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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

#301

Post by pigpop »

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…

Suno is a good example. I've written lyrics for a lot of songs and then "produced" them with Suno, a process that involves dozens to hundreds of remix/cover/extend revisions or a lot of time in their editor to get it sounding the way I want it to. The songs are songs that I like and will listen to in my playlist but they haven't gotten much traction on Suno's algorithm. I haven't tried to promote them much elsewhere either but when I have posted them they get a few likes at best. I'm not disappointed because I was creating the music for myself and just sharing it as a side effect but what I take away from this is that getting people to pay attention to and enjoy something that you've created takes a lot of work. You have to market it, get it in front of them, get them to pay attention to it and I'm convinced you also need to give them a reason to like it by associating it with something whether that's a video, a story, a persona or some other vibe. If you want it to "stick" you need to do all of that over and over again for the same audience so that they learn it.

That is what takes determination and why you have to really care about the thing you are trying to sell to people. You have to stick to it before they will stick to it.

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

#302

Post by teliosix »

misswaterfairy wrote: post #70
jmyeet wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extraordinarily rosy view of the future. I'm old enough to remember the dot-com crash, specifically the years afterwards. In 2002-2003, the unemployment rate of software engineers was something like 40%. In fact, the only reason it wasn't higher was because of the number of people who had permanently left the field to become plumbers (or other trades). I think this is going to be worse. In the dot-com crash…

> I think people are being naive here thinking this can't or won't happen in tech. What would this future look like? Software developer salaries burrowing into the ground?

That isn't going to happen. To me what is going on is that no one really reads anything positive so there is all the incentives to write as hyperbolic + negative as possible to try to rise through the noise.

The reality is this all the standard lump of labor fallacy. I am not a software engineer but it is obvious to me at some point I will be using claude code or whatever to automate tasks. I won't be taking software engineering jobs, I will be using code to do what is done manually today that you wouldn't bother paying a software engineer to handle.

Today's software engineers will just be higher up the stack from me the same way they are today.

In 20 years, many of us will be working in sectors of the economy that don't exist today.

The idea we get something as powerful as AI and it doesn't create new businesses and sectors is just stupid.

Imagine telling someone in 1997 they are going to be getting deliveries from Amazon all the time in the mail. What kind of idiot would believe this? I don't even read that many books!

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

#303

Post by mattmanser »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #289
galactushonor wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required Did it do the correct job once you put the regulations doc(s) in the context?

What I usually do when in doubt is challenge the AI. “Please quote the section of regulation the product is non compliant with”. It usually admits it hallucinated the whole thing.

It sometimes says that even if it hasn't though, so like everything with LLMs, you can't actually rely on that.

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

#304

Post by tiahura »

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…

Today is when ground needs to be broke on the data centers to run it in 3 years.

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

#305

Post by bigstrat2003 »

csallen wrote: post #239
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.

For some reason, tons of people seem to be in camps at both extremes. It's either "AI sucks don't trust it!" or "AI is so much better than humans!" But the most reasonable take, which I'm happy to see reflected in so many comments in this thread, is… use both. Do an AI pass, and have humans verify, and vice versa. Let the humans drive the AI. Then the unique shortcomings of each party can be covered by the other's st…

> Do an AI pass, and have humans verify, and vice versa. Let the humans drive the AI.

You can do that, sure. But doing so negates any improvements in speed the LLM brought. And at that point, you may as well just do it yourself to begin with.

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

#306

Post by awill88 »

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…

LLMs don’t “solve” execution at all. They aid and accelerate it.

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

#307

Post by manishsharan »

dwh452 wrote: post #255

There are lots of positives that have resulted from using AI in software engineering. (1) No more long repetitive text editing sessions. I.e. changing namespaces or replacing deprecated APIs with the "correct" ones. AI will make nearly perfect text modifications with ease. (2) No more bike-shedding code reviewers nitpicking over every tiny coding decision. I.e, "you should use std::format instead of std::stringstream…

Average folks like their Excel and Word. Most families have MS subscriptions like they have Netflix subscriptions.

Monopolies will continue as Token prices continue to rise.

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

#308

Post by dfffsdfdsfds »

photochemsyn wrote: post #131

If corporations really thought LLMs were a great cost-savings tool, then the obvious target for replacement are not the lower-paid staff, but the higher-paid staff - the ‘product managers and stakeholders’. That justifies token burn, replacing the 7- and 8-figure people, right? But that’s not the real goal, is it? The goal is to inflate the stock value, take the cream off the top, and dump the whole business on the p…

The idea is to start with the largest, easiest lever. The one which will accelerate all _other_ automation. That lever is software development itself.

Say you are Anthropic and want to shake up the world of law or medicine or whatever. What will you need? Product managers? You need tooling, software, infrastructure and a lot of it and quickly and you need to iterate really F fast on it as well.

If you automate the development of software itself you will enter a new era in which automation of All The Things becomes an engineering problem instead of a pipe dream. Besides software engineering there is (AI) research/science and robotics. That is the holy trinity. Crack that and it's over.

BTW: "double-entry ledgers, escrows, reconciliation, payment lifecycles, bank transfer idempotency", these all sound like solved problems and also things that are festering with accidental instead of essential complexity. I won't bet my career on those things. Now if you say something like physics or geology, that's a tougher nut to crack.

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

#309

Post by criticalfault »

deanc wrote: post #120
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…

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.

not according. to my experience.

regulation questions. even the simple ones, AI gets all the time wrong. it wasn't Mythos, but other models like opus.

I can adjust the view on this topic if/when we get access to mythos.

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

#310

Post by trumpdong »

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…

It doesn't matter to your boss. He will still fire you and replace you with a slop machine. Then you will not be able to get a job again and you will have low self-esteem.
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