Even if LLM can do everything any software developer is capable of doing, it doesn’t mean it’ll solve interesting and profitable problems that humans or systems need. Just because most or some Hacker News readers can code, and some solve extremely difficult problems doesn’t mean they’re going to be successful and make profit.
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?
#732Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
People hire teams from some countries because they are cheap and they are terrible. LLMs are not good but better than many of these and cheaper. It's not really changing much in code quality or process, just a lot cheaper.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have a decade of experience writing web code professionally, in my experience, LLM is a true waste of time regarding web. As someone who knows web front end development only to the extent I need it for internal tools, it’s been turning day-long fights into single hour dare I say it pleasurable experiences. I tell it to make a row of widgets and it outputs all the div+css soup (or e.g. material components) that on…
> it outputs all the div+css soup Is there a difference between soup and slop? Do you clean up the "soup" it produces or leave it as is?
It’s soup in the sense you need it for the layout to work in the browser. I clean up when I know there’s a component for what I need instead of a div+span+input+button or whatever use case is being solved. I mostly tweak font sizes, paddings and margins, sometimes rearrange stuff if the layout turns out broken (usually stuff just doesn’t fit the container neatly, don’t remember an instance of broken everything).
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Bad programmers aren't black and white situation, there's so many range of programmers quality out there, with different sector too (analysis, programming, db design, debugging, etc). And as the standard, companies need to adjust cost and requirement, while those are affected by supply and demand too. Moreover, common people cannot measure programmers quality as easy, and bad programmers have delayed effect too. So it's not as simple as not hire bad programmers.
LLM however, will change the playing field. Let's say that bottom 20 or 30% of programmers will be replaced by LLM in form of increased performance by the other 70%.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#735I might be too optimistic but I think LLMs will basically replace the worst and most junior devs, while the job of anyone with 5 or 10+ years of experience will be babysitting AI codevelopers, instead of junior developers.
I find a lot of good use for LLMs but it's only as a multiplier with my own effort. It doesn't replace much anything of what I do that actually requires thought. Only the mechanical bits. So that's the first thing I ensure: I'm not involved in "plumbing software development". I don't plug together CRUD apps with databases, backend apis and some frontend muck. I try to ensure that at least 90% of the actual code work is about hard business logic and domain specific problems, and never "stuff that would be the same regardless of whether this thing is about underwear or banking".
If I can delegate something to it, it's every bit as difficult as delegating to another developer. Something we all know is normally harder than doing the job yourself. The difference between AI Alice and junior dev Bob, is that Alice doesn't need sleep. Writing specifications, reviewing changes and ensuring Alice doesn't screw up is every bit as hard as doing the same with Bob.
And here is the kicker: whenever this equation changes, that we have some kind of self-going AI Alice, then we're already at the singularity. Then I'm not worried about my job, I'll be in the forest gathering sticks for my fire.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#736> seem to have missed the party where they told us that "coding is not a means to an end"
What is it for you then? My role isn't software engineer, but with a background in computer engineering, I see programming as a tool to solve problems.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#737I do use LLM for various support tasks. Is it super necessary? Probably not, but it really helps.
What they excel in in my experience is translating code to different languages and they do find alternative dependencies in different runtime environments.
Code can be weird and prompting can take longer than writing yourself, but it still is nice support, even if you need to check the results. I only use local LLM where I do embed some of my code.
I am still not sure if LLM are a boon for learning to code or if it is a hindrance. I tend to think it is a huge help.
As for future proofing your career, I don't think developers need to be afraid that AI will write all code for us yet, just because non software engineers suck at defining good requirements for software. I also believe that LLM seem to hit walls on precision.
Some other industries might change significantly though.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#738Earlier 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…
> business people trying to replace one guy like myself with 3 Indians has been a reality for 10 years at this point, and amusingly they keep failing and never learning their lesson. /off-topic
What is the "lesson" that business people fail to learn? That Indians are worse developers than "someone like yourself"?
(I don't mean to bump on this, but it is pretty offensive as currently written.)
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#739Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…
Completely agree. The other day I was trying to find something in the Shopify API docs (an API I'm not familar with), and I decided to try their chat bot assistant thingy. I thought, well, if an LLM is good at something, it's probably at finding information in a very narrow field like this. However, it kept telling me things that were plain wrong, I could compare it to the docs next to it easily. Would have been faster just reading the docs.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#740Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…
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