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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?

#311

Post by ska »

sigmarule wrote: post #268
RangerScience wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fav anecdote from ages ago: When hand-held power tools became a thing, the Hollywood set builder’s union was afraid of this exact same thing - people would be replaced by the tools. Instead, productions built bigger sets (the ceiling was raised) and smaller productions could get in on things (the floor was lowered). I always took that to mean “people aren’t going to spend less to do the job - they’ll just do a bigger…

This could very well prove to be the case in software engineering, but also could very well not; what is the equivalent of "larger sets" in our domain, and is that something that is even preferable to begin with? Should we build larger codebases just because we _can_? I'd say likely not, while it does make sense to build larger/more elaborate movie sets because they could. Also, a piece missing from this comparison i…

> Should we build larger codebases just because we _can_?

The history of software production as a profession (as against computer science) is essentially a series of incremental increases in the size and complexity of systems (and teams) that don't fall apart under their own weight. There isn't much evidence we have approached the limit here, so it's a pretty good bet for at least the medium term.

But focusing on system size is perhaps a red herring. There is an almost unfathomably vast pool of potential software systems (or customization of systems) that aren't realized today because they aren't cost effective...

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

#312

Post by [deleted] »

karaterobot wrote: post #286
RangerScience wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fav anecdote from ages ago: When hand-held power tools became a thing, the Hollywood set builder’s union was afraid of this exact same thing - people would be replaced by the tools. Instead, productions built bigger sets (the ceiling was raised) and smaller productions could get in on things (the floor was lowered). I always took that to mean “people aren’t going to spend less to do the job - they’ll just do a bigger…

Another anecdote: when mechanical looms became a thing, textile workers were afraid that the new tools would replace them, and they were right.

[deleted]

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

#313

Post by latentsea »

janalsncm wrote: post #255
latentsea wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the last-mile problems of things like autonomous vehicles have been anything to go by, it seems the last mile problems of entrusting your entire business operations to complete black box software, or software written by a novices talking to complete black box, will be infinitely worse. There's plenty of low-code, no-code solutions around, and yet still lots of software. The slice of the pie will change, but it's v…

Even if seniors still do the last mile, that’s a significant reduction from the full commute they were paid for previously. Are you saying seniors should concede this?

No, I think there's cases in which if you can't do the last mile, you aren't entrusted to do the first either.

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

#315

Post by colecut »

vinnymac wrote: post #295
tlarkworthy wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can already type faster than I can think. But can you write tickets faster than you can implement them? I certainly can.

Depends on the ticket. If it's "Get us to the moon", it's gonna take me years to write that ticket. If it was "Make the CTA on the homepage red", it is up for debate whether I needed a ticket at all.

Based on current methods of productivity scoring, I'd try to make 2 tickets for that...

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

#316

Post by indrora »

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…

> Bottom line, you don't see too many assembly language developers anymore.

And where you do, no LLM is going to replace them because they are working in the dark mines where no compiler has seen and the optimizations they are doing involve arcane lore about the mysteries of some Intel engineer's mind while one or both of them are on a drug fueled alcoholic deep dive.

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

#317

Post by hnthrowaway6543 »

karaterobot wrote: post #286
RangerScience wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fav anecdote from ages ago: When hand-held power tools became a thing, the Hollywood set builder’s union was afraid of this exact same thing - people would be replaced by the tools. Instead, productions built bigger sets (the ceiling was raised) and smaller productions could get in on things (the floor was lowered). I always took that to mean “people aren’t going to spend less to do the job - they’ll just do a bigger…

Another anecdote: when mechanical looms became a thing, textile workers were afraid that the new tools would replace them, and they were right.

430 million people currently work in textiles[0]; how big was the industry before mechanical looms?

[0] https://www.uniformmarket.com/statistics/global-apparel-indu...

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

#318

Post by raincole »

m_ke wrote: post #182
asdev wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was a vulnerability of 7-zip found in Nov, 2024.

Yes, 7-zip.

https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2024...

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

#319

Post by ben_w »

rybosworld wrote: post #164
IshKebab wrote: post #98

Earlier 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…

> 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".

> It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code.

What I've seen of them, the good ones mostly produce OK code. Not terrible, usually works.

Although I like them even for that low-ish bar, although I find them to be both a time-saver and a personal motivation assistant, they're still a thing that needs a real domain expert to spot the mistakes they make.

> 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".

I do find it amusing how many humans turned out to be stuck thinking in boolean terms, dismissing the I in AGI, calling them as "useless" because it "can't take my job". Same with the G in AGI, dismissing the breadth of something that speaks 50 languages when humans who speak five or six languages are considered unusually skilled.

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

#320

Post by raincole »

rybosworld wrote: post #291
swishman wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arrogance of comments like this is amazing. I think it's an interesting psychological phenomenon similar to virtue signalling. Here you are signalling to the programmer in-group how good of a programmer you are. The more dismissive you are the better you look. Anyone worried about it reveals themself as a bad coder. It's a luxury belief, and the better LLMs get the better you look by dismissing them.

This is spot on. It's essentially like saying "What I do in particular, is much too difficult for an AI to ever replicate." It is always in part, humble bragging. I think some developers like to pretend that they are exclusively solving problems that have never been solved before. Which sure, the LLM architecture in particular might never be better than a person for the novel class of problem. But the reality is, an…

How is it humble bragging when there isn't "humble" part?
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