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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#351

Post by hjort-e »

geodel wrote: post #316
hjort-e wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?

It is irrelevant that complex frontend would be easy for AI or not. To me 1) how many unique complex frontends are needed out of total frontends that millions of sites out there need. 2) Will there be increase in need of such frontend engineers so other displaced folks can land a job there. I think it will be far fewer to have any positive impact on IT engineers' overall job prospects.

But that's equally true for any type of system. Frontend isn't inherently easier than other systems, so i was just wondering why you singled it out. To me AI just seems better at backends and database design

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#352

Post by snozolli »

vga1 wrote: post #155
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…

>bosses The AI is coming for those too.

Something like five to ten years ago, when AI hype was starting to hit media, one of the claims was that AI would come for middle-management first. Since middle-management can generally be described as collecting information from underlings and reporting information to upper management, their work was supposed to be easy to automate with AI. As far as I can tell, this hasn't proven to be true at all, and we software engineers proudly wrote ourselves out of work by constantly publishing our source code and discussing it openly.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#353

Post by ryandrake »

rootusrootus wrote: post #333
monknomo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

45% of folks sitting on their hands are going to have the free time to talk, and this group of people are skilled at organization. Are you planning on throwing your hands up and passively accepting whatever comes your way?

And at least in the US they have >45% of all the small arms weaponry. There is no bunker strong enough nor private army big enough if 100M people come for you.

They're probably be betting that the technology they will need to defend their bunkers, think autonomous kill-bots or whatever, will emerge before people start to riot.

Or they're planning to build an Elysium-like colony in the ocean or space, to keep the billionaire class far from danger.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#354

Post by anon84873628 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #177
ryandvm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> max out at "knowing everything" LLMs know nothing but are great at giving the illusion that they know stuff. (It's "mansplaining as a service"; it is easier to give confident answers every time, even if they are wrong, than to program actual knowledge.) Even your first case seems wildly optimistic. The second case is a lot of "maybes" and "we don't know how but we might figure it out" that seems like a lot to bet a…

I'm skeptical of LLM "reasoning" but they sure as hell know a lot. That's what the embeddings are: a giant semantic relationship between concepts.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#355

Post by PizzaBorsch »

hatthew wrote: post #332
sefrost wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 5% of your time is spent writing code? That sounds like a low estimate for most software engineers I work with. May I ask if you could estimate how you spend the other 95% of the time?

In no particular order - Meetings - Reading papers - Understanding legacy code - Reading internal news - Ad hoc chats with coworkers - Writing docs - Editing configs - Thinking about solutions - Slacking off - Analyzing results - Testing code - Reviewing PRs - Understanding others' ongoing projects

AI can do everything you listed except chats with coworkers and slacking off.

I just don't think you've utilized the most recent versions of codex or claude.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#356

Post by marcindulak »

geodel wrote: post #156
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…

Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing. One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability. Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends…

After hearing various similarly sounding opinions about CRUD being easy for LLMs, I started tracking how well LLMs handle a standard CRUD Django app I'm familiar with at https://github.com/marcindulak/learning-api-styles-gen-ai-ex....

So far it appears that LLMs still require constant hand-holding, even for a small educational CRUD app.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#357

Post by logicchains »

doug_durham wrote: post #184
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…

This is a bit of glib answer. Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API. OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to ge…

>OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to get the drill string put together.

Those two formulations represent different developers' approaches to the same task. The former being developers who are much better at planning than the latter.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#358

Post by hjort-e »

evilduck wrote: post #307
hjort-e wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?

Hubris. I don't mean this as a snarky jab. It's coming for anything software. I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend APIs, systems programming, embedded programming, they all seem equally threatened it's just a matter of time. Front end is easy to see in the AI web front end…

I 100% agree it's coming for everything. I'm just curious what the arguments would be for why frontend would be easier.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#359

Post by geodel »

m463 wrote: post #288
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…

- Compilers will make developers irrelevant ... - Compilers can write assembly language code - Compilers have -O3 now etc... Maybe we should rejoice. I remember dreading writing documentation, and now I would happily hand that off to AI.

It is indeed exciting (for you at least). The problem is for most people is not that AI is spewing out code and reading documentation while developer do more interesting things. It is that companies are handing over the job of those developers to AI itself.

So those ex-developers are free to do most interesting things in the world with little change of not relying on nice, steady paychecks every month.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#360

Post by xhevahir »

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…

The "apply my ability" is doing a lot of work, so to speak, in the above exchange. Work that might eventually well be automated away.
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