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

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

#711

Post by tugu77 » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:08 AM UTC

fendy3002 wrote: post #695

anonzzzies wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen this happening since the 70s. My father made a tool to replace programmers. It did not and it disillusioned him greatly. Sold very well though. But this time is different though; I have often said that I thought chatgpt like AI was at least 50 years out still but it's here; it does replace programmers every day. I see many companies inside (I have a troubleshoot company; we get called to fix very urgent s…

> It is just stupidly cheaper; for the price of one junior you can do so many api requests to claude it's not even funny Idk if the cheap price is really cheap price or promotion price, where after that the enshittification and price increase happen, which is a trend for most tech companies. And agree, llm will weed bad programmers further, though in the future, bad alternatives (like analyst or bad llm users) may em…

"For the price of a cab you can take so many ubers it's not even funny". Yeah, until the price dumping stops and workers demand better conditions and you start comparing apples to apples.

Why do you have bad programmers on staff? Let them go, LLMs existing or not.

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

#712

Post by jb_briant » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:10 AM UTC

anonzzzies wrote: post #672

jb_briant wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can totally understand it! I would loved to have access to a LLM back in time. Especially since I started to learn just after the era but we didn't have "flex" yet. It was true garbage... Now I mostly JSX / tailwind, which is way faster than prompting, but surely because I'm fluent in that thing.

> Now I mostly JSX / tailwind, which is way faster than prompting, Not saying that is not true, but did you measure that actually or is it a feeling or you didn't spend very much time on getting a prompt you can plop your requests in? jsx and tailwind are very verbose ; frontend is mostly very verbose, and, unless you are building LoB apps, you will have to try things a few times. Cerebras and groq with a predefined…

I prompt a lot everyday for various reasons, including, but not exclusively coding. Because jsx/tw is indeed very verbose, it requires a lot of accuracy because there is sooo many places you have to be just perfect, this is something LLM are inherently incapable of.

Don't get me wrong, it will output the code faster than me. But overall, i will spend more time prompting + correcting, especially when I want to achieve special designs which are not looking like basic "bootstrap". It's also much less enjoyable to tweak a prompt than just spitting jsx/tw which doesn't require lot of effort for me.

I don't have a demo to justify my claim and I'm totally fine if you dismiss my message because of that.

I recon that I don't like front ending with LLM yet, maybe one day it will.be much better.

My website where I tried some LLM stuff and been disapointed https://ardaria.com

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

#713

Post by svilen_dobrev » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:10 AM UTC

mass software-making has been commoditizing for decade+ maybe (~~LEGo-like sticking CRUD APIs), and now ML/LLM jump-accelerate this process. any-API-as-service? combination-there-of? In the terms of wardle-maps, its entering a state of war, and while there will be new things on top of it, the gray-mass will disappear / be unneeded / replaced.

IMO the number and the quality / devotion of programmers will go back to levels of pre-web/js, or even pre-visual-Basic. They would be programming somewhat differently than today. But that's a (rosy) prediction, and it probably is wrong. The not-rosy version is that all common software (and that's your toaster too) will become shitmare, with the consequence everyone will live in order to fix/workaround/"serve"-in-a-way it, instead of using it to live.

Or maybe something in the middle?

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

#714

Post by dreamfactored » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:11 AM UTC

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 don't write code like that

As someone who has been doing this since the mid 80's in all kinds of enterprise environments, I am finding that the latest generation are getting rather good at code like that, on par with mid-senior level in that way. They are also very capable of discussing architecture approaches with an encyclopaedic knowledge, although humans contribute meaningfully by drawing connections and analogies, and are needed to lead the conversation and make decisions.

What LLM's are still weak at is holding a very large context for an extended period (which is why you can see failures in the areas you mentioned if not properly handled e.g. explicitly discussed, often as separate passes). Humans are better at compressing that information and retaining it over a period. LLM's are also more eager and less defensive coders. That means they need to be kept on a tight leash and drip fed single changes which get backed out each time they fail - so very bright junior in that way. For example, I'm sometimes finding that they are too eager to refactor as they go and spit out env vars to make it more production like, when the task in hand is to get basic and simple first pass working code for later refinement.

I'm highly bullish on their capabilities as a force multiplier, but highly bearish on them becoming self-driving (for anything complex at least).

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

#715

Post by tugu77 » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:11 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #638

ido wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the concern is that they might become good enough for a senior to not need a novice. At that point where to the seniors come from?

That "need" is not as a helper but a cheap way to train the next gen senior which by the time they are senior know the ins and outs of your company's tech so well that they will be hard to replace by an external hire.

If your approach to juniors is that they are just cheap labour monkeys designed to churn out braindead crap and boost the ego of your seniors then you have a management problem and I'm glad I'm working somewhere else.

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

#716

Post by euroderf » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:15 AM UTC

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…

Let's say we get an AI that can take well-written requirements and cough up an app.

I think you have to be a developer to learn how to write those requirements well. And I don't even mean the concepts of data flows and logic flows. I mean, just learning to organise thoughts in a way that they don't fatally contradict themselves or lead to dead ends or otherwise tie themselves in unresolvable knots. I mean like non-lawyers trying to write laws without any understanding of the entire suite of mental furniture.

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

#717

Post by bertylicious » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:16 AM UTC

Disclaimer: I wholeheartedly hate all the systems they call AI these days and I hate the culture around it for technological, ecological, political, and philosophical reasons.

I won't future-proof my career against LLMs at all. If I ever see myself in the position that I must use them to produce or adjust code, or that I mostly read and fix LLM-generated code, then I'll leave the industry and do something else.

I see potential in them to simplify code search/navigation or to even replace stackoverflow, but I refuse to use them to build entire apps. If management in turn believes that I'm not productive enough anymore then so be it.

I expect that lots of product owners and business people will be using them in order to quickly cobble something together and then hand it over to a dev for "polishing". And this sounds like a total nightmare to me. The way I see it, devs make this dystopian nightmare a little bit more true everytime they use an LLM to generate code.

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

#718

Post by olivermuty » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:16 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #629

pdimitar wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If an LLM can give you feedback on a way to proceed it sounds more like you might be the junior? :P

LLMs seems to be ok'ish at solving trivial boilerplate stuff. 20 attempts deep I have not yet seen it able to even remotely solve anything I have been stuck enough on to have to sit down and think hard.

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

#719

Post by sureglymop » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:17 AM UTC

As a junior dev, I do two conscious things to make sure I'll still be relevant for the workforce in the future.

1. I try to stay somewhat up to date with ML and how the latest things work. I can throw together some python, let it rip through a dataset from kaggle, let models run locally etc. Have my linalg and stats down and practiced. Basically if I had to make the switch to be an ML/AI engineer it would be easier than if I had to start from zero.

2. I otherwise am trying to pivot more to cyber security. I believe current LLMs produce what I would call "untrusted and unverified input" which is massively exploitable. I personally believe that if AI gets exponentially better and is integrated everywhere, we will also have exponentially more security vulnerabilities (that's just an assumption/opinion). I also feel we are close to cyber security being taken more seriously or even regulated e.g. in the EU.

At the end of the day I think you don't have to worry if you have the "curiosity" that it takes to be a good software engineer. That is because, in a world where knowledge, experience and willingness to probe out of curiosity will be even more scarce than they are now you'll stand out. You may leverage AI to assist you but if you don't fully and blindly rely on it you'll always be the more qualified worker than someone who does.

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

#720

Post by arisAlexis » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 9:18 AM UTC

NorthTheRock wrote: post #397

arisAlexis wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your argument is: There is some tech that is getting progressively better. I am high on the linear scale Therefore I don't worry about it cathing up to me ever And this is the top voted argument.

> is getting progressively better Is it still getting better? My understanding is that we're already training them on all of the publicly available code in existence, and we're running in to scaling walls with bigger models.

So you think that was it? Amazing comforting thoughts here