I write code for things for which there is no code to learn from.
Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
741–750 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#742Earlier 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…
Did you think computers and ARPANET came out for commercial-grade applications and not "good for playing with stuff" ?
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#743Nothing 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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Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Other people were wrong about something else so that invalidates your argument" Why are half the replies like this?
The cognitive dissonance of seemingly educated people defending the LLMs when it comes to writing code is my top mystery for the entirety of 2024. Call me if you find a good reason. I still have not.
Genuine question: how hard have you tried to find a good reason?
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#745Earlier quoted context omitted.
They shouldn’t be expected to improve in accuracy because of what they are and how they work. Contrary to what the average HackerNews seems to believe, LLMs don’t “think,” they just predict. And there’s nothing in them that will constrain their token prediction in a way that improves accuracy.
> Contrary to what the average HackerNews seems to believe, LLMs don’t “think,” they just predict. Anecdotally, I can't recall ever seeing someone on HackerNews accuse LLM's of thinking. This site is probably one of the most educated corners of the internet on the topic. > They shouldn’t be expected to improve in accuracy because of what they are and how they work. > And there’s nothing in them that will constrain th…
> I can’t recall ever seeing someone on HackerNews accuse LLMs of thinking.
There are definitely people here who think LLMs are conscious.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean human generations because to do system architecture, design and development well you need something that can at least match an average human brain in reasoning, logic and learning plasticity. I don’t think that’s impossible but I think we’re quite a few human generations away from that. And scaling LLM’s is not the solution to that problem; an LLM is just a small but important part of it.
I'd be cautious as describing anything in tech as human generations away because we're only about a single human generation into a lot of this industry existing.
I understand the hesitancy to do so, but the thing is, what's changed with computers since the inception of the technology is speed and size. The fundamentals are still the same. Programming today is a lot more convenient than programming via punch cards, but it's a matter of abstractions + scale + speed. Given this I'm pretty confident when I say that, but obviously not 100%.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 i…
> Moreover, common people cannot measure programmers quality as easy
So you can't fire the bad apples because you don't know who they are, but you feel confident that you can pick out whom to replace by an LLM and then fire?
It's hopefully obvious to everybody that this is a hopelessly naïve take on things and is never going to play out that way.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#748I learnt how to write them. Modern equivalent of re-skilling. When my role as it is, is replaced, then I'll be on the ground floor already for all things AI.
If you're in software dev and can't already reskill rapidly then you're probably in the wrong job.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Companies like that deserve to die out since the quality they bring to the market is horrendous either way.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
At my job I review a lot of code, and I write code as well. The only type of developer an LLM’s output comes close to is a fresh junior usually straight out of university in their first real development job, with little practical experience in a professional code-shipping landscape. And the majority of those juniors improve drastically within a few weeks or months, with handholding only at the very start and then les…
That's a good observation. How would you teach an LLM the processes and conduct in your company? I suppose you'd need to replace code reviews and tutoring with prompt engineering. And hope that the next software update to the LLM won't invalidate your prompts.
It's not very different from documentation, except it's not used for learning but rather immediate application, i.e. it's something you must include with each prompt/interaction (and likely need a way to determine which are the relevant bits to reduce token count, depending on the size of the main prompt.) In fact, this is probably one of the more important aspects of adapting LLMs for real-world use within real team/development settings that people don't do. If you provide clear and comprehensive descriptions of codebase patterns, pitfalls, practices, etc the latest models are good at adhering to them. It sounds difficult and open-ended, as this requires content beyond the scope of typical (or even sensible) internal documentation, but much of this content is captured in internal docs, discussions, tickets, PR comments, and git commit histories, and guess what's pretty great at extracting high-level insights from these types of inputs?