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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

#381

Post by iterateoften »

jalev wrote: post #92
simon84 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much about velocity or quality, both of which LLM do (or will) provide. The real question is about accountability and liability. When a major data leak is going to happen, who will they sue or fire ? That is the value engineers provide. They understand, confirm, and take ownership.

This is what I'm wondering too. We've signed a confidentiality agreement with all the big players (as I'm sure all other companies have done), which is supposed to ensure our data is both segregated and not used for training. I don't trust these companies not to do just that; their business is in taking what we have and training their models.

Yeah, I always wonder if they do some type of obfuscation and transformation on the private data and find a way to backdoor the info without technically using it directly.

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

#382

Post by tossandthrow »

docheinestages wrote: post #378

LLMs can synthesize the domain knowledge so long as it's within their training data. At some point, blindly trusting the decisions they make becomes gambling.

There is this over indexing in training data that I find quite problematic.

I have really good results getting LLMs to read documentation and work of these. This is in domains probably sparsely represented in the training data.

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

#383

Post by hedora »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #156
gaiagraphia wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a net positive though? (not sure about the cost human and tech cost). I'm guessing that without using Mythos, those conversations would never have been had, and confidence in the compliance of the product would've been lower. I love using AI tools as casinos. It's epic in helping to forge ideas and kickstart thought processes. You basically have the entirety of world knowledge at your fingertips to have a…

> I'm guessing that without using Mythos, those conversations would never have been had, and confidence in the compliance of the product would've been lower. The conversations had already been had and the product made compliant. Mythos just pulled new rules out of its ass and of course the product wasn't compliant with those. So they do a fire drill and find that to be the case at great expense. Yeah you can frame it…

There's a chapter in Simple Sabotage about how to undermine a white collar organization from the inside. One of the key tactics is to hold meetings that revisit decided upon points, and to invent unnecessary process / checking.

So, in this case, the LLM's behavior was equivalent to the behavior of the resistance during WWII.

I think that book should be required reading for all engineering students.

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

#384

Post by adrianN »

ericmcer wrote: post #373
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…

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 ma…

After a couple of years of this their expertise will be gone too and then nobody is qualified to supervise the clankers.

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

#385

Post by causal »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #370

I’m just continuing to get paid as long as I can, while also going back to school part time to train in a role that’s insulated from AI. Having a backup plan at least makes me feel better day to day.

> to train in a role that’s insulated from AI

Would love to know more about that role

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

#386

Post by Aperocky »

dakiol wrote: post #84
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…

> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track. But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading t…

> because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.

This is giving too much credit to LLM. I think LLMs are great and it is incredibly useful both in personal and professional settings. However, it exist on a separate plane than human workers in the tools category.

Sooner or later, people will find out that LLMs only overlaps with existing human hierarchy (e.g. junior dev X%, senior dev Y%, etc), but almost never 100%. If it was 100% to a certain position, you are probably using the humans wrong to begin with there - since humans have one of the most priced thing that I don't see an single ounce out of LLMs: initiative

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

#387

Post by mschuster91 »

mannanj wrote: post #290

Isn't the solution to learn business skills? My challenge is seeking good resources for the business skills. I'm doing sales for a passion project for the first time, and it's teaching me a lot. I'm just confused still on why it feels so hard and why I can't find an easier way.

> My challenge is seeking good resources for the business skills. I'm doing sales for a passion project for the first time, and it's teaching me a lot. I'm just confused still on why it feels so hard and why I can't find an easier way.

Sales are going to be drowned by AI soon enough. The low end is already getting yeeted by webshops, dropshippers and AI powered bots and a lot of B2C and B2B sales are shifting off of the classic representative sales model as well (towards self-service) because everyone that does not is cheaper. Basically if I have the choice between a SaaS that says "contact for a quote" and "X users => Y $/month", I'll always go with the latter option. And on top of that comes offshoring, that has gotten surprisingly good with ever increasing voice call quality.

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

#388

Post by trumpdong »

5701652400 wrote: post #355
trumpdong wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You pay tax on owning land.

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

#389

Post by IAmGraydon »

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.

Where did you get this impression from?

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

#390

Post by Aperocky »

causal wrote: post #379
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.

Yes, let's build a 40K line main loop! I wonder if they thought claude code need to be more like an LLM to work lmao.
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