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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?

#751

Post by rkachowski »

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…

This is quite an absurd, racist and naive take.

"Commercial grade applications" doesn't mean much in an industry where ~50% of projects fail. It's been said before that the average organisation cannot solve a solved problem. On top of this there's a lot of bizarre claims about what software _should_ be. All the dependency injection and TDD and scrum and all the kings horses don't mean anything when we are nothing more than a prompt away from a working reference implementation.

Anyone designing a project to be "deployed in every cloud provider" has wasted a huge amount of time and money, and has likely never run ops for such an application. Even then, knowing the trivia and platform specific quirks required for each platform are exactly where LLMs shine.

Your comments about "business people" trying to replace you with multiple Indian people shows your level of personal and professional development, and you're exactly the kind of personality that should be replaced by an LLM subscription.

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

#752

Post by mianos »

Scarblac wrote: post #671
baq wrote: post #645

Earlier 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…

That's also my experience, the AI is very helpful for doing common things with languages you're not great at. Makes it easier to pick up a few extra tools to use now and then.

This I agree with. It is awesome when you don't know something. I have being doing some TypeScript recently and it's not something I have used professionally in anger before.

But, as I learn it, GPT 4o becomes less and less useful for anything but short questions to fill in gaps. I am already way better than it at anything more than a few pages long. Getting it to do something substantial is pretty much an exercise in frustration.

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

#753

Post by crazylogger »

When doing X becomes cheaper with the invention of new tools, X is now more profitable and humanity tends to do much more of it.

Nearly all code was machine-generated after the invention of compilers. Did the compiler destroy programming? Absolutely not. Compilers and other tools like higher-level programming languages really kickstarted the software industry. IMO the potential transition from writing programming languages -> writing natural language and have LLM generate the program is still a smaller change than machine code/assembly -> modern programming languages.

If the invention of programming languages expanded the population of programmers from thousands to the 10s of millions, I think LLMs could expand this number again to a billion.

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

#754

Post by Quarrel »

shafyy wrote: post #739
simianparrot wrote: post #80

Nothing 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 fast…

> I thought, well, if an LLM is good at something, it's probably at finding information in a very narrow field like this.

I feel like of all the things in this thread, this one is on them. It absolutely is something that LLMs are good at. They have the sample size, examples and docs, all the things. LLMs are particularly good at speaking "their" language, the most surprising thing is that they can do so much more beyond that next token reckoning.

So, yeah, I'm a bit surprised that a shop like Shopify is so sloppy, but absolutely I think they should be able to provide you an LLM to answer your questions. Particularly given some of the Shopify alumni I've interviewed.

That said, some marketing person might have just oversold the capabilities of an LLM that answers most of their core customer questions, rather than one that knows much at all about their API integrations.

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

#755

Post by mianos »

Aeolun wrote: post #627
ipnon wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

It was awesome 20 years before that, and the 10s in the middle. It's great now too.

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

#756

Post by mianos »

euroderf wrote: post #716
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-la…

That is exactly what I mean when I said "we'll be the ones using it".

I didn't want to expand it, for fear of sounding like an elitist, and you said it better anyway. The same things that make a programmer excellent will be in a much better position to use an even better LLM.

Concise thinking and expression. At the moment LLMs will just kinda 'shotgun' scattered ideas based on your input. I expect the better ones will be massively better when fed better input.

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

#757

Post by anonzzzies »

tugu77 wrote: post #707
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…

> Large companies are still thinking about privacy of data etc but all of that will simply not matter in the long run. That attitude is why our industry has such a bad rep and why things are going down the drain to dystopia. Devs without ethics. This world is doomed.

It definitely is doomed. But somehow we might survive.

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

#758

Post by anonzzzies »

tugu77 wrote: post #749
anonzzzies wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is by far most companies. But yes, I agree.

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

#759

Post by ForHackernews »

jarsin wrote: post #612
Panzer04 wrote: post #596

My view is that the point at which LLMs could cause the death of SWE as a profession is also the point at which practically all knowledge professions could be killed. To fully replace SWEs still requires the LLM to have enough external context that it could replace a huge range of jobs, and it'd probably be best to deal with the consequences of that as and when they happen.

So to take that a step further couldn't all businesses be killed as well?

No, because rich people own businesses.

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

#760

Post by anonzzzies »

tugu77 wrote: post #749
anonzzzies wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with all remarks you made; but how old are you? As it all seems pretty naive? The world unfortunately is only about money and nothing else, it is terrible but it is. Better worlds are eradicated by this reality all the time.
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