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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

#351

Post by Eridrus »

cmiles74 wrote: post #129

I’ve been using Claude Code with Opus 4.7; it’s not that the code it produces is wrong, it simply tends to write too much of it. In my opinion it’s still worth thinking about a particular feature and finding the best way to fit it into your code because Claude will often just pick a layer of the stack (maybe presentation), and jam it in there. A couple weeks later you need this data somewhere else and Claude can’t re…

I have the same criticism of AI writing too much code. It's surprisingly effective to just tell the AI to cut the (prod) line count in half and look at whether there are other libraries it could reuse. I think you could probably also have a refactor bot that spots duplication and pulls it out.

None of this comes out of the box atm, but it's not clear that it's not possible.

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

#352

Post by bigstrat2003 »

jmkni wrote: post #140
mcmcmc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people would just call that construction

Construction working entirely with wood If only there was another word for that...?

Carpentry is not the same thing as woodworking, to be fair. The latter has the connotation of making furniture, trim, and other such items that people want to look nice. Carpentry does not necessarily have that connotation. It's a kind of "all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares" situation.

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

#353

Post by 5701652400 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #260
5701652400 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

look at layoffs.fyi. chances are he will be laid off pretty soon. and if not tomorrow, give it couple extra years until AI gets even better. it is one-way road, down the hill. not woodworking. farming. get a pot of land and grow your own food. do not participate in economy at all. that's the only survival.

My comment was about the fact that even if you're laid off, you're more likely to find success in artisanal software than artisanal woodworking. That statement is not an assertion that you're guaranteed success, just that it's more likely to sustain yourself than woodworking is. Layoffs also don't really tell you anything. Is it actually LLMs that are causing layoffs or is it deteroriating economic conditions and unc…

true, agree on later point.

but for "woodwork" / personal-farm still belive he is better off than software. at least he will be employed and have food on the table.

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

#354

Post by senfiaj »

normanthreep wrote: post #82

computers are made for automation. programmers were always working on automating things, making other things obsolete, and we have been killing jobs for decades. did you really think we would suddenly stop when it's your job? i'm happy this is happening, genuinely giddy

But this raises the barrier to entry into programming if LLMs are capable of doing the vast majority of junior/mid level tasks. This can ruin the lives of many average people for whom programming was one of the few truly possible jobs. I have a friend whose initial interests are not related to IT and he is not particularly passionate about programming, but it still brought him a decent income (unlike the profession he was passionate about). This is the people I'm talking about, they need some fucking stable job that brings income.

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

#355

Post by 5701652400 »

trumpdong wrote: post #238
5701652400 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

look at layoffs.fyi. chances are he will be laid off pretty soon. and if not tomorrow, give it couple extra years until AI gets even better. it is one-way road, down the hill. not woodworking. farming. get a pot of land and grow your own food. do not participate in economy at all. that's the only survival.

You are not allowed to have land without participating in the economy. The government forced you to acquire land by buying it, and to pay taxes in dollars.

I mean you can sell surplus to market. but key point you do not pay taxes on food you grown on your backyard and eat yourself! nor you are subject to any market collapse. as long as sun shines and raind pours, your food grows in your backyard, no matter S&P or inflation rates.

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

#356

Post by atomicnumber3 »

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,…

Suno is completely incapable of producing heavy metal. I can't speak for other genres bc I don't listen to them, but what it produces is completely hollow and devoid of what makes metal metal. I also think most metal fans will categorically reject AI-made metal on principle.

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

#357

Post by lelanthran »

trumpdong wrote: post #284
lelanthran wrote: post #14

To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end. Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a…

No lelanthran, software engineering and plumbing are not the same job. No lelanthran, LLMs can't be plumbers.

> No lelanthran, software engineering and plumbing are not the same job. No lelanthran, LLMs can't be plumbers.

Who said that?

More to the point, how many plumbers does society need?

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

#358

Post by 5701652400 »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #253
5701652400 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

look at layoffs.fyi. chances are he will be laid off pretty soon. and if not tomorrow, give it couple extra years until AI gets even better. it is one-way road, down the hill. not woodworking. farming. get a pot of land and grow your own food. do not participate in economy at all. that's the only survival.

> get a pot of land and grow your own food Rejecting industrialized society is actually very expensive

"industrialized society" just rejected 160,000 sofware engineers this year. other industries are no better. you are either wage-slave barely making it. or getting laid off, as those people are not needed.

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

#359

Post by Aperocky »

> And then I started realizing: all the knowledge I have accumulated over the years: the trade-offs between implementations, how acquiring works, how to structure idempotency to prevent double-charges, everything, was becoming useless.

How is that true? I've been using Opus on an industry scale over last 6 months and this is just not real.

It has consistently with a certain percentage of chance each time (and no claude.md and skills do not stop it fully):

* Suggested to remove tests to allow for things to pass

* Suggested remove an error so that things can be "unblocked"

* Suggested to use a second path when the original path ran into problem instead of making the original path accomodate for that possibility.

* Suggested or silently added "features" or "guardrail" that I don't want.

* Can be left unsupervised only if given a goal that it can verify against itself. Without such clear goal (e.g. this test in the integration environment must be fixed), it flounders.

I'm not using just the native harness (e.g. CC) either, with additional, customized harness, the behavior improves somewhat but are still fundamentally constrained and cannot really be trusted without verification.

See my methodology (100% handwritten): https://aperocky.com/blog/post.html?slug=agentic-development....

Being a heavy user I think I've ran into every single hallucination that the model can do over development release and operations. I am still a heavy user but there are a lot of value in recognizing where exactly LLM's limit is and work around that.

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

#360

Post by liglam »

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…

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