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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

#371

Post by doctorpangloss »

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,…

In 2024 some people were saying, illustrators will be fine, the models can't even get the number of fingers right! They were wrong.

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

#372

Post by hedora »

franze wrote: post #184
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…

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

I walked down that path for a few months. The more you constrain LLM's, the more underhanded they behave in order to produce something that satisfies all the constraints.

Doing the above doesn't actually make the model smarter, so, if it couldn't get to correct code with fewer steps, then the light you see at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.

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

#373

Post by ericmcer »

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…

The dynamic of agent codes human reviews does seem like the only sane one for the foreseeable future. Even Anthropic themselves still fall back to this.

The problem is that sucks, even if all software engineers keep their jobs and salaries, the floor is still pulled out from under us. Imagine if a surgeons job was to supervise robot surgeons from a remote computer, or a woodworker just signs off on work before the machines do all the cutting and assembly. Sure they still have important jobs in their field but the soul & humanity of their skill is gone.

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

#374

Post by gxs »

> 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.

It’s not useless, at least not yet. And the fact that you recognize this puts you way ahead of the typical HN user constantly crying about how AI could never

What’s going to make you a good AI-augmented engineer is going to be treating AI like a good partner

Not like a genius, not like an idiot - these are extremes where all the memes on LinkedIn are generated

Like any partnership you will see it comes with bad ideas and good ideas - that it will challenge your own ideas and be sometimes wrong and sometimes right

Approaching it this way, I think my learnings only accelerated - the conversation is of much higher value because it’s a fast back and forth where I can take a moment to learn on those occasions where its ideas beat mine

You are feeling a little insecure, paranoid is not the word, and that’s a good thing

Tackle the problem for what it is: I have this sidekick now that can help me bang shit out in a fraction of the time it used to

Use the the brain that got you here to figure that out - don’t waste your time on these debating whether ai is good or not or listening to stories about how it’s stupid because one time it suggested something that wrong

You’re going to be fine, put AI to work for you

Ask me again in a few months but for now you’re fine

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

#375

Post by rjrjrjrj »

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…

C'mon, the LLM/compiler false analogy? In 2026?

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

#376

Post by InsideOutSanta »

trumpdong wrote: post #221
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…

It was my impression that a whole lot of products are only pretending to be compliant, and that it's much more profitable to operate like that.

I've worked in fintech for 30 years. I've never seen a product that was intentionally "only pretending to be compliant" with laws.

I've seen accidental non-compliance. I've seen what I would call negligent compliance, where a company attempted to be compliant but didn't meet full, correct compliance (one example I've seen is that a company assigned resources to compliance and forgot to increase resources as workload increased, causing them to be increasingly behind on compliance work), but I've never seen a company that just decided to pretend to be compliant knowing that they were not.

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

#377

Post by mschuster91 »

hypeatei wrote: post #175

I'm not worried. You cannot hold a machine accountable and there's no way OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. are going to take on that kind of liability if some code resulted in a major outage or a lawsuit. Perhaps that's the signal I'd be looking for: so much confidence in the product that they put their money where their mouth is. Besides, you can look at the websites/apps/software you use everyday and evaluate whether or not…

> You cannot hold a machine accountable

Well... accountability is a myth, primarily used to justify obscene paychecks for executives aka "you can't get fired for buying IBM". Basically, as long as you follow what everyone else is doing at the time, even catastrophic losses won't result in consequences. Just look at the recent AWS outages and issues - if you're a CTO and you'd have your webshop running on-prem, you'd get axed for a multi hour downtime. But since your webshop runs on AWS, you're following "industry best practice".

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

#379

Post by causal »

Aperocky wrote: post #359

> 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 clau…

To me the greatest monument to Claude's poor software quality is Claude Code itself.

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

#380

Post by gaiagraphia »

jplusequalt wrote: post #234
gaiagraphia wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the artform will be lost, but surely humanity will inherently be more 'logical' and systems driven afterwards? Maybe using writing as an analogy is flawed, but most of humanity having 'writing' as a core skill did enable many other things, even if oral storytelling cultures suffered at its hand. At its core, tech is all about breaking through inefficiencies and barriers. Does it matter if people can't code pyth…

Sincerely, how is prompting an AI to build software for you building "logic and systems thinking"? The thing many people are ringing the alarms over is the offloading of critical thinking and knowledge work to LLMs.

Being able to program isn't the end game of critical thinking. Programming languages are just a way of representing the processes. The thinking underneath was always more important, and there's now technically more time freed up to focus on that. Billions of people now have access to tools which will aid them in reasoning through complex problems without needing a $100k CS degree. Of course some people are using LLMs to get recipe inspiration, but others are now empowered to do things which were impossible for them before.

I personally think the alarm ringers are mainly the privileged elite who are scared of their moats beyond filled in. LLMs have effectively broken down the gates of access to knowledge. In a diverse world, having more people being empowered to do more things has to be a net positive.

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