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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

#461

Post by monegator »

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,…

re: SUNO

i actually was discussing that with a guy i met the other day, an old school producer, did succesful stuff 30 years ago. He used SUNO to reinterpret old and ideas of his, in his judgement it did an excellent job and lets him create many songs daily if he want.

Sounds familliar? the good old "let AI be steered by experienced X and boost productivity".

All in all, gun to the head, i think i am so critical because to use these tools is surrendering to big corpos. It is not a democratic tool. If it was i would probably be using it. I have finally given up and started messing with local models (well, i did already with images) but general local models are useless.

OR maybe it's me? i cannot for one moment let go and converse with the machine. I can give order to the machine.

The tech is fantastic, but the fact that it's in the hand of corpos with all interests in never letting us be able to do shit without them, makes me one hundred and one percent against it.

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

#462

Post by throwatdem12311 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #252
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #207

My job as a staff engineer has turned into just reviewing slop farm vomit from offshore devs in Pakistan making pennies on the dollar given a slop code subscription and going wild. I’ve lately just turned to having Claude do a quick /review, spot checking it, doing my own review and the. firing up some web agents to make the needed changes and just ignoring the back and forth because they don’t give a fuck anyway. Ju…

I will be happy if Claude lets me eliminate my offshore Genpact team. I don’t need slop from slop.

I’m the one that needs to support it in production and fix the bugs anyway. Offshore is pointless.

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

#464

Post by PeterStuer »

jayd16 wrote: post #436
PeterStuer wrote: post #418

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?

Contrary to what you indicate rules are not declared in a vacuum, for people to read and then algorithmically 'implement'. There are many ways to interpret regulation, and there will be both accompanying clarifications, as well as compliance departments negotiating with regulators on what is an acceptable and sufficient compliance action. Then there furthermore is a risk that will be calculated vs the cost and opportunity costs etc.

As an enterprise architect, these are all part of the meetings you have with compliance when you are working on major projects. I have had the privilege of working with some excellent compliance officers, and they are the opposite of the nay-saying caricature that is often painted of them. I found these people to be extremely creative and helpful, working together towards solutions rather than stalling or nixing viable progress.

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

#465

Post by [deleted] »

tsunamifury wrote: post #439
jayd16 wrote: post #436

Earlier 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”

[deleted]

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

#466

Post by canadaduane »

epolanski wrote: post #451
canadaduane wrote: post #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 i…

I have not seen evidence that they are regression to the mean machines. I'm lucky to work with great engineers and their productivity and code quality has become even higher. Wish that wasn't the case, but it is, and that puts also lots of pressure on myself to work more and better all the time. It's exhausting. There are cons too, system's understanding sometimes is not as intimate, which in turn produces less "gotc…

I'm curious what you think of as "the mean"? I consider the input training set for an LLM to contain its mean. My hypothesis would be: an LLM alone cannot consistently produce code above the mean of the quality it was trained on.

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

#467

Post by baobabKoodaa »

epolanski wrote: post #225
dakiol wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well almost 70% of the developers in the industry can't write a fizz buzz. But, besides coding skills (which some possess), the engineering, social, and business ones are close to non existent.

Did you pull this 70% out of your ass or from some other place? It's quite obviously not reality.

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

#469

Post by mellosouls »

torben-friis wrote: post #56

My career path is suprisingly similar to the author's. Weirdly enough, what he takes as the first pillar to fall is the one I see most undamaged currently. LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations. They're great at refactoring, translating between languages, tracing bugs on existing code even, but there is…

LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations.

This is domain expertise - software engineers are not needed for that. Ofc often senior sws are expert in it, but they aren't necessary.

Traditionally its been useful for frictionless production to have engineers to be able to do maybe 90% of their work without consulting the business experts but this is the whole crux of the moment TFA discusses - "tradition" is over.

In this new world its now the job of a senior engineer not to have this domain expertise themselves, but to know how to ensure the agents have it, or can acquire it and it be verifiably correct.

Senior engineers who hang on to the idea that their advanced business domain expertise makes them safe will soon be as dead in the water as juniors who haven't pivoted.

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

#470

Post by rectang »

tsunamifury wrote: post #439
jayd16 wrote: post #436

Earlier 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”

In your world, do subordinates ever get scapegoated for bending the rules at a boss's behest?
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