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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?

#151

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.

ego? LLMs goof on basic math and cant even generate code for many non public things. theyre not useful to me whatsoever

LLMs aren't supposed to do basic math, but be chat agents. Wolfram Alpha can't do chat.

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

#152

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.

At my job I review a lot of code, and I write code as well. The only type of developer an LLM’s output comes close to is a fresh junior usually straight out of university in their first real development job, with little practical experience in a professional code-shipping landscape. And the majority of those juniors improve drastically within a few weeks or months, with handholding only at the very start and then less and less guidance. This is because I teach them to reason about their choices and approaches, to question assumptions, and thus they learn quickly that programming rarely has one solution to a problem, and that the context matters so much in determining the way forward.

A human junior developer can learn from this tutoring and rarely regress over time. But the LLM’s all by design cannot and do not rewire their understanding of the problem space over time, nor do they remember examples and lessons from previous iterations to build upon. I have to handhold them forever, and they never learn.

Even when they use significant parts of the existing codebase as their context window they’re still blind to the whole reality and history of the code.

Now just to be clear, I do use LLM’s at my job. Just not to code. I use them to parse documents and assist users with otherwise repetitive manual tasks. I use their strength as language models to convert visual tokens parsed by an OCR to grasp the sentence structure and convert that into text segments which can be used more readily by users. At that they are incredible, even something smaller like llama 7b.

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

#153

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.

>> > 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 indus…

Your customers don't care how your code smells, as long as it solves their problem and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

A ton of huge business full of Sr Principal Architect SCRUM masters are about to get disrupted by 80 line ChatGPT wrappers hacked together by a few kids in their dorm room.

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

#154

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.

> > 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.

Isn't this a kind of survivor bias? You wouldn't know if you approved (undisclosed) LLM-generated code that was good..

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

#155
My job is not to translate requirements into code, or even particularly to create software, but to run a business process for which my code forms the primary rails. It is possible that advanced software-development and reasoning LLMs will erode some of the advantage that my technical and analytical skills give me for this role. On the other hand even basic unstructured-text-understanding LLMs will dramatically reduce the size of the workforce involved in this business process, so it's not clear that my role would logically revert to a "people manager" either. Maybe there is a new "LLM supervisor" type of role emerging in the future, but I suspect that's just what software engineer means in the future.

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

#156

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…

I mean human generations because to do system architecture, design and development well you need something that can at least match an average human brain in reasoning, logic and learning plasticity.

I don’t think that’s impossible but I think we’re quite a few human generations away from that. And scaling LLM’s is not the solution to that problem; an LLM is just a small but important part of it.

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

#157

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.

ego? LLMs goof on basic math and cant even generate code for many non public things. theyre not useful to me whatsoever

This... for my most important use case (applied numerical algorithms) it is in fact beyond not useful, it is negative value - even for highly available methods’ codes.

Sure, I can ask for it to write (wrong) boilerplate but it is hardly where work ends. It is up to me to spend the time doing careful due diligence at each and every step. I could ask for it to patch each mistake but, again, it relies on a trained, skillful, many times formally educated domain expert on the other end puppeteering the generative copywriter.

For the many cases where computer programming is similar to writing boilerplate, it could indeed be quite useful but I find the long tail of domain expertises will always be outside the reach of data-driven statistical learners.

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

#158

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.

>> > 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 indus…

> 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.

The possible outcome space is not binary (at least in the near term), i.e. either AI replace devs, or it doesn't.

What I'm getting at is this: There's a pervasive attitude among some developers (generally older developers, in my experience) that LLM's are effectively useless. If we're being objective, that is quite plainly not true.

These conversations tend to start out with something like: "Well _my_ work in particular is so complex that LLM's couldn't possibly assist."

As the conversation grows, the tone gradually changes to admitting: "Yes there are some portions of a codebase where LLM's can be helpful, but they can't do _everything_ that an experienced dev does."

It should not even be controversial to say, that AI will only improve at this task. That's what technology does, over the long run.

Fundamentally, there's ego involved whenever someone says "LLM's have _never_ produced useable code." That statement, is provably false.

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

#159
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ego? LLMs goof on basic math and cant even generate code for many non public things. theyre not useful to me whatsoever

LLMs aren't supposed to do basic math, but be chat agents. Wolfram Alpha can't do chat.

Math is a major part of programming. In fact programming without math is impossible. And if you go all the way down to bare metal it’s all math. We are shifting bits through incredibly complex abstractions.

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

#160
You are asking wrong people. Of course, people are going to say it is not even close and probably they are right given current chaos of LLMs. It's like asking a mailman delivering email would you be replaced by email. The answer was not 100% but volume went down by 95%.

Make no mistake. All globalists — Musks, Altmans, Grahams, A16Zs, Trump supporting CEOs, Democrats — have one goal. MAKE MORE PROFIT.

The real question is — can you make more money than using LLM?

Therefore, the question is not whether there will be impact. There will absolutely will be impact. Will it be Doomsday scenario? No, unless you are completely out of touch — which can happen to a large population.

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