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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?

#481

Post by irunmyownemail »

mofeien wrote: post #376
pockmarked19 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like they caught up because I have posted this before including in chatGPT. All that means is you have to change it up slightly. Unfortunately “change it up slightly” is not good enough for people to do anything with, and anything more specific just trains the LLM eventually so it stops proving the point. I cannot load this link though.

It also means that you should update your belief about the reasoning capabilities of LLMs at least slightly. if disconfirming evidence doesn’t shake your beliefs at all, you dont really have beliefs, you have an ideology.

"It also means that you should update your belief about the reasoning capabilities of LLMs at least slightly."

AI, LLM, ML - have no reasoning ability, they're not human, they are software machines, not people. People reason, machines calculate and imitate, they do not reason.

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

#482

Post by mplanchard »

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".

Working code some subset of the time, for popular languages. It’s not good at Rust nor at other smaller languages. Tried to ask it for some help with Janet and it was hopelessly wrong, even with prompting to try to get it to correct its mistakes.

Even if it did work, working code is barely half the battle.

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

#483

Post by peab »

pdimitar wrote: post #458
richardw wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those less confident: U.S. (and German) automakers were absolutely sure that the Japanese would never be able to touch them. Then Koreans. Now Chinese. Now there are tariffs and more coming to save jobs. Betting against AI (or increasing automation, really) is a bet against not against robots, but against human ingenuity. Humans are the ones making progress, and we can work with toothpicks as levers. LLM's are ou…

In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day. LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be ea…

"In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day."

The majority of programmers getting paid a good salary are implementing other people's ideas. You're getting paid to be some PMs chatGPT

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

#484

Post by mbm »

light_triad wrote: post #183

There'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…

Beautiful article, thanks for sharing. Miss his writing.

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

#485

Post by cruffle_duffle »

chasd00 wrote: post #332

Learn the tools, use them where they shine avoid them where they do not. Your best bet is just learn to start using LLM in your day to day coding and find out what works and what doesn’t.

This in basically the answer. It’s a tool. Just like all the other tools. It is both very powerful and very stupid and the more you use it the better your intuition will be about if a given task is good for it or bad.

It’s not gonna replace developers anytime soon. It’s going to make you more productive in some things and those that avoid it are shooting themselves in the foot but whatever.

What will happen is software will march forward eating the world like it has for so long. And this industry will continue to change like it always has. And you’ll have to learn new tools like you always did. Same as before same as it will always be.

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

#486

Post by irunmyownemail »

swishman wrote: post #419
randmeerkat wrote: post #323

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/

They have automated trains..

They also have planes with autopilot. Who still flies planes, people. For that matter, all automated trains still have many people involved.

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

#487

Post by shiveenp »

pdimitar wrote: post #459
jayd16 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Other people were wrong about something else so that invalidates your argument" Why are half the replies like this?

The cognitive dissonance of seemingly educated people defending the LLMs when it comes to writing code is my top mystery for the entirety of 2024. Call me if you find a good reason. I still have not.

In my opinion people that harp on about how LLMs have been game changer for them are the people that put themselves as never actually having built anything sophisticated enough that a team of engineers can work and extend on for years.

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

#488

Post by pdimitar »

peab wrote: post #483
pdimitar wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day. LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be ea…

"In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day." The majority of programmers getting paid a good salary are implementing other people's ideas. You're getting paid to be some PMs chatGPT

I never said we are working on new ideas only -- that's impossible.

I even gave several examples of the traits that a commercial code must have and that LLMs fail to generate such code. Not sure why you ignored that.

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

#489

Post by mbm »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #97
finebalance wrote: post #11

Not a clue. I'm a decent engineer working as a DS in a consulting firm. In my last two projects, I checked in (or corrected) so much more code than the other two junior DS's in my team, that at the end some 80%-90% of the ML-related stuff had been directly built, corrected or optimized by me. And most of the rest that wasn't, was mostly because it was boilerplate. LLMs were pivotal in this. And I am only a moderately…

Once again, this seems to only apply to Python / ML SWEs. Try to get any of these models to write decent Rust, Go or C boilerplate.

Have been writing Rust servers with Cursor. Very enjoyable.

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

#490

Post by mixmastamyk »

How many of these posts do we have to suffer through?

It's just like the self-driving car—great for very simple applications but when will human drivers become a thing of the past? Not any time soon. Not to mention the hype curve has already crested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42381637

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