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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

#331

Post by xpct »

peheje wrote: post #114
discreteevent wrote: post #26

This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless" 'Maybe I should consider woodworking' - Fuck off.

resistance is futile

It's futile to race against the money hungry capitalistic machine, but it's not futile to steer your own career into work that's more lucrative or is more enjoyable, be it with our without AI tools.

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

#332

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…

Regarding hubris, I've been in this field for 20 years, and there are people in it who are just intolerable, frankly. They memorize every Vim command, refuse to use any other tools, and treat everyone else as less intelligent simply because they can write code... those people are getting humbled hard right now.

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

#333

Post by GuB-42 »

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, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff

I played with it a bit, and no, it doesn't! And I am talking as someone with limited music culture, musicians are likely to be even more critical.

For the first few tries, it sounds impressive and the tunes are catchy. It used to sound wrong in the background but they mostly (but not completely) fixed that. However, after a few dozen songs, it starts to always sound the same. It is all generic stuff, the songs tell no story, it is a bit like the kind of music that accompany corporate advertisement. You can try to be more precise in your prompt, but I never had any success, it will just ignore most of the details that could make your song interesting.

The most interesting result I had was actually when I managed to get it off rails, a bug more or less. I asked it to mix two very different genres together, and it made something unsettling in a way I don't remember hearing before. But as always, further working on it proved extremely difficult, as it always tried to go back to making generic stuff, ignoring the details you give it.

Suno can do remixes though. And it is a bit like with code. LLMs are very good at porting, when you already have something that works, it can make it work in another language. But if you just have an idea, it will screw up at anything original. If you want a LLM to implement your idea properly, you have to give it so much guidance that it amounts to writing the code yourself, while struggling with the ambiguousness of natural languages.

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

#334

Post by thin_carapace »

techblueberry wrote: post #137
juleiie wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds more like a problem of close minded narrow focus on economic output instead of culture, virtue and spiritual traditions. AI is fundamentally an equivalent to slave economy . Cheap, plentiful workforce. This time ethically neutral. You either get Greece or Rome. I’d prefer Greece but it will probably be Rome. From the past we can predict the future.

> That sounds more like a problem of close minded narrow focus on economic output instead of culture, virtue and spiritual traditions. I’m starting to be more sensitive to the argument that without god, people are unable to have a strong moral foundation. Not for the people expressing creativity in how they fuck, but as a check on those in power.

maybe if people werent busy fucking around so creatively they could band together as families and follow agreed social practices to ensure distribution of labor and charitable action in their local communities, maybe then people would care more about their neighbours and less about consuming shit. no thanks ... everyone too busy creatively fucking around and consuming shit while ignoring reality (eg partner count directly correlates to divorce rate, fill the blanks what divorce correlates with).

maybe thats a reason that god was deleted from the western cultural lexicon, so that broken communities could be capitalized upon? no way, surely god is merely a deprecated irrelevant vestige. it's not like a fractured social fabric is a ripe substrate of raw suffering to mine profit from. surely a few hundred generations were enough for our morals to have been encoded into genetics, we don't have to bother consciously practicing morality any more. that's for the narrow minded.

..... this isn't intended to be aimed at anyone except those who delete god to make money, and those who use god to make money. there's plenty of negative aspects to religion. the argument is intended to focus on the sheer idiocy of expecting morality to spontaneously manifest in the absence of external motivation or any teaching of lessons already collectively learned the hard way.

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

#335

Post by kakacik »

techblueberry wrote: post #137
juleiie wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds more like a problem of close minded narrow focus on economic output instead of culture, virtue and spiritual traditions. AI is fundamentally an equivalent to slave economy . Cheap, plentiful workforce. This time ethically neutral. You either get Greece or Rome. I’d prefer Greece but it will probably be Rome. From the past we can predict the future.

> That sounds more like a problem of close minded narrow focus on economic output instead of culture, virtue and spiritual traditions. I’m starting to be more sensitive to the argument that without god, people are unable to have a strong moral foundation. Not for the people expressing creativity in how they fuck, but as a check on those in power.

It takes a special kind of issues-riddled mind in very unhealthy place, for the lack of better words, to assume that people without strong faith have less morals.

In my own experience such people are often far from objectively moral or good people themselves, and overcompensate some deep issues.

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

#336

Post by esafak »

hammock wrote: post #249
csallen wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AI review is never going to beat a fully resourced human review. It might beat an underresourced human review, on time, efficiency, cost metrics. But on the metric of accuracy, throwing unlimited humans at a problem will still beat throwing unlimited AI at it

That's an irrelevant comparison because cost is always a constraint, so there are not going to be unlimited AI or humans. The question is how to optimally combine them for a given cost.

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

#337

Post by holyknight »

People are missing the long-term horizon on this. Yes, definitely, you can automate most of your workflows as a software engineer with today's LLM frontier capabilities fully E2E. But many things are still super open: -First, cost is not a settled topic yet. We have no indication that automating everything E2E will be a cost-effective way of doing stuff. So the bare minimum is that you will need some expert designing the workflows in a token-efficient way. Worst-case scenario, tokens become super expensive and only certain parts of the job can be efficiently automated and many companies are not even able to afford tokens. -Second, the system you just "created" is just a static snapshot of today. Yeah it may work fully automated for 6 months, maybe a year. What then? Breaking changes? Updates? Re-designs? What if the quality slowly degrades until nothing ever works again? Who will fix that? There are so many unknowns that it is borderline irresponsible to make guesses on what can be automated sustainably long-term or not. Unless you are OpenAI's Codex team wasting a billion tokens a day on automating and self-improving everything, there is a high chance that everything you set up today is completely useless in a year. -Third, the core engineering workflow hasn't changed a single bit. People like stakeholders, product owners, PMs, etc. can come up with ideas and things to build but someone needs to take decisions on what gets built and what doesn't, balance out paying down technical debt vs. feature development, incorporate new domain knowledge into the system (Or would you expect your PM to be tweaking the prompts about a new regulation regarding GDPR or a completely new legal framework that changes the whole thing?) -Fourth, probably the most important one. If you think AI will soon get good enough to get self-improving and self-sustaining enough to replace full engineering departments E2E with no supervision then nothing else matters because we will all end up without a job and living on UBI (not only tech people). So why do you even care? If it happens it doesn't matter, and if it doesn't happen we just continue doing what we were doing until now. Why do you care?

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

#338

Post by efortis »

shreddit wrote: post #136

This doesn’t read to me as someone who is sincerely impressed or rather surprised what ai is capable off. This reads like someone is trying to convince me, that ai is just this good, and that the author is telling me to use more ai. To me this sounds like: Trust me, it’s really bad, i know what I’m talking about. Just lean into it, or change profession.

yes, I stopped reading it because of that, and because it felt AI generated.

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

#339

Post by causal »

GuB-42 wrote: post #333
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, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff I played with it a bit, and no, it doesn't! And I am talking as someone with limited music culture, musicians are likely to be even more critical. For the first few tries, it sounds impressive and the tunes are catchy. It used to sound wrong in the background but they mostly (but not completely) fixed that. However,…

Yeah I have played with Suno a lot and I find that no matter how I change the genre, lyrics, etc. there's some underlying quality I can't quite name that my brain recognizes and quickly gets tired of. It's fun in a novelty sense, for now.

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

#340

Post by sillyfluke »

deanc wrote: post #271
sillyfluke wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 cou…

>Your top coder has guard rails in place to prevent him autonomously going free - right?

The parent is implying they would prefer an AI when working in the airline and health industry because it makes less errors. Read the comment again.

They have not said, "Hey, I work in the airline and health industry and I'd love to use AI for a couple of the bullshit IT UIs we have as long as we can put guardrails on the AI to stay in its lane."

I asked a yes or no question. The guardrails you can put to mitigate errors are the same guardrails pre-AI for the humans (tests, regressions, reviews). If you were wary of employing a top lead engineer with verifiable dementia prior to AI for a mission critical system, logic implies you should think twice giving that much responsibility to an AI as well.

> The hallucination thing I think is mostly overblown

Can you predict when and how the SOTA model will hallucinate? Yes or no. Can you predict the severity impact of that error beforehand? Yes or no.

>from speaking to colleagues it seems to vary wildly depending on which model and harness you are using

You have partially answered my question it would seem.

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