LLMs are overrated trash feeding themselves garbage and producing garbage in return. AI is in a bubble, when reality comes back the scales will of course rebalance and LLMs will be a tool to improve human productivity but not replace them as some people might think. Then again I could be wrong, most people don't actually know how to create products for other humans and that's the real goal... not simply coding to code. Let me know when LLMs can produce products.
Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#182Earlier 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 Every SaaS, marketplace is at risk of extinction, superseded by AI agents communicating ad-hoc.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…
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
Most people don’t want cloud hosted subscription software, we do it that way because VCs love vendor lock in and recurring revenue.
Old school desktop software takes very little maintenance. Once you get rid of user tracking, AB testing, monitoring, CICD pipelines, microservices, SOC, multi tenant distributed databases, network calls and all the other crap things get pretty simple.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#183There's a great Joel Spolsky post about developers starting businesses and realising that there's a bunch of "business stuff" that was abstracted away at big companies. [1]
One way to future proof is to look at the larger picture, the same way that coding can't be reduced to algorithm puzzles:
"Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user. But for that conversation to happen requires a lot of work beyond the software development."
[1] The Development Abstraction Layer https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#184Earlier 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.
Yeah. Code that works is a fraction of the aim. You also want code that a good junior can read and debug in the midst of a production issue, is robust against new or updated requirements, has at least as good performance as the competitors, and uses appropriate libraries in a sparse manner. You also need to be able to state when a requirement would loosen the conceptual cohesion of the code, and to push back on requirements thdt can already be achieved in just as easy a way.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#185There's a great Joel Spolsky post about developers starting businesses and realising that there's a bunch of "business stuff" that was abstracted away at big companies. [1] One way to future proof is to look at the larger picture, the same way that coding can't be reduced to algorithm puzzles: "Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user. But for that conversation to happen requires a lot…
But conversations are exactly LLMs strength?
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#186Nothing 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 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?
I mean, in a way, yeah.
Last 10 years were basically one hype-cycle after another filled with lofty predictions that never quite panned out. Besides the fact that many of these predictions kind of fell short, there's also the perception that progress on these various things kind of ground to a halt once the interest faded.
3D printers are interesting. Sure, they have gotten incrementally better after the hype cycle died out, but otherwise their place in society hasn't changed, nor will it likely ever change. It has its utility for prototyping and as a fun hobbyist machine for making plastic toys, but otherwise I remember people saying that we'd be able to just 3D print whatever we needed rather than relying on factories.
Same story with VR. We've made a lot of progress since the first Oculus came out, but otherwise their role in society hasn't changed much since then. The latest VR headsets are still as useless and still as bad for gaming. The metaverse will probably never happen.
With AI, I don't want to be overly dismissive, but at the same time there's a growing consensus that pre-training scaling laws are plateauing, and AI "reasoning" approaches always seemed kind of goofy to me. I wouldn't be surprised if generative AI reaches a kind of equilibrium where it incrementally improves but improves in a way where it gets continuously better at being a junior developer but never quite matures beyond that. The world's smartest beginner if you will.
Which is still pretty significant mind you, it's just that I'm not sure how much this significance will be felt. It's not like one's skillset needs to adjust that much in order to use Cursor or Claude, especially as they get better over time. Even if it made developers 50% more productive, I feel like the impact of this will be balanced-out to a degree by declining interest in programming as a career (feel like coding bootcamp hype has been dead for a while now), a lack of enough young people to replace those that are aging out, the fact that a significant number of developers are, frankly, bad at their job and gave up trying to learn new things a long time ago, etc etc.
I think it really only matters in the end if we actually manage to achieve AGI, once that happens though it'll probably be the end of work and the economy as we know it, so who cares?
I think the other thing to keep in mind is that the history of programming is filled with attempts to basically replace programmers. Prior to generative AI, I remember a lot of noise over low-code / no-code tools, but they were just the latest chapter in the evolution of low-code / no-code. Kind of surprised that even now in Anno Domini 2024 one can make a living developing small-business websites due to the limitations of the latest batch of website builders.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#187Nothing 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.
> ChatGPT was only just released in 2022.
Bitcoin was released in what year? I still cannot use it for payments.
No-code solutions exist since when? And still programmers work...
I dont think all hyped techs are fads. For instance: we use SaaS now instead of installing software locally. This transition took the world by storm.
But those tech that needs lots of ads, and lots of zealots, and make incredible promises: they usually are fads.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#188Earlier 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.
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.
The infrastructure is not a 'some dude writing tons of YAML code'.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#189Earlier 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.
> LLM-generated code that people have submitted to open source projects I work on
Are you sure it was people? Maybe the AI learned how to make PRs, or is learning how to do so by using your project as a test bed.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Firstly, GPT-2 was released in 2019. Five years is not "almost ten years".
Secondly, LLMs are objectively useful for coding now. That's not the same thing as saying they are replacements for SWEs. They're a tool, like syntax highlighting or real-time compiler error visibility or even context-aware keyword autocompletion.
Some individuals don't find those things useful, and prefer to develop in a plain text editor that does not have those features, and that's fine.
But all of those features, and LLMs are now on that list, are broadly useful in the sense that they generally improve productivity across the industry. They already right now save enormous amounts of developer time, and to ignore that because you are not one of the people whose time is currently being saved, indicates that you may not be keeping up with understanding the technology of your field.
There's an important difference between a tool being useful for generating novel content, and a tool being useful. I can think of a lot of useful tools that are not useful for generating novel content.