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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?

#851

Post by lifeisstillgood »

jvanderbot wrote: post #837
oangemangut wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is interesting - yes of course true

But like so much of this thread “we can do this already without AI, if we wanted”

Want to try 5/10 different approaches a day? Fine - get your best stakeholders and your best devs and lock them in a room on the top floor and throw in pizza every so often.

Projects take a long time because we allow them to. (NB this is not same as setting tight deadlines, this is having a preponderance of force on the side of our side

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

#852

Post by apwell23 »

richardw wrote: post #364
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 “…

For those less confident: U.S. (and German) automakers were absolutely sure that the Japanese would never be able to touch them. Then Koreans. Now Chinese. Now there are tariffs and more coming to save jobs. Betting against AI (or increasing automation, really) is a bet against not against robots, but against human ingenuity. Humans are the ones making progress, and we can work with toothpicks as levers. LLM's are ou…

> 've got almost 30 years experience but I'm a bit rusty in e.g. web. But I've used LLM's to build maybe 10 apps that I had no business building, from one-off kids games to learn math,

Yea i built bunch of apps when RoR blog demo came out like 2 decades ago. So what?

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

#853

Post by qup »

oops wrote: post #202
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".

My experience so far has been: if I know what I want well enough to explain it to an LLM then it’s been easier for me to just write the code. Iterating on prompts, reading and understanding the LLM’s code, validating that it works and fixing bugs is still time consuming. It has been interesting as a rubber duck, exploring a new topic or language, some code golf, but so far not for production code for me.

Okay, but as soon as you need to do the same thing in [programming language you don't know], then it's not easier for you to write the code anymore, even though you understand the problem domain just as well.

Now, understand that most people don't have the same grasp of [your programming language] that you have, so it's probably not easier for them to write it.

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

#854

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

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…

Who checks to see if the LLM swallowed it or not?

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

#855

Post by constantcrying »

nicoburns wrote: post #95
rybosworld wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 am constantly surprised how prevalent this attitude is. ChatGPT was only just released in 2022. Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test This is ego speaking.

> > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test > This is ego speaking. That's been my experience of LLM-generated code that people have submitted to open source projects I work on. It's all been crap. Some of it didn't even compile. Some of it changed comments that were previously correct to say something untrue. I've yet to see a single PR that implemented something useful.

Terrible software engineers sent you terrible code. A good software engineer will obviously send you good quality code, whether he used AI for that is impossible to tell on your end.

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

#856

Post by qup »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #440
rybosworld wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a lot more involved in senior dev work beyond producing code that works. Completely agree. What I don't agree with is statements like these: > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test To me, these (false) absolutions about chat bot capabilities, are being rehashed so frequently, that it derails every conversation about using LLM's for dev work. You'll find similar statements in nearly every thread a…

> It's provably true that LLM's can produce working code ChatGPT, even now in late-2024, still hallucinates standard-library types and methods more-often-than-not whenever I ask it to generate code for me. Granted, I don’t target the most popular platforms (i.e. React/Node/etc; I’m currently in a .NET shop, which is a minority platform now, but ChatGPT’s poor performance is surprising given the overall volume and qua…

> still hallucinates standard-library types and methods more-often-than-not whenever I ask it to generate code for me

Not an argument, unsolicited advice: my guess is you are asking it to do too much work at once. Make much smaller changes. Try to ask for as roughly much as you would put into one git commit (per best practices)-- for me that's usually editing a dozen or less lines of code.

> Once a project grows past hundreds of KB of significant source I honestly don’t know how us humans are meant to get LLMs to work on them. Please educate me.

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider

Edit: The author of aider puts the percentage of the code written by LLMs for each release. It's been 70%+. But some problems are still easier to handle yourself. https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/releases

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

#857

Post by intelVISA »

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…

Arguably you never really needed a SWE for those use cases, SWEs are for bespoke systems with specific constraints or esoteric platforms.

"That guy who can barely glue together a couple of pages" was never going to provide much value as a developer, the lunches you describe were already eaten: LLMs are just the latest branding for selling solutions to those "crap jobs".

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

#858

Post by constantcrying »

simianparrot wrote: post #159
agilob wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs aren't supposed to do basic math, but be chat agents. Wolfram Alpha can't do chat.

Math is a major part of programming. In fact programming without math is impossible. And if you go all the way down to bare metal it’s all math. We are shifting bits through incredibly complex abstractions.

Has never been true in my experience, almost all programming can be done without any mathematics. Of course very specific things do require mathematics, but they are uncommon and often solved by specialists.

Btw. I come from a math background and later went into programming.

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

#859

Post by pdimitar »

felideon wrote: post #838
pdimitar wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am simply qualifying my claims with the fact that they might not be super up to date is all.

And my comments here mostly stem from annoyance that people claim that we already have this super game-changing AI that will remove programmers. And I still say: no, we don't have it. It works for some things. _Some_. Maybe 10% of the whole thing, if we are being generous.

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

#860

Post by constantcrying »

simianparrot wrote: post #219
agilob wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, math is major part of writing good code, but when was the last time you've seen somebody put effort into writing O(n) algorithm? 99% of programming is "import sort from sort; sort.sortThisReallyQuick". Programming is mostly writing code that just compiles and eventually gives correct results (and has bugs). You can do a lot of programming just buy copy-pasting results from stackoverflow. https://en.wikipedia.org/…

In any real-world application you'll sooner than later run into optimization challenges where if you don't understand the foundational challenges, googling "fastly do the thing" won't help you ;) Much like asking an LLM to solve a problem for you.

Most optimization you do as a software engineer is about figuring out what you do not need to do, no math involved.

You aren't going around applying novel techniques of numerical linear algebra.

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