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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

#501

Post by lc9er »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #356
GuB-42 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Suno is completely incapable of producing heavy metal. I can't speak for other genres bc I don't listen to them, but what it produces is completely hollow and devoid of what makes metal metal. I also think most metal fans will categorically reject AI-made metal on principle.

Metal, punk, hardcore - any type of heavy music, really, should reject AI-made slop. If you’re a fan and/or maker of them and are not just wearing the genres as an aesthetic, you fully know they are a rejection of corporate and governmental control.

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

#502

Post by greenbeans12 »

From someone who thinks there's too much AI doom right now and is a glass half full optimist: If you are a software engineer reading this and panicking, don't. The author only mentions his codified, stable knowledge like you'd get from a distributed systems O'Reilly book.

There's no mention of the functional elements of a software engineering role - incident response, working with auditors to define and maintain controls for internal services, handling escalated account support & fraud, working on DevEx, selling shovels (MCPing your consumer-facing APIs/services), getting on customer calls to help sell your company's X feature, managing people downwards and upwards.

The piece kinda reads like remorse over sunken costs and attachment of knowledge to personality. If you twiddle your thumbs and stay static in your role, you will be replaced. It's the differentiation that sets employees apart. And attaching yourself to functions instead of knowledge is the only way to stay afloat.

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

#503

Post by mike_hearn »

trumpdong wrote: post #284
lelanthran wrote: post #14

To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end. Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a…

No lelanthran, software engineering and plumbing are not the same job. No lelanthran, LLMs can't be plumbers.

LLMs not but generalized multi-modal VLA models, yes.

Seems some on HN haven't been keeping up with progress in physical robotics. Unique physical work is lagging behind a bit, but not by much. Expect to see robots doing simple plumbing jobs within a few years, not a few decades.

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

#504

Post by bilater »

The bitter lesson is that there is no domain that will be left which AI won't get good at eventually. So really you have two options: if you actually believe the timeline is long you can keep retreating to the sectors that will be taken over last (emotional support nurse etc) or you can just say if you can't beat me join em and try to supercharge your career/project/life with AI now so it improving helps you rather than hurts you.

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

#505

Post by bonoboTP »

bob1029 wrote: post #108
cassianoleal wrote: post #15

> The company is now hiring again for a few roles and domain familiarity is not a strong differentiator anymore. We used to list "Software Engineer - Area". Now it's just "Software Engineer" and the team assignment comes after the offer is accepted. > Of course, this is good for brilliant engineers that never had the chance to get deep into the domain and now have better chances at getting a job, but it's also sad to…

> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles. What kind of domains did you have in mind?

That's the right question. I don't like this dichotomy between domain and engineering. It seems to come from people who just build different CRUD apps for mobile and websites for businesses in different industries and that's what they call domain.

Not like a webdev entering game engine design or a database engineer entering computer vision research, or someone working in embedded hard-realtime systems switching to making video editing GUIs.

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

#506

Post by suttontom »

ilaksh wrote: post #494
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…

3 years max. Maybe 5 if you are lucky.The models will continue to improve. The exponential gains in compute efficiency that have been ongoing for 70+ years will continue and that will result in even smarter models. There are dramatic hardware changes in the pipeline. But really that particular issue could have been solved by literally just telling it in a markdown file or instructions something like "verify all facts…

Ah yes, the magical equivalent of "you are a senior software engineer who writes bug-free code".

IME people would benefit greatly from the process, albeit tedious and time-consuming, of testing out the same prompt sequence/session with the exact same model multiple times. It becomes clear extremely quickly how capable but unreliable and inconsistent a model can be even when given the same context. If you have ever completed a long, complicated task with an agent and then lost the session and tried doing the same thing again from scratch you may have had the experience of seeing the subtle changes that come up in the model's thinking which lead it to accept or reject certain paths and ignore or incorporate prompt instructions like the one you've provided.

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

#507

Post by [deleted] »

ralferoo wrote: post #343
threethirtytwo wrote: post #183

There is an element of human nature that is known as self delusion and it is extremely common. Almost everyone on HN is suffering from a form of self delusion. Usually when a human self deludes they do it when they're identity is under threat. People would rather hold on to identity then face the truth at the cost of their identity. That is what is going on in almost every HN thread that has to do with this topic. A…

At the risk of being voted down for stating an unpopular opinion, the problem is that faith is neither provably true nor provably false. That's what makes it faith, not science. Even though you clearly believe very strongly that religion is wrong, that's not a scientific viewpoint because science doesn't and cannot disprove the fundamentals of religion. Taking it further, you can't actually prove anything is true wit…

[deleted]

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

#508

Post by ofjcihen »

ilaksh wrote: post #494
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…

3 years max. Maybe 5 if you are lucky.The models will continue to improve. The exponential gains in compute efficiency that have been ongoing for 70+ years will continue and that will result in even smarter models. There are dramatic hardware changes in the pipeline. But really that particular issue could have been solved by literally just telling it in a markdown file or instructions something like "verify all facts…

This is akin to “don’t make mistakes”

“Verify all facts and compliance requirements” leaves enormous holes even if you assume the LLM has a concept of facts and requirements (it does not).

What facts? What requirements? For what industry? For what subset of that industry? For what country or countries that you will be doing business in? Are these current “facts” and “requirements” or is the LLM referencing a dusty article from 1992 for which the subject matter has been radically overhauled?

In my job I regularly see small but incredibly important mistakes like this lead to major issues. Some of those are human driven but increasingly the defense of the person responsible has turned into “Claude said it was fine though!”

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

#509

Post by dorgo »

Aperocky wrote: post #386
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…

> 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%…

It's hard to show initiative without a pulse. Most agents don't have that (yet). But can't be too hard to build.

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

#510

Post by rdedev »

worldthruword wrote: post #294
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. Would a skill which forces you and LLM to reach a shared understanding of the product features and the regulations those features are supposed to capture be of help here? The main idea is we provide documents to the LLM and it asks lot of questions which clear amb…

> The main idea is we provide documents to the LLM and it asks lot of questions which clear ambiguity and possible misconceptions the LLM might have

This kind of works but the difficulty is that you have to be very explicit about everything. It was mentioned in a spec document that a particular excel file is treated as a source of truth throughout the whole company and it is treated as an append only database. The agent still decided to add a check to see if a previous row was modified. It pushed back on its decision when asked why it decided to do so. "What if someone entered it wrong and had to correct it"? Valid question but it's not my teams responsibility to check for it

This check makes sense from a traditional development view point and that's why the agent did it. I would say it's good practice too but it's beyond the scope of the project it was working on. If what you are doing is beyond the norm you have to watch out for things like this

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