don't worry, soon there will be no "software engineering" careers anymore.
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
191–200 of 1001 posts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#192Yeah the writing is on the wall. Not just for knowledge work, but for jobs in general, as I've been saying in other comments. The era of wage labour, and this dominant economic system, is coming to an end. There's no way it can coexist with AI, but it also needs to continuously push for better AI, which means there's no stopping it. The only thing to do really is brace for the disruption - which will likely be pretty rough - and hope governments play their role properly to ease the transition.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#193[flagged]
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#194This doesn’t read to me as someone who is sincerely impressed or rather surprised what ai is capable off. This reads like someone is trying to convince me, that ai is just this good, and that the author is telling me to use more ai. To me this sounds like: Trust me, it’s really bad, i know what I’m talking about. Just lean into it, or change profession.
I was thinking maybe the author really likes Datadog MCP or has some kind of conflict of interest. It's weird to see this content in HN.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#195> 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.
I think the author downplays how much of that knowledge is used on knowing what to zoom in on, what to prompt, or what to look for.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#196Earlier 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…
what am i missing? you take a spec and create tests, every little thing you use another ai to verify these tests against the spec you review the tests vs the spec (at one point human review) you put the tests off limits to change / wall them. you let the ai write the software that fulfills the tests. there will be some gaps where you repeat the cycle above if the tests fulfill the spec, the code will fulfill the spec
If each step requires micro-steps iterating with an LLM with human review to prevent hallucinations creeping in.. at some point you might just be better off letting the human do the work.
Particularly as tokenmaxxing has ended and people are being charged more economic prices. If the pricing 5-10x the way Uber,etc did on the path to profitability.. even more so.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#197Earlier 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…
what am i missing? you take a spec and create tests, every little thing you use another ai to verify these tests against the spec you review the tests vs the spec (at one point human review) you put the tests off limits to change / wall them. you let the ai write the software that fulfills the tests. there will be some gaps where you repeat the cycle above if the tests fulfill the spec, the code will fulfill the spec
IME, regulatory compliance is something you are rarely able to test for in a nice little box or with well-known suite. So there's no easy "this complies" in many situations, no matter how many lawyers, compliance officers, and llm's you run it past.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#198This is good. We want less barrier to entry and more competition in software.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#199Wut? 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…
Reg PRs - for the ones with complex requirements what I am seeing is that time to initial PR is very short, and a ping-pong between the reviewer and developer begins, because in my cases (not all) the developer vibe-coded parts, and they didn't really understand the requirements deeply or their code, and it takes multiple iterations for them to fix it. You can argue this is a human problem but this is the net effect I'm seeing.
I am not sure but for complex cases it seems to me that the earlier sum of moderately long PR time + moderately long review time has been replaced by very short PR time + even longer review time. I am not sure if there's a net gain in these cases. Sometimes even if the code is functionally correct, it's verbose enough (e.g., too many intermediate functions) that I think they will impact future reviews.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
what am i missing? you take a spec and create tests, every little thing you use another ai to verify these tests against the spec you review the tests vs the spec (at one point human review) you put the tests off limits to change / wall them. you let the ai write the software that fulfills the tests. there will be some gaps where you repeat the cycle above if the tests fulfill the spec, the code will fulfill the spec
IME, regulatory compliance is something you are rarely able to test for in a nice little box or with well-known suite. So there's no easy "this complies" in many situations, no matter how many lawyers, compliance officers, and llm's you run it past.
so, whats the difference to human engineering?
other than there are "internal micro feedback loops" during development?