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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?

#811

Post by pdimitar »

Aeolun wrote: post #629
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…

Very defensive. I love it anyhow. Sure, it generates shit code, but if you ask it it’ll gladly tell you all the ways it can be improved. And then actually do so. It’s not perfect. I spent a few hours yesterday pulling it’s massive blobby component apart by hand. But on the plus side, I didn’t have to write the whole thing. Just do a bunch of copy paste operations. I kinda like having a junior dev to do all the typing…

I would not mind having a junior type out the code, or so I thought for a while. But in the case of those of us who do deep work it simply turned out that proof-reading and correcting the generated code is more difficult than writing it out in the first place.

What in my comment did you find defensive, btw? I am curious on how does it look from the outside for people that are not exactly of my mind. Not making promises I'll change, but still curious.

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

#812

Post by pdimitar »

palata wrote: post #774
Aeolun wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very defensive. I love it anyhow. Sure, it generates shit code, but if you ask it it’ll gladly tell you all the ways it can be improved. And then actually do so. It’s not perfect. I spent a few hours yesterday pulling it’s massive blobby component apart by hand. But on the plus side, I didn’t have to write the whole thing. Just do a bunch of copy paste operations. I kinda like having a junior dev to do all the typing…

> I spent a few hours yesterday pulling it’s massive blobby component apart by hand. But on the plus side, I didn’t have to write the whole thing. The question, really, is: are you confident that this was better than actually writing the whole thing yourself? Not only in terms of how long it took this one time, but also in terms of how much you learned while doing it. You accumulate experience when you write code, wh…

Those are the right questions indeed, thank you for being one of the commenters who looks past the niche need of "I want to generate this and move along".

I tried LLMs several times, even started using my phone's timers, and found out that just writing the code I need by hand is quicker and easier on my brain. Proof-reading and looking for correctness in something already written is more brain-intensive.

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

#813

Post by pdimitar »

edanm wrote: post #738
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…

> business people trying to replace one guy like myself with 3 Indians has been a reality for 10 years at this point, and amusingly they keep failing and never learning their lesson. /off-topic What is the "lesson" that business people fail to learn? That Indians are worse developers than "someone like yourself"? (I don't mean to bump on this, but it is pretty offensive as currently written.)

1. The Indians were given as an example of absolutely terrible outsourcing agencies' dev employees. Call it racist or offensive if you like, to me it's statistical observation and I will offer no excuses that my brain is working properly and is seeing patterns. I have also met amazingly good Indian devs for what it's worth but most have been, yes, terrible. There's a link between very low-quality outsourcing agencies and Indian devs. I did not produce or fabricate this reality, it's just there.

2. The lesson business people fail to learn is that there's a minimum payment for programmers to get your stuff done, below which the quality drops sharply and that they should not attempt their cost-saving "strategy" because it ends up costing them much more than just paying me to do it. And I am _not_ commanding SV wages btw; $100k a year is something I only saw twice in my long career. So it's double funny how these "businessmen" are trying to be shrewd and pay even less, only to end up paying 5x my wage to a team that specializes in salvaging nearly-failed projects. I'll always find it amusing.

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

#814

Post by pdimitar »

nadam wrote: post #678
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 (i.e. by using env vars and config files for modifying its behavior).." Interestingly I do not find that the stuff you mentioned are the t…

If you say so then OK, I am not going to claim you are imagining it. But some proof would be nice.

I have quickly given up on experimenting with LLMs because they turned out to be net negative for my work -- proof-reading code is slower than writing it.

But if you have good examples then I'll check them out. I am open to the possibility that LLMs are getting better at iterating on code. I'd welcome it. It's just that I haven't seen it yet and I am not going to go out of my way to re-vet several LLMs for the... 4th time it would be, I think.

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

#815

Post by pdimitar »

richardw wrote: post #523
pdimitar wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming I am arrogant because I don't view the current LLMs as good coders. That's a faulty assumption so your argument starts with a logical mistake. Also I never said that I "have no equal". I am saying that the death of my career has been predicted for no less than 10 years now and it still has not happened, and I see no signs of it happening; LLMs produce terrible code very often. This gives me the right…

"You seem to confuse" "Your analogy with the automakers seems puzzlingly irrelevant" "Your take is rather romantic." That's pretty charged language focused on the person not the argument, so if you're surprised why I'm annoyed, start there. Meta has one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08806 Another, edited in above: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/multi-repo-ai-assisted-refact... Another: https://codescene.com/product/ai-…

Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.

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

#816

Post by pdimitar »

Aeolun wrote: post #637
pdimitar wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming I am arrogant because I don't view the current LLMs as good coders. That's a faulty assumption so your argument starts with a logical mistake. Also I never said that I "have no equal". I am saying that the death of my career has been predicted for no less than 10 years now and it still has not happened, and I see no signs of it happening; LLMs produce terrible code very often. This gives me the right…

> If you find it, let me know. That I would view as an interesting proof and a worthy discussion to have on it after. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/tra... To be honest, I have no idea how well it works, but you can’t get much bigger than AWS in this regard.

Thanks. I'll absolutely check this out.

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

#817

Post by UltraSane »

Aeolun wrote: post #634
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

LLM’s are good at things a lot of people do, because a lot of people do them, and there’s tons of examples. It’s the very definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yes. LLMs are great at generating Python code but not so great at generating APL code.

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

#818

Post by bdangubic »

015a wrote: post #386
bdangubic wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nicely said. > AI cannot replace people; AI augments people. Here’s where we slightly disagree. If AI augments people (100% does) it makes those people more productive (from my personal experience I am ballparking currently I am 40-45% more productive) and hence some people will get replaced. Plausibly in high-growth companies we’ll just all be more productive and will crank out 40-45% more products/features/… but in…

Directionally, I think that's certainly true for some professions. It is probably the case that it isn't true for software engineering. The biggest reason involves how software, as a business, involves a ton of problem space exploration and experimentation. Most businesses have an infinite appetite for software; there's always another idea, another feature they can sell, another expectation, another bug we can fix, o…

> At the end of the day: there's an infinite appetite for software, and someone has to wire it all up.

I agree with this 100%... the core issue to ponder is this - Javascript was probably 1,000,000% productivity boon over assembly - no question about that but it did not offer much in the form of "automation" so-to-speak. It was just a new language that luckily for it became de-facto language that browsers understand. You and I have spent countless hours writing JS, TS code etc... The question I think here is whether LLMs can automate things or not. I consider a single greatest trait in the absolute best SWEs I ever worked with (that is a lot of them, two and a half decades plus doing this) and that is LAZINESS. Greatest SWEs are lazy by nature and we tend to look to automate everything that can be automated. Javascript is not helping me a whole lot with automation but LLMs just might. Writing docs, writing property-based tests for every function I write, writing integration tests for every end-point I write etc etc... In these discussions you can always detect "junior" developers from "senior" developers in that "juniors" will fight the fight "oh no way imma get replaced here, I do all this shit LLMs can't even dream of" while "seniors" are going "I have already automated 30-40-50% of the work that I used to do..."

the most fascinating part to me is that same "juniors" in the same threads are arguing things like "SWEs are not just writing code, there are ALL these other things that we have to do" without realizing that it is exactly all those "other things" that with LLMs you just might be able to automate your way out of it, fully or partially...

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

#820

Post by GeoAtreides »

pdimitar wrote: post #802
GeoAtreides wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

i'm sorry, both you and /u/NorthTheRock have a dev first mindset. Or a google-work-of-art codebase mindset. Or a bespoke little dev boutique mindset. Something like that. For the vast, vast majority of software devs it doesn't work that way. The way it works is: a PM says: we need this out ASAP, then we need this feature, this bug, hurry up, close your tickets, no, a clean codebase and unit tests are not needed, just get this out, the client is complaining.

And so it goes. I'm happy you guys work in places where you can take your time to design beautiful work of arts, I really am. Again, that's not the experience for everyone else, who are toiling in the fields out there, chased by large packs of rabid tickets.

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