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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?

#971

Post by simianparrot »

dreamfactored wrote: post #902
simianparrot wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This made me chuckle. But at the same time a bit uneasy because this could mean my own way of expressing myself online might've been impacted by reading too much AI drivel whilst trying to find signal in the noisy internet landscape... The off-topic mentioning of graphics programming was because I tend to type as I think, then make corrections, and as I re-read it now the paragraph isn't great. The intent was to give…

I'm certain that humans are picking up AI dialect. Very hard to prove though and will become harder.

Either that or it's this simple: AI dialect is already the amalgamation of the most popular internet dialects for its training set. I used to read a lot of Reddit years ago now. It's more likely my dialect is influenced by that in subtle ways when typing online in English, and AI is parroting this for obvious reasons.

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

#972

Post by prerok »

orr94 wrote: post #951
prerok wrote: post #177

As others have stated, I don't think we have anything to worry about. As a SWE you are expected to neatly balance code, its architecture and how it addresses the customers' problems. At best, what I've seen LLMs produce is code monkey level programming (like copy pasting from StackOverflow), but then a human is still needed to tweak it properly. What would be needed is General AI and that's still some 50 years away (…

> delve Nice try, ChatGPT!

Hehe, yeah, I like the word and I am not a native English speaker. Working with people across the globe I find it interesting how some uses are more common in some parts than in others.

Use of "same" comes to mind in working with Indian developers or the use of "no worries" and how it proliferated from NZ/AU region to the rest of the world.

Otherwise, yes, I am Skynet providing C++ compilation from the future :)

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

#973

Post by pdimitar »

LouisSayers wrote: post #891
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.

"Game changer" maybe. But what you'll probably find is that people that are skilled communicators are currently getting a decent productivity boost from LLMs, and I suspect that the difference between many that are bullish vs bearish is quite likely coming down to ability to structure and communicate thoughts effectively. Personally, I've found AI to be a large productivity boost - especially once I've put certain pa…

> I suspect that the difference between many that are bullish vs bearish is quite likely coming down to ability to structure and communicate thoughts effectively.

Strange perspective. I found LLMs lacking in less popular programming languages, for example. It's mostly down to statistics.

I agree that being able to communicate well with an LLM gives you more results. It's a productivity enabler of sorts. It is not a game changer however.

> don't be too quick to assume that LLMs aren't already making an impact within production systems. I know from experience that they are.

OK, I am open to proof. But people are just saying it and leaving the claims hanging.

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

#974

Post by cookiemonsieur »

I don't know about all the other commenters on this thread, but my personal experience with LLMs is that it really is just a glorified stack overflow. That's how I use it anyway. It saves me a couple clicks and keystrokes on Google.

It's also incredibly useful for prototyping and doing grunt work. (ie, if you work with lambda functions on AWS, you can get it to spit out a boilerplate for you to amend).

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

#975

Post by fragmede »

pdimitar wrote: post #801
fragmede wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orrrrr more simpler than imagining a vast conspiracy is that your observations just don't match theirs. If you're writing, say, C# with some esoteric libraries using CoPilot, it's easy to see it as glorified auto-complete that hallucinates to the point of being unusable because there's not enough training data. If you're using Claude with Aider to write a webpage using NextJS, you'll see it as a revolution in program…

Where did I imply conspiracy? People have been known to turn a blind eye to criticism towards stuff they like ever since... forever. The funny thing about the rest of your comment is that I'm in full agreement with you but somehow you decided that I'm an extremist. I'm not. I'm simply tired of people who make zero effort to prove their hypothesis and just call me arrogant or old / stuck in my ways, again with zero de…

You said you couldn't imagine a conspiracy and I was responding to that. As far as zero demonstration, simonw has a bunch of detailed examples at:https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/ or maybe https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude-artifacts/, but the proof is in the pudding, as they say, so setting aside some time and $20 to install Aider and get it working w/ Claude, and then building a web app is the best way to experience either the second coming, or an overhyped let down. (or somewhere in the middle.)

Still, I don't think it's a hypothesis that most are operating under, but a lived experience that either it works for them or it does not. Just the other day I used ChatGPT to write me a program to split a file into chunks along a delimiter. Something I could absolutely do, in at least a half-dozen languages, but writing that program myself would have distracted me from the actual task at hand, so I had the LLM do it. It's a trivial script, but the point is I didn't have to break my concentration on the other task to get that done. Again, I absolutely could have done it myself, but that would have been a total distraction. https://chatgpt.com/share/67655615-cc44-8009-88c3-5a241d083a...

On a side project I'm working on, I said "now add a button to reset the camera view" (literally, aider can take voice input). we're not quite at the scene from star trek where scottie talks into the mac to try and make transparnet aluminum, but we're not that far off! The LLM went and added the button, wired it into a function call that called into the rendering engine and reset the view. Again, I very much could have done that myself, but it would have taken me longer just to flip through the files involved and type out the same thing. It's not just the time saved, which, I didn't have a stopwatch and a screen recorder, but apart from the time, it's not having to drop my thinking into that frame of reference, so I can think more deeply about the other problems to be solved. Sort of why ceo isn't an IC and why IC's aren't supposed to manage.

Detractors will point out that it must be a toy program, and that it won't work on a million line code base, and maybe it won't, but there's just so much that LLMs can do, as they exist now, that it's not hyperbole to say it's redefined programming, for those specific use cases. But where that use case is "build a web app", I don't know about you, but I use a lot of web apps these days.

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

#976

Post by tinodb »

pdimitar wrote: post #458
richardw wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Many people have tried with many prompts. It's mostly good for just generating stuff once and maybe do little modifications while convincingly arguing the code has no bugs (and it has).

You have to make them write code like that. I TDD by telling the LLM what I want a test for, verify it is red, then ask it to implement. I ask it to write another test for an edge case that isn’t covered, and it will.

Not for 100% of the code, but for production code for sure. And it certainly speeds me up. Especially in dreadful refactoring where I just need to flip from one data structure to another, where my IDE can’t help much.

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

#977

Post by oops »

qup wrote: post #853
oops wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t disagree with anything you said and I don’t think anything you said disagrees with my original comment :)

I actually said in my comment that exploring a new language is one area I find LLMs to be interesting.

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

#978

Post by goddamnyouryan »

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 “…

Tell me more about this 2D pixel blitter engine

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

#979

Post by parentheses »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #528
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…

Okay, but one thing you kinda miss is that trading (e.g. investing) is still one of the largest ways for people to make money. Even passively investing in ETFs is extremely lucrative. If LLMs become so good that everyone can just let an LLM go into the world and make them money, the way we do with our investments, won't that be good?

The financial markets are a 0 sum game mostly. This approach would not work.
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