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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?

#981

Post by jvanveen »

pdimitar wrote: post #821
dreamfactored wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Recently used Cursor/Claude sonnet to port ~30k lines of EOL Livescript/Hyperscript to Typescript/JSX in less than 2 weeks. That would have took at least several months otherwise. Definitively a force multiplier, for this kind of repetitional work.

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

#982

Post by pdimitar »

jvanveen wrote: post #981
pdimitar wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Recently used Cursor/Claude sonnet to port ~30k lines of EOL Livescript/Hyperscript to Typescript/JSX in less than 2 weeks. That would have took at least several months otherwise. Definitively a force multiplier, for this kind of repetitional work.

Shame that you can't probably open-source this, that would have been a hugely impressive case study.

And yeah, out of all the LLMs, it seems that Claude is the best when it comes to programming.

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

#983

Post by UziTech »

A couple reasons why I am not scared of AI taking my job:

1. They are trained to be average coders.

The way LLMs are trained is by giving them lots of examples of previous coding tasks. By definition, half of those examples are below average. Unless there is a breakthrough on how they are trained any above average coder won't have anything to worry about.

2. They are a tool that can (and should) be used by humans.

Computers are much better at chess than any human, but a human with a computer is better than any computer. The same is true with a coding LLM. Any SWE who can work with an LLM will be much better than any LLM.

3. There is enough work for both.

I have never worked for a company where I have had less work when I left than when I started. I worked for one company where it was estimated that I had about 2 years worth of work to do and 7 years later, when I left, I had about 5 years of work left. Hopefully LLMs will be able to take some of the tedious work so we can focus on harder tasks, but most likely the more we are able to accomplish the more there will be to accomplish.

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

#984

Post by ta12653421 »

pdimitar wrote: post #970
ta12653421 wrote: post #969

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not know how you are using them? It speeded up my development around 8-10x, things i wouldnt have done earlier i'm doing now, e let it do by the AI; writing boilerplate etc. Just great!

8-10x?! That's quite weird if you ask me. I just used Claude recently. Helped me with an obscure library and with the hell that is JWT + OAuth through the big vendors. Definitely saved me a few hours and I am grateful, but those cases are rare.

I developed things which i would have never started without AI because i could see upfront that there would be a lot of mundane/exhausting tasks

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

#985

Post by pdimitar »

ta12653421 wrote: post #984
pdimitar wrote: post #970

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8-10x?! That's quite weird if you ask me. I just used Claude recently. Helped me with an obscure library and with the hell that is JWT + OAuth through the big vendors. Definitely saved me a few hours and I am grateful, but those cases are rare.

I developed things which i would have never started without AI because i could see upfront that there would be a lot of mundane/exhausting tasks

Amusingly, lately I did something similar, though I still believe my manual code is better in Elixir. :)

I'm open to LLMs being a productivity enabler. Recently I started occasionally using them for that as well -- sparingly. I more prefer to use them for taking shortcuts when I work with libraries whose docs are lacking.

...But I did get annoyed at the "programming as a profession is soon dead!" people. I do agree with most other takes on LLMs, however.

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

#986

Post by NikkiA »

tptacek wrote: post #563
jcranmer wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is at least the third time in my life that we've seen a loudly-heralded purported the-end-of-programming technology. The previous two times both ended up being damp squibs that barely mention footnotes in the history of computing. Why do we expect that LLMs are going to buck this trend? It's not for accuracy--the previous attempts, when demonstrating their proof-of-concepts, actually reliably worked, whereas wit…

I wonder how programmers of the time felt when spreadsheets got popular.

We used spreadsheets too, and found them useful, but not very threatening

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

#987

Post by throwaway123198 »

w-hn wrote: post #408

I have been unemployed for almost a year now (it started with a full division layoff and then no willingness or motivation to look for work at the time). Seeing the way AI can do most of the native app development (which is what I did) code I wrote I am losing almost any motivation to even try now. But I have been sleeping the best after college (where I slept awesome) and I have been working out, watching lots of th…

Honestly this is my plan. I'm waiting for my time in this career to run out. In the mean time I'm trying to aggressively save whatever way I can.

This industry is going to shrink. And that's ok. We had our time. I wish it was longer and I wish I made more, but I don't think I ever saw myself here forever.

Kudos to those who made a whole career off of this.

I'm in my mid 30s with a wife and kid and I'm mostly hoping I can complete my immigration to the US before my time in this career ends.

Then, I might pursue starting a business or going back to school with the savings and hopefully my wife can be employed at the time in her completely unrelated field and cover us until I can figure out what to do next.

I'm not sad about this. I am happy I have tried to live frugally enough to never buy my own hype or believe that my salary is sustainable forever.

A part of it for me is that I never really loved building software. I might have ADHD and that might be a big factor, but honestly it was never what excited me.

The biggest fallacy I see a lot of people buying into is that LLMs being good enough to replace software developers means they're AGI and the world has other problems. I never quite bought that. I think software developers think too highly of themselves.

But they're also not technically wrong. Ya, a LLM can basically replace a family doctor and most internal medicine physicians. But the path to that happening is long and arduous due to how society has setup medics. Software devs never fought hard enough for their profession to be protected. So we are just the easiest target, same thing that happened to a lot of traders before.

If you're mid career like me, just get ready for the idea that your career is probably much shorter than you thought it will be and you will need to retrain. It will suck but many others have done it.

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

#988

Post by throwaway123198 »

protocolture wrote: post #648

I dont think the prediction game is worthwhile. The Cloud was meant to decimate engineering AND development. But what it did was it created enough chaos that theres a higher demand for both than ever, just maybe not in your region and for your skillset. LLMs are guaranteed to cause chaos, but the outcome of that chaos is not predictable. Will every coder now output the same as a team of 30 BUT there are 60 times as m…

This isnt true. Cloud definitely completely changed the market for sysadmin and network engineers. Some folks managed to retrain but many were left out post dotcom bubble.

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

#989

Post by sunnybeetroot »

ramon156 wrote: post #278

Another thing I want to note is; even if I get replaced by AI, I think I'd be sad for a bit. I think it'd be a fun period to try to find a "hand-focused" job. Something like a bakery or chocolatier. I honestly wouldn't mind if I could do the same satisfying work but more hands-on, rather than behind a desk all day

What will you do once robotics takes over that?

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

#990

Post by throw09890989 »

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…

>> LLMs aren't making the high quality products,

And who cares exactly? The only real criteria is whether the product is good _enough_ to bring in profit. And rightly so if you ask me.

Also, far too many products build by human _experts_ are low quality. So, in a way we're more than ready for the LLM-quality products.

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