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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

#581

Post by juleiie »

thin_carapace wrote: post #334
techblueberry wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sounds more like a problem of close minded narrow focus on economic output instead of culture, virtue and spiritual traditions. I’m starting to be more sensitive to the argument that without god, people are unable to have a strong moral foundation. Not for the people expressing creativity in how they fuck, but as a check on those in power.

maybe if people werent busy fucking around so creatively they could band together as families and follow agreed social practices to ensure distribution of labor and charitable action in their local communities, maybe then people would care more about their neighbours and less about consuming shit. no thanks ... everyone too busy creatively fucking around and consuming shit while ignoring reality (eg partner count dir…

I think that social justice replaced the religious preaching of values in many circles but it was well… it’s not a sort of thing that many find appealing to follow.

Concepts like "checking your privilege" or being "canceled" closely parallel religious ideas of original sin and repentance, where individuals must acknowledge their unearned moral failings to become "good".

Actions like using specific pronouns, displaying yard signs, or performing land acknowledgments function similarly to reciting a catechism; they signal allegiance to a shared belief system and reassure the in-group

Protests and social movements often evoke the communal, revival-like atmosphere of religious gatherings, providing participants with a sense of purpose and belonging.

But what’s most convincing is that many times it is hypocritical in the same way religions are. There is no room for questioning or doubt and yet the actions do not align with the performance. Which means it isn’t driven by dry results but fulfills a deeper human need.

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

#583

Post by micromacrofoot »

Quothling wrote: post #523
realusername wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things can do 90% of the work ... but only if used by the right people. I've seen first hand what less experienced developers produce using the same models, your 90% accuracy suddenly drops to 50%...

With opus 4.8 we're frankly aproaching the 100% of the work, but only if tasked by the right people. A decade ago I worked as an enterprise architect and left it because I preffered coding. Now I'm an enterprise architect again, and we're at the point where I've setup a Microsoft Fabric and integrated a ADLS Gen2 with a Lakehouse building Dimension and Fact tables for our Business Intelligence people with Cowork. A m…

similar experience here, I don't think I've run into a challenging problem that I've had to solve directly for months

I've been a developer for 25 years

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

#584

Post by antonvs »

thewebguyd wrote: post #471
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…

> 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. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance.

This is such a nonsensical claim. If a company is asking someone from IT to read the regulations and implement them, then obviously you’re going to get something that conforms to the written specification they were provided.

But a company that does that is basically delegating both compliance and legal functions to IT. No sane company does that.

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

#585

Post by notepad0x90 »

LLMs mean less devs are needed, not no devs. even after serveral more decades, they'll need steering. I've seen agents stuck chasing one issue, when to me the issue was obvious, but I can see how the model would rule out the obvious easily and move on, but my instinct/experience tells me that's where I need to focus time on. This translates into costly token-waste. Secondly, it isn't simply "quality", the LLM might generate something that's good quality from its perspective, but it simply won't consider things unless it's explicitly told to in excruciating detail, and even then! understanding things from a simian point of view can't be perfected without that simian experience as part of its training. It can come very close but not quite.

Think of it this way, who needs engineering managers, project managers, scrum masters,etc.. if they're employable then surely actual devs that can tell what good architecture is vs bad, good code vs potentially bug code is are also employable.

But the number of devs needed, that demand will obviously decline dramatically. At the same time though, there are other careers that require programming and software dev as part of your skill set. Simply integrating LLM-enabled solutions into real world workflows is a new area that's very young and immature.

Let's not act like we're suddenly in some sort of post-scarcity utopia where all problems are solved by LLMs, where tech can solve problems, there is demand for those who can use technology to do so. However, I see a lot of people attacking the technology and resisting change a lot, and to those I suggest they look up every single technological revolution and see about the fate of such people.

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

#586

Post by techblueberry »

thin_carapace wrote: post #334
techblueberry wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sounds more like a problem of close minded narrow focus on economic output instead of culture, virtue and spiritual traditions. I’m starting to be more sensitive to the argument that without god, people are unable to have a strong moral foundation. Not for the people expressing creativity in how they fuck, but as a check on those in power.

maybe if people werent busy fucking around so creatively they could band together as families and follow agreed social practices to ensure distribution of labor and charitable action in their local communities, maybe then people would care more about their neighbours and less about consuming shit. no thanks ... everyone too busy creatively fucking around and consuming shit while ignoring reality (eg partner count dir…

Part of the problem is some of the most creative fuckers are those spearheading the “band together as families” movement.

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

#587

Post by rglover »

Based on what I've been seeing/reading online the past ~6 months or so, I think there's a self-fulfilling prophecy going on here.

Developers are concerned about jobs going away, but how often are they pushing back in their orgs about how AI works? In response to "are you using AI to move faster," how many are responding with "yes, but there are some things you should know..."?

If there's no pushback and just pure acceptance of stuff like tokenmaxxing, then what does anybody expect when the broader narrative around AI is that it can help a novice to grind out miracles (i.e., "holy crap, if this is what a novice can do, what can an expert do?!")?

Of course leadership is confused because (it seems) few are asserting expertise, saying "no," and stating a clear case as to why they're doing that.

The default excuse is "I don't want to lose my job" (which is a fair reaction to all of this, especially these days), but it's worth considering when/how that choice is actually just shooting future you in the foot later. It seems there's a broader trend toward compliance more than there is "you hired me to do this job properly, did you not?"

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

#588

Post by altmanaltman »

bwfan123 wrote: post #254
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…

> I pilot LLMs all day Love the metaphor. Planes are sophisticated machines capable of auto-piloting, but humans are still needed to ultimately pilot the beast.

What about autonomous drones then? They are not planes?

The real reason we have pilots in commerical jets is that they are a failsafe because a mistake in your automated system can kill 100+ people and guess what? It still does from time to time even with a human piloting the "beast."

It is not impossible to have fully automated planes. We just cannot afford to make any mistakes otherwise people will die so we keep pilots as failsafes.

Nobody will die if your claude code hallucinates.

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

#589

Post by ex-aws-dude »

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 had a scenario the other day where the codebase had two functions

fooBar() and fooBarExtended()

The latter had additional params and functionality that was needed for the current problem.

Instead of calling that function though Claude kept trying to add in the same extended params to the first function

Even after telling it not to do that it kept suggesting the same thing again later, its so annoying sometimes

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

#590

Post by davedx »

PeterStuer wrote: post #418
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…

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…

Ha. I've worked in a fairly strongly regulated sector (energy, in the Netherlands), where I collaborated closely with our head of compliance, and she heavily over-interpreted the regulations while I often tried to find more pragmatic solutions.

I think adherence to regulation and compliance is nothing to do with whether you're a SWE, a risk officer, or C-level, and everything to do with your own principles, ethics, professional attitude, and pragmatism.

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