So what I've seen so far is that LLMs are amazing for small self contained problems. Anything spanning a whole project they aren't quite up to the task yet. I think we're going to need a lot more processing power to get to that point. So our job will change, but I have a feeling it will be slow and steady.
Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
101–110 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#102I just copied the html from this thread into Claude to get a summary. I think being very realistic, a lot of SWE job requirements will be replaced by LLMs.
The expertise to pick the right tool for the right job based on previous experience that senior engineers poses is something that can probably be taught to an LLM.
Having the ability to provide a business case for the technology to stakeholders that aren't technologically savvy is going to be a people job for a while still.
I think positioning yourself as an expert / bridge between technology and business is what will future-proof a lot of SWE, but in reality, especially at larger organizations, there will be a trimming process where the workload of what was thought to need 10 engineers can be done with 2 engineers + LLMs.
I'm excited about the future where we're able to create software quicker and more contextual to each specific business need. Knowing how to do that can be an advantage for software engineers of different skill levels.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#103Nothing 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 “…
That’s short term thinking in my opinion. LLMs will not replace developers by writing better code: it’s the systems we work on that will start disappearing.
Every SaaS, marketplace is at risk of extinction, superseded by AI agents communicating ad-hoc. Management and business software replaced by custom, one-off programs built by AI. The era of large teams painstakingly building specialized software for niche use cases will end. Consequently we’ll have millions of unemployed developers, except for the ones maintaining the top level orchestration for all of this.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#104Better tools that accelerate how fast engineers can produce software? That's not a threat, just a boon. I suspect the actual transition will just be people learning/focusing on somewhat different higher level skills rather than lower level coding. Like going from assembly to c, we're hoping we can transition more towards natural language.
> junior to mid level software engineering will disappear mostly People don't magically go to senior. Can't get seniors without junior and mid to level up. We'll always need to take in and train new blood.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#105Software quality, already bad, will drop even more as juniors outsource all their cognition to the SUV for the mind. Most "developers" will be completely unable to function without their LLMs.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#106Not 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.
I can't speak to Rust, Go or C, but for me LLMs have greatly accelerated the process of learning and building projects in Julia.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#107Nothing 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 “…
That’s short term thinking in my opinion. LLMs will not replace developers by writing better code: it’s the systems we work on that will start disappearing. Every SaaS, marketplace is at risk of extinction, superseded by AI agents communicating ad-hoc. Management and business software replaced by custom, one-off programs built by AI. The era of large teams painstakingly building specialized software for niche use cas…
> most of the actual systems we work on will simply start disappearing.
What systems do you think are going to start disappearing? I'm unclear how LLMs are contributing to systems becoming redundant.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#108My plan is to retire in 1-2 years, take a break and then, if I feel like it, go all in on AI. Right now it's at that awkward spot where AI clearly shows potential but from my experience it's not really improving my productivity on complex tasks.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#109Im hoping I can transition to some kind of product or management role since frankly Im not that good at coding anyways (I dont feel like I can pass a technical interview anymore, tbh.) I think a lot of engineers are in for some level of rude awakening. I think a lot of engineers havent applied some level of business/humanities thinking in this, and I think a lot of corporations care less about code quality than even…
What's your plan to transition into product/management?
right now? Keeping my eyes very peeled for what people in my network post about needing. Unfortunately I dont' have much of a plan right now, sorry.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thes…
>As someone who's personally tried with great success to build agentic systems over the last 6 months.
Like what? You're the only person ive seen claim they've built agentic systems with great success. I dont regard improved chat-bot outputs as success, im talking about agentic systems that can roll their own auth from scratch, or gather data from the web independently and build even a mediocore prediction model with that data. Or code anything halfway decently in something other than Python.