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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?

#511

Post by pdimitar »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #506
pdimitar wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> LLMs fail to generate such code As another oldster, yes, yes absolutely. But the deeper question is: can this change? They can't do the job now, will they be able to in the future? My understanding of what LLM's do/how they work suggests a strong "no". I'm not confident about my confidence, however.

I am sure it can change. Ultimately programming we be completely lost; we are going to hand-wave and command computers inside us or inside the walls of our houses. This absolutely will happen.

But my issue is with people that claim we are either at that point, or very nearly it.

...No, we are not. We are not even 10% there. I am certain LLMs will be a crucial part of such a general AI one day but it's quite funny how people mistake the brain's frontal lobe with the entire brain. :)

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

#513

Post by robwwilliams »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #272
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…

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…

Ditto for most academic biomedical research: we desperately need more high quality customized code. Instead we have either nothing or Python/R code written by a grad student or postdoc—code that dies a quick death.

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

#514

Post by danenania »

lukev wrote: post #293
rybosworld wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Code is a liability, not an asset. It is a necessary evil to create functional software. Senior devs know this, and factor code down to the minimum necessary. Junior devs and LLMs think that writing code is the point and will generate lots of it without worrying about things like leverage, levels of abstraction, future extensibility, etc.

LLMs can be prompted to write code that considers these things.

You can write good code or bad code with LLMs.

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

#515

Post by mplanchard »

epolanski wrote: post #442
globnomulous wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is ego speaking. It absolutely isn't. I have yet to find an area where LLM-generated code solves the kinds of problems I work on more reliably, effectively, of efficiently than I do. I'm also not interested in spending my mental energy on code reviews for an uncomphrehending token-prediction golem, let alone finding or fixing bugs in the code it blindly generates. That's a waste of my time and a special kind o…

Comments like these make me wonder whether we live in the same worlds. I'm a cursor user e.g. and Tab completion is by far the most powerful auto complete I've ever used. There's scenarios where you can do some major refactors by simply asking (extract this table to its own component while using best react practices to avoid double renders) and it does so istantly. Refactor the tests for it? Again. Semi instant. Mean…

Sounds like you’re working in react. The models are orders of magnitude worse at less common frameworks and/or languages. React is so boilerplate-heavy that it’s almost a perfect match for LLMs. That said, every large react codebase I’ve worked in inevitably became really complex and had a ton of little quirks and tweaks to deal with unexpected re-renders and such. I avoid the FE when I can these days, but I’d be fairly surprised if LLMs generated anything other than typical performance-footgun-heavy react

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

#516

Post by solarized »

Be exceptionally skilled in areas that can’t yet be automated.

Focus on soft skills: communication, problem-solving, social intelligence, collaboration, connecting ideas, and other "less technical" abilities. Kind of management and interpersonal stuff that machines can’t replicate (yet).

It's real. Subscribing LLM provider for $20/month feels like better deal than hiring average-skilled software engineer.

It's even funnier when we realize that people we hire are just going to end up prompting the LLM anyway. So, why bother hiring?

We really need next-level skills. Beyond what LLM can handle.

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

#517

Post by dweinus »

jvanderbot wrote: post #398
dogman144 wrote: post #378

The last fairly technical career to get surprisingly and fully automated in the way this post displays concern about - trading. I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt. Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was: - How complex the job was - How high a…

They most insightful thing here would have been to learn how those traders survived, adapted, or moved on. It's possible everyone just stops hiring new folks and lets the incumbents automate it. Or it's possible they all washed cars the rest of their careers.

I knew a bunch of them. Most of them moved on: retired or started over in new careers. It hit them hard. Maybe not so hard because trading was a lucrative career, but most of us don't have that kind of dough to fall back on.

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

#519

Post by pdimitar »

richardw wrote: post #502
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…

The analogy is that Japanese cars were initially utterly uncompetitive, and the arrogance of those who benefited from the status quo meant they were unable to adapt when change came. Humans improved those cars, humans are currently improving models and their use. Cheap toys move up the food chain. Find the direction of change and align yourself with it. > people trying to replace one guy like myself with 3 Indians ha…

You are assuming I am arrogant because I don't view the current LLMs as good coders. That's a faulty assumption so your argument starts with a logical mistake.

Also I never said that I "have no equal". I am saying that the death of my career has been predicted for no less than 10 years now and it still has not happened, and I see no signs of it happening; LLMs produce terrible code very often.

This gives me the right to be skeptical from where I am standing. And a bit snarky about it, too.

I asked for a measurable proof, not for your annoyed accusations that I am arrogant.

You are not making an argument. You are doing an ad hominem attack that weakens any other argument you may be making. Still, let's see some of them.

---

RE: choices, my choice has been made long time ago and it's this one: "I will become quite good so as to be mostly safe. If 'AI' displaces me then I'll be happy to work something else until my retirement". Nothing more, nothing less.

RE: "startup universe", that's a very skewed perspective. 99.99999% of all USA startups mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things out there, they are but a tiny bubble in one country in a big planet. Trends change, sometimes drastically and quickly so. What a bunch of guys in comfy positions think about their bubble bears zero relevance to what's actually going on.

> I can't find it now, but there's at least one company that is doing enterprise-scale refactoring with LLM's, AST's, rules etc.

If you find it, let me know. That I would view as an interesting proof and a worthy discussion to have on it after.

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

#520

Post by baner2020 »

pdimitar wrote: post #500
jprete wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a message board frequented by extremely tech-involved people. I'd expect the vast majority of people here to have some financial interest in LLMs - big-tech equity, direct employment, AI startup, AI influencer, or whatever.

Yeah, very likely. It's the new gold rush, and they are commanding wages that make me drool (and also make me want to howl in pain and agony and envy but hey, let's not mention the obvious, shall we?). I always forget the name of that law but... it's hard to make somebody understand something if their salary depends on them not understanding it.

Conflict of interest perhaps
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