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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?

#111
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Every SaaS, marketplace is at risk of extinction, superseded by AI agents communicating ad-hoc.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.

I think a lot of CRUD apps will disappear. A lot of the infrastructure may also be done by AI instead of some dude writing tons of YAML code.

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

#112
Learn to think above the code: learn how to model problems and reason about them using maths. There are plenty of tools in this space to help out: model checkers like TLA+ or Alloy, automated theorem provers such as Lean or Agda, and plain old notebooks and pencils.

Our jobs are not and have never been: code generators.

Take a read of Naur's essay, Programming as Theory Building [0]. The gist is that it's the theory you build in your head about the problem, the potential solution, and what you know about the real world that is valuable. Source code depreciates over time when left to its own devices. It loses value when the system it was written for changes, dependencies get updated, and it bit-rots. It loses value as the people who wrote the original program, or worked with those who did, leave and the organization starts to forget what it was for, how it works, and what it's supposed to do.

You still have to figure out what to build, how to build it, how it serves your users and use cases, etc.

LLM's, at best, generate some code. Plain language is not specific enough to produce reliable, accurate results. So you'll forever be trying to hunt for increasingly subtle errors. The training data will run out and models degrade on synthetic inputs. So... it's only going to get, "so good," no matter how many parameters of context they can maintain.

And your ability, as a human, to find those errors will be quickly exhausted. There are way too few studies on the effects of informal code review on error rates in production software. Of those that have been conducted any statistically significant effect on error rates seems to disappear when humans have read ~200SLOC in an hour.

I suspect a good source of income will come from having to untangle the mess of code generated by teams that rely too much on these tools that introduce errors that only appear at scale or introduce subtle security flaws.

Finally, it's not "AI," that's replacing jobs. It's humans who belong to the owning class. They profit from the labour of the working class. They make more profit when they can get the same, or greater, amount of value while paying less for it. I think these tools, "inevitably," taking over and becoming a part of our jobs is a loaded argument with vested interests in that becoming true so that people who own and deploy these tools can profit from it.

As a senior developer I find that these tools are not as useful as people claim they are. They're capable of fabricating test data... usually of quality that requires inspection... and really, who has time for that? And they can generate boilerplate code for common tasks... but how often do I need boilerplate code? Rarely. I find the answers it gives in summaries to contain completely made-up BS. I'd rather just find out the answer myself.

I fear for junior developers who are looking to find a footing. There's no royal road. Getting your answers from an LLM for everything deprives you of the experience needed to form your own theories and ideas...

so focus on that, I'd say. Think above the code. Understand the human factors, the organizational and economic factors, and the technical ones. You fit in the middle of all of these moving parts.

[0] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Update: forgot to add the link to the Naur essay

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They shouldn’t be expected to improve in accuracy because of what they are and how they work. Contrary to what the average HackerNews seems to believe, LLMs don’t “think,” they just predict. And there’s nothing in them that will constrain their token prediction in a way that improves accuracy.

[dead]

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

#114

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 “…

> But I think that’s generations away at best.

I'm not sure whether you mean human generations or LLM generations, but I think it's the latter. In that case, I agree with you, but also that doesn't seem to put you particularly far off from OP, who didn't provide specific timelines but also seems to be indicating that the elimination of most engineers is still a little ways away. Since we're seeing a new generation of LLMs every 1-2 years, would you agree that in ~10 years at the outside, AI will be able to do the things that would cause you to gladly retire?

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

#115
Learning how to use LLMs and seeing what works and what doesn't. When I've used them to code after awhile I can start to figure out where they hallucinate. I have made an LLM system that performs natural language network scanning called http://www.securday.com which I presented at DEF CON (hacker conference). Even if it has no change or affect on your employment it is fun to experiment with things regardless.

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

#117
As a systems administrator now SRE, it's never really been about my code... if code at all.

Where I used to be able to get by with babysitting shell scripts that only lived on the server, we're now in a world with endless abstraction. I don't hazard to guess; just learn what I can to remain adaptable.

The fundamentals tend to generally apply

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

#118
I will not believe the AI takeover until there's evidence. I haven't seen any examples, apart from maybe TODO list apps. Needless to say, that's nowhere near the complexity that is required at most jobs. Even if my carreer was endangered, I would continue the path I've taken so far: have a basic understanding of as much as possible (push out the edges of knowledge circle or whatever it's called), and strive to have an expert knowledge about maybe 1 or 2, or 3 subjects which pay for your daily bread. Basically just be good at what you do, and that should be fine. As for beginners, I advise to dive deep into a subject, start with a solid foundation and be sure to have a hands-on approach, while maintaining a consistent effort.

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

#119
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recovering enterprise SaaS PM here. I don't necessarily know that a lot of enterprise SaaS will disappear, but I do think that a lot of the companies that build it will go out of business as their customers start to build more of their internal systems with LLMs vs. buy from an existing vendor. This is probably more true at the SMB level for now than actual enterprise, both for technical and internal politics reasons, but I expect it to spread.

As a direct example from myself, I now acquire and run small e-commerce brands. When I decided to move my inventory management from Google Sheets into an actual application, I looked at vendors but ultimately just decided to build my own. My coding skills are pretty minimal, but sufficient that I was able to produce what I needed with the help of LLMs. It has the advantages of being cheaper than buying and also purpose-built to my needs.

So yeah, basically the tl;dr is that for internal tools, I believe that LLMs giving non-developers sufficient coding skills will shift the build vs. buy calculus squarely in the direction of build, with the logical follow-on effects to companies trying to sell internal tools software.

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

#120

This question is so super weird, because: Ask an LLM to generate you 100 more lines of code, no problem you will get something. Ask the same LLM to look at 10000 lines of code and intelligently remove 100... good luck with that! seriously, I tried uploading some (but not all) source code of my company to our private Azure OpenAI GPT 4o for analysis, as a 48 MB cora-generated context file, and really the usefulness is…

> Ask an LLM to generate you 100 more lines of code, no problem you will get something. Ask the same LLM to look at 10000 lines of code and intelligently remove 100... good luck with that!

These two tasks have a very different difficulty level though. It will be the same with a human coder. If you give me a new 10k sloc codebase and ask to add a method, to cover some new case I can probably do it in a hour to a day, depending on my familiarity with the language, subject matter, codebase overall state, documentation, etc.

New 10k codebase and a task of removing 100 lines? That's probably at least half a week to understand how it all works (disregarding simple cases like a hundred-line comment bloc with old code), before I can make such a change safely.

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