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

human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev

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

#201

Post by goodrun »

xyzal wrote: post #188
goodrun wrote: post #181

I read all the posts in this thread - but no one has a good idea to avoid software developer obsolescence. My guess is this profession has 5 more years. It was a good run while it lasted. All the other white collar workers are in the same boat. A pillar of the economy is going to be destroyed with no obvious replacement in sight.

Which other profession has the same amount of training data freely available for the taking?

Don't need much training data for bank/insurance/retail analyst work - it's just basic reasoning and data retrieval. If AI could crack the programming nut - one of the most intellectually challenging professions - it can handle the rest with ease. The only human role will be high level monitoring - and even this will be largely automated so fewer will be required.

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

#202

Post by 5701652400 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #4

> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession... 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.

look at layoffs.fyi. chances are he will be laid off pretty soon. and if not tomorrow, give it couple extra years until AI gets even better. it is one-way road, down the hill.

not woodworking. farming. get a pot of land and grow your own food. do not participate in economy at all. that's the only survival.

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

#203

Post by hypfer »

This feels fake/engineered but regardless of that also redundant.

It's the exact same story that we've heard countless times by now. Hosted on a blog with just a single post. Named in a way that suggests that said blog was created for this very single post.

What is there to learn from this other than LLMs seem to be bad for some people's psyches and that AI companies need these very stories to not get their funding shut down?

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

#204

Post by [deleted] »

franze wrote: post #184
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…

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

[deleted]

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

#205

Post by baq »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #178
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…

> AI systems will never learn to anticipate the future

Citation needed. I don’t see any reason these systems shouldn’t be able to speculate; indeed some would say that’s all they do, even about the past.

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

#206

Post by bloaf »

troupo wrote: post #162
SuperV1234 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In regulated industries none of those matter if the tool invents compliance issues or breaks compliance. The only thought-ptovoking discussion should be "why the hell do we have this stochastic parrot anywhere near out codebase"

I think that what technical people fail to understand is that a lot of the time, "compliance" is not the same as a binary compiles/does not compile. For a lot of rules/regulations, compliance means "making enough effort that legal is willing to back you up".

A system which will just randomly decide to give the legal team reasons to not back you up is:

* A system whose output will get brought up in lawsuits and make legal's job harder.

* A system that will make the dev team perpetually chase its tail while it oscillates between the several different valid interpretations of the rules.

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

#207

Post by throwatdem12311 »

My job as a staff engineer has turned into just reviewing slop farm vomit from offshore devs in Pakistan making pennies on the dollar given a slop code subscription and going wild.

I’ve lately just turned to having Claude do a quick /review, spot checking it, doing my own review and the. firing up some web agents to make the needed changes and just ignoring the back and forth because they don’t give a fuck anyway.

Just waiting for someone to notice and ask the obvious question at this point.

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

#210

Post by juleiie »

steveBK123 wrote: post #179

> 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 questi…

That’s why I use AI more like: Write a tool for me that does this.

Instead of directly: do this.

Preferably I would interweave code and AI queries where some function waits on prompt result too I think?? To avoid too big context hallucinations

I mean that would work for my use cases.

At least what I learned is that the less AI itself does in the context is the better so to say as critical LLM mistakes are approaching 100% of probability over time.

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