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

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431–440 of 1001 posts

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

#431
post #12

The glory days are over. In the future, one software engineer will be able to support multiple product areas much like how one HR team can support 1,000's of employees. LLMs have made domain knowledge and reasoning "cheap"; it doesn't matter if the output is lower quality - look around you for countless examples of where cheap wins and "cheap" continues to improve. Good luck out there; we will all need it.

> The glory days are over. In the future, one software engineer will be able to support multiple product areas much like how one HR team can support 1,000's of employees.

I mean, it seems within the realm of possibility that much more productive software engineers make more and not less money.

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

#432

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…

I never found there to be much soul and humanity in the job to begin with. Coding personal projects has soul, but for me at least the demands of high-velocity sprint-based software development to match business needs removed most of the soul and humanity long before AI got good at coding. And I mean, I totally understand why it has to be like that. In most businesses, you do better by shipping decent software fast than by shipping great software slowly. I don't have a problem with that in principle. But it does mean that for me, the software development side of things has never had much soul and humanity to begin with. It was just being a glorified assembly line worker, with the sprints being the assembly line. Of course, others may have had very different experiences, but that has been mine.

For me, AIs have actually made the job more soulful, not less. For one thing, it lets me use the part of my mind that is good at human language, not just the part of my mind that is good at software. This makes the job feel a bit less one-dimensional in terms of what parts of me are engaged while doing it. For another, I find it liberating to no longer have to think much about boilerplate code or to spend time roaming around the Internet looking up documentation of various language syntax and API details, the vast majority of which are arbitrary rather than being based on any kind of mathematical beauty. For me it makes the job more soulful that I can think of the job on a higher level instead of having to spend effort on arbitrary and tedious details.

Of course there is still the question of "will the job even exist in a few years, at least for more than a relatively small number of people?". But that's a separate question. For now at least, I am finding that for me AIs have brought a lot more soul and humanity to the job than it ever had before.

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

#433
post #300

Coding taste and good architecture are the final pillars because AIs are trained on a ton of bad examples that are presented as good examples. That pillar will stand until AIs are able to reconsider and re-evaluate the material they've been trained on.

That should help, but there is a fundamental problem. A conscious entity exercising good judgement can say they don't know a good answer or method for getting one, but an LLM will always compose a response for a given prompt.

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

#434
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…

>Are people on HN still typing out functions by hand one character at a time?

Well I use tab completion, of course. And I copy-paste snippets from LLM more often than from SO now. But otherwise not much has changed in my career in the last 5 years. Is this different for you?

I'm not fundamentally opposed to code generation, and I use LLMs for some taks, but I don't see myself vibecoding whole pages of production code. I vibecoded a throwaway note-taking app for myself though.

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

#436

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 have worked on highly regulated areas in finance (risk). Compliance is a highly creative art, often requiring lots of out-of-the-box thinking and non-obvious solutions. The people I found worst at this were IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. My guess is the model makes the same mistakes as the programmers: taking 'rules' literally, un…

Who gets in trouble if it turns out you are actually held to the literal rule?

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

#437

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 produces 7m "professional" songs per day. Can't think of a better example of a slop generator. Many songs that will never get more than a handful of listens if it all.

True of human-made things as well. Most video essays don't get more than a dozen views, most gameplay streams similarly. People playing their guitar and uploading, same. SoundCloud, YouTube, twitch. Human-made app store apps is the same story. Most are not downloaded by even 100 people. Most Github repos don't even get a handful of stars.

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

#439
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked on highly regulated areas in finance (risk). Compliance is a highly creative art, often requiring lots of out-of-the-box thinking and non-obvious solutions. The people I found worst at this were IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. My guess is the model makes the same mistakes as the programmers: taking 'rules' literally, un…

Who gets in trouble if it turns out you are actually held to the literal rule?

If you think rules are literal than you aren’t aware how the world works.

There’s a reason it’s called “judgement”

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

#440
I posted this elsewhere, but I think it still has a valuable insight to bring to the table: https://halecraft.org/software-engineering-is-the-new-manufa...

> LLMs are regression-to-the-mean machines--they pull junior developers up, and drag senior developers down. Taming them requires trading the romance of 'code as craft' for the physics of manufacturing.

The thing I don't know is: how do we decide which direction is most valuable? I can see arguments in both directions--quality vs quantity, essentially. I think there's a strong argument for the value of both:

- we need more quantity of software: for a long time, the ability to write software has been locked up, confined to a closed cabal of specialists

- we need more quality in software: we depend more and more on software in every aspect of our lives, mistakes are intolerable and should be avoided

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