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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

#271

Post by deanc »

sillyfluke wrote: post #237
deanc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on projects in the airline and health industry which are highly regulated too. The regulations can be incredibly difficult to process and implement, and make sure you adhere to everything correctly. I've been involved in multiple scenarios where people have made false assertions about compliance or lack of. I'd still place a bet that the SOA models make _far_ less mistakes than humans.

>I'd still place a bet that the SOA models make _far_ less mistakes than humans. Genuine question: your top coder seems to be producing the most error-free code from your perspective, has the deepest knowledge of the architecture and codebase, and is faster on the trigger than the others. But your top coder has proven and verifiable dementia, where they will confidently assume the existence of apis and code that do n…

Your top coder has guard rails in place to prevent him autonomously going free - right? This is how you should approach agentic development with LLMs. Like it or not, we are the final bastion, the gatekeepers. The hallucination thing I think is mostly overblown and from speaking to colleagues it seems to vary wildly depending on which model and harness you are using - always go for SOA. In the last 3 months I can count on one hand where it's done something wrong and that's primarily as I'm operating it with guard rails and giving it context.

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

#272

Post by IshKebab »

runamuck wrote: post #97
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.

I have a historic house with a hand carved/ uniquely shaped door. The jamb rotted and we paid a woodworker $4k to create a replacement. The door itself would easily cost $25k to replace. So, move to a major historic area with hand carved doors and you could make some decent money.

You paid $4k because it's a niche task that isn't much in demand.

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

#273

Post by worldthruword »

hmokiguess wrote: post #259

I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care e…

> I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness".

https://x.com/chamath/status/2033385903520129161

> I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff. What's happening there? A lot of people play with their own little universe and get tired quickly, move away from it, and only a few prolific creators stay and turn it into a "job like" environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Sturgeon's law states, "Ninety percent of everything is crap". The adage was coined by American science fiction author and critic Theodore Sturgeon while defending the merits of the genre. Sturgeon observed that most works in any field were low quality. Therefore, science fiction was not uniquely inferior.

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

#274

Post by SoftTalker »

> I spent 10 years (even more when you account for non-profession experience) getting good at things that are becoming less and less valuable.

This is just how it is, and has always been in this industry. And it takes about 10 years to realize it.

When I started my career in software, businesses were still writing new code in COBOL. 10 years later those skills were pretty much useless, except for dwindling maintenance roles.

Then there was the client/server era. Then the web era. Then mobile. Then cloud, etc.

All the same functionality, written and re-written time and time again, using the latest popular stacks and methodologies.

I hope to be retiring in a few years and pretty much everything I have learned over nearly 40 years is no longer applicable or is at best losing relevancy to the way sofware is built today. And that's how it's always been.

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

#275

Post by pieceofcake »

Agents may have made 80% of your experience go to $0, but the other 20% is exponentially more valuable now. This outweighs your other losses.

The ability to orchestrate intelligence is a magnificent power that few have, and while barriers to entry will be eroded, it will take time and they won't be eroded fully. This is your edge.

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

#276

Post by whstl »

mattbee wrote: post #169
9dev wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'd still question it. The experience of just… knowing how a good architecture looks like without being able to really put it in words is what makes a good engineer to me. These people can pick up relevant regulations or industry terms and deliver value quickly enough.

How is "without being able to really put it in words" a mark of experience ? Surely an engineer should be able to justify why an architecture should be arranged the way it is!

It's perfectly possible to put that sort of knowledge into words, but not in a condensed "recipe" that can be explained in a meeting, that will go into a single Hacker News comment, that will cover all cases, or that will satisfy LLM users looking for the easy way out.

Pretty much every area of knowledge is full of those. That's why people publish books, that's why people go to college or get PhDs, that's why people with experience gets hired.

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

#277

Post by aogaili »

jplusequalt wrote: post #264
aogaili wrote: post #228

Software engineers with low self-esteem who built their entire identity as mechanical cognitive workers are having an identity crisis and spreading FUD. Currently, LLMs are nothing more than amplification tools that require significant steering. If you think your job is mainly to take input from POs or managers, translate it into if/else statements and loops, and review PRs, then you never really understood your role…

>You can sit and cry, or you can learn the tools and help shape the future. What exactly are you helping shape? The volume of your employers bank account?

Chinese Gen Zers are starting companies before graduating, people are generating music and starting their own studios, others are improving models and building harnesses, and the rest are on a mission to automate the entire knowledge economy—from healthcare to governance.

Regarding your employer's bank account: if that is all you were doing before, then that is all you will be doing after. You are just complaining about capitalism now. The irony, is that the means of production is now in the hands of millions. Those who are crying are those who paid their mortgages with for loops..well, I think they will continue doing so, with less hubris that's all. LLMs are nowhere near replacing full engineer.

So get a grip fellow engineers.

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

#278

Post by hmokiguess »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #262
hmokiguess wrote: post #259

I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care e…

> If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". They don't "solve" execution. If you're willing to push them enough, and put in place the system that they can actually get working code, they can solve execution - but that IS engineering!! They are far from doing that by default now (replacing engineering…

Totally, I meant that more in the lenses of how folks are perceiving it. They solve the execution part of the "one shot" aspect mentioned in the post. You still need to do a lot of plumbing, orchestration, supervision, etc. I think it will get cheaper and cheaper over time, though not magical enough to one shot a Rust compiler from "write a Rust compiler make no mistakes" haha.

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

#279

Post by kloop »

mattbee wrote: post #169
9dev wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'd still question it. The experience of just… knowing how a good architecture looks like without being able to really put it in words is what makes a good engineer to me. These people can pick up relevant regulations or industry terms and deliver value quickly enough.

How is "without being able to really put it in words" a mark of experience ? Surely an engineer should be able to justify why an architecture should be arranged the way it is!

You're not wrong that a rationale is required.

But the master knowing when to break the rules because of tacit knowledge without being able to explain it is a real effect

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

#280

Post by Yokohiii »

dakiol wrote: post #84
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 t…

> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.

I don't think this is true.

A good engineer doesn't have infinite throughput. In my opinion the best engineers should be constantly bottlenecked because they solve difficult problems. They don't have time for grunt work. Every company needs less than perfect engineers, AI assisted or not.

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