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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?

#611

Post by c0redump »

jayd16 wrote: post #456
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…

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

Because they don’t have an actual argument.

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

#612

Post by jarsin »

Panzer04 wrote: post #596

My 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.

So to take that a step further couldn't all businesses be killed as well?

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

#613

Post by hi_hi »

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…

I don't think the problem is the LLM.

I think of LLMs like clay, or paint, or any other medium where you need people who know what they're doing to drive them.

Also, I might humbly suggest you invest some time in the junior dev and ask yourself why they keep on producing "garbage code". They're junior, they aren't likely to know the difference between good and bad. Teach them. (Maybe you already are, I'm just taking a wild guess)

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

#614

Post by paulcole »

deathanatos wrote: post #581
paulcole wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, it really isn't It really is. Either that or you’re not thinking about what you’re saying. Imagine code passes your rigorous review. How do you know that it wasn’t from an LLM? If it’s because you know that you only let good code pass your review and you know that LLMs only generate bad code, think about that a bit.

> Imagine code passes your rigorous review. How do you know that it wasn’t from an LLM? That's not what I'm saying (and it's a strawman; yes, presumably some LLM code would escape review and I wouldn't know it's from an LLM, though I find that unlikely, given…) — what I'm saying is of LLM generated code that is reviewed, what is the quality & correctness of the reviewed code? And it's resoundingly (easily >90%) crap.…

> what I'm saying is of LLM generated code that is reviewed, what is the quality & correctness of the reviewed code? And it's resoundingly (easily >90%) crap.

What makes you so sure that none of the resoundingly non-crap that you have reviewed was not produced by LLM?

It’s like saying you only like homemade cookies not ones from the store. But you may be gleefully chowing down on cookies that you believe are homemade because you like them (so they must be homemade) without knowing they actually came from the store.

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

#615

Post by mianos »

I am 61, I have been a full time developer since I was about 19. I have lost count of the number of 'next thing to replace developers' many many times. many of them showed promise. Many of them continue to be developed. Frameworks with higher and higher levels of abstraction.

I see LLMs as the next higher level of abstraction.

Does this mean it will replace me? At the moment the output is so flawed for anything but the most trivial professional tasks, I simply see, as before, it has a long long way to go.

Will be put me out of a job? I highly doubt it in my career. I still love it and write stuff for home and work every day of the week. I'm planning on working until I drop dead as it seems I have never lost interest so far.

Will it replace developers as we know it? Maybe in the far future. But we'll be the ones using it anyway.

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

#616

Post by hi_hi »

KPGv2 wrote: post #575
Me001 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the programming for the Apollo Program took less then a year and Microsoft Teams is decades in development obviously they are better than NASA programmers.

the programming for the NASA program is very simple; the logistics of the mission, which has nothing to do with programming, is what was complex You're essentially saying "the programming to do basic arithmetic and physics took only a year" as if that's remotely impressive compared to the complexity of something like Microsoft Teams. Simultaneous editing of a document by itself is more complicated than anything an Ap…

I want to not like this comment, but I think you are right! There's a reason people like to say your watch has more compute power than the computers it took to put man on the moon.

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

#617

Post by sleazebreeze »

w-hn wrote: post #408

I have been unemployed for almost a year now (it started with a full division layoff and then no willingness or motivation to look for work at the time). Seeing the way AI can do most of the native app development (which is what I did) code I wrote I am losing almost any motivation to even try now. But I have been sleeping the best after college (where I slept awesome) and I have been working out, watching lots of th…

I don't quite get this. How can you be relaxed when you have no plan and are just waiting for your savings to run out?

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

#619

Post by fy20 »

brandall10 wrote: post #598
skydhash wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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." https://antirez.com/news/144 If the author of Redis finds novel utility here then it'…

"AI didn’t replace me, AI accelerated me or improved me with feedback about my work"

This really sums up how I feel about AI at the moment. It's like having a partner who has broad knowledge about anything that you can ask any stupid questions to. If you don't want to do a small boring task you can hand it off to them. It lets you focus on the important stuff, not "whats the option in this library called to do this thing that I can describe but don't know the exact name for?".

If you aren't taking advantage of that, then yes, you are probably going to be replaced. It's like when version control became popular in the 00s, where some people and companies still held out in their old way of doing things, copying and pasting folders or whatever other nasty workflows the had, because $reasons... where the only real reason was that they didn't want to adapt to the new paradigm.

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