Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 1001 posts

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

#621

Post by not_kurt_godel »

cadamsau wrote: post #413
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…

One hundred per cent this. LLM pair programming is unbelievably fun, satisfying, and productive. Why type out the code when you can instead watch it being typed while thinking of and typing out/speaking the next thing you want. For those who enjoy typing, you could try to get a job dictating letters for lawyers, but something tells me that’s on the way out too.

My experience is it's been unbelievably fun until I actually try to run what it writes and/or add some non-trivial functionality. At that point it becomes unbelievably un-fun and frustrating as the LLM insists on producing code that doesn't give the outputs it says it does.

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

#622

Post by ashoeafoot »

Be the referee in times of uncertainty. Be the reverse engineer of black boxes. Be the guy who knows what kind of wrong on stackoverflow grows. Be witty. Be an outlier but nit an outliar. Be someine who explains the words of prophets from sandmountains to the people . Also as AI depopulizes everything it touches, carry a can of oil with you to oil the door hinges of ghosttowns.

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

#623

Post by amrocha »

janalsncm wrote: post #263
thegrim33 wrote: post #71

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…

To replace all developers, we need AGI yes. To replace many developers? No. If one developer can do the same work as 5 could previously, unless the amount of work expands then 4 developers are going to be looking for a job. Therefore, unless you for some reason believe you will be in the shrinking portion that cannot be replaced I think the question deserves more attention than “nothing”.

I have a coworker who I suspect has been using LLMs to write most of his code for him. He wrote multiple PRs with thousands of lines of code over a month.

Me and the other senior dev spent weeks reviewing these PRs. Here’s what we found:

- The feature wasn’t built to spec, so even though it worked in general the details were all wrong

- The code was sloppy and didn’t adhere to the repos guidelines

- He couldn’t explain why he did things a certain way versus another, so reviews took a long time

- The code worked for the happy path, and errored for everything else

Eventually this guy got moved to a different team and we closed his PRs and rewrote the feature in less than a week.

This was an awful experience. If you told me that this is the future of software I’d laugh you out of the room, because engineers make enough money and have enough leverage to just quit. If you force engineers to work this way, all the good ones will quit and retire. So you’re gonna be stuck with the guys who can’t write code reviewing code they don’t understand.

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

#624

Post by ipnon »

mianos wrote: post #615

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 t…

Yes, and if you look back on the history of the tech industry, each time programmers were supposedly on the verge of replacement was an excellent time to start programming.

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

#625

Post by barrell »

Build something with an LLM outside of your comfort zone.

I was a pretty early adopter to an LLM based workflow. The more I used it, the worse my project became, and the more I learned myself. It didn’t take long for my abilities to surpass the LLM, and for the past year my usage of LLMs has been dropping dramatically. These days I spend more time in docs than in a chat conversation.

When chatGPT was announced, many people thought programming was over. As in I would absolutely love to not have to program anymore. For me, programming is a means to an end. However, after having used LLMs pretty much everyday for 2.5 years, it’s very clear to me that software engineering won’t be changing anytime soon. Some things will get easier and workflows may change, but if you want to build and maintain a moderately difficult production grade application with decent performance, you will still be programming in 10 years

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

#626

Post by amrocha »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #532
uludag wrote: post #194

Firstly, as many commenters have mentioned, I don't see AI taking jobs en masse. They simply aren't accurate enough and they tend to generate more code faster which ends up needing more maintenance. Advice #1: do work on your own mind. Try to improve your personal organization. Look into methodologies like GTD. Get into habits of building discipline. Get into the habit of storing information and documentation. From m…

Yep, massive LOC means massive maintenance. Maybe the LLMs can maintain their own code? I'm skeptical. I feel like they can easily code themselves into an unmaintainable corner. But maybe the times that happens is so rare and low that you just hire a human to unstuck the whole thing and get it running again. Maybe we'll become more like mechanics you visit every now and then for an expensive, quick job, vs an annual…

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a developer who enjoys refactoring a messy, bug ridden code base. This is the reason why rewrites happen, nobody wants to touch the old code with a ten foot pole and it’s easier to just rewrite it all.

So if you turn the entire job into that? I don’t think skilled people will be lining up to do it. Maybe consulting firms would take that on I guess.

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

#627

Post by Aeolun »

ipnon wrote: post #624
mianos wrote: post #615

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 t…

Yes, and if you look back on the history of the tech industry, each time programmers were supposedly on the verge of replacement was an excellent time to start programming.

The best time was 20 years ago. The second best time is now :)

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

#628

Post by aussieguy1234 »

I've tended to think of the current stage of AI as a productivity boost along the lines of let's say, using an IDE vs coding with a text editor.

It's also good as a replacement for reading the docs/Google search, especially with search getting worse and full of SEO spam lately.

It's a big help, but it doesn't really replace the human. When the human can be replaced, any job done in front of a computer will be at risk, not just coders. I hope when that happens there will be full robot bodies with AI to do all of the other work.

Also, I know of several designers who can't code but are planning to use LLMs to make their startup ideas a reality by building an MVP. If the said startups take off, they will probably hire real human coders, thus creating more coding jobs. Jobs that would not exist without LLMs getting the original ideas of the ground.

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

#629

Post by Aeolun »

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…

Very defensive.

I love it anyhow. Sure, it generates shit code, but if you ask it it’ll gladly tell you all the ways it can be improved. And then actually do so.

It’s not perfect. I spent a few hours yesterday pulling it’s massive blobby component apart by hand. But on the plus side, I didn’t have to write the whole thing. Just do a bunch of copy paste operations.

I kinda like having a junior dev to do all the typing for me, and to give me feedback when I can’t think of a good way to proceed.

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

#630

Post by ido »

mianos wrote: post #615

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 t…

I'm only 41 but that's long enough to have also seen this happen a few times (got my first job as a professional developer at age 18). I've also dabbled in using copilot and chatgpt and I find at most they're a boost to an experienced developer- they're not enough to make a novice a replacement for a senior.
Post reply on HN