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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

#101

Post by techblueberry »

p-e-w wrote: post #35
lelanthran wrote: post #14

To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end. Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a…

> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones. Turns out brains just aren’t as special as we thought.

> Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones.

How do you figure? We’ve already automated away way more manual labor jobs than we currently have.

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

#102

Post by verdverm »

trilogic wrote: post #75
verdverm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The saying goes... first we shape our tools, then they shape us We are now manufacturing intelligence (why it's artificial) and it shall be interesting to see how it shapes us individually and as a whole. While marching on May Day, the woman next to me made the comment that Ai will force every human and humanity to reflect on what it means to be human, all of us at the same time over a short time period. What makes a…

Interesting Tony, you seen to have been working for the AI since long time. We others are catching up but eventually all of us will be working for it, as directly or indirectly we are already doing. The "robot" was figurative cause we are no different from a machine, but that is too much for humans to comprehend.

I work for myself and the world, not for Ai. It's a tool without identity, but a damn good one that multiplies my capabilities.

I anticipate the first bifurcation to be wheat from chaff. Ai is going to do better at a job than say half the people, those who don't care about the effort they put in or the quality of their output. These people will have to come to terms with their mediocrity or blandness.

I'm still unsure what the good ideas are for when we reach a world without labor scarcity.

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

#103

Post by skepticATX »

The reason that I’m looking for an out is that it’s turned everyone I work with into imbeciles.

Nobody wants to think anymore. Coworkers are now just intermediaries for their LLMs. Talking to them is just talking to the LLM - sometimes directly copied and pasted, sometimes minimal effort to conceal what they’re doing. It is so disheartening.

And the sad part is, LLMs are incredible and can enable you to do much better work if you can stay in the loop, and stop focusing only on shipping speed. But from what I have observed, very few people care to do this. Who cares about substance when middle management thinks your productivity is 10x?

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

#104

Post by tsouth2 »

I've wondered about this a lot. I am brand new to software engineering, fully powered by AI coding. Traditional software engineers have to pivot hard or the are going to be left in the dust. The slow, methodical, take two days to put a change on a production site approach are over. I'm shipping exponentially faster than a co-worker who hasn't embraced AI yet.

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

#105

Post by ohyes »

LLM is a powerful tool but it still doesn’t have the context that a person would have. A million tokens is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall context that the person guiding the LLM needs to keep it on track and being productive.

If you’re not a good engineer and you don’t have the domain knowledge, your token costs will be very high for whatever gets shipped, because you won’t be able to provide the context necessary to prompt machine efficiently.

Claude will still very often hallucinate bugs, explanations, domain requirements, that have no basis in reality. It will offer fixes and improvements that are pretty standard but not optimal. This is correctable if you catch it, but you need to review every line of code and comment, because in addition to being obviously wrong, it is often very subtle in the wrongness. For every bit of “slop” there is almost microslop, the places where it just kind of confidently guesses… and doesn’t tell you… but sometimes is correct anyway.

The “problem” is there’s less low hanging fruit. You have to know a lot to add value beyond being a middleman gating the slop. You have to really pay attention to the details to find some of the errors that it’s making.

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

#106

Post by gdiamos »

zaphirplane wrote: post #73
gdiamos wrote: post #43

What I tell my team to do is to drop using so many cloud saas apps, and build more themselves using LLMs. I’m not planning on firing people, but I am planning on building more, using more tokens, and less app subscriptions. One aspect of building that doesn’t erode is human values. LLMs don’t create software with zero direction and although I do have 12 agents building constantly, I run out of attention to increase t…

How strange or at least unintuitive. Buying should be cheaper than creating for a customer of 1

Think about the worst enterprise SaaS apps you have used…

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

#107

Post by zmgsabst »

cejast wrote: post #57

> All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable. Is it really though? Access to information is quicker, but you still need to know what ‘good’ looks like to leverage it effectively. I can prompt my way to a medical diagnosis, but I’d still want to run it by a doctor.

I’ve found it extremely hard to get LLMs to exit the basin of your current knowledge.

One of my tests for new models is to ask about a concept I already know the mathematical model for, but as if I don’t. So far, they all answer the same way:

1. Convoluted explanations about how it kinda-sorta is common terms.

2. If you follow up with the correct mathematical term, it immediately claims that’s correct and the right way to model it.

3. If you ask it why it didn’t use that term for your question, the LLM gives some version of explaining that it tried to match your language.

I have no choice but to assume the model behaves similarly other times — and that I am largely trapped in a basin of my own ignorance, when using LLMs.

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

#108

Post by bob1029 »

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…

> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.

What kind of domains did you have in mind?

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by gdiamos »

dominotw wrote: post #49
gdiamos wrote: post #43

What I tell my team to do is to drop using so many cloud saas apps, and build more themselves using LLMs. I’m not planning on firing people, but I am planning on building more, using more tokens, and less app subscriptions. One aspect of building that doesn’t erode is human values. LLMs don’t create software with zero direction and although I do have 12 agents building constantly, I run out of attention to increase t…

you dont need to vibe code shitty apps. you just need to learn how to use apps like codex, claude desktop.

I don’t get it. That’s what I am using.
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