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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?

#321

Post by talldayo »

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.

> This is ego speaking.

I suspect you haven't seen code review at a 500+ seat company.

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

#322

Post by tqi »

janalsncm wrote: post #263
thegrim33 wrote: post #71

I don't worry about it, because: 1) I believe we need true AGI to replace developers. 2) I don't believe LLMs are currently AGI or that if we just feed them more compute during training that they'll magically become AGI. 3) Even if we did invent AGI soon and replace developers, I wouldn't even really care, because the invention of AGI would be such an insanely impactful, world changing, event that who knows what the…

To replace all developers, we need AGI yes. To replace many developers? No. If one developer can do the same work as 5 could previously, unless the amount of work expands then 4 developers are going to be looking for a job. Therefore, unless you for some reason believe you will be in the shrinking portion that cannot be replaced I think the question deserves more attention than “nothing”.

I'm not sure it is as simple as that - Induced Demand might be enough to keep the pool of human-hours steady. What that does to wages though, who can say...

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

#323

Post by randmeerkat »

Here’s a question for you, have they automated trains yet? They’re literally on tracks. Until trains are fully automated, then after that cars, then later airplanes, then maybe, just maybe “ai” will come for thought work. Meanwhile, Tesla’s “ai” still can’t stop running into stopped firetrucks[1]…

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

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

#324

Post by esmevane »

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.

Oh my, no. Fabrics and things made from fabrics remain largely produced by human workers.

Those textile workers were afraid machines would replace them, but that didn't happen - the work was sent overseas, to countries with cheaper labor. It was completely tucked away from regulation and domestic scrutiny, and so remains to this day a hotbed of human rights abuses.

The phenomenon you're describing wasn't an industry vanishing due to automation. You're describing a moment where a domestic industry vanished because the cost of overhauling the machinery in domestic production facilities was near to the cost of establishing an entirely new production facility in a cheaper, more easily exploitable location.

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

#325

Post by ConspiracyFact »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #309
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually not accurate. See Jevons paradox, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . In the short term, LLMs should have the effect of making programmers more productive, which means more customers will end up demanding software that was previously uneconomic to build (this is not theoretical - e.g. I work with some non-profits who would love a comprehensive software solution, they simply can't afford i…

yes, this. the backlog of software that needs to be built is fucking enormous . you know what i'd do if AI made it so i could replace 10 devs with 8? use the 2 newly-freed up developers to work on some of the other 100000 things i need done

I'm casting about for project ideas. What are some things that you think need to be built but haven't?

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

#326

Post by obiefernandez »

My strategy is to be the guy who wrote the "bible" of integrating LLM code with your normal day-to-day software engineering: Patterns of Application Development Using AI

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Application-Development-Usin...

Leanpub (ebook only): https://leanpub.com/patterns-of-application-development-usin...

This is actual advice that can be generalized to become an authority in technology related to the phenomenon described by the OP.

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

#327

Post by nrawe »

rybosworld wrote: post #172
hmillison wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

As a developer, while I do embrace intellisense, I don't copy/paste code, because I find typing it out is a fast path to reflection and finding issues early. Copilot seems to be no better than mindlessly copy/pasting from StackOverflow.

From what I've seen of Copilots, while they can produce working code, I've not seen that much that it offers beyond the surface level which is fast enough for me to type. I am also deeply perturbed from some interviews I've done for senior candidates recently who are using them and, when asked to disable them for collaborative coding task, completely fall apart because of their dependency over knowledge.

This is not to say I do not see value in AI, LLMs or ML (I very much do). However, I code broadly at the speed of thought, and that's not really something I think will be massively aided by it.

At the same time, I know I am an outlier in my practice relative to lots around me.

While I don't doubt other improvements that may come from LLM in development, the current state of the art feels less like a mechanical drill and more like an electric triangle.

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

#328

Post by rakkhi »

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 “…

Agree with this. SWE don't need to do anything because LLMs will just make expert engineers more productive. More detail on my arguments here: https://rakkhi.substack.com/p/economics-of-large-language-mo...

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

#329

Post by ben_w »

gspencley wrote: post #123
rybosworld wrote: post #85

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…

> Consider this, 100% of AI training data is human-generated content.

Probably doesn't change the conclusion, but this is no longer the case.

I've yet to try Phi-4, but the whole series has synthetic training data; I don't value Phi-3 despite what the benchmarks claim.

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

#330

Post by talldayo »

mh- wrote: post #154
nicoburns wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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..

Good LLM-generated code comes from good developers that can provide detailed requests, filter through wrong/misleading/cruft results, and test a final working copy. If your personal bar for PRs is high enough then it won't matter if you use AI or not because you won't contribute shitty results.

I think the problem has become people with no bar for quality submitting PRs that ruin a repo, and then getting mad when it's not merged because ChatGPT reviewed the patch already.

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