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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

#321

Post by rvz »

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.

Exactly. You are free to use openclaw or a coding agent to build a competing bank, hedge-fund, hospital or even a new airliner because the previous ones were built by humans. Surely an AI can do it better by itself.

So why haven't you done it yet?

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

#322

Post by mariopt »

dasil003 wrote: post #283

It's odd to me how quickly the author devalues their own experience just because AI can do certain things well. There's a huge chasm between what AI can do when prompted by an expert software engineer vs a non-technical person. Sure the models and the tooling will get better, but it still needs to be driven by someone with an intuition for how software works and able to dig in when necessary to unpack and correct the…

I think the core issue is not AI itself, it's people.

Right now non-tech people just think AI will do anything they want and are the one in charge of hiring/firing, managing, etc. It's horrible to be a software dev right now, you've to deal with AI and lunatics.

Of course Domain Knowledge is important but, right now it's very hard to have reasonable conversation because... you know... AI this, AI that. I had a customer showing me a Claude vibe coded atrocity trying to convince me it's was a great app, now ask yourself: How are devs even supposed to collaborate with this without going insane? Simple, you can't.

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

#323

Post by xpct »

tsouth2 wrote: post #104

I've wondered about this a lot. I am brand new to software engineering, fully powered by AI coding. Traditional software engineers have to pivot hard or the are going to be left in the dust. The slow, methodical, take two days to put a change on a production site approach are over. I'm shipping exponentially faster than a co-worker who hasn't embraced AI yet.

As someone who's not a programmer, how did you discover HN?

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

#324

Post by awill88 »

I think we are all vulnerable and need to reassess what it is we bring.

Agents merely accelerate and equalize the playing field. And they cost money. We might be a dying breed, but we are the best operators of this technology. And if we want it, this is our moment.

Yes, get into wood working.

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

#325

Post by matwood »

SoftTalker wrote: post #274

> 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 maintenanc…

This is a good point. I started with Turbo Pascal in school and my first job was writing VB 5 Windows apps for local businesses. SQL (and C, but I haven't written it in ages) is probably the only thing I learned in the late 90s that has been a constant my entire career. Languages and frameworks seemed to change so frequently that I never thought too much about them. I was always focused on the end goal of solving some business problem.

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

#327

Post by Yokohiii »

enormousness wrote: post #81
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.

Accountants have specialized domain knowledge (laws, regulations, procedures, bureaucracy etc.) that goes well beyond what a calculator can do. If we apply the same argument to software engineering I think it's a good point... just maybe not the one you intended to make.

Learning a company and it's product is so natural to us that we hardly talk about it. It's a key skill for reliable workers.

It's probably impossible for LLMs to learn and apply that wisdom reliably.

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

#328

Post by larodi »

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…

Sumo produces plausible cheesy stuff that is otherwise sonically awful, ringing alongside the full spectrum due to how it works. As a musician I would not use it - I like to keep some creative power. Some people use it around me for samples… and then their tracks ring. But it works for them as they be advertising producers. Mind u - I’ve used paid version and I know one or two about music production.

As an information architect I find it amazing it works so good, but is useless to me except being a great think to play with… a toy really. I’m much more fascinated by Strudel.cc and LLMs do a great job to educate me into it, myself being mostly an autodidact.

As a dev I struggle to maintain coherence with Claude Code even though I’ve piped more than 10b tokens since Jan. Certain trivial stuff is easily remedied but even more devil lives in abundance of details now. So the task moves one level above in terms of abstraction, but is not solved.

If guys were good at typing one and the same thing in one and the same lang, which is nothing wrong about given how crafts went for ages, then they will be struggling to compete with the GPTs. But if they are in the architectural and operational perspective … well - work and demand just increased, so please stop whining.

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

#329

Post by dfffsdfdsfds »

kypro wrote: post #267

This was a good summary. I feel similar. At this point I think 95% of the skills I've developed over the 2 decades are basically useless. Prior to 2023 I felt like every new skill only made me more employable, but now I don't really see any software skills that are safe from AI today. Even the ones that are very likely won't be in a year or two so there's no point in learning. I've said this in other threads, but it…

The fact the whole world is going down with me is of some help actually. I can't stop the world. There is no preparing for that. We'll figure something out and if not, then not.

My non-tech friends will not suddenly be able to run servers or oversee AI systems. They will come to me with their ideas and I will turn the crank. My role will probably be named differently, something like "Intent Manager" or "Architecture Developer" or whatever but I have a strong feeling much of it will basically remain the same. The politics, the egos, the personality differences, AI has changed nothing in that regard. The jocks will not suddenly sit in front of laptops prompting Claude to debug their MQTT setups. You can say AI will do that and sure it will, prompted by me. If AI will do it autonomously then we're all fucked and I don't care about my "career" by that point. It'll be survival of the species time.

Much of accounting could have been automated. A good friend of mine has been manually entering paper receipts and whatever for well over 20 years now and his work load has actually increased. It's all automatable, but there are so. much. more. levers. Possible != will happen.

I do agree it's not the time to empty your savings account. Get ready for some rough times.

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

#330

Post by mbbutler »

t34t34r43 wrote: post #113
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…

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…

False-positive rate is so high with Mythos according to friends and other reporting I have seen.

The original Mythos release used ASan to filter false-positives so it was able to maintain a good FPR, but when Mythos moves into domains that don't have a readily available oracle to help filter hits, the result is a deluge of false bullshit.

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