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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?

#831

Post by hoppp »

If people enjoy SWE they will never be replaced, nobody will forcefully enter my house to tear the keyboard out of my hands.

Even if AI coding becomes the norm, people who actually understand software will write better prompts.

The current quality of generated code is awful anyways. We are not there yet.

But there is a very simple solution for people who really dislike AI. Licensing. Disallow AI to contribute to and use your FOSS code and if they do, sue the entity that trained the model. Easy money.

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

#832

Post by taylodl »

indrora wrote: post #316
taylodl wrote: post #25

Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a craze called CASE - Computer-Aided Software Engineering. The idea was humans really suck at writing code, but we're really good at modeling and creating specifications. Tools like Rational Rose arose during this era, as did Booch notation which eventually became part of UML. The problem was it never worked. When generating the code, the best the tools could do was create…

> Bottom line, you don't see too many assembly language developers anymore. And where you do, no LLM is going to replace them because they are working in the dark mines where no compiler has seen and the optimizations they are doing involve arcane lore about the mysteries of some Intel engineer's mind while one or both of them are on a drug fueled alcoholic deep dive.

Out of curiosity, who does assembly language programming these days? Back in the 90s the compilers had learned all our best tricks. Now with multiple instruction pipelines and out-of-order instruction processing and registers to be managed, can humans still write better optimized assembly than a compiler? Is the juice worth that squeeze?

I can see people still learning assembly in a pedagogical setting, but not in a production setting. I'd be interested to hear otherwise.

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

#833

Post by Macha »

dukeyukey wrote: post #784
lordnacho wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But the low quality CRUD websites (think restaurant menus) will get swallowed by LLMs. You no longer need a guy to code up a model, run a migration, and throw it on AWS. You also don't need a guy to make the art. To be fair those were eaten long ago by Wordpress and site builders.

And even Facebook. I think the last time bespoke restaurant menu websites were a viable business was around 2010.

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

#834

Post by Macha »

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.

Given they're a VC backed company rushing to claim market share and apparently selling well below cost, it's not clear that that will be the case. Compare the ride share companies for one case where prices went up once they were successful.

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

#835

Post by jf22 »

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 “…

I'd challenge the assertion that LLMs never pass whatever a "sniff test" is to you. The code they produce is looking more and more like working production code.

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

#836

Post by actionfromafar »

Macha wrote: post #833
dukeyukey wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the low quality CRUD websites (think restaurant menus) will get swallowed by LLMs. You no longer need a guy to code up a model, run a migration, and throw it on AWS. You also don't need a guy to make the art. To be fair those were eaten long ago by Wordpress and site builders.

And even Facebook. I think the last time bespoke restaurant menu websites were a viable business was around 2010.

That doesn't agree with my area at all. Most restaurants have menus or an app or both. Some have a basic website with phone number and link to an app. There seems to be some kind of app template many restaurants use which you can order from too.

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

#837

Post by jvanderbot »

oangemangut wrote: post #417
dogman144 wrote: post #378

The last fairly technical career to get surprisingly and fully automated in the way this post displays concern about - trading. I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt. Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was: - How complex the job was - How high a…

Having also worked on desks in the 00s and early 10s I think a big difference here is what trading meant really changed; much of what traders did went away with innovations in speed. Speed and algos became the way to trade neither of which humans can do. While SWE became significantly more important on trading desks, you still have researchers, quants, portfolio analysts, etc. that spend their working days developing…

This actually surfaces a much more likely scenario: That it's not our jobs that are automated, but a designed-from-scratch automated sw/eng job that just replaces our jobs because it's faster and better. It's quite possible all our thinking is just required because we can only write one prototype at a time. If you could generate 10 attempts / day, until you have a stakeholder say "good enough", you wouldn't need much in the way of requirements, testing, thinking, design, etc.

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

#838

Post by felideon »

pdimitar wrote: post #829
baq wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the OP, but I imagine it has to do with the "LLMs will improve over time" trope. You said "and have been for the last at least 6 months" and it's confusing what you meant or what you expected should have happened in the past 6 months.

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

#840

Post by n_ary »

I recall the Code Generation from class diagram and then low-code declared as death of all devs.

The current generation of LLMs are immensely expensive and will become further more if all the VC money disappears.

A FT dev is happy to sit there and deal with all the whinning, meeting, alignment, 20 iterations of refactoring, architectural change, late friday evening to put out fire. To make an LLM work for 40h/week with that much of context would cost insane and several steering people. Also the level of ambiguous garbage spewed by management and requirement engineers which I turn to value is… difficult with LLMs.

Lets take it this way, before LLMs, we have wonderful outsourcing firms that costs slightly less than maintaining inhouse team, if devs were to disappear, that would be the nail. LLMs need steering and does not deal well with ambiguity, so I don’t see a threat.

Also for all the people touting LLM holy song, try asking windsurf or cursor to generate something niche which does not exist publicly, see how well it does. Aside, I closed several PRs last week because people started using generated code with 100+ LOC which would do with just one or two lines if the authors took some time to review the latest release of the library.

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