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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?

#71

Post by thegrim33 »

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 world would even look like afterwards. It would be massively changed. Having a development job is the absolute least of my worries in that scenario, it pales in comparison to the transformation the entire world would go through.

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

#72

Post by nyrikki »

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 limit their blast radius.

4) Dig deep into complexity theory to understand what LLMs can't do, either for defensive or offensive reasons.

5) Realize that SWE is more about correctness and context than code.

6) Realize what many people are already discovering, that LLM output is more like clip art than creation.

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

#73

Post by timr »

nerder92 wrote: post #43
rvz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good software engineer is not going to be replaced by Cursor/Co-pilot, because the essence of programming is to translate the business requirements of a real world problem that other humans are facing into an ergonomic tool that can be used to solve such problem at scale, not writing characters on an IDE. Managers and executives only see engineers and customer service as an additional cost and will find an opport…

From a financial point of view, engineers are considered assets not costs, because they contribute to grow the valuation of the company assets. The right thing to do economically (in capitalism) is to do more of the same, but faster. So if you as a software engineer or customer service rep can't do more of the same faster you will replaced by someone (or something) that alleggedly can.

> From a financial point of view, engineers are considered assets not costs

At Google? Perhaps. At most companies? No. At most places, software engineering is a pure cost center. The software itself may be an asset, but the engineers who are churning it out are not. That's part of the reason that it's almost always better to buy than build -- externalizing shared costs.

Just for an extreme example, I worked at a place that made us break down our time on new code vs. maintenance of existing code, because a big chunk of our time was accounted for literally as a cost, and could not be depreciated.

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

#74

Post by Xophmeister »

My anecdata shows people who have no/limited experience in software engineering are suddenly able to produce “software”. That is, code of limited engineering value. It technically works, but is a ultimately an unmaintainable, intractable Heath Robinson monstrosity.

Coding LLMs will likely improve, but what will happen first: a good-at-engineering LLM; or a negative feedback cycle of training data being polluted with a deluge of crap?

I’m not too worried at the moment.

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

#75

Post by cookingrobot »

angoragoats wrote: post #62
tinthedev wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd gladly double up on your bet. Frankly, I think it's ridiculous that anyone who has done any kind of real software work would predict this. Layoffs? Probably. Layoffs of capable senior developers, due to AI replacing them? Inconceivable, with the currently visible/predictable technology.

Yeah, I agree. Let me take a stab at a statement that I'd bet against: There will publicly-announced layoffs of 10 or more senior software engineers at a tech company sometime between now and December 31st, 2025. As part of the announcement of these layoffs, the company will state that the reason for the layoffs is the increasing use of LLMs replacing the work of these engineers. I would bet 5k USD of my own money, m…

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/klarna-ceo-says-th...

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

#77

Post by markus_zhang »

busterarm wrote: post #17
finebalance wrote: post #11

Not a clue. I'm a decent engineer working as a DS in a consulting firm. In my last two projects, I checked in (or corrected) so much more code than the other two junior DS's in my team, that at the end some 80%-90% of the ML-related stuff had been directly built, corrected or optimized by me. And most of the rest that wasn't, was mostly because it was boilerplate. LLMs were pivotal in this. And I am only a moderately…

You're making the mistake of overvaluing volume of work output. In engineering, difference of perspective is valuable. You want more skilled eyeballs on the problem. You won't be redundant just as your slower coworkers aren't now. It's not a race, it's a marathon.

For most of the business, they don't really need exceptionally good solutions. Something works is fine. I'm pretty sure AI can replace at least do 50% of my coding work. It's not going to replace me right now, but it's there in the foreseeable future, especially when companies realize they can have some setup like 1 good PM + a couple of seniors + bunch of AI agents instead of 1 good PM + a few seniors + bunch of juniors.

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

#79

Post by askonomm »

johanam wrote: post #28

I think in some sense the opposite could occur, where it democratizes access to becoming a sort of pseudo-junior-software engineer. In the sense that a lot more people are going to be generating code and bespoke little software systems for their own ends and purposes. I could imagine this resulting in a Cambrian Explosion of small software systems. Like @m_ke says, there will be way more software. Who maintains these…

I tend to agree. I also think that the vast majority of code out there is quite frankly pretty bad, and all that LLM's do is learn from it, so while I agree that LLM's will help make a lot more software, I doubt it would increase the general quality in any significant way, and thus there will always be a need for people who can do actual programming as opposed to just prompting to fix complex problems. That said, not sure if I want my future career to be swimming in endless piles of LLM-copy-paste-spaghetti. Maybe it's high time to learn a new degree. Hmm.

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

#80

Post by simianparrot »

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 “solved” to others. For example I have a CPU-only custom 2D pixel blitter engine I wrote to make 2D games in styles practically impossible with modern GPU-based texture rendering engines, and I recently did 3D in it from scratch as well.

All the while re-evaluating all my assumptions and that of others.

If there’s ever a day where there’s an AI that can do these things, then I’ll gladly retire. But I think that’s generations away at best.

Honestly this fear that there will soon be no need for human programmers stems from people who either themselves don’t understand how LLM’s work, or from people who do that have a business interest convincing others that it’s more than it is as a technology. I say that with confidence.

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