LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

Maybe just maybe here in HN we are in an echo chamber that is convincing us that there is a theoretical limit to how far the LLMs can make progress. It’s not unthinkable that LLMs will make better overall architectural decisions or follow the good practices better or understand the problem in bigger picture (more access to company/product context already makes a huge difference)

Lots of jobs have been automated away and careers based on those jobs faded away in history. Maybe in near future there won’t be a ton of opportunities for software engineers in the traditional form. I’m also embracing for that future.

There were people called calculators that did manual calculations in the past. There were people hand weaving all the fabric. There were people painting cars in the factory. All those jobs are gone for the most part.

We are sitting here portending there is going to be demand for software engineers managing those engineer robots but let’s be real. The demand for software is not increasing at the rate software engineering is becoming efficient using those robots. Some (many) of us have to find new careers.

This has been said millions of times but yet you felt the need to say this again. maybe our jobs are safe :)

My career path is suprisingly similar to the author's. Weirdly enough, what he takes as the first pillar to fall is the one I see most undamaged currently.

LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations. They're great at refactoring, translating between languages, tracing bugs on existing code even, but there is always many things subtly wrong iterating and expanding our domain.

This might be because the companies I worked for happen to be tackling complex domains precisely for moat-building reasons. They stay in business explicitly because there's not a book out there you can read to build a clone, the knowhow stays inside.

Also, a fintech whose managers recommend speeding up design docs with AI sounds way too careless to be in the money handling business. It's way, way too easy to end up with millions incorrectly allocated, particularly if you deal with high volumes of small transactions. These bugs are always a bitch to deal with because correcting the logic is just step one, you then have to correct all the wrongly calculated data in immutable DBs, move around the red tape and client comms, and your fix is bound to become a gotcha that new features and observability have to take into account ("remember that there's a bump in the data in february 2 because we had incident X".)

I think this experience is universal. The answer is the same as always has been - develop skills that are becoming most important. Right now that is (at least from what I can see): - Data analysis, data pipelines, models, etc. - Tacit business knowledge - architecture and design patterns (always has been, but now the scale os larger so this is even more important)

It's harsh but nobody cares if a model or a human made a system.

The "good" bits are that now automating anything and providing value from software is much easier. If I have an idea or a nitpick somewhere, I can just do it, up to a limit (which is quickly rising).

I have always been a generalist and generally interested in a very wide array of things, and this period has been the most exciting in my engineering career (13y now). Learning about anything is so frictionless, looking back at my first learning experience - picking up a fat C++ book and spending days/weeks debugging, while I can romanticize that, I would never go back.

I can also now write software solo or with an extremely small team at a huge scale in comparison, and that is super exciting.

A lot of skills that took sleepless nights to acquire, they are "gone", but I still don't regret anything or wouldn't go back. Their "usefulness" has degraded, true, but this has always been the case with engineering.

We are now able to spend much more time thinking about utility rather than low level implementation and imo that's great.

We have many challenges ahead of us, and there are seriously bad things, the biggest one I have experienced is the hours are increasing and mental load is vastly increasing as well. As capacity, speed and leverage increases, so do expectations and hours, and that is probably a social problem.

Sorry for the unstructured stream of thoughts, and this is just an opinion (quite an unpopular one I believe), I hope your distress decays away for a new excitement and new opportunities.

Thanks for the article .

I might have been a bit broad with the brush. I can't speak for banks, but I can speak for the the fintech/money-movement space (e.g. Remitly, Wise, Revolut).

It's a race to get first-to-market for backend integrations/features. It's given rise to a culture of "move fast break things" where safety is only for some core features, but absolutely not for the constellation of other services we provide. Failure rates have increased almost a percentage point since Codegen/LLM adoption was mandated from up top.

You would think regulators would be on top of this, but our industry runs on all actors "self reporting" their outages. Most don't unless they can't hide it (>1h)