Start selling the shovels.
I.e., get into the LLM/AI business
Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#232Earlier 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…
I imagine though they might replace 3 out of 4 senior programmers (keep one around to sanity check the AI).
That's the same figuring a lot of business folks had when considering off-shoring in the early 2000s - those companies ended up hiring twice as many senior programmers to sanity check and correct the code they got back. The same story can be heard from companies that fired their expensive seniors to hire twice as many juniors at a quarter the price.
I think that software development is just an extremely poor market segment for these kinds of tools - we've already got mountains of productivity tools that minimize how much time we need to spend doing the silly rote programming stuff - most of software development is problem solving.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#233Earlier 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.
Yet, they were able to find a market for their products. He knew both how to code and what to code.
Ultima Underword was technologically superior to Wolfenstein 3D.
System Shock was technologically superior to Doom and a much better game for my taste. I also think it has aged better.
Doom, Wolf 3D and Quake were less sophisticated, but kicked ass. They captured the spirit of the times and people loved it.
They're still pretty good games too, 30 years later.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#234Nothing 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 “…
This is a fascinating comment, because it shows such a mis-reading of the history and point of technology (on a tech forum). Technological progress always leads to loss of skilled labor like your own, usually resulting in lower quality (but higher profits and often lower prices). Of COURSE an LLM won't be able to do work as well as you, just as industrial textile manufacturing could not, and still does not, produce the quality of work of 19th century cottage industry weavers; that was in fact one of their main complaints.
As an aside, at the top of the front page right now is a sprawling essay titled "Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?"...
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#235Earlier 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…
For trivial setups this might work, but for anything sufficiently complex that actually hits on real complexity in the domain, it's hard to see any LLM doing an adequate job. Especially if the person driving it doesn't know what they don't know about the domain.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#236I have huge balls and I am not threatened by RNG.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#237LLM's are a model therefore require data, including new data. When it comes to obscure tasks, niche systems and peculiar integrations, LLM's seem to struggle with that nuance.
So should you be worried they will replace you? No. You should worry about not adopting the technology in some form, otherwise your peers will outpace you.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#238Right now LLMs have a slight advantage over stackoverflow etc in that they'll react to your specific question/circumstances, but they also require you to doublecheck everything they spit out. I don't think that will ever change, and I think most of the hype comes from people whose salaries depend on it being right around the corner or people who are playing a speculation game (if I learn this tool I'll never have to work again/ avoid this tool will doom me to poverty forever).
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
> are broadly useful in the sense that they generally improve productivity across the industry. They already right now save enormous amounts of developer time, But is that actually a true statement. Are there actual studies to back that up? AI is hyped to the moon right now. It is really difficult to separate the hype from reality. There are ancedotal reports of ai helping with coding, but there are also ancedotal re…
> Are there actual studies to back that up?
I am aware of an equal number of studies about the time saved overall by use of LLMs, and time saved overall by use of syntax highlighting.
In fact, here's a study claiming syntax highlighting in IDEs does not help code comprehension: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-017-9579-0
Shall we therefore conclude that syntax highlighting is not useful, that developers who use syntax highlighting are just part of the IDE hype train, and that anecdotal reports of syntax highlighting being helpful are counterbalanced by anecdotal reports of $IDE having incorrect syntax highlighitng on $Esoteric_file_format?
Most of the failures of LLMs with coding that I have seen has been a result of asking too much of the LLM. Writing a hundred context-aware unit tests is something that an LLM is excellent at, and would have taken a developer a long time previously. Asking an LLM to write a novel algorithm to speed up image processing of the output of your electron microscope will go less well.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#240After 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 (…
The biggest surprise to me (generally across HN) is that people expect LLMs to develop on a really slow timeframe. In the last two years LLM capabilities have gone from "produces a plausible sentence" to "can generate a functioning web app". Sure it's not as masterful as one produced by a team of senior engineers, but a year ago it was impossible. But everyone seems to evaluate LLMs like they're fixed at today's capa…
You can’t extrapolate the future trajectory of progress from the past. It comes in pushes and phases. We had long phases of AI stagnation in the past, we might see them again. The past five years or so might turn out to be a phase transition from pre-LLM to post-LLM, rather than the beginning of endless dramatic improvements.