looks like you just need a bit of harness for your AI:
https://leestack.dev/writing/nasa-rules-for-code-that-cant-f...
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
441–450 of 1001 posts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#442I 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.
Passable and fine is the Hallmark of capitalism.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#443Earlier 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?
Yes, me. Yes, I tried LLMs for what I am doing and will try again in few months. No, there was no noticeable or clear improvement over doing it manually.
Yes, I am using some LLMs for some purposes but Claude Code had slight improvement, if any, not worth introducing proprietary dependency.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#444It's odd to me how quickly the author devalues their own experience just because AI can do certain things well. There's a huge chasm between what AI can do when prompted by an expert software engineer vs a non-technical person. Sure the models and the tooling will get better, but it still needs to be driven by someone with an intuition for how software works and able to dig in when necessary to unpack and correct the…
I think the core issue is not AI itself, it's people. Right now non-tech people just think AI will do anything they want and are the one in charge of hiring/firing, managing, etc. It's horrible to be a software dev right now, you've to deal with AI and lunatics. Of course Domain Knowledge is important but, right now it's very hard to have reasonable conversation because... you know... AI this, AI that. I had a custom…
The other thing is that a lot of this thread is talking about domain knowledge and ignoring it forgetting that a massive number of jobs in this industry are in web app crud.
There is a massive number of software engineers that are closer to plumbers than computer scientists and for them the progressing AI models are going to be a problem.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
This here. Overall society feels more turbulent, but this is otherwise all the same song and dance all over again. The 90s and 00s had this wave of "object oriented programming changes everything". Hey we're doing this thing that's been done successfully 100s of times before, but now it's OO. Writing some code in involving an airplane? Just purchase this omni-airplane object that does everything for airplanes (an act…
> Overall society feels more turbulent, but this is otherwise all the same song and dance all over again. The thing is... everything you mentioned had only brought the need to retrain. This new hotness AI? It's bringing actual layoffs, and not just of the boom bust cycle kind, but permanent, industrial-revolution kind that lasts for decades.
It is?
Covid overhiring, no more 0% interest rates, that one accounting change, and companies needing a "growth" sounding way to announce layoffs. Maybe that's bringing actual layoffs in the name of AI?
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#446Software engineers with low self-esteem who built their entire identity as mechanical cognitive workers are having an identity crisis and spreading FUD. Currently, LLMs are nothing more than amplification tools that require significant steering. If you think your job is mainly to take input from POs or managers, translate it into if/else statements and loops, and review PRs, then you never really understood your role…
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Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”
...And that judgement could take them literally. So what is your point?
My point was simply that it's easy to scoff at someone else being careful if it's their neck and not yours.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#448Hear me out: what about just refusing to use them?
why would i ever want to use a tool that remove the part of my job that brings me joy? Fuck productivity, we were already doing good, when we were able to actually do our job, i.e.: not wasting hours in useless meetings, or doing customer care to idiots who could not be bothered to follow instructions, which i shouldn't be doing in the first place. let the LLM do that, or let the human assisted by the LLM do that. Not my job.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#449I 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…
Code has never been the execution of the ideas is cheap mantra.
It is the whole business flow chain of value to the end user what is valuable.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#450Earlier 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?
That's why you work with your Legal/Compliance Team to make sure you stay in line. They can explain when a rule applies and when it doesn't. This needs the engineering side to be able to explain what's happening, and translate it into the business process as closely as possible, and the legal side to be able to apply the law to the case.