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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

#551

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

fantasizr wrote: post #312
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 produces 7m "professional" songs per day. Can't think of a better example of a slop generator. Many songs that will never get more than a handful of listens if it all.

I've made songs on Suno that I actually like and have listened to tons of times, not to mention just having fun in general making music, seeing what comes out of the box.

The future is going to be different.

Right now, people effectively spend ~0% of their time entertaining themselves with their own music, art, writing, film, etc.

In the future, it's going to be >0%.

Will it be >10%? Who knows.

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

#552

Post by suttontom »

BurningFrog wrote: post #424
csallen wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, tons of people seem to be in camps at both extremes. It's either "AI sucks don't trust it!" or "AI is so much better than humans!" But the most reasonable take, which I'm happy to see reflected in so many comments in this thread, is… use both. Do an AI pass, and have humans verify, and vice versa. Let the humans drive the AI. Then the unique shortcomings of each party can be covered by the other's st…

This makes sense, but a logical next step is to have one AI write code, and then have another AI, instead of humans, verify it. Or are current AIs too similar for that to be fruitful?

This is commonly known as "LLM-as-a-judge" and anecdotally multiple people I know who write code using OpenRouter or using multiple models say it's surprisingly effective. It's strange that there don't appear to be any major papers on it since ~early 2025, which at this point is basically ancient history.

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

#553

Post by hootz »

monegator wrote: post #461
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,…

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 beca…

Have you tried the open weight models, but not locally? Like, using it from a provider. That way, you get access to better models while still not using private closed models, anyone with enough compute can host them, not just the big AI corps.

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

#554

Post by hyperadvanced »

AJRF wrote: post #550

We have all the AI tools you could bare to mention, but we still don't have anyone but programmers shipping things. Why aren't the designers and PMs shipping things if these tools are so good?

I don’t know about your co but at my job we very much have non SWE shipping their own (mostly garbage) apps

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

#555

Post by mindcrime »

cassianoleal wrote: post #241
NikolaNovak wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles." I'm not sure that's universally true. Good software engineers who are arrogant about easily acquired domain knowledge have been the downfall of many an ERP system. There's SO much IT that's literally all about putting business rules into the system.

> Good software engineers who are arrogant about easily acquired domain knowledge This is a problem of arrogance, not of domain expertise. Having worked in a few different industries, I'd wager that for the vast majority of them, a competent person can probably learn 80% of the required domain knowledge in under 6 months. For the latter 20%, as long as the person is not arrogant, they will seek help from colleagues w…

"The first 80% is easy... it's the second 80% that gets you."

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

#556

Post by riazrizvi »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #262
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…

> If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". They don't "solve" execution. If you're willing to push them enough, and put in place the system that they can actually get working code, they can solve execution - but that IS engineering!! They are far from doing that by default now (replacing engineering…

Execution has just moved up the conceptual stack. We once wrote assembly, and then changed to higher order languages. Same is happening with lexical work generally.

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

#557

Post by epolanski »

canadaduane wrote: post #466
epolanski wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The input training doesn't matter much, besides, the input training is already skewed for code that has been submitted after much trial and error by a dev locally and possibly reviewed. And input has an over bias over open source projects, not crap internal tools no llm has ever seen.

There's more to the quality of the output, like prompts, the quality of the codebase (from which the llms learn), the documentation/harnessing, the feedback an engineer provides while reviewing multiple times (in the chat, in the diff, in the pr) etc, etc.

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

#558

Post by hyperadvanced »

Eridrus wrote: post #351
cmiles74 wrote: post #129

I’ve been using Claude Code with Opus 4.7; it’s not that the code it produces is wrong, it simply tends to write too much of it. In my opinion it’s still worth thinking about a particular feature and finding the best way to fit it into your code because Claude will often just pick a layer of the stack (maybe presentation), and jam it in there. A couple weeks later you need this data somewhere else and Claude can’t re…

I have the same criticism of AI writing too much code. It's surprisingly effective to just tell the AI to cut the (prod) line count in half and look at whether there are other libraries it could reuse. I think you could probably also have a refactor bot that spots duplication and pulls it out. None of this comes out of the box atm, but it's not clear that it's not possible.

I do this several times per week. You can ask Claude to hunt down duplication, brittle scripty code, overly defensive fallbacks, and footguns.

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

#559

Post by hax0ron3 »

abalashov wrote: post #544
hax0ron3 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never found there to be much soul and humanity in the job to begin with. Coding personal projects has soul, but for me at least the demands of high-velocity sprint-based software development to match business needs removed most of the soul and humanity long before AI got good at coding. And I mean, I totally understand why it has to be like that. In most businesses, you do better by shipping decent software fast th…

That's an interesting perspective. It's hard for me to relate to it because I haven't worked in a job where I just have to ship code 'for work' in so long. Being a more or less one-man software company, all my work projects, but especially our products, feel like personal projects. However, if I were just having to do things for the man, I might have a rather different take on all this.

Yup, I can definitely imagine that it's different if you're working directly for customers and have the freedom to do things however you want to do them as long as you still make a living.

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

#560

Post by weakfish »

eikenberry wrote: post #517
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…

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

Like full self driving!
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