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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?

#871

Post by plantwallshoe »

thegrim33 wrote: post #71

I don't worry about it, because: 1) I believe we need true AGI to replace developers. 2) I don't believe LLMs are currently AGI or that if we just feed them more compute during training that they'll magically become AGI. 3) Even if we did invent AGI soon and replace developers, I wouldn't even really care, because the invention of AGI would be such an insanely impactful, world changing, event that who knows what the…

This is where I’m at too. By the time we fully automate software engineering, we definitely will have already automated marketing, sales, customer success, accountants, office administrators, program managers, lawyers, etc.

At that point its total societal upheaval and losing my job will probably be the least of my worries.

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

#872

Post by 015a »

bdangubic wrote: post #818
015a wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I agree;

- if your response to LLMs taking over is "they're bad and its not going to happen" i think you've basically chosen to flip a coin, and that's fine, you might be right (personally I do think this take is right, but again, its a coin flip)

- if your response is "engineering is about a lot more than writing code" you're right, but the "writing code" part is like 90% of the reason why you get paid what you do, so you've chosen the path of getting paid less, and you're still flipping a coin that LLMs won't come for that other stuff.

- the only black-pilled response is "someone has to talk to the llm", and if you spend enough time with that line of thinking you inevitably uncover some interesting possibilities about how the world will be arranged as these things become more prevalent. for me, its that: larger companies probably won't get much larger, we've hit peak megacorp, but smaller companies will become more numerous as individual leverage is amplified.

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

#873

Post by nyrikki »

Animats wrote: post #658
nyrikki wrote: post #72

1) have books like 'The Art of Programming' on my shelf, as AI seems to propagate solutions that are related to code golf more than robustness due to coverage in the corpus. 2) Force my self to look at existing code as abstract data types, etc... to help reduce the cost of LLMs failure mode (confident, often competent, and inevitable wrong) 3) curry whenever possible to support the use of coding assistants and to lim…

> 1) have books like 'The Art of Programming' on my shelf, Decades ago I used to be constantly thumbing through vol. 1 of Knuth (Fundamental Algorithms) and coding those basic algorithms. Now that all comes from libraries and generics. There has been progress, but not via LLMs in that area.

That is part of the problem, LLM coding assistants often code out what a human would often use a core library for, only including when required, like importing deque in Python to do a BFS.

An example I helped someone with on AoC last week.

Looking for 'lines' in a game board in Python, the LLM had an outer loop j, with an inner loop i

This is how it 'matched' a line.

    if i != j and (x1 == x2) or (y1 = y2):
I am sure you can see the problem with that, but some of the problems in Knuth 4a are harder for others.

There is a lot to learn for many in Knuth 1, but I view it as world building for other concepts.

With LLMs polluting web search results, the point is to have reference material you trust.

Knuth is accessible, I did error on that side rather than suggesting books that are grad level and above that I really appreciate but would just collect dust.

People will need to figure out what works for them, but having someone to explain why you do something is important IMHO.

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

#874

Post by collingreen »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #830
GeoAtreides wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pri…

Are they more of a threat than all the no code, spreadsheets, bi tools, and salesforce?

We've watched common baselines be abstracted away and tons of value be opened up to creation from non engineers by reducing the complexity and risk of development and maintenance.

I think this is awesome and it hasn't seemed to eliminate any engineering jobs or roles - lots of crud stuff or easy to think about stuff or non critical stuff is now created that wasn't before and that seems to create much more general understanding of and need for software, not reduce it.

Regardless of tools available I think of software engineering as "thinking systematically" and being able to model, understand, and extend complex ideas in robust ways. This seems improved and empowered by ai coding options, not undermined, so far.

If we reach a level of ai that can take partially thought out goals and reason out the underlying "how it should work"/"what that implies", create that, and be able to extend that (or replace it wholesale without mistakes) then yeah, people who can ONLY code wont have much earning potential (but what job still will in that scenario?).

It seems like current ai might help generate code more quickly (fantastic). Much better ai might help me stay at a higher level when I'm implementing these systems (really fantastic if it's at least quite good), and much much better ai might let me just run the entire business myself and free me up to "debug" at the highest level, which is deciding what business/product needs to exist in the first place and figuring out how to get paid for it.

I'm a pretty severe ai doubter but you can see from my writing above that I think if it DOES manage to be good I think that would be good for us actually, not bad.

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

#875

Post by dragonwriter »

015a wrote: post #872
bdangubic wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

I agree; - if your response to LLMs taking over is "they're bad and its not going to happen" i think you've basically chosen to flip a coin, and that's fine, you might be right (personally I do think this take is right, but again, its a coin flip) - if your response is "engineering is about a lot more than writing code" you're right, but the "writing code" part is like 90% of the reason why you get paid what you do,…

> if your response is “engineering is about a lot more than writing code” you’re right, but the “writing code” part is like 90% of the reason why you get paid what you do

[…]

> the only black-pilled response is “someone has to talk to the llm”,

This is literally the exact same response as “engineering is about a lot more than writing code”, since “talking to the LLM” when the LLM is the main code writer is exactly doing the non-code-writing tasks while delegating code writing to the LLM which you supervise. Kind of like a lead engineer does anyway, where they do much of the design work, and delegate and guide most of the code writing (while still doing some of it themselves.)

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

#876

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

collingreen wrote: post #874
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pri…

Are they more of a threat than all the no code, spreadsheets, bi tools, and salesforce? We've watched common baselines be abstracted away and tons of value be opened up to creation from non engineers by reducing the complexity and risk of development and maintenance. I think this is awesome and it hasn't seemed to eliminate any engineering jobs or roles - lots of crud stuff or easy to think about stuff or non critica…

I don't know what to believe, long or short term; I'm just speculating based on what I perceive to be a majority of software job opportunities and hypothetical immediate impacts.

My basic conclusion is "they seem quite good (enough) at what appears to be a large portion of 'Dev' jobs" and I can't ignore the possibility of this having a material impact on opportunities.

At this point I'm agnostic on the future of GenAI impacts in any given area. I just no longer have solid ground upon which to have an opinion.

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

#877

Post by whtsthmttrmn »

paulcole wrote: post #614
deathanatos wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine code passes your rigorous review. How do you know that it wasn’t from an LLM? That's not what I'm saying (and it's a strawman; yes, presumably some LLM code would escape review and I wouldn't know it's from an LLM, though I find that unlikely, given…) — what I'm saying is of LLM generated code that is reviewed, what is the quality & correctness of the reviewed code? And it's resoundingly (easily >90%) crap.…

> what I'm saying is of LLM generated code that is reviewed, what is the quality & correctness of the reviewed code? And it's resoundingly (easily >90%) crap. What makes you so sure that none of the resoundingly non-crap that you have reviewed was not produced by LLM? It’s like saying you only like homemade cookies not ones from the store. But you may be gleefully chowing down on cookies that you believe are homemade…

> What makes you so sure that none of the resoundingly non-crap that you have reviewed was not produced by LLM?

From the post you're replying to:

> Obviously we can't sample from unknown-authorship … nor am I; I'm sampling problems that I and others run through an LLM, and the output thereof.

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

#878

Post by tomcar288 »

rybosworld wrote: post #85
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 “…

> 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.

when people's entire livehoods are threatened, you're going to see some defensive reactions.

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

#880

Post by isx726552 »

mofeien wrote: post #376
pockmarked19 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like they caught up because I have posted this before including in chatGPT. All that means is you have to change it up slightly. Unfortunately “change it up slightly” is not good enough for people to do anything with, and anything more specific just trains the LLM eventually so it stops proving the point. I cannot load this link though.

It also means that you should update your belief about the reasoning capabilities of LLMs at least slightly. if disconfirming evidence doesn’t shake your beliefs at all, you dont really have beliefs, you have an ideology.

Or it just means anything shared on the internet gets RLHF’d / special cased.

It’s been clear for a long time that the major vendors have been watching online chatter and tidying up well-known edge cases by hand. If you have a test that works, it will keep working as long as you don’t share it widely enough to get their attention.

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