Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 1001 posts

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

#91

Post by sirwhinesalot »

My job is not to write monospace, 80 column-wide text but to find solutions to problems.

The solution often involves software but what that software does and how it does it can vary wildly and it is my job to know how to prioritize the right things over the wrong things and get to decent solution as quickly as possible.

Should we implement this using a dependency? It seems it is too big / too slow, is there an alternative or do we do it ourselves? If we do it ourselves how do we tackle this 1000 page PDF full of diagrams?

LLMs cannot do what I do and I assume it will take a very long time before they can. Even with top of the line ones I'm routinely disappointed in their output on more niche subjects where they just hallucinate whatever crap to fill in the gaps.

I feel bad for junior devs that just grab tickets in a treadmill, however. They will likely be replaced by senior people just throwing those tickets at LLMs. The issue is that seniors age and without juniors you cannot have new seniors.

Lets hope this nonsense doesn't lead to our field falling apart.

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

#93

Post by TechDebtDevin »

ramesh31 wrote: post #81

Grappling with this hard right now. Anyone who is still of the "these things are stupid and will never replace me" mindset needs to sober up real quick. AGI level agentic systems are coming, and fast . A solid 90% of what we thought of as software engineering for the last 30 years will be completely automated by them in the next couple years. The only solution I see so far is to be the one building them.

As someone who's personally tried ( with lots of effort) to build agentic assistants/systems 3+ times over the course of the last few years I haven't seen any huge improvements in the quality of output. I think you greatly underestimate the plateau these models are running into.

Grok and o1 are great examples of how these plateaus also wont be overcome with more capital and compute.

Agentic systems might become great search/research tools to speed up the time it takes to gather (human created) info from the web, but I don't see them creating anything impressive or novel on their own without a completely different architecture.

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

#95

Post by nicoburns »

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.

> > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test

> This is ego speaking.

That's been my experience of LLM-generated code that people have submitted to open source projects I work on. It's all been crap. Some of it didn't even compile. Some of it changed comments that were previously correct to say something untrue. I've yet to see a single PR that implemented something useful.

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

#96

Post by askonomm »

I feel the influencer crowd is overblowing the actual utility of LLM's massively. Kind of feels akin to the "cryptocurrency will take over the world" trope 10 years ago, and yet .. I don't see it any crypto in my day to day life to this day. Will it improve general productivity and boring tasks nobody wants to do? Sure, but to think any more than that frankly I'd like some hard evidence of it being actually able to "reason". And reason better than most devs I've ever worked with, because quite honestly humans are also pretty bad at writing software, and LLM's learn from humans, so ...

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

#97

Post by TechDebtDevin »

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…

Once again, this seems to only apply to Python / ML SWEs. Try to get any of these models to write decent Rust, Go or C boilerplate.

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

#98

Post by IshKebab »

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.

> Is there some expectation that these things won't improve?

I definitely expect them to improve. But I also think the point at which they can actually replace a senior programmer is pretty much the exact point at which they can replace any knowledge worker, at which point western society (possibly all society) is in way deeper shit than just me being out of a job.

> This is ego speaking.

It definitely isn't. LLMs are useful for coding now, but they can't really do the whole job without help - at least not for anything non-trivial.

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

#99

Post by ramesh31 »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #93
ramesh31 wrote: post #81

Grappling with this hard right now. Anyone who is still of the "these things are stupid and will never replace me" mindset needs to sober up real quick. AGI level agentic systems are coming, and fast . A solid 90% of what we thought of as software engineering for the last 30 years will be completely automated by them in the next couple years. The only solution I see so far is to be the one building them.

As someone who's personally tried ( with lots of effort) to build agentic assistants/systems 3+ times over the course of the last few years I haven't seen any huge improvements in the quality of output. I think you greatly underestimate the plateau these models are running into. Grok and o1 are great examples of how these plateaus also wont be overcome with more capital and compute. Agentic systems might become great…

>As someone who's personally tried ( with lots of effort) to build agentic assistants/systems 3+ times over the course of the last few years I haven't seen any huge improvements in the quality of output. I think you greatly underestimate the plateau these models are running into.

As someone who's personally tried with great success to build agentic systems over the last 6 months, you need to be aware of how fast these things are improving. The latest Claude Sonnet makes GPT-3.5 look like a research toy. Things are trivial now in the code gen space that were impossible just earlier this year. Anyone not paying attention is missing the boat.

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

#100

Post by ksdnjweusdnkl21 »

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 “…

Hard to believe anyone is getting contacted more now than in 2020. But I agree with the general sentiment. I'll do nothing and if I get replaced then I get replaced and switch to woodworking or something. But if LLMs do not pan out then I'll be ahead of all the people who wasted their time with that.
Post reply on HN