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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

#311

Post by bigstrat2003 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #282
rvz wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is it such a dramatic statement for Boris to claim that he no longer writes code? Are people on HN still typing out functions by hand one character at a time? It would be like a developer in 2020 claiming that he only writes assembly because compilers can’t be trusted. No one is taking that person seriously. If you chose a career in tech you made a decision to work in one of the fastest moving fields in human his…

> Now it’s time to get over it, learn the new tools and adapt.

No, thank you. I have used the new tools, determined that they aren't helpful to me, and set them aside as I would with any other bad tool. I don't feel the need to let hype take the steering wheel.

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

#312

Post by fantasizr »

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 produces 7m "professional" songs per day. Can't think of a better example of a slop generator. Many songs that will never get more than a handful of listens if it all.

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

#313

Post by worldthruword »

keyle wrote: post #34

I sympathise with the author being in the same boat, largely. I just want to emphasise a point... Calculators give 100% correct answers and yet we still hire accountants; for the simple fact that we don't want all to be accountants. People will hire software engineers for the simple fact that they do not want to be software engineers.

People don't make their own bread. They buy it from an expert.

But bread shops are available on every corner. Will software jobs become as common as bread shops? If yes, what happens to the salaries? Something to think about.

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

#314

Post by cambaceres »

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.

Ok so it’s five years now? I’ve heard for the last three years that software developers will be out of job within the next 6-18 months. I’m glad to hear I’ll have a job for a little bit longer.

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

#315

Post by polotics »

pigpop wrote: post #301
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…

Same here, I vibe coded my perfect alarm & reminders & productivity app for Android, (Promptly AI link below) that does TTS and Gemini calls and other things that rapacious alarm-clock marketing masters charge dozens of bucks per month for, but at some point the day job and dislike of the marketing grind is just too much, summer is here and yeah...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sixteenam....

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

#316

Post by hparadiz »

torben-friis wrote: post #236
franze wrote: post #184

Earlier 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

>you take a spec and create tests, every little thing A spec detailed enough and unambiguous enough to be translated into machine execution deterministically is called code. Unlike a compiler, AI can build with a spec that is not detailed enough or unambiguous enough: It does so by filling in the gaps with educated guesses. This is safe if and only if you take the time to later read the output, understand what its gu…

Code is not a spec. It's an instruction set. It can be a spec if you try hard but that's not an inherent property of code. For example you can write code to be a compiler..that makes it a spec. But hello world is not a spec.

As for whether or not LLMs can write unit tests. The answer is yes.

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

#317

Post by ralferoo »

Interesting that this dev sees domain knowledge as the most important part of his job. Over my nearly 30 year history, I consider domain knowledge as the least important aspect, and in fact have experience of many varied domains. 3 years web development, 2 years systems administration, 5 years point-of-sale / payment systems, 3 years performance management software, 16 years games development, 2 years GPU development tools, etc.

In every case when I've shifted domains, the skills that have got me the job were demonstrable solid programming experience on a wide variety of systems, with only a tangential link to the new company's business. In each case, I've gone in knowing almost none of the domain knowledge, but it's never been a problem because the business analysts know that stuff and tell me what they want me to do, or it's been stuff I've been able to pick up in the first few months.

For example, when I switched to games development it was the combo of systems admin and web backend development that the company wanted, I actually used none of those skills in the first year doing what they hired me for, and pretty quickly I'd transitioned from that to become a rendering engineer, and I've now spent the majority of my career optimising shaders and game engines.

So for me, it's certainly the case that I value my adaptability across domains, and I'm not worried about having to shift to another business domain because I know I'll be able to produce whatever it is they want if there's a reasonable spec in place.

Sure, when hiring if you have 2 candidates - 1 with the exact domain knowledge you want, and 1 without, the one with domain knowledge has a head start, but in the case where nobody has that domain knowledge (or in the case of the article, it doesn't matter because AI levels the field), then I don't think it matters much. Personally, I'd rather be the person with the broadest skills and able to pick up what I need than to have been stuck doing the same thing my entire career.

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

#318

Post by amelius »

trumpdong wrote: post #292
amelius wrote: post #209

It's not just our careers. In the hunks versus nerds wars, it is now clear who has won. The nerds have made themselves obsolete and put the continued evolution of homo sapiens to an abrupt halt.

No software developers == no humans?

No, homo sapiens degenerating into homo stupidus.

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

#319

Post by aogaili »

jplusequalt wrote: post #299
aogaili wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

>Chinese Gen Zers are starting companies before graduating, people are generating music and starting their own studios Both of these have been happening before the advent of LLMs >The irony, is that the means of production is now in the hands of millions The "means of production" means jack shit unless you have the capital to scale up rapidly >Those who are crying are those who paid their mortgages with for loops..we…

> Both of these have been happening before the advent of LLMs

I'm not sure about that. I read they are making better use of AI to accelerate building their businesses. Apparently, in China, people were not looking to work in corporations anyway, so they saw AI as a means to escape them.

> The "means of production" means jack shit unless you have the capital to scale up rapidly

There are people topping music charts without even having a brand; they just produce good music. There are people automating entire marketing pipelines to minimize capital expenditure, and there are people building niches for small crowds and making a good living out of it. Not everything needs scaling.

> Why is it hubris to give a damn about you spend 40 hours a week doing, or to lament change when it works against your enjoyment of those 40 hours a week. God forbid people value their time in any way that isn't monetary.

If you enjoy writing loops and if/else statements, you can still do it, but the market won't pay you when there is a tool that does it faster. That is the nature of the domain. Have you ever thought about the jobs that software engineers automated? What do you think those people did? They adapted, learned the tools, and moved on. This is the first time we are seeing automation at this scale in software engineering, and the reaction of software engineers is exactly the same as those in other fields.

Adapt.

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

#320

Post by xpct »

enraged_camel wrote: post #33

Code quality and architecture still matter, because they also make it easier for LLMs to reason about the system. That said, Opus 4.8 and Codex 5.5 both can write code that is higher quality than your average engineer. They are not quite there yet in terms of code re-use, but I think that's a solvable problem.

Regarding code quality, the largest issue I've run into is pollution that stems from committing too much unfiltered LLM code. They introduce some type of structures into the codebase that are hard to read for a human, then start reusing them or use them as example to create new ones, then when a human needs to quickly hop in and make changes, it's not as easy to do.
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