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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

#171

Post by margalabargala »

SuperV1234 wrote: post #157
t34t34r43 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting this under a burner so I don't dox myself: I work in FinTech on a regulated product. We have access to Mythos. Mythos identified part of our codebase that it confidently asserted was not complaint with a particular regulation and we were at grave risk by allowing it to operate the way it was. Except this was not the case, it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required (I know this because…

Is that all that Mythos did? Did it find any real potential issue, optimization/simplification opportunities, or sparked any thought-provoking discussion within your organization? Or was it purely a net negative experience?

Read their comment. It's a negative anecdote surrounded by them using genAI all the time.

You're the only one coming away thinking there was a net negative experience.

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

#173

Post by johnbarron »

vulcan01 wrote: post #159
gaiagraphia wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a net positive though? (not sure about the cost human and tech cost). I'm guessing that without using Mythos, those conversations would never have been had, and confidence in the compliance of the product would've been lower. I love using AI tools as casinos. It's epic in helping to forge ideas and kickstart thought processes. You basically have the entirety of world knowledge at your fingertips to have a…

your parent: > the code in question had already been reviewed by human counsel

They cant read all comments they comment on...

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

#174

Post by deckar01 »

dmos62 wrote: post #68

What work remains valuable when implementation becomes cheap? How about moving closer to ownership? I think that in a product-centric or mission-centric perspective, effective automation is good, because it frees you up to do other important things. E.g., in gardening, time spent weeding, is time not spent surviving slug armageddon.

Businesses like a record of reliability, so devs going solo with AI is going to be a hard sell. I think we will know that AI is actually good enough when these AI providers start absorbing project management companies and hiring contractors to use their product instead of selling subscriptions.

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

#175

Post by hypeatei »

I'm not worried. You cannot hold a machine accountable and there's no way OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. are going to take on that kind of liability if some code resulted in a major outage or a lawsuit. Perhaps that's the signal I'd be looking for: so much confidence in the product that they put their money where their mouth is.

Besides, you can look at the websites/apps/software you use everyday and evaluate whether or not the agentic era has produced better results. Personally, there's still plenty of bugs and annoyances. Banks still using SMS 2FA, library breakages in minor version bumps, inconsistent UIs between web and mobile, etc.

If all that was a hurdle before... because humans, regulations, or something else... then surely these magical machines that can supposedly replace us and do it much faster would've handled it by now? And they wouldn't introduce more bugs[0], would they? ;)

0: https://www.0xsid.com/blog/meta-account-takeover-fiasco

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

#176

Post by rvz »

t34t34r43 wrote: post #113
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…

Posting this under a burner so I don't dox myself: I work in FinTech on a regulated product. We have access to Mythos. Mythos identified part of our codebase that it confidently asserted was not complaint with a particular regulation and we were at grave risk by allowing it to operate the way it was. Except this was not the case, it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required (I know this because…

100%. Unfortunately those not in the depths of mission critical systems or regulated products will continue to believe that producing tons of code quickly using LLMs without humans in these systems is acceptable.

Here's an example of what we will continue to see with folks fully immersed in gen AI psychosis:

"The creator of claude code said that he no longer writes code for about 6 months and now has Claude doing all his work now. He also said recently that he no longer prompts Claude and now has it running in loops and it is self-improving itself and performing better than a human!"

If the code produced by the LLM is perfect, the LLM takes the credit. But when a disaster happens, you cannot blame the LLM and it then falls on the human who did it.

I don't think SWEs heavily vibe-coding with LLMs realize the risk in not understanding what the code the LLM being produced is doing even after generating tests (lol). We will see more of this too. [0]

[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...

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

#177

Post by shevy-java »

I don't see it as negatively, in that there are specific trade-offs.

For one: LLMs make a lot of mistakes. We all see that when they hallucinate search results and what not. But, possibly even more important than that, you ultimately become dependent on some big company via LLMs. Perhaps that trade-off is worth it for some companies, but I personally don't want to become dependent on these companies. I actually consider it a hostile attack from the USA, and under Trump this is even more obvious.

Another thing that sucks by LLMs is documentation. They generate a lot of crap that is useless. So that's another area where humans could be better.

Admittedly a lot of vibe-coded AI slop is also useful in some ways, but it has started to make me rather angry in general - youtube already spoiled me here. I no longer want to see ANY AI videos at all whatsoever. It just wastes my time. I am not here to empower skynet version 20.2.

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

#178

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

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…

> 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 about, is regularly wrong, frequently myopic, and just outright dumb constantly. It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track.

I'd posit there's another layer. You have domain knowledge, certainly. But more valuable still is the wisdom to find more.

Anthropic and OpenAI can stick financial regulations in the training data all they want, but the AI systems will never learn to anticipate the future, or reach out to clients, partners, or regulators in complicated situations.

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

#179

Post by steveBK123 »

> when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents

It's still funny that 4 years into this mania the models can hallucinate basic ground truths, humans are increasingly not reviewing the output, and misusing LLMs where simple automation would suffice.

My wife does project management and works with a lot of tech leads. They came to her with a project plan deck, and she started questioning some weird dates.

The LLM was able to pull artifacts out of their issuer tracker, but it just.. hallucinated some of the dates in the process of creating a project plan deck out of the underlying data. These guys didn't care to review and notice, and who knows what else it hallucinated content wise. They were happy to send this project plan multiple levels up the food chain with hallucinated unreviewed dates.

5 years ago they would have just written a script and had none of this mess.

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

#180

Post by cheschire »

Lionga wrote: post #138
t34t34r43 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting this under a burner so I don't dox myself: I work in FinTech on a regulated product. We have access to Mythos. Mythos identified part of our codebase that it confidently asserted was not complaint with a particular regulation and we were at grave risk by allowing it to operate the way it was. Except this was not the case, it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required (I know this because…

Have you added "Make no mistakes" to the proompt? Mythos can't go wrong then, must be a skill issue.

its shocking people don't realize you're being ironic
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