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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?

#351

Post by tokioyoyo »

Xophmeister wrote: post #74

My anecdata shows people who have no/limited experience in software engineering are suddenly able to produce “software”. That is, code of limited engineering value. It technically works, but is a ultimately an unmaintainable, intractable Heath Robinson monstrosity. Coding LLMs will likely improve, but what will happen first: a good-at-engineering LLM; or a negative feedback cycle of training data being polluted with…

> is a ultimately an unmaintainable

Does it need to be maintainable, if we can re-generate apps on the go with some sort of automated testing mechanism? I'm still on the fence with the LLM-generated apps debacle, but since I started forcing Cursor on myself, i'm writing significantly less code (75% less?) on my day-to-day job.

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

#352

Post by iLoveOncall »

rqtwteye wrote: post #111
dimgl wrote: post #107

Earlier 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.

> I think a lot of CRUD apps will disappear

How does that make any sense? How is AI, and especially GenAI, something that is by definition fallible, better in ANY way than current frameworks that allow you to write CRUD applications deterministically with basically one line of code per endpoint (if that)?

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

#353

Post by bdangubic »

015a wrote: post #343

There's no reality in the next twenty years where a non-technical individual is going to converse with a persistent agentic AI to produce a typical SaaS product and maintain it over a period of many years. I think we'll see stabs at this space, and I think we'll see some companies try to replace engineering teams wholesale, and these attempts will almost universally feel kinda sorta ok for the first N weeks, then nos…

Nicely said.

> AI cannot replace people; AI augments people.

Here’s where we slightly disagree. If AI augments people (100% does) it makes those people more productive (from my personal experience I am ballparking currently I am 40-45% more productive) and hence some people will get replaced. Plausibly in high-growth companies we’ll just all be more productive and will crank out 40-45% more products/features/… but in other places me being 40-45% more productive may mean other people might not be needed (think every fixed-price government contract - this is 100’s of billions of dollar market…)

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

#354

Post by perrygeo »

> My prediction is that junior to mid level software engineering will disappear mostly, while senior engineers will transition to be more of a guiding hand to LLMs output

This. Programming will become easier for everyone. But the emergent effect will be that senior engineers become more valuable, juniors much less.

Why? It's an idea multiplier. 10x of near-zero is still almost zero. And 10x of someone who's a 10 already - they never need to interact with a junior engineer again.

> until eventually LLMs will become so good, that senior people won't be needed any more.

Who will write the prompts? How do you measure the success? Who will plan the market strategy? Humans are needed in the loop by definition as we build software to achieve human goals. We'll just need significantly fewer people to achieve them.

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

#355

Post by akircher »

PeterisP wrote: post #244
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…

If a LLM (or any other tool) makes so that team of 8 can get the same results in the same time as it used to take a team of 10 to do, then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers" - even if there's no particular person for which the whole job has been replaced, that's not a meaningful practical difference, replacing a significant fraction of every programmer's job has the same outcomes and impacts as replacing…

As a founder, I think that this viewpoint misses the reality of a fixed budget. If I can make my team of 8 as productive as 10 with LLMs then I will. But that doesn’t mean that without LLMs I could afford to hire 2 more engineers. And in fact if LLMs make my startup successful then it could create more jobs in the future.

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

#356

Post by themanmaran »

unclad5968 wrote: post #288
themanmaran wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Probably because we see stuff like this every decade. Ten years ago no one was ever going to drive again because self-driving cars were imminent. Turns out a lot of problems can be partially solved very quickly, but as anyone with experience knows, solving the last 10% takes at least as much time as solving the first 90.

> Ten years ago no one was ever going to drive again because self-driving cars were imminent

Right.. but self driving cars are here. And if you've taken Waymo anywhere it's pretty amazing.

Of course just because the technology is available doesn't mean distribution is solved. The production of corn has been technically solved for a long time, but doesn't mean starvation was eliminated.

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

#357

Post by 65 »

LLMs are not 100% correct 100% of the time. LLMs are subjective. Code should work 100% of the time, be readable, and objective.

We also already have "easier ways of writing software" - website builders, open source libraries, StackOverflow answers, etc.

Software builds on itself. It's already faster to copy and paste someone's GitHub repo of their snake game than to ask an LLM to build a snake game for you. Software problems will continue to get more challenging as we create more complex software with unsolved answers.

If anything, software engineers will be more and more valuable in the future (just as the past few decades have shown how software engineers have become increasingly more valuable). Those that code with LLMs won't be able to retain their jobs solving the harder problems of tomorrow.

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

#358

Post by koliber »

perrygeo wrote: post #354

> My prediction is that junior to mid level software engineering will disappear mostly, while senior engineers will transition to be more of a guiding hand to LLMs output This. Programming will become easier for everyone. But the emergent effect will be that senior engineers become more valuable, juniors much less. Why? It's an idea multiplier. 10x of near-zero is still almost zero. And 10x of someone who's a 10 alre…

All senior engineers were junior engineers at one point.

I worry where we will get the next generation of senior engineers.

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

#359

Post by esmevane »

RangerScience wrote: post #262
PeterisP wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a LLM (or any other tool) makes so that team of 8 can get the same results in the same time as it used to take a team of 10 to do, then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers" - even if there's no particular person for which the whole job has been replaced, that's not a meaningful practical difference, replacing a significant fraction of every programmer's job has the same outcomes and impacts as replacing…

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…

It's always played out like this in software, by the way. Famously, animation shops hoped to save money on production by switching over to computer rendered cartoons. What happened instead is that a whole new industry took shape, and brought along with it entire cottage industries of support workers. Server farms required IT, renders required more advanced chips, some kinds of animation required entirely new rendering techniques in the software, etc.

A few hundred animators turned into a few thousand computer animators & their new support crew, in most shops. And new, smaller shops took form! But the shops didn't go away, at least not the ones who changed.

It basically boils down to this: some shops will act with haste and purge their experts in order to replace them with LLMs, and others will adopt the LLMs, bring on the new support staff they need, and find a way to synthesize a new process that involves experts and LLMs.

Shops who've abandoned their experts will immediately begin to stagnate and produce more and more mediocre slop (we're seeing it already!) and the shops who metamorphose into the new model you're speculating at will, meanwhile, create a whole new era of process and production. Right now, you really want to be in that second camp - the synthesizers. Eventually the incumbents will have no choice but to buy up those new players in order to coup their process.

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

#360

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

The best software is made by people who are using it. So I figure we should all go learn something that interests us which could use some more software expertise. Stop being SWE's and start being _____'s with a coding superpower.

AI aside, we probably should have done this a long time ago. Software for software's sake tends build things that treat the users poorly. Focusing on sectors that could benefit forum software and not treating software itself like a sector seems to me like a better way.

I know that sounds like giving up, but look around and ask how much of the software we work on is actually helping anybody. Let's all go get real jobs. And if you take an honest look at your job and think it's plenty real, well congrats, but I'd wager you're in the minority.

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