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

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

#81

Post by enormousness »

keyle wrote: post #34

I sympathise with the author being in the same boat, largely. I just want to emphasise a point... Calculators give 100% correct answers and yet we still hire accountants; for the simple fact that we don't want all to be accountants. People will hire software engineers for the simple fact that they do not want to be software engineers.

Accountants have specialized domain knowledge (laws, regulations, procedures, bureaucracy etc.) that goes well beyond what a calculator can do.

If we apply the same argument to software engineering I think it's a good point... just maybe not the one you intended to make.

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

#82

Post by normanthreep »

computers are made for automation. programmers were always working on automating things, making other things obsolete, and we have been killing jobs for decades. did you really think we would suddenly stop when it's your job? i'm happy this is happening, genuinely giddy

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

#83

Post by mahogany »

leoncos wrote: post #6

The last sentence in the article is correct: "Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession." As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game. In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People…

> As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game.

And what sort of economic system do you imagine will be in place to support billions of people being able to just play Go all day long? How do you imagine the large capitalistic global powers transitioning into that state?

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

#84

Post by dakiol »

iandanforth wrote: post #18

Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks…

> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track.

But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.

This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading this thinks they are in top the 10-5% of their company/city/country, and therefore they think they are not "mediocre" engineers that can get affected by the introduction of LLMs. Statistically, they are probably wrong. So, it's all about ego. Chances are you are not a rockstar and LLMs will eventually take over your job.

As usual, the only winners here are corporations and executives. Most of us are the last monkeys in the chain, and so we'll get screwed.

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

#86

Post by anygivnthursday »

keyle wrote: post #34

I sympathise with the author being in the same boat, largely. I just want to emphasise a point... Calculators give 100% correct answers and yet we still hire accountants; for the simple fact that we don't want all to be accountants. People will hire software engineers for the simple fact that they do not want to be software engineers.

With todays LLMs, yes. But if they can ever reach a level of a contractor in a reliable way and companies offering them willing to take responsibility (because confidence is high and rest is insured), then one can just hire a cheap AI agent to fulfill a contract - design, implement, deploy, run and maintain your service/website like the engineer before.

Calculators are not a replacement for accountants, online accounting services are in many cases. Which again can be run by an AI if they reach that level of reliability.

Today with LLMs this is still sci-fi, though.

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

#87

Post by dchftcs »

cassianoleal wrote: post #15

> The company is now hiring again for a few roles and domain familiarity is not a strong differentiator anymore. We used to list "Software Engineer - Area". Now it's just "Software Engineer" and the team assignment comes after the offer is accepted. > Of course, this is good for brilliant engineers that never had the chance to get deep into the domain and now have better chances at getting a job, but it's also sad to…

The development and acquisition of valuable domain knowledge is a hard, risky, expensive and slow process. Because the valuable domain knowledge isn't yesterday's, it's today's and tomorrow's. In fields where domain knowledge matters, it is also deeply intertwined with engineering - you won't task Jeff Dean to develop Unreal Engine from scratch.

With that said, there are still many SWE principles that are not fully internalized or adequately practiced by domain knowledge experts, and that will remain the case as much as domain knowledge remains valuable, because software engineering is yet but another domain.

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

#88

Post by nevertoolate »

leoncos wrote: post #6

The last sentence in the article is correct: "Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession." As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game. In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People…

So you believe that your work will be done by AI and you will enjoy life more? This is not a loaded question, just trying to understand what your future ideal day / week would look like as an "ai optimist".

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

#89

Post by avocadoking »

josephg wrote: post #16
lelanthran wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software. A small percentage of the market, maybe a fraction of a percent, are still willing to pay for hand-built goods - bonus if it's thoroughly modern but retro (steam-punk keyboards, maybe). Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built s…

> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software. People are increasingly associating “AI art” with cheap slop. I wonder if the same will ever happen to programming.

Only if the quality is bad. And users normally can only judge this when something is not working. So maybe only badly written/tested software will get labeled ai slop.

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

#90

Post by mmcnl »

mactavish88 wrote: post #48

> I still have one pillar standing, though: code quality and software architecture - what's now being reduced to being called "taste". Genuine question: what exactly is "quality"? It's something I've been trying to understand for a very long time. It seems like it's entirely contextual, and it has both subjective and objective facets (the latter only for quantifiable things, and still entirely contextual).

Good question indeed, I think quality matters less these days because it's trivial for an LLM to increase code quality.

Quality is usually observed from a human perspective. But in my experience, codebases that humans would judge as "low quality" are actually fine for LLMs. They don't have as much trouble as we do with spaghetti code. They don't have problems with readability or obscure syntax, it's all perfectly fine for them. They don't care about indentation either.

Also it's really easy to increase the quality of the code base. You can just prompt to add unit test coverage and it will. You can prompt the LLM to handle edge cases better and it will (you don't even have to specify which, it helps, but it's optional). If you want to have better separation of concerns, just ask the LLM to have more separation of concerns and you'll have it. Documentation lacking? Just one prompt away. More robust build pipeline? You get the idea.

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