Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 1001 posts

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

#531

Post by JimBlackwood »

hparadiz wrote: post #500
thewebguyd wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. IME this is less the fault of IT and more so bad auditors that won't consider, or just don't understand, what compensating controls are. If it doesn't meet their little checklist exactly, they fail the audit.

It's cause IT never has to live with the consequences of their decisions. Who cares if the other department keeps bleeding talent because you twisted the knobs so hard no one wants to work in your system?

Sounds like communication between departments sucks. If IT develops for them, you’d expect there to be a feedback loop?

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

#532

Post by ofjcihen »

ilaksh wrote: post #519
ofjcihen wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It still does not rise the standard he requires which your response indicated would be easy for the model to achieve with a simple prompt.

Additionally, using a specific tool does not suddenly give the model common sense enough to say “this piece of information doesn’t answer the question of whether this solution fits in this specific industry at this time in this place”.

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

#533

Post by rightbyte »

misnome wrote: post #232
aleqs wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corporations and executives are already winning if you swallowed the concept of 'rockstar' engineer. Sure there are more and less experienced engineers, but even interns can and often do provide good input and spot mistakes made by seniors. The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (…

For the most part there aren’t 10x engineers But there are certainly 0.1x engineers

There certainly are 10x engineers just that they get most of the x from turning down bad ideas and saving work.

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

#535

Post by anupshinde »

Domain knowledge and architectural skills are not gone. I can say even Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 get domain-specific stuff wrong. I use both, because when I am not sure I ask both and also check with Gemini. But these days, I ask those even when I am sure - its like I get something confirmed from a peer. And yes, you have to be the gate keeper - the speed breaker in a way - LLMs still lack a lot of context. And even if they get more context, they will end up costing a lot and still have no accountability. In accounting, one wrong entry and the whole system can be seen as "unreliable" - thats why you are needed. The interesting part is "who takes over" - accountants who become coders, or coders who become accountants. And the latter looks more likely, in any profession. And when that happens - the bar will be raised in these other white-collar professions too, just like what happening in tech.

Opus is getting good at architecture - I need lesser "pushbacks" either because I have learnt to say the right thing or it has learnt to do the right thing - I do not know which one.

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

#536

Post by rdbl27 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #274

> I spent 10 years (even more when you account for non-profession experience) getting good at things that are becoming less and less valuable. This is just how it is, and has always been in this industry. And it takes about 10 years to realize it. When I started my career in software, businesses were still writing new code in COBOL. 10 years later those skills were pretty much useless, except for dwindling maintenanc…

Sure, but those are cherrypicked cases where a technology became obsolete. There are many counterexamples of decades-old technologies that are still actively chosen for greenfield work today, in 2026.

SQL was first released in 1973. More new SQL is being written today than ever.

C++ (1985) is the de facto standard implementation language for web browsers, JavaScript engines, networking stacks, telecommunications, video games, high speed trading, CAD/CAM, video rendering and editing, audio processing, filesystems, databases, hardware drivers, automotive, aerospace, and robotics, among others.

Is Rust making inroads? Sure, and it's a tiny fraction of C++ still. It's a long ways from being the standard.

Likewise, Python is often cited as the "AI language," but that's on the surface -- CUDA, tensor libraries, inference languages, GPU kernels, compiler stacks, and so on are usually C++.

Then there's C -- introduced in 1972. Still widely used for greenfield in kernels, device drivers, embedded systems and microcontrollers, filesystems, firmware, network stacks, cryptography, databases, compilers.

LaTeX, MATLAB, Erlang, Verilog, PostScript, Lisp (including Scheme and Clojure), shell scripting (and the UNIX paradigm itself)... the list of old tech that still sees new projects in 2026 goes on.

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

#537

Post by [deleted] »

iandanforth wrote: post #18

Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks…

[deleted]

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

#538

Post by kanbankaren »

PeterStuer wrote: post #464
jayd16 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opport…

> There are many ways to interpret regulation,

Then the rules should enumerate all the ways. From your posts, you come across as if programmers don't know what they are doing which is insulting to those who work in mission critical industries like aviation where a programmer could be criminally charged if he/she didn't implement the specs STRICTLY.

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

#539

Post by Terr_ »

genxy wrote: post #142
deanc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on projects in the airline and health industry which are highly regulated too. The regulations can be incredibly difficult to process and implement, and make sure you adhere to everything correctly. I've been involved in multiple scenarios where people have made false assertions about compliance or lack of. I'd still place a bet that the SOA models make _far_ less mistakes than humans.

They might make fewer mistakes, but they aren't evenly distributed. They don't use logic when making mistakes, it is gaps in the training data and now large of a span they have to bridge in the latent space. Just as they aren't smart like humans, they aren't stupid like humans. Don't mistake rate for quality.

Yeah, this starts to overlap with some autonomous vehicle stuff, where I like to say that the rate of errors is not the shape or distribution of errors.

We have long historical experience and innate tools for detecting and mitigating errors made by humans. If we can't apply those to automation, then even fewer total mistakes may end up being a worse outcome.

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

#540

Post by strangescript »

Agents are getting good but professing they are surpassing you in domain and architectural knowledge with no special prompting is basically self reporting at this point. That could be your job wasn't that complicated or your personal knowledge wasn't that strong, either way, same result.

Don't get me wrong, I am sure we will get to all three of these pillars, probably by next year. I am not naive.

Post reply on HN