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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?

#791

Post by cadamsau »

wyclif wrote: post #498
cadamsau wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One hundred per cent this. LLM pair programming is unbelievably fun, satisfying, and productive. Why type out the code when you can instead watch it being typed while thinking of and typing out/speaking the next thing you want. For those who enjoy typing, you could try to get a job dictating letters for lawyers, but something tells me that’s on the way out too.

What do you prefer to use for LLM pair programming?

Claude and pasting code back and forth for simple things. But I’d like to try Claude with a few MCP servers so it can directly modify a repo.

But lately Cursor. It’s just so effortless.

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

#792

Post by pdimitar »

richardw wrote: post #589
RealityVoid wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you and I don't think OP disagrees either. The point if contention is the inevitable and immediate death of programming as a profession.

Surely nobody has that binary a view? What are the likely impacts over the next 1, 5, 10, 20 years. People getting into development now have the most incredible technology to help them skill up, but also more risk than we had in decades past. There's a continuum of impact and it's not 0 or 100%, and it's not immediate. What I consider inevitable: humans will keep trying to automate anything that looks repeatable. As…

And I'll keep telling you that I never said I'm safe forever.

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

#793

Post by pdimitar »

richardw wrote: post #543
pdimitar wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, as cynical and demeaning that must sound to them, I am arriving at the same conclusion.

My last project made millions for the bank I was working at within the first 2 years and is now a case study at one of our extremely large vendors who you have definitely heard of. I conceptualised it, designed it, wrote the most important code. My boss said my contribution would last decades. You persist with making statements about people in the discussion, when you know nothing about their context aside from one o…

You're the one who claimed that I'm arrogant and pulled that out of thin air. Take your own advice.

I also have no idea what your comment here had to do with LLMs, will you elaborate?

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

#794

Post by pdimitar »

sigmarule wrote: post #744
pdimitar wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Obviously not very hard. And looking at the blatant and unproven claims on HN gave me the view that the proponents are not interested in giving proof; they simply want to silence anyone who disagrees LLMs are useful for programming.

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

#795

Post by atemerev »

munificent wrote: post #504
codery wrote: post #493

"The use of FORTRAN, like the earlier symbolic programming, was very slow to be taken up by the professionals. And this is typical of almost all professional groups. Doctors clearly do not follow the advice they give to others, and they also have a high proportion of drug addicts. Lawyers often do not leave decent wills when they die. Almost all professionals are slow to use their own expertise for their own work. Th…

> Looking at the code you’ve been paid to write over the past few years, how much of that can you honestly say is truly novel? While the code I write is rarely novel, one of the primary intrinsic motivators that keeps being a software engineer is the satisfaction of understanding my code . If I just wanted software problems to be solved and was content to wave my hands and have minions do the work, I'd be in manageme…

And that is exactly what we won’t have anymore, at least on the job. They are not paying us for our satisfaction and our understanding.

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

#796

Post by palata »

brink wrote: post #256
luddite2309 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fascinating comment, because it shows such a mis-reading of the history and point of technology (on a tech forum). Technological progress always leads to loss of skilled labor like your own, usually resulting in lower quality (but higher profits and often lower prices). Of COURSE an LLM won't be able to do work as well as you, just as industrial textile manufacturing could not, and still does not, produce t…

Comparing an LLM to an industrial textile machine is laughable, because one is consistent and reliable while the other is not.

It's laughable only if you think that the only reasonable metric is "consistent and reliable".

The parent says "it typically doesn't matter that the product is worse if it's cheap enough". And that seems valid to me: the average quality of software today seems to be worse than 10 years ago. We do worse but cheaper.

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

#797

Post by pdimitar »

Aeolun wrote: post #639
pdimitar wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but I can't imagine that everybody here on HN that's defending LLMs so... misguidedly and obviously ignoring observable reality... are financially interested in LLMs' success, can they?

I’m financially interested in Anthropic being successfull since it means their prices are more likely to go down, or for their models to get (even) better. Honestly, if you don’t think it works for you, that’s fine with me. I just feel the dismissive attitude is weird since it’s so incredibly useful to me.

Why is it weird, exactly? I don't write throwaway projects so the mostly one-off nature of LLM code generation is not useful to me. And I'm not the only one either.

If you can give examples of incredible usefulness then that can advance the discussion. Otherwise it's just us trying to out-shout each other, and I'm not interested in that.

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

#798

Post by pdimitar »

richardw wrote: post #722
jayd16 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer is they're trying to sell it.

And it’s the short wrong answer. I get absolutely zero benefit if you or anyone else uses it. This is not for you or I, it’s for young people who don’t know what to do. I’m a person who uses a few LLM’s, and I do so because I see the risks and want to participate rather than have change imposed on me.

OK, do that. Seems like a case of FOMO to me but it might very well turn out that you're right and I'm wrong.

However, that's absolutely not clear today.

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

#799

Post by palata »

TZubiri wrote: post #142
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 “…

"Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time" That's why the question is future proof. Models get better with time, not worse.

> Models get better with time, not worse

A decade (almost?) ago, people were saying "look at how self-driving cars improved in the last 2 years: in 3-5 years we won't need to learn how to drive anymore". And yet...

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

#800

Post by atemerev »

irunmyownemail wrote: post #481
mofeien wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also means that you should update your belief about the reasoning capabilities of LLMs at least slightly. if disconfirming evidence doesn’t shake your beliefs at all, you dont really have beliefs, you have an ideology.

"It also means that you should update your belief about the reasoning capabilities of LLMs at least slightly." AI, LLM, ML - have no reasoning ability, they're not human, they are software machines, not people. People reason, machines calculate and imitate, they do not reason.

People are just analog neural circuits. They are not magic. Human brain is one physical implementation of intelligence. It is not the only one possible.
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