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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?

#761

Post by zelphirkalt »

WWLink wrote: post #703
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…

> I tell it to make a row of widgets and it outputs all the div+css soup (or e.g. material components) that only needs some tuning instead of having to google everything. As someone with a fairly neutral/dismissive/negative opinion on AI tools, you just pointed out a sweet silver lining. That would be a great use case for when you want to use clean html/css/js and not litter your codebase with a gazillion libraries t…

Given how bad most DOM trees look out there (div soup, thousands of not needed elements, very deep nesting, direct styling, HTML element hacks, not using semantically appropriate elements, wrong nesting of elements, and probably more), I would be surprised, if LLMs give non-div-soup and responsive HTML and CSS, the way I would write it myself. Some day I should test one such LLM as to whether it is able to output a good HTML document, with guidance, or the sheer amount of bad websites out there has forever poisoned the learned statistics.

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

#762

Post by rob74 »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #551
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…

> 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 easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars an…

If there is one job I don't want to do, it's being responsible for a big heap of enterprise CRUD slop generated and glued together by LLMs. If they can write it, they should learn to maintain it too!

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

#763

Post by throwawayffffas »

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…

The main takeaway is that llms can't code to a professional level yet. But with improvement they probably will. It doesn't even have to be LLMs the coding part of our job will eventually be automated to a much larger degree than it is.

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

#764

Post by smusamashah »

anonzzzies wrote: post #682
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…

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…

Which tool did he make?

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

#765

Post by anonzzzies »

smusamashah wrote: post #764
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…

Which tool did he make?

I do not want to dox myself but if you were in enterprise IT in the 80s in europe you will have heard of it or used it.

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

#766

Post by tumetab1 »

thor_molecules wrote: post #179

After reading the comments, the themes I'm seeing are: - AI will provide a big mess for wizards to clean up - AI will replace juniors and then seniors within a short timeframe - AI will soon plateau and the bubble will burst - "Pshaw I'm not paid to code; I'm a problem solver" - AI is useless in the face of true coding mastery It is interesting to me that this forum of expert technical people are so divided on this (…

Many commenters suffer the first experience bias, they tried ChatGPT and it was "meh" so they see no impact.

I have tried cursor.ai, agent mode, and I see a clear big impact.

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

#767

Post by throwawayffffas »

janalsncm wrote: post #263
thegrim33 wrote: post #71

I don't worry about it, because: 1) I believe we need true AGI to replace developers. 2) I don't believe LLMs are currently AGI or that if we just feed them more compute during training that they'll magically become AGI. 3) Even if we did invent AGI soon and replace developers, I wouldn't even really care, because the invention of AGI would be such an insanely impactful, world changing, event that who knows what the…

To replace all developers, we need AGI yes. To replace many developers? No. If one developer can do the same work as 5 could previously, unless the amount of work expands then 4 developers are going to be looking for a job. Therefore, unless you for some reason believe you will be in the shrinking portion that cannot be replaced I think the question deserves more attention than “nothing”.

That's a weird way to look at it. If one developer can do what 5 could do before, that doesn't mean I will be looking for a job, it means I will be doing 5 times more work.

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

#768

Post by latentsea »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #385
latentsea wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think there's cases in which if you can't do the last mile, you aren't entrusted to do the first either.

It's astounding that basically every response you give is just "it can't happen to me". The actual answer to the OP's question for you is a resounding: "nothing".

More or less. I'm just going to enjoy the ride of what becomes of the industry until I either retire or just go do something else with my life.

I already had my panic moment about this like 2 years ago and have calmed down since then. I feel a lot more at peace than I did when I was thinking AGI was right around the corner and trying to plan for a future where no matter what course of action I took to learn new skills to outpace the AI I was already too late with my pivot because the AI would also become capable at doing whatever I was deciding to switch to on a shorter timeline than It would take me to become proficient in it.

If you at all imagine a world where the need for human software engineers legit goes away, then there isn't likely much for you to do in that world anyway. Maybe except become a plumber.

I don't think AGI is this magic silver bullet Silicon Valley thinks it is. I think, like everything in engineering, it's a trade-off, and I think it comes with a very unpalatable caveat. How do you learn once you've run out of data? By making mistakes. End of the day I think it's in the same boat as us, only at least we can be held accountable.

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

#769

Post by throw234234234 »

robwwilliams wrote: post #508
throw234234234 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It solely depends on whether more software being built is being constrained by feasibility/cost or a lack of commercial opportunities. Software is typically not a cost constrained activity due to its typically higher ROI/scale. Its all about fixed costs and scaling profits mostly. Unfortunately given this my current belief is that on balance AI will destroy many jobs in this industry if it gets to the point where it…

Is there a good reason to assume inelastic demand? In my field —- biomedical research —-I see huge untapped areas in need of much more and better core programming services. Instead we “rely” way too much on grad students (not even junior SWEs) who know a bit of Python.

Depends on the niche (software is broad) but I think as a whole for the large software efforts employing a good chunk of the market - I think so. Two main reasons for thinking this way:

- Software scales; generally it is a function of market size, reach, network effects, etc. Cost is a factor but not the greatest factor. Most software makes profit "at scale" - engineering is a capital fixed cost. This means that software feasibility is generally inelastic to cost or rather - if I make SWE's cheaper/not required to employ it wouldn't change the potential profit vs cost equation much IMV for many different opportunities. Software is limited more by ideas, and potential untapped market opportunities. Yes - it would be much cheaper to build things; but it wouldn't change the feasibility of a lot of project assessments since cost of SWE's at least from what I've seen in assessments isn't the biggest factor. This effect plays out to varying degrees in a lot of capex - as long as the ROI makes sense its worth going ahead especially for larger orgs who have more access to capital. The ROI from scale dwarfs potential cost rises often making it less of a function of end SWE demand. This effect happens in other engineering disciplines as well to varying effects - software just has it in spades until you mix hardware scaling into the mix (e.g GPUs).

- The previous "golden era" where the in-elasticity of software demand w.r.t cost meant salaries just kept rising. Inelasticity can be good for sellers of a commodity if demand increases. More importantly demand didn't really decrease for most companies as SWE salaries kept rising - entry requirements were relaxing generally. The good side of in-elasticity is reversed potentially by AI making it a bad thing.

However small "throwaway" software which does have a "is it worth it/cost factor" will increase under AI most probably. Just don't think it will offset the reduction demanded by capital holders; nor will it be necessarily done by the same people anyway (democratizing software dev) meaning it isn't a job saver.

In your case I would imagine there is a reason why said software doesn't have SWE's coding it now - it isn't feasible given the likely scale it would have (I assume just your team). AI may make it feasible, but that doesn't help the OP in the way it does it - it does so by making it feasible for as you put it junior out of uni not even "SWE" grads. That doesn't help the OP.

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