Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 1001 posts

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

#421

Post by skillina »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #305
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…

> Do an AI pass, and have humans verify, and vice versa. Let the humans drive the AI. You can do that, sure. But doing so negates any improvements in speed the LLM brought. And at that point, you may as well just do it yourself to begin with.

Yeah, humans reviewing the AI review can only detect the false positives, where the LLM claims something is non-compliant and flags it for review/correction by a human or another agent. Human review can’t find the false negatives (true deficiencies not flagged) unless you do a full audit yourself to find whatever deficiencies the AI missed.

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

#422

Post by whatevaa »

tpoacher wrote: post #415
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…

In some sense, you should still act on this, since if an external auditor relies on the same stack, it'll still cause you headaches.

The models can change at any time and behave differently.

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

#424

Post by BurningFrog »

csallen wrote: post #239
deanc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on projects in the airline and health industry which are highly regulated too. The regulations can be incredibly difficult to process and implement, and make sure you adhere to everything correctly. I've been involved in multiple scenarios where people have made false assertions about compliance or lack of. I'd still place a bet that the SOA models make _far_ less mistakes than humans.

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…

This makes sense, but a logical next step is to have one AI write code, and then have another AI, instead of humans, verify it.

Or are current AIs too similar for that to be fruitful?

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

#425

Post by emodendroket »

Do any of us? But I think it's kind of backwards the way it's presented in this article; the raw code part it has down more so than the design sense.

I also would point out that, while this thought has occurred to me about the skills being commoditized, in practice I don't see that everyone's getting the same results from the tools. Not sure what's going on but that's interesting.

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

#426

Post by ImprobableTruth »

odeono wrote: post #392
ericmcer wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Soul and humanity" is doing a lot of work here. Does the woodworker who shape using a handsaw use less "soul" than the one who uses a machine? Does the musician who use a DAW and VSTs instead of analogue tape recorders create music with less "soul"? Does the painter who buys acryllic paint instead of synthesizing their own dye from plants use less "soul"? As technological innovation progresses, the barrier to creati…

Except it's not just a tool.

It's when a woodworker, musician or painter completely outsources their work and just marks what's wrong, sending those parts back. Yes, the final art piece might be the same, but the artist definitely uses less of their "soul".

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

#427

Post by emodendroket »

shevy-java wrote: post #177

I don't see it as negatively, in that there are specific trade-offs. For one: LLMs make a lot of mistakes. We all see that when they hallucinate search results and what not. But, possibly even more important than that, you ultimately become dependent on some big company via LLMs. Perhaps that trade-off is worth it for some companies, but I personally don't want to become dependent on these companies. I actually consi…

OK, but that same argument applied to getting on one of like four cloud providers and essentially everyone did that.

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

#428

Post by Aeolun »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #399
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…

I use Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 and haven't suffered from hallucinations in months. But we also put a lot of effort into our harness.

Opus 4.8 and gpt constantly hallucinate stuff as well. If you haven’t encountered or caught it that’s something different. Of course these days it’s mostly confidently asserting a wrong thing.

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

#429

Post by emodendroket »

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…

Well, are they? I think two things are at work:

1) How long has full self driving been just six months away? The last mile often tends out to be the hard part.

2) If the catastrophic scenario comes true where white collar work essentially disappears, what does "preparing" actually mean? There's not a whole lot I can do about that. It's like trying to make plans for what I'm going to do if I get into a coma.

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

#430

Post by cautiouscat »

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…

> I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff.

Does it? It produces passable stuff that is fine. However the lack of passion and care completely disinterests me.

Post reply on HN