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

I also agree with your assessment that issue trackers and other aspects of the workflow are as important as the coding phase.

I don't know yet exactly what can be done to leverage LLMs to offer real help.

But I think it has the potential of transforming the space. But not necessarily the way it's currently used.

For example, I think that we currently rely too much on the first order prose emitted directly by the LLMs and we mistakenly think that we can consume that directly.

I think LLMs are already quite good at understanding what you ask and are very resistant to typos. They thus work very well in places where traditional search engines suck.

I can navigate through complex codebases in ways that my junior colleagues cannot because I learned the tricks of the trade. I can see a near future where junior engineers can navigate code with the aid of ML based code search engines without having to be affected by the imprecise summarization artefacts of the current LLMs.

Similarly, there are many opportunities of using LLMs to capture human intentions and turn it into commands for underlying deterministic software which will then perform operations without hallucinations.

Building those tools requires time and iteration. It also requires funding and it won't happen as long as most funding is funneled towards just trying to make better models which would potentially leapfrog any ad-hoc hybrid.

For the sake of not repeating myself, I would like to clarify/state some things.

1. I did not intend to signal that SWE will disappear as a profession, but would rather undergo transformation, as well as shrinking in terms of the needed workforce.

2. Some people seem to be hanging up to the idea that they are doing unimaginably complicated things. And sure, some people do, but I doubt they are the majority of the SWE workforce. Can LLM replace a cobol developer in financial industry? No, I don't think so. Can it replace the absurd amount of people whose job description can be distilled to "reading/writing data to a database"? Absolutely.

3. There seems to be a conflicting opinion. Some people say that code quality matters a lot and LLMs are not there yet, while other people seems to focus more on "SWE is more than writing code".

Personally, based on some thinking and reading the comments, I think the best way to future-proof a SWE career is to move to position that requires more people skills. In my opinion, good product managers that are eager to learn coding and combine LLMs for code writing, will be the biggest beneficiaries of the upcoming trend. As for SWEs, it's best to start acquiring people skills.