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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

#511

Post by variodot »

wfleming wrote: post #27
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #4

> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession... Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.

Custom furniture/cabinetry is already a pretty tough market, and woodworking is such a common programmer hobby that if a significant chunk of us decided to make a go of it the market would get heavily oversupplied pretty fast :). I’ve had people tell me I should try selling some of the furniture I make and my response is always that I made the mistake of turning a hobby into a career once, I don’t intend to make that…

I'm threading this now and have paired AI-assisted development with woodworking knowledge. Partially chose to work on this because I wanted to build in a domain that the models might have a tougher time understanding.

Parallels and interests overlap everywhere between programming and woodworking; decisions about tooling, tolerances, sequencing, and what can be easily fixed later.

The models get rectangles pretty well and has been fun exploring a parametric casework planner for my own shop.

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

#512

Post by skor »

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.

just verified, it cant make a decent techno track, nor a drone track nor anything experimental. Its creativity is subpar, it feels like listening to a producer that knows where things go but is tired of playing, zero interest in creating/ performing, it gives off that kind of vibe

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

#513

Post by Atiscant »

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.

I mean, even if could produce generic metal would it produce Igorrr? Meshugga? Tim Henson? Baby Metal? All of these are driven by other things then just producing metal. I agree pure AI music would properly rejected unless there was some point to it. I could see it have some part, but then as a weird instrument. Take a model for music, randomly mutate internal weights and then let it produce a drum beat. Keep doing that unless you hit some limit and perhaps that is interesting.

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

#514

Post by dragontamer »

monegator wrote: post #448

Hear 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 tha…

My boss came up to me and said a coworker using LLM tools has shipped more customer solutions in a week than basically what I've done in 3 months.

The bosses are out to force people like you to use AI. And have been for months.

Maybe not your boss yet, but it swept through my office dramatically. Maybe two or three months from limited tests to now today FORCED usage of AI (people going around the office asking constantly if there's any AI that can help today).

----------

This has a few toxic effects.

1. You are not allowed to complain about code quality issues anymore. Any complaints are met with okay, we will get the AI to fix it.

No discussion, no elaboration. No one in the office is even interested anymore. AI solves everything.

2. You are basically in a position where you are forced to use AI, whether you want it or not.

3. I expect code quality at my office to drop dramatically as fewer and fewer office mates give a shit

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

#515

Post by mike_hearn »

an0malous wrote: post #38

There’s one force where software engineering is being automated by LLMs, but the other force is that there isn’t really much more software that needs to be built. Even before AI coding became big, back in 2021, we were already in late stage SaaS territory where each new idea was an increasingly minor variation of an existing idea. There were no new GitHubs, Herokus, Stripes, Salesforces, Instagrams, Reddits, just var…

Can't disagree more! There's bottomless demand for more software. Here's a few examples I encountered just in the last few weeks that wouldn't be feasible before LLMs:

- More localism. Are you afraid of being cut off from tech by some future US government? Now it's feasible for your local culture to grow its own office suite, operating systems, Active Directory competitor etc. A less interdependent world with more competition does have its advantages.

- The building management company for my apartment sucks. Basic problems go unfixed because they appear to suffer extreme labour shortages and serious problems with flaky labour e.g. employees that just randomly go AWOL in the middle of conversations without bothering to tell anyone. A lot of the work of these employees is actually just coordinating and paying contractors in response to problem reports, something that can now be automated by AI ... but they haven't done it yet.

- I just finished assembling some flatpack furniture. Every time I do this it reminds me why IKEA dominates the market. Other furniture companies give the strong impression they don't usability test their instruction leaflets. This should and could be massively better: AR assistance during the build would be great, AI stress-testing instructions to verify they make sense would be great, AI checking every packet has the right number of components in it would be great. And there are lots of furniture companies out there. They don't all need to use a single SaaS to do this.

+ in general robots will require tons of software/models to make them do tasks usefully, especially as they lack training data.

That's just a few examples of places software could have made my life easier in just the last few weeks.

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

#516

Post by stevenhuang »

awill88 wrote: post #306
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…

LLMs don’t “solve” execution at all. They aid and accelerate it.

Don't kid yourself.

The high watermark of what can be "solved" (read: one shotted) is rising, and will continue to rise. Look at the gig economy (Fiver etc) for simple programming/design tasks, LLMs have taken over completely with their execution.

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

#517

Post by eikenberry »

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…

The classic 3-5 year window for a new technology that is uncertain and requires just a few more breakthroughs to get there...

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

#519

Post by ilaksh »

ofjcihen wrote: post #508
ilaksh wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

It can make mistakes and will sometimes, but what he specifically mentioned was a case where it did not pull up a reference that it needed. So using a web search tool effectively would make a big difference.

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

#520

Post by runarberg »

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…

Your analogies are flawed. DAWs and skill saws generate nothing. They take skill to operate, and a novice cannot use these tools at all unless they know the craft.

Compare to this to prompting an LLM: “Generate a third person where game with a view from above where you can steal cars, shoot at people, run from the police, etc.” Anybody with access to the tool can do this, and the results are just another uninspiring GTA clone that you would imagine.

The latter is more like a carpenter ordering their “work” from alibaba then it is like using a skill saw.

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