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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

seangoedecke.com

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#121

Post by dmazzoni »

KronisLV wrote: post #101
bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions The AI is coming for that too. You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not ev…

There are periods of time where I might spend 80% of my time "coding", meaning I have minimal meetings and other responsibilities.

However, even out of that 80% of my time, what fraction is actually spent "writing code"?

AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work:

- Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback

There are times when AI can do the "write the code" portion 10x faster than I could, but if it's production code that actually matters, by the time I actually review the code, I doubt it's more than 2x.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#122

Post by bborud »

KronisLV wrote: post #101
bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions The AI is coming for that too. You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not ev…

> The AI is coming for that too.

To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need.

This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs and suchlike. He spent 6 months working in the company. On the factory floor, in the logistics department, in procurement, in accounting and even shadowing the board. Then he delivered a proposal for how to restructure the parts of the company, change manufacturing processes, and show how logistics and procurement could be optimized if you saw them as two parts in a bigger dance.

He redesigned the company so that it could a) be automated, and b) leverage automation to increase the efficiency of several parts of the business. THEN, he started planning how to write the software (this was the 80s after all), and then we started implementing it.

Now think about what went into this. For instance we changed a lot of what happened on the factory floor. Because my boss had actually worked it. So he knew what pain points existed. Pain points even the factory workers didn't know how to address because they didn't know that they could be addressed.

I was naive. I thought this was how everyone approached "software projects". People generally don't. But it did teach me that the job isn't writing code. It is reasoning about complex systems that often are not even known to those who are parts of it.

And this is for _boring_ software that requires very little creativity and mostly zero novelty. Now imagine how you do novel things.

> People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.

You make it sound like it is a bad thing that certain tasks become easier.

I spent a lot of time writing CRUD stuff. Because the things i really want to work on depend on them. I don't enjoy what is essentially boilerplate. Who does? If you can do the same job in 1/20 the time, then how is this a bad thing?

It is only a bad thing if writing CRUD webapps is the limit of your ability. We don't argue for banning excavators because it puts people with shovels out of work. We find more meaningful things for them to do and become more productive. New classes of work becomes low-skilled jobs.

If you have been doing software for a while, you are probably doing some subset of this. But these things are hard to articulate. It is hard to articulate because it is not something we think about. Like walking: easy for us to do, hard to program a robot to do it.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#123

Post by AbbeFaria »

There’s a hierarchy amongst knowledge work and AI hasn’t yet been able to do the work that is rare and valuable.

Over the past two decades, there have been lot of solved problems like building boring scalable web apps, UX design etc and AI is fairly good at this, enough so that good prompting can get you very far. This shouldn’t be a surprise, there’s a lot of publicly available data for this (GitHub repos etc).

On the other hand, there are rarer Computer science problems like designing efficient Datacenters, GPUs, DL models. Think about problems that someone of Jeff Dean’s or James Hamilton’s (AWS SVP) or a skilled Computer Architecture researcher like David Paterson’s ability would solve. These are incredibly hard and rare problems and AI hasn’t been able to make much progress in these areas. That’s true for other sciences as well.

If you’re a regular Joe like me who builds boring CRUD apps, AI is coming for you.

What I mean is if you are working on incredibly hard and rare problems that require rare skills and also those problems don’t have publicly available data that LLMs can be trained on, you’re safe from being “automated” away. If not, you must plan accordingly. Also if you’re a skilled manager (in any field) AI cannot replace you, highly skilled managers that can get the best out of their teams have rare skills that aren’t easily replicable even amongst humans much less AI. Although, if going forward we need fewer developers we will need fewer managers too.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#124

Post by passivepinetree »

mariopt wrote: post #39

Why are we upvoting this? Virtually, the entire blog is about AI with a ridiculous publishing rate ( https://www.seangoedecke.com/page/5 ), funny how I can look at this site HTML and know right away it was done with AI. Can we stop upvoting vibe published articles? The arguments are flawed and don't even make sense to anyone who does software

I think you're being a bit harsh here.

Yes, the blog is mostly about AI, and yes, he publishes very frequently. But his articles don't read like AI and he claims not to have used it in his writing (https://www.seangoedecke.com/avoid-ai-writing/). And regardless of how you feel about the content, the community has clearly decided it's worthwhile as a discussion point.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#125

Post by torben-friis »

huani wrote: post #41
torben-friis wrote: post #15

Unless I'm missing something, there's an obvious logic issue here. If we truly need to sacrifice our skill to be productive by using LLMs that atrophy us, then the only devs that have a limited lifespan are us. The next ones won't have a skillset to atrophy since they won't have built it through manual work. Also, I hereby propose to publicly ban the "LLMs generating code are like compilers generating machine code" a…

why is the LLM-compiler analogy flawed? Is it only because LLM output is non deterministic?

Besides probabilistic and non reproducible output, programming languages are designed to be unambiguous and explicit, and human language doesn't have that.

For(){} it's normally either undefined or has a specific meaning. "Then iterate and do x" might mean many subtly different things.

Most programmers never deal with a compiler bug in their whole career, and can dismiss the possibility. For LLMs it would be hard to even define what a "compiler bug" would be since there is no specification for English.

Then there's the fact that models generally don't guarantee anything at all. Sonnet can change under your feet.

Models also degrade as the context window gets larger. Compilers handle one line just the same as 20.

I could keep going, there's so many fundamental differences in the process that the analogy only serves to provide a false feeling of security.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#126

Post by fooker »

rayiner wrote: post #105
jerf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2020, there are two companies that are competitors with each other. They each employ 100 programmers to do their job, and we all know how those organizations operated; perpetually behind, each feature added generating yet more possible future features, we've all lived it and are still largely living it today. In 2026, both companies decide that AI can accelerate their developers by a factor of 10x. I'm not asserti…

Your hypothetical ignores the distribution of programmer talent. Company 1 can pay more per person and hire 10x programmers, who can then leverage AI to produce the same or more as Company 2. We have seen this in other knowledge industries. U.S. legal sector job count is about the same today as it was 20 years ago. But billing rates have exploded and revenues in the 200 largest firms have increased more than 50% afte…

I think paying significantly more was a very localized thing that happened for AI researchers who were familiar with the alchemy that made GPT4 suddenly work much better than anything else seen before.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#127

Post by golddust-gecko »

ryandvm wrote: post #104
bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

I dunno, man. I've been doing this for 20+ years and I think we're at a really important fork in the road where there are two possibilities. The first is that AI is achieving human-level expertise and capability, but since they're now being increasingly trained on their own output they are fighting an uphill battle against model collapse. In that case, perhaps AI is going to just sort of max out at "knowing everythin…

100% this.

I'll also add another factor: it's become increasingly clear at our company that AI-enabled humans are getting to the bottom of the backlog of feature ideas much quicker. This makes the 'good ideas' part of the business the rate limiting step. And those are definitely not increasing with AI, beyond that generated by the AI churn itself ("let's bolt on a chat experience or an MCP!")

So maybe the coding assistants don't get a 10x improvement any time soon, but we see engineering job market contraction because there aren't really enough good ideas to turn into code.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#128

Post by SoftTalker »

bborud wrote: post #122
KronisLV wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions The AI is coming for that too. You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not ev…

> The AI is coming for that too. To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need. This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs…

> To some degree yes, in practice, not so much.

We used to say that (not long ago, even) about the code-writing part. Why do we believe that LLMs are going to stop there? Why do we think they won't soon be able to talk to people, listen, and determine what they need? I think it's mostly a cope.

We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#129

Post by keybored »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

Pure wage workers should consider dropping the attitude about how tech progress will just make their inferiors in the same line of work be out of a job (hrmph good riddance etc.). Because this pseudo-progress could creep up on them as well.

Then you won’t have this just world of the deserving workers at all. Just formerly deserving workers and idiot billionaires like Musk (while the robots do all of the work).

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#130

Post by Rotundo »

fooker wrote: post #18

If by software engineering, one means typing code character by character into a text editor, sure it's going to be difficult to find someone to pay you for it. If you mean creating software, well we are creating more software than ever before and the definition of what software is has never been so diverse. I can see many different careers branching off from here.

Creating more software does not solve anything if that software is mostly a functional duplicate of other software. Or, in other words, all companies re-invent the wheel many times over. It doesn't matter if you 10x the development of software that brings nothing new besides being written in a shiny new framework.

We should, IMHO, start getting rid of most software. Go back to basics: what do you need, make that better, make it complete. Finish a piece of software for once.

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