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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?

#31

Post by m_ke »

angoragoats wrote: post #21

I think there's been a lot of fear-mongering on this topic and "the inevitable LLM take over" is not as inevitable as it might seem, perhaps depending on your definition of "take over." I have personally used LLMs in my job to write boilerplate code, write tests, make mass renaming changes that were previously tedious to do without a lot of grep/sed-fu, etc. For these types of tasks, LLMs are already miles ahead of w…

Those models will be here within a year.

Long context is practically a solved problem and there's a ton of work now on test time reasoning motivated by o1 showing that it's not that hard to RL a model into superhuman performance as long as the task is easy / cheap to validate (and there's works showing that if you can define the problem you can use an LLM to validate against your criteria).

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

#32

Post by marpstar »

busterarm wrote: post #3

Most organizations don't move that fast. Certainly not fast enough to need this kind of velocity. As it is I spend 95% of my time working out what needs to be done with all of the stakeholders and 5% of my time writing code. So the impact of AI on that is negligible.

This is consistent with my experience. We're far from a business analyst or product engineer being able to prompt an LLM to write the software themselves. It's their job to know the domain, not the technical details.

Maybe we all end up being prompt engineers, but I think that companies will continue to have experts on the business side as well as the tech side for any foreseeable future.

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

#34

Post by brodouevencode »

LLMs will just write code without you having to go copy-pasta from SO.

The real secret is talent stacks: have a combination of talents and knowledge that is desirable and unique. Be multi-faceted. And don't be afraid to learn things that are way outside of your domain. And no, you wouldn't be pigeon-holing yourself either.

For example there aren't many SWEs that have good SRE knowledge in the vehicle retail domain. You don't have to be an expert SRE, just be good enough, and understand the business in which you're operating and how those practices can be applied to auto sales (knowing the laws and best practices of the industry).

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

#36

Post by angoragoats »

m_ke wrote: post #31
angoragoats wrote: post #21

I think there's been a lot of fear-mongering on this topic and "the inevitable LLM take over" is not as inevitable as it might seem, perhaps depending on your definition of "take over." I have personally used LLMs in my job to write boilerplate code, write tests, make mass renaming changes that were previously tedious to do without a lot of grep/sed-fu, etc. For these types of tasks, LLMs are already miles ahead of w…

Those models will be here within a year. Long context is practically a solved problem and there's a ton of work now on test time reasoning motivated by o1 showing that it's not that hard to RL a model into superhuman performance as long as the task is easy / cheap to validate (and there's works showing that if you can define the problem you can use an LLM to validate against your criteria).

I intentionally glossed over a lot in my first comment, but I should clarify that I don't believe that increased context size or RL is sufficient to solve the problem I'm talking about.

Also "as long as the task is easy / cheap to validate" is a problematic statement if we're talking about the replacement of senior software engineers, because problem definition and development of validation criteria are core to the duties of a senior software engineer.

All of this is to say: I could be completely wrong, but I'll believe it when I see it. As I said elsewhere in the comments to another poster, if your points could be expressed in easily testable yes/no propositions with a timeframe attached, I'd likely be willing to bet real money against them.

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

#37

Post by brodouevencode »

m_ke wrote: post #23

I've been thinking about this a bunch and here's what I think will happen as cost of writing software approaches 0: 1. There will be way more software 2. Most people / companies will be able to opt out of predatory VC funded software and just spin up their own custom versions that do exactly what they want without having to worry about being spied on or rug pulled. I already do this with chrome extensions, with the h…

Good points - my company has already committed to #2

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

#38

Post by nerder92 »

throwaway_43793 wrote: post #24
nerder92 wrote: post #12

As for every job done well the most important thing is to truly understand the essence of your job, why it exist in the first place and which problem truly solves when done it well. A good designers is not going to be replaced by Dall-e/Midjourney, becuase the essence of design is to understand the true meaning/purpose of something and be able to express it graphically, not align pixels with the correct HEX colour co…

It's a good point, and I keep hearing it often, but it has one flaw. It assumes that most engineers are in contact with the end customer, while in reality they are not. Most engineers are going through a PM whose role is to do what you described: speak with customers, understand what they want and somehow translate it to a language that the engineers will understand and in turn translate it into code. (Edit), the oth…

(1) is exactly the misunderstanding i'm talking about, most creative jobs are not defined by their output (which is cheap) but by the way they reach that output. Software engineers that thought they could write their special characters in their dark room without the need to actually understand anything will go away in breeze (for good).

This entire field was full of hackers, deeply passionate and curious individuals who want to understand every little detail of the problem they were solving and why, then software becomes professionalized and a lot of amateurs looking for a quick buck came in commoditizing the industry. With LLM will go full-circe and push out a lot of amateurs to give again space to the hackers.

Code was never the goal, solving problem was.

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

#40

Post by hnthrowaway6543 »

throwaway_43793 wrote: post #29
hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the correct answer i can only assume software developers afraid of LLMs taking their jobs have not been doing this for long. being a software developer is about writing code in the same way that being a CEO is about sending emails. and i haven't seen any CEOs get replaced even thought chatgpt can write better emails than most of them

But the problem is that the majority of SWs are like that. You can blame them, or the industry, bust most engineers are writing code most of the time. For every Tech Lead who does "people stuff", there are 5-20 engineers who, mostly, write code and barely know that entire scope/context of the product they are working on.

> bust most engineers are writing code most of the time.

the physical act of writing code is different than the process of developing software. 80%+ of the time working on a feature is designing, reading existing code, thinking about the best way to implement your feature in the existing codebase, etc. not to mention debugging, resolving oncall issues, and other software-related tasks which are not writing code

GPT is awesome at spitting out unit tests, writing one-off standalone helper functions, and scaffolding brand new projects, but this is realistically 1-2% of a software developer's time

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