Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

seangoedecke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 809 posts

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#421

Post by platevoltage »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #214
pllbnk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem partially is that AI can also fix AI slop. At this point I am in doubt whether code quality matters anymore in most non-critical software. You can ask an LLM if the code has quality issues and refactor to a _better_ version. It will reason through, prepare a plan and refactor. So now with this "better" code you can expect that your LLM will be able to deliver higher quality results but that's all the qual…

> AI can also fix AI slop No it can't. AI knows nothing about software engineering, all it can do is generate code.

I'm currently being paid by a client to fix his AI slop.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#422

Post by wiseowise »

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.

Encyclopedia and Wikipedia know a lot too. Knowledge isn't much of use on its own, it's about how you use it.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#423

Post by ecocentrik »

pear01 wrote: post #412
ecocentrik wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no senior developers are banging their heads for hours over typos. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK3gT5e0

This is temporary. What is the SKILL.md equivalent going to be in five years? In ten? You don't already see a pattern emerging around solutions to encode that "professional experience" into the tools themselves? These LLMs can already incorporate our entire cultural corpus yet your "professional experience" is the threshold they won't cross?

The capacity of the person prompting it to understand is the threshold they won't cross. They can squeeze the gap as much as possible by dumbing down answers or slowly ramping up information complexity but there is a limit to comprehension.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#424

Post by truncate »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #294
davidw wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenting on Hacker News?

For those who claim to be developers who code no more than 5% of their time and resort to arguments like "we're already not writing machine code by hand for 50 years, how is AI different from a higher level language?", it's not commenting, it's shilling for the AI corpocracy on HN.

>> "we're already not writing machine code by hand for 50 years, how is AI different from a higher level language?"

I never got that argument. Compilers are formally proven, deterministic algorithms . If you understand what compiler does, you can have pretty good idea what it will produce. If it doesn't do that, its a bug. Definition of correctness is well defined by semantic equivalence.

LLMs are none of that. Its a fuzzy system that approximates your intent and does its best. I can make my intent more and more specific to get closer to what I want, but given all that is just regular spoken language its still open to interpretation. And all that is still quite useful, but I don't get the assembly language comparison here.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#426

Post by topherPedersen »

It's been absolutely astonishing to see software developers pick software development as the first profession to attempt to automate away. Couldn't you geniuses have picked any other profession to start with? And it's not just the developers at Anthropic & OpenAI, even at my own company, the rockstar developers were the first to try and automate away all of the software development jobs at our company.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#427

Post by forlorn_mammoth »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #411
bel8 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

With farming, you couldn't just start your own farm, because it requires farmland, and there's only so much of that. But those 6 software engineers can start their own companies, fire up their own team of agents. There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.

and buy their own health insurance, and find their own customers, ...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#428

Post by hoppp »

If you don't know how to code then you can't really influence the AI technically and that can result in everything being the same.

Maybe you want a react app and using redux for state would be the best for the specific case but the AI doesn't recommend it and you don't know, then you are missing out and can end up with something suboptimal This was just an example

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#429

Post by QuercusMax »

skydhash wrote: post #321
michaelrpeskin wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, I'm using LLMs as my abstraction to "junior engineer". A junior engineer isn't deterministic either. I find that if you treat the LLM output like a person's output, you're good. Or at least in my projects, it's been very successful. I don't have it generate more code than I can review, or if I give it a snippet to help me fix it, if it ends up re-writing it like an ambitious engineer would do, I tel…

The thing is you can quickly teach a Junior how to respect a specification contract, so that with very minimal oversight, you get the wanted implementation. And after a few years (or months), the communication overhead get shorter. What would have been multiple rounds of meetings and review sessions are a short email and one or two demos.

What I've been learning as a 20% "harness engineer" is that in order to get the models to "learn" you need to add both documentation and static checks, as well as often custom skills. My main project at work has issues where the AI will often get super confused and step on itself trying to run tests - so the answer is writing better docs (AGENTS.md) and providing deterministic tools to work with the projects.

Large software projects (I'm thinking google3) often have large amounts of both of those things, as they're always getting new developers joining.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#430

Post by pzo »

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.

it's nondeterministic because we chosen it by having higher 'temperature' in settings. I bet if you run open weights model with temperature 0 and on the same device the same prompt and turn off parallelism you will have more deterministic result (excluding some floating point operations).
Post reply on HN