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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

#381

Post by KalMann »

bel8 wrote: post #292
Aperocky wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not pre-trained using the summary of all human knowledge over all of history. Yet we make certain decisions with much more ease. We are much more limited, but we fundamentally work differently. Hence adding more parameter like certain companies are doing isn't necessarily going to help. We need to rethink how LLM work, or how it work in tandem with something that's completely different. I think it's doable, I…

> We are not pre-trained using the summary of all human knowledge over all of history. But we are? That's our education system. The only reason school doesn't try to shove more information in our brains is because we hit bandwidth limits.

> But we are? That's our education system.

That is not what the education system does. That's an obvious distortion of reality. People train over billions of documents to statistically predict the next word to gain and understanding of language. LLMs do this statistical processing in order to mimic humans natural language learning ability. And there has been continued evidence of the limitations of this approach to accurately mimic the totality of human cognition.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#382

Post by Peanuts99 »

thisisit wrote: post #163
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…

Lot of people don't seem to get that - It is easier to go from terrible to average but much harder to go from average to good. I am sure AI bros are same people who were convinced consumer grade fully automated driving was going happen "by end of the year" for last 7 years.

I agree with the statement and think a lot of people miss this, but I also wonder how many people probably don't care for good, they only care for 'good enough'.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#383

Post by logicchains »

bel8 wrote: post #255
hibikir wrote: post #237

In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50. Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a…

But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers? In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?

>what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers?

They need to go into business for themselves, and become capital owners, who benefit from AI, not workers who are replaced by it. AI won't be able to compete at entrepreneurship unless robots are given autonomy and property rights like humans, which is quite unlikely to happen any time soon.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#384

Post by koonsolo »

anon84873628 wrote: post #354
WorldMaker wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree with you, but a big drawback is that the accuracy or confidence of their output can't be estimated.

So they surely know a lot, but you are never sure if the info is correct or not.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#385

Post by ansk »

udave wrote: post #327
ansk wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're getting at, but determinism isn't the right word either. LLMs are fundamentally deterministic -- they are pure functions which output text as a function of the input text and the network parameters[1]. Depending on your views on free will, it could be effectively argued that humans are deterministic as well. The concept you're touching on is the idea that LLMs (and humans) are functions which are in…

Let's be real, if you and I both ask claude to generate a feature on the same project, what are the chances that it spits out 100% replicated code? But if we are to build the project using a Dockerfile, we will get the same binary and the same image. Products around LLMs are non deterministic unlike compilers.

I can assure you that a fully deterministic and equally effective claude is possible to build. And yes, that would mean identical prompts would yield 100% identical output 100% of the time. It would still make the occasional logical or factual error, but it would do so deterministically. Would this solve any of the problems with building reliable programs using LLMs?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#386

Post by FatherOfCurses »

sefrost wrote: post #147
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…

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?

Sneering at "kids these days"

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#387

Post by laughing_man »

nitwit005 wrote: post #364
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. Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. > People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. I'm not sure anyone is actually working on those. People talk about spending all day writing CRUD apps here, but if you suggest there are alrea…

>Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker.

Yes. Yes, that's exactly what we're going to see, and more swiftly than people are generally comfortable with. What are we going to do with all those cubicle dwellers?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#388

Post by KalMann »

coldtea wrote: post #221
Aperocky wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. That's where we fundamentally disagree about. Yes, AI is coming for solution formulation, absolutely, but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. Until the day LLMs are not statistical machine with a context limit, this will hold. Someone need to make something that has intent and purpose, and evidently now not by adding another 10T to the LLM p…

> but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. And the human mind is not?

I can give you the exact mathematical formula used to statistically optimize the output of a neural network from input examples. Can you do the same for the brain?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#389

Post by pear01 »

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…

Let's also not forget a lot of the market edge of SWEs comes in knowing how to navigate these parts. The fact you needed to be reasonably fluent in a language was already a barrier to entry which meant in better times new grads could earn six figures at their first job just for putting in that effort.

Maybe you will still be needed. That is one question. How well you will be paid and treated when the barrier to entry is now "I can think" is another. As the parent indicates, most people doing software are not doing things akin to pure math. I don't think most SWEs want that lifestyle anyway.

It's ok. You shouldn't fight the coming change. Instead use the time we still have to fight for more equal outcomes (vote for politicians that support UBI, Medicare for all). The longer you delude yourself that you are uniquely needed in an increasingly mechanized world the worse all our outcomes will be.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#390

Post by QuercusMax »

hibikir wrote: post #237

In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50. Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a…

For me - I'm 43, and used to be an extremely productive Java/Swing developer after 15 years of experience, and I knew all my tools inside and out. But I no longer work at that company (which doesn't exist any more), and it takes me a lot longer to learn how to be effective with the new tools I'm using simply because I haven't had a decade to learn the ins and outs of the new environments I'm working with.

So AI saves me immense amounts of time figuring out how to write proper syntax, remembering the ins and outs of unit testing frameworks, etc. If I stick around for a year or three I'm sure I'll get much much faster and learn these tools better.

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