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

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

#121

Post by asdev » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #103

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 “…

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 Every SaaS, marketplace is at risk of extinction, superseded by AI agents communicating ad-hoc.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

you do realize that these so called "one-off" AI programs would need to be maintained? Most people paying for Saas are paying for the support/maintenance rather than features, which AI can't handle. No one will want to replace any Saas they depend on with a poorly generated variant that they want to maintain

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

#122

Post by Terr_ » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:50 PM UTC

dimgl wrote: post #107

ricardobeat wrote: post #103

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 Every SaaS, marketplace is at risk of extinction, superseded by AI agents communicating ad-hoc.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

Not parent poster, but I imagine it will be a bit like the horror stories of companies (ab)using spreadsheets in lieu of a proper program or database: They will use an LLM to get half-working stuff "for free" and consider it a bargain, especially if the detectable failures can be spot-fixed by an intern doing data-entry.

I think we'll see it first in internal reporting tools, where the stakeholder tries to explain something very specific they want to see (logical or not) and when it's visibly wrong they can work around it privately.

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

#123

Post by gspencley » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:50 PM UTC

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.

Consider this, 100% of AI training data is human-generated content.

Generally speaking, we apply the 90/10 rule to human generated content: 90% of (books, movies, tv shows, software applications, products available on Amazon) is not very good. 10% shines.

In software development, I would say it's more like 99 to 1 after working in the industry professionally for over 25 years.

How do I divorce this from my personal ego? It's easy to apply objective criteria:

- Is the intent of code easy to understand?

- Are the "moving pieces" isolated, such that you can change the implementation of one with minimal risk of altering the others by mistake?

- Is the solution in code a simple one relative to alternatives?

The majority of human produced code does not pass the above sniff test. Most of my job, as a Principal on a platform team, is cleaning up other peoples' messes and training them how to make less of a mess in the future.

If the majority of human generated content fails to follow basic engineering practices that are employed in other engineering disciplines (i.e: it never ceases to amaze me how much of an uphill battle it is just to get some SWEs just to break down their work into small, single responsibility, easily testable and reusable "modules") then we can't logically expect any better from LLMs because this is what they're being trained on.

And we are VERY far off from LLMs that can weigh the merits of different approaches within the context of the overall business requirements and choose which one makes the most sense for the problem at hand, as opposed to just "what's the most common answer to this question?"

LLMs today are a type of magic trick. You give it a whole bunch of 1s and 0s so that you can input some new 1s and 0s and it can use some fancy proability maths to predict "based on the previous 1s and 0s, what are the statistically most likely next 1s and 0s to follow from the input?"

That is useful, and the result can be shockingly impressive depending on what you're trying to do. But the limitations are so limited that the prospect of replacing an entire high-skilled profession with that magic trick is kind of a joke.

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

#124

Post by dingnuts » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:50 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #98

rybosworld wrote: post #85

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.

> 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 ar…

> LLMs are useful for coding now

*sort of, sometimes, with simple enough problems with sufficiently little context, for code that can be easily tested, and for which sufficient examples exist in the training data.

I mean hey, two years after being promised AGI was literally here, LLMs are almost as useful as traditional static analysis tools!

I guess you could have them generate comments for you based on the code as long as you're happy to proofread and correct them when they're wrong.

Remember when CPUs were obsolete after three years? GPT has shown zero improvement in its ability to generate novel content since it was first released as GPT2 almost ten years ago! I would know because I spent countless hours playing with that model.

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

#125

Post by cozzyd » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:50 PM UTC

eschaton wrote: post #87

rybosworld wrote: post #85

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.

If anything, they may regress due to being trained on lower-quality input.

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

#126

Post by asdev » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:52 PM UTC

askonomm wrote: post #96

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 "…

the hype bubble is nearing it's top

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

#127

Post by dingnuts » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:52 PM UTC

idopmstuff wrote: post #119

dimgl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> go out of business as their customers start to build more of their internal systems with LLMs vs. buy from an existing vendor.

there is going to be so much money to make as a consultant fixing these setups, I can't wait!

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

#128

Post by rdrsss » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:52 PM UTC

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 “…

+1 to this sentiment for now, I give them a try every 6 months or so to see how they advance. And for pure code generation, for my workflow, I don't find them very useful yet. For parsing large sets of documentation though, not bad. They haven't creeped their way into my usual research loop just yet, but I could see that becoming a thing.

I do hear some of my junior colleagues use them now and again, and gain some value there. And if llm's can help get people up to speed faster that'd be a good thing. Assuming we continue to make the effort to understand the output.

But yeah, agree, I raise my eyebrow from time to time, but I don't see anything jaw dropping yet. Right now they just feel like surrogate googler's.

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

#129

Post by selimthegrim » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:52 PM UTC

finebalance wrote: post #106

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you give some more specific examples? I am currently learning Julia…

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

#130

Post by mellosouls » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 7:52 PM UTC

It depends on whether you think they are a paradigm change (at the very least) or not. If you don't then either you will be right or you will be toast.

For those of us who do think this is a revolution, you have two options:

1. Embrace it.

2. Find another career, presumably in the trades or other hands-on vocations where AI ingress will lag behind for a while.

To embrace it you need to research the LLM landscape as it pertains to our craft and work out what interests you and where you might best be able to surf the new wave, it is rapidly moving and growing.

The key thing (as it ever was) is to build real world projects mastering LLM tools as you would an IDE or language; keep on top of the key players, concepts and changes; and use your soft skills to help open-eyed others follow the same path.