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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?

#171

Post by vbezhenar »

So far I haven't found much use for LLM code generation. I'm using Copilot as a glorified autocomplete and that's about it. I tried to use LLM to generate more code, but it takes more time to yield what I want than to write it myself, so it's just not useful.

Now ChatGPT really became indispensable tool for me, on the one row with Google and StackOverflow.

So I don't feel threatened so far. I can see the potential, and I think that it's very possible for LLM-based agents to replace me eventually, probably not this generation, but few years later - who knows. But that's just hand waving, so getting worried about possible future is not useful for mental well-being.

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

#172

Post by rybosworld »

hmillison wrote: post #168
rybosworld wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test If that statement isn't coming from ego, then where is it coming from? It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code. They've been trained on billions of examples. Developers seem to focus on the set of cases that LLM's produce code that doesn't work, and use that as evidence that these tools are "useless".

there's a lot more involved in senior dev work beyond producing code that works. if the stakeholders knew how to do what they needed to build and how, then they could use LLMs, but translating complex requirements into code is something that these tools are not even close to cracking.

> there's a lot more involved in senior dev work beyond producing code that works.

Completely agree.

What I don't agree with is statements like these:

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

To me, these (false) absolutions about chat bot capabilities, are being rehashed so frequently, that it derails every conversation about using LLM's for dev work. You'll find similar statements in nearly every thread about LLM's for coding tasks.

It's provably true that LLM's can produce working code. It's also true, that some increasingly large portion of coding is being offloaded to LLM's.

In my opinion, developers need to grow out of this attitude that they are John Henry and they'll outpace the mechanical drilling machine. It's a tired conversation.

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

#173

Post by watt »

yodsanklai wrote: post #134
archagon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except I suspect that Carmack would not be where he is today without a burning intellectual draw to programming in particular.

Exactly... I read "masters of doom" and Carmack didn't strike me as the product guy who cares about people needs. He was more like a coding machine.

In "Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters" id guys figure out that their product is the cutting-edge graphics, and being first, and are able to pull that off for a while. Their games were not great, but the product was idTech engines. With Rage however (id Tech 5) the streak ran cold.

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

#174

Post by code_for_monkey »

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.

I agree with you tbh, and it also just misses something huge that doesnt get brought up: its not about your sniff test, its about your bosses sniff test. Are you making 300k a year? Thats 300 thousand reasons to replace you for a short term boost in profit, companies love doing that.

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

#175

Post by neilv »

taylodl wrote: post #25

Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a craze called CASE - Computer-Aided Software Engineering. The idea was humans really suck at writing code, but we're really good at modeling and creating specifications. Tools like Rational Rose arose during this era, as did Booch notation which eventually became part of UML. The problem was it never worked. When generating the code, the best the tools could do was create…

I worked on CASE, and generally agree with this.

I think it's important to note that there were a couple distinct markets for CASE:

1. Military/aerospace/datacomm/medical type technical development. Where you were building very complex things, that integrated into larger systems, that had to work, with teams, and you used higher-level formalisms when appropriate.

2. "MIS" (Management Information Systems) in-house/intranet business applications. Modeling business processes and flows, and a whole lot of data entry forms, queries, and printed reports. (Much of the coding parts already had decades of work on automating them, such as with WYSIWYG form painters and report languages.)

Today, most Web CRUD and mobile apps are the descendant of #2, albeit with branches for in-house vs. polished graphic design consumer appeal.

My teams had some successes with #1 technical software, but UML under IBM seemed to head towards #2 enterprise development. I don't have much visibility into where it went from there.

I did find a few years ago (as a bit of a methodology expert familiar with the influences that went into UML, as well as familiar with those metamodels as a CASE developer) that the UML specs were scary and huge, and mostly full of stuff I didn't want. So I did the business process modeling for a customer logistics integration using a very small subset, with very high value. (Maybe it's a little like knowing hypertext, and then being teleported 20 years into the future, where the hypertext technology has been taken over by evil advertising brochures and surveillance capitalism, so you have to work to dig out the 1% hypertext bits that you can see are there.)

Post-ZIRP, if more people start caring about complex systems that really have to work (and fewer people care about lots of hiring and churning code to make it look like they have "growth"), people will rediscover some of the better modeling methods, and be, like, whoa, this ancient DeMarco-Yourdon thing is most of what we need to get this process straight in a way everyone can understand, or this Harel thing makes our crazy event loop with concurrent activities tractable to implement correctly without a QA nightmare, or this Rumbaugh/Booch/etc. thing really helps us understand this nontrivial schema, and keep it documented as a visual for bringing people onboard and evolving it sanely, and this Jacobson thing helps us integrate that with some of the better parts of our evolving Agile process.

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

#176

Post by pooper »

hmillison wrote: post #168
rybosworld wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test If that statement isn't coming from ego, then where is it coming from? It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code. They've been trained on billions of examples. Developers seem to focus on the set of cases that LLM's produce code that doesn't work, and use that as evidence that these tools are "useless".

there's a lot more involved in senior dev work beyond producing code that works. if the stakeholders knew how to do what they needed to build and how, then they could use LLMs, but translating complex requirements into code is something that these tools are not even close to cracking.

> if the stakeholders knew how to do what they needed to build and how, then they could use LLMs, but translating complex requirements into code is something that these tools are not even close to cracking.

They don't have to replace you to reduce headcount. They could increase your workload so where they needed five senior developers, they can do with maybe three. That's like six one way and half a dozen the other way because two developers lost a job, right?

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

#177

Post by prerok »

As others have stated, I don't think we have anything to worry about.

As a SWE you are expected to neatly balance code, its architecture and how it addresses the customers' problems. At best, what I've seen LLMs produce is code monkey level programming (like copy pasting from StackOverflow), but then a human is still needed to tweak it properly.

What would be needed is General AI and that's still some 50 years away (and has been for the past 70 years). The LLMs are a nice sleight of hand and are useful but more often wrong than right, as soon as you delve into details.

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

#178

Post by gspencley »

m_ke wrote: post #153
gspencley wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> > 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.

> 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.

Software is interesting because if you buy a refrigerator, even an inexpensive one, you have certain expectations as to its basic functions. If the compressor were to cut out periodically in unexpected ways, affecting your food safety, you would return it.

But in software customers seem to be conditioned to just accept bugs and poor performance as a fact of life.

You're correct that customers don't care about "code quality", because they don't understand code or how to evaluate it.

But you're assuming that customers don't care about the quality of the product they are paying for, and you're divorcing that quality from the quality of the code as if the code doesn't represent THE implementation of the final product. The hardware matters too, but to assume that code quality doesn't directly affect product quality is to pretend that food quality is not directly impacted by its ingredients.

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

#179

Post by thor_molecules »

After reading the comments, the themes I'm seeing are:

- AI will provide a big mess for wizards to clean up

- AI will replace juniors and then seniors within a short timeframe

- AI will soon plateau and the bubble will burst

- "Pshaw I'm not paid to code; I'm a problem solver"

- AI is useless in the face of true coding mastery

It is interesting to me that this forum of expert technical people are so divided on this (broad) subject.

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

#180

Post by gosub100 »

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.

The reason it's so good at "rewrite this C program in Python" is because it was trained on a huge corpus of code at GitHub. There is no such corpus of examples of more abstract commands, thus a limited amount by which it can improve.
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