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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?

#801

Post by pdimitar »

fragmede wrote: post #566
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?

Orrrrr more simpler than imagining a vast conspiracy is that your observations just don't match theirs. If you're writing, say, C# with some esoteric libraries using CoPilot, it's easy to see it as glorified auto-complete that hallucinates to the point of being unusable because there's not enough training data. If you're using Claude with Aider to write a webpage using NextJS, you'll see it as a revolution in program…

Where did I imply conspiracy? People have been known to turn a blind eye to criticism towards stuff they like ever since... forever.

The funny thing about the rest of your comment is that I'm in full agreement with you but somehow you decided that I'm an extremist. I'm not. I'm simply tired of people who make zero effort to prove their hypothesis and just call me arrogant or old / stuck in my ways, again with zero demonstration how LLMs "revolutionize" programming _exactly_.

And you have made more effort in that direction than most people I discussed this with, by the way. Thanks for that.

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

#802

Post by pdimitar »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #663
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…

> 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 the code doesn't have to be anything like that, it only has to do one thing and one thing only: ship

If and only if it's a one-off. I already addressed this in my comment that you are replying to, and you and several others happily ignored it. Really no idea why.

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

#803

Post by pdimitar »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #763
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…

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.

Anything might happen in the future. My issue is with people claiming we're already in this future, and their only proof is "I generated this one-off NextJS application with LLMs".

Cool for you but a lot of us actually iterate on our work.

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

#804

Post by pdimitar »

baq wrote: post #657
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 barely at the level of a diligent but not very good junior dev at the moment, and have been for the last at least 6 months. > Your take is rather romantic. I’m not sure you’re aware what you’ve written here. The contrast physically hurts.

Apparently I'm not. Elaborate?

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

#805

Post by pdimitar »

shenbomo wrote: post #742
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…

Did you think computers and ARPANET came out for commercial-grade applications and not "good for playing with stuff" ?

Of course they came from playing. But did you have people claiming we have a general AI while basic programming building blocks were still on the operating table?

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

#806

Post by BoxOfRain »

mplanchard wrote: post #482
rybosworld wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test If that statement isn't coming from ego, then where is it coming from? It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code. They've been trained on billions of examples. Developers seem to focus on the set of cases that LLM's produce code that doesn't work, and use that as evidence that these tools are "useless".

Working code some subset of the time, for popular languages. It’s not good at Rust nor at other smaller languages. Tried to ask it for some help with Janet and it was hopelessly wrong, even with prompting to try to get it to correct its mistakes. Even if it did work, working code is barely half the battle.

I'd say ChatGPT at least is a fair bit better at Python than it is at Scala which seems to match your experience.

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

#807

Post by richardw »

pdimitar wrote: post #793
richardw wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[flagged]

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

#808

Post by pdimitar »

rkachowski wrote: post #751
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…

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 mor…

And yet, zero proof again.

Getting so worked up doesn't seem objective so it's difficult to take your comment seriously.

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

#809

Post by pdimitar »

lordnacho wrote: post #776
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…

We're gonna get mini-milled. People with the attitude that real programmers are producing the high level product are going to get eaten slowly, from below, in the most embarrassing way possible. Embarrassing because they'll actually be right. LLMs aren't making the high quality products, it's true. But the low quality CRUD websites (think restaurant menus) will get swallowed by LLMs. You no longer need a guy to code…

Yeah, and it's always in the future, right? ;)

I don't disagree btw. Stuff that is very easy to automate will absolutely be swallowed by LLMs or any other tool that's the iteration #13718 of people trying to automate boring stuff, or stuff they don't want to pay full programmer wages for. That much I am very much convinced of as well.

But there are many other, rather nebulous shall we call them, claims, that I take issue with. Like "programming is soon going to be dead". I mean OK, they might believe it, but arguing it on HN is just funny.

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

#810

Post by pdimitar »

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…

Absolutely. I agree with your take. It's just that I prefer to work in places where products are iterated on and not made once, tweaked twice, and then thrown out. There LLMs are for the moment not very interesting because you have to correct like 50% of the code they generate, ultimately wasting more time and brain energy than writing the thing yourself in the first place.
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