I can to remain adaptable. The fundamentals tend to generally apply
I suppose I could already be replaced with any number of services (vercel, heroku, Google cloud run etc..). But I haven't yet. I think I still provide value in other ways. (Also a sys admin)
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I'm fighting for the software I sell my customers to be actually reliable.
That ship seems to have sailed at the same time boxed software went extinct. How many companies still have dedicated QA orgs with skilled engineers? How many SaaS solutions have flat out broken features? Why is SRE now a critical function? How often do mobile apps ship updates? How many games ship with a day zero patch? The industries that still have reliable software are because there are regulatory or profit advant…
Not sure I agree. Where it matters people will prefer and buy products that "just work" compared to something unreliable.
People tolerate game crashes because you (generally) can't get the same experience by switching.
People wouldn't tolerate f.e broswers crashing if they can switch to an alternative. The same would apply to a lot of software, with varying limits to how much shit will be tolerated before a switch would be made.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I'm fighting for the software I sell my customers to be actually reliable.
That ship seems to have sailed at the same time boxed software went extinct. How many companies still have dedicated QA orgs with skilled engineers? How many SaaS solutions have flat out broken features? Why is SRE now a critical function? How often do mobile apps ship updates? How many games ship with a day zero patch? The industries that still have reliable software are because there are regulatory or profit advant…
So majority of software we have now is unreliable piles of sh*t. Seems to check out, with how often I need to restart my browser to keep memory usage under control
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#596My view is that the point at which LLMs could cause the death of SWE as a profession is also the point at which practically all knowledge professions could be killed. To fully replace SWEs still requires the LLM to have enough external context that it could replace a huge range of jobs, and it'd probably be best to deal with the consequences of that as and when they happen.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#597Earlier 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…
one side thing i want to point out. There is a lot of talk about llms not being able to replace a senior engineer... The implication being that they can replace juniors. How exactly do you get senior engineers when you've destroyed the entire market for junior engineers, exactly?
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#598Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having also worked on desks in the 00s and early 10s I think a big difference here is what trading meant really changed; much of what traders did went away with innovations in speed. Speed and algos became the way to trade neither of which humans can do. While SWE became significantly more important on trading desks, you still have researchers, quants, portfolio analysts, etc. that spend their working days developing…
> That being said, there's also a massive low hanging fruit in dev work that we'll automate away And this has been solve for years already with existing tooling. Debuggers, Intellisense, Linters, Snippets and other code generations tools, build systems, Framework Specific tooling.... There's a lot of tools for writing and maintaining code. The only thing left was always the understanding of the system that solves the…
"And now, at the end of 2024, I’m finally seeing incredible results in the field, things that looked like sci-fi a few years ago are now possible: Claude AI is my reasoning / editor / coding partner lately. I’m able to accomplish a lot more than I was able to do in the past. I often do more work because of AI, but I do better work."
If the author of Redis finds novel utility here then it's likely useful beyond React boilerplatey stuff.
I share a similar sentiment since 3.5 Sonnet came out. This goes far beyond dev tooling ergonomics. It's not simply a fancy autocomplete anymore.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#599My anecdata shows people who have no/limited experience in software engineering are suddenly able to produce “software”. That is, code of limited engineering value. It technically works, but is a ultimately an unmaintainable, intractable Heath Robinson monstrosity. Coding LLMs will likely improve, but what will happen first: a good-at-engineering LLM; or a negative feedback cycle of training data being polluted with…
Something similar happened when Rails showed up. Lots of people were able to build somewhat complex websites than ever before. But there are still specialized people being paid for doing websites today.
My god, sudden flashback of our CTO doing Rails code after hours and showing us how easily and quickly he was building stuff. We called that period of time the "Ruby Derailment"
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diagramming out what needs to be built is often what some of the highest paid programmers do all day
This is what keeps crossing my mind. Even trivial things like an ETL pipeline for processing some data at my work fall into this category. It seemed trivial on its surface, but when I spoke to everyone about what we were doing with it and why (and a huge amount of context regarding the past and future of the project), the reason the pipeline wasn’t working properly was both technically and contextually very complex.…
those llms all learned to code by devouring github. How much good code is on github and how much terrible code is on github.
My favorite thing is writing golang with co-pilot on. It make suggestions that use various libraries and methods that were somewhat idomatic several years ago but are now deprecated.