Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

I've been using SO since it first launched, and through time it has changed a lot already. It used to be simple to ask questions and get answers, when it grew and the huge influx of questions required moderation it was a nice smooth change but over time the pearl clutching of mods to mark many reasonable questions as irrelevant started to grip the usefulness.

I used to answer a lot of the basic questions just to help others as I've felt I had been helped, the moderation shift applying more and more rules started to make me feel unwelcomed to ask questions and even to answer. I do understand why it happened, with the influx of people trying to game the platform to show off in their resumés they were at the "top" of whatever buzzword was hot in the industry at the time but it still affected me as a contributing user out of kindness.

By 2018 I would not even login to vote or add comments, and I feel it was already going on a slow downhill path, and LLMs will definitely kill it.

We will definitely suffer, SO has been an incredible resource to figure out things not covered well in documentation, I remember when proper experts (i.e. maintainers of libraries/frameworks) would jump in to answer about a weird edge case, or clarify the usage of a feature, explain why it was misuse, etc.

Right now I don't see anything else that will provide this knowledge to LLMs, in 10-20 years time there will be a lot missing in training datasets, and it will be a slow degradation of knowledge available in the open for us all to learn from.

That's one of the things I find most interesting when it comes to LLMs, a depressingly large proportion of the population seems to enjoy interacting with a deranged sycophant who treats all of their ideas and comments as a stroke of genius. Every time I read a response like "[you're right] [you're smart] [more than others]" to the most obvious observation it makes me squirm with discomfort. Especially when I just pointed out a grave error in LLM's reasoning.

My suspicion is that it's a reflection of how people like Altman want to be treated. As an European who worked with US companies, my experience with work communication there can only be summed up as being heavily biased towards toxic positivity. Take that up another 3 egotistical notches for CEOs and you get the ChatGPT tone.

AI is not doing 30-50% of our work in a company of ~10k employees.

It's helping with a lot of toil work that used to be annoying to do, PMs can do their own data analysis without having to pull me out of deliverable tasks to craft a SQL query for something and put it up on a dashboard; I don't need to go copy-paste-adapt test cases to cover a change in some feature, I don't need, most times, to open many different sections of documentation to figure out how a library/framework/language feature should be used.

It's a boost to many boring tasks but anything more complex takes as much work to setup and maintain the environment for a LLM to understand the context, the codebase, the services' relationships, the internal knowledge, the pieces of infrastructure, as it does for me to just do the work.

I've been hybridising as much as I can, when I feel there's something a LLM would be good at I do the foundational work to set it up, and prompt it incrementally to work on the task so I can review each step before it goes haywire (which it usually does), it takes effort to read what's been generated, explain what it did wrong so it can correct course, and iteratively build 80% of the solution, most times it's not able to completely finish it since there's a lot of domain knowledge that isn't documented (and there's no point in documenting since it changes often enough). Otherwise it's been more productive to just do the work myself: get pen and paper to think through the task, break it down after I have a potential solution, and use LLMs to just do the very boring scaffolding for the task.

Does it help me to get unstuck when there's some boring but straightforward thing to do? Absolutely. Has it ever managed to finish a complex task even after being given all the context, setup the Markdown documentation, explain the dependencies, the project's purpose, etc.? No, it hasn't, not even close, in many cases it gave me more work to actually massage the code it wrote into something useful than if I had done it myself. I'm tired of trying the many approaches people seem to praise about and see it crumble, I spent a whole week in 2 of our services writing all the Markdown files, iterating through them to fix any missing context it could need, and every single time it broke down at some point while trying to execute a task so, for now, I just decided to use it as a nice tool and stopped getting anxious about "missing out".

Today is not so bad indeed, we've seen between 1/5 and 1/3 in recent weeks. Quite the dilution. Granted, there's been a lot of releases lately.

I agree that there's a lot of other stuff though, even on the worst days.

My morale is extremely low. But I have different circumstances: I live under war, with my future life perspectives unknown. Software engineering, apart from being enjoyable, provided the sense of security. I felt that I could at least either relocate to some cheap country and work remotely, or attempt to relocate to an expensive country with good jobs.

With AI, the future seems just so much worse for me. I feel that productivity boost will not benefit me in any way (apart from some distant trickle down dream). I expect the outsource, and remote work in general to be impacted negatively the most. Maybe there's going to be some defensive measures to protect domestic specialists, but that wouldn't apply to me anyway unless I relocate (and probably acquire citizenship).

>Is your company hiring more/ have they stopped hiring software engineers

Stopped hiring completely and reduced workforce, but the reasons stated were financial, not AI.

>Is the management team putting more pressure to get more things done

with less workforce, there is naturally more work to do. But I can't say there is a change in pressure, and no one forces AI upon you.