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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?

#821

Post by pdimitar »

dreamfactored wrote: post #714
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 don't write code like that As someone who has been doing this since the mid 80's in all kinds of enterprise environments, I am finding that the latest generation are getting rather good at code like that, on par with mid-senior level in that way. They are also very capable of discussing architecture approaches with an encyclopaedic knowledge, although humans contribute meaningfully by drawing connections and a…

> I'm highly bullish on their capabilities as a force multiplier, but highly bearish on them becoming self-driving (for anything complex at least).

Very well summed and this is my exact stance, it's just that I am not seeing much of the "force multiplier" thing just yet. Happy to be proven wrong, but last time I checked (August 2024) I didn't get almost anything. Might be related to the fact that I don't do throwaway code, and I need to iterate on it.

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

#823

Post by pdimitar »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #820
pdimitar wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am aware that the way I work is not the only one, of course, but I am also not so sure about your "vast, vast majority" thing.

You can call it dev-first mindset, I call it a sustainable work mindset. I want the people I work for to be happy with my output. Not everything is velocity. I worked in high-velocity companies and ultimately got tired and left. It's not for me.

And it's not about code being beautiful or other artsy snobby stuff like that. It's about it being maintainable really.

And no I am not given much of a time, I simply refused to work in places where I am not given any time is all. I am a foot solider in the trenches just like you, I just don't participate in the suicidal charges. :)

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

#824

Post by pdimitar »

w10-1 wrote: post #685
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…

I think you're talking about the differencing between coding and writing systems, which means you're talking teams, not individuals. Rarely, systems can be initiated by individuals, but the vast, vast majority are built and maintained by teams. Those teams get smaller with LLMs, and it might even lead to a kind of stasis, where there are no new leads with deep experience, so we maintain the old systems. That's actual…

I have not seen any proof so far that LLMs can enable teams. I and one other former colleague had to fix subtly broken LLM code several times, leading to the "author" being reprimanded that he's wasting three people's time.

Obviously anecdata, sure, it's just that LLMs for now seem mostly suited for throwaway code / one-off projects. If there's systemic proof for the contrary I'd be happy to check it out.

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

#825

Post by pdimitar »

cle wrote: post #552
shiveenp wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion people that harp on about how LLMs have been game changer for them are the people that put themselves as never actually having built anything sophisticated enough that a team of engineers can work and extend on for years.

This back and forth is so tiring. I have built web services used by many Fortune 100 companies, built and maintained and operated them for many years. But I'm not doing that anymore. Now I'm working on my own, building lots of prototypes and proof-of-concepts. For that I've founding LLMs to be extremely helpful and time-saving. Who the hell cares if it's not maintainable for years? I'll likely be throwing it out anyw…

And I never said both can't exist at the same time. Are you certain you are not the one fighting straw men and are tiring yourself with the imagined extreme dichotomy?

My issue is with people claiming LLMs are undoubtedly going to remove programming as a profession. LLMs work fine for one-off code -- when they don't make mistakes even there, that is. They don't work for a lot of other areas, like code you have to iterate on multiple times because the outer world and the business requirements keep changing.

Works for you? Good! Use it, get more productive, you'll only get applause for me. But my work does not involve one-off code and for me LLMs are not impressive because I had to rewrite their code (and to eye-ball it for bugs) multiple times.

"Right tool for the job" and all.

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

#826

Post by valval »

AlphaSite wrote: post #294
deathanatos wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is ego speaking. No, it really isn't. Repeatedly, the case is that people are trying to pass off GPT's work as good without actually verifying the output. I keep seeing "look at this wonderful script GPT made for me to do X", and it does not pass code review , and is generally extremely low quality. In one example, a bash script was generated to count number SLoC changed by author; it was extremely convoluted,…

I think fundamentally if all you do is glue together popular OSS libraries in well understood way, then yes. You may be replaced. But really you probably could be replaced by a Wordpress plugin at that point. The moment you have some weird library that 4 people in the world know (which happens more than you’d expect) or hell even something without a lot of OSS code what exactly is an LLM going to do? How is it suppos…

You ask what the LLM is going to do. It’s going to swallow the entire code base in context and allow any developer to join those 4 people in generating production grade code.

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

#827

Post by baq »

pdimitar wrote: post #804
baq wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Current generation LLMs have been in development for approximately as long as it takes for a college to ingest a high schooler and pump out a non-horrible junior software developer. The pace of progress slowed down, but if we get further 50% improvement in 200% time it’s still you who is being the romantic, not the op.

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

#828

Post by valval »

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 “…

Another post where I get to tell a skeptic that they’re failing at using these products.

There will be human programmers in the future as well, they just won’t be ones who can’t use LLMs.

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

#829

Post by pdimitar »

baq wrote: post #827
pdimitar wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently I'm not. Elaborate?

Current generation LLMs have been in development for approximately as long as it takes for a college to ingest a high schooler and pump out a non-horrible junior software developer. The pace of progress slowed down, but if we get further 50% improvement in 200% time it’s still you who is being the romantic, not the op.

I honestly don't follow your angle at all. Mind telling me your complete takeaway? You are kind of throwing just bits and pieces at me and I followed too many sub-threads to keep full context.

I don't see where I was romantic either.

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

#830

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #820
pdimitar wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for saying this; I commented something similar.

The HN commentariat seems to be comprised of FAANGers and related aspirants; a small part of the overall software market.

The "quality" companies doing high-skilled, bespoke work are a distinct minority.

A huge portion of work for programmers IS Java CRUD, React abominations, some C# thing that runs disgusting queries from an old SQL Server, etc etc.

Those privileged enough to work exclusively at those companies have no idea what the largest portion of the market looks like.

LLMs ARE a "threat" to this kind of work, for all the obvious reasons.

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