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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

#651

Post by mikeocool »

mellosouls wrote: post #469
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. This is domain expertise - software engineers are not needed for that. Ofc often senior sws are expert in it, but they aren't necessary . Traditionally its been useful for frictionless production to have engineers to be able to do maybe 90% of their work without con…

> This is domain expertise - software engineers are not needed for that.

I want to work with the business domain experts you work with. The ones I’ve worked with are experts in their domain, not modeling that domain in software.

Left to their own devices with Claude Code, they produce some great POCs. Then those POCs buckle under their own weight they pile on contradicting requirements and have opus spinning to fix bugs.

Maybe the models will get good enough to solve for this, but they’re not there yet.

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

#652

Post by coldtea »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #305
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…

> Do an AI pass, and have humans verify, and vice versa. Let the humans drive the AI. You can do that, sure. But doing so negates any improvements in speed the LLM brought. And at that point, you may as well just do it yourself to begin with.

>But doing so negates any improvements in speed the LLM brought.

We could do with less speed.

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

#653

Post by downrightmike »

george_max wrote: post #617

I see many comments saying, "AI can't do X with 80-100% accuracy; therefore our professions are in good hands." While I don't want to sound overly pessimistic, the models are improving at a rapid rate. If asked ~3 years ago where the state of the models are today, it would sound like sci-fi if answered, "the models are creating full MVP apps in ~30 minutes with one prompt". The hurdles the models are facing now, like…

That's what the AI comapnies would like, but they can't pay back the 100's of billions they are blowing without 10,000x the price they charge. The investors won't allow it. we're not even in a revenue cycle yet and they are already trying to dump their deep losses on retail by trying to IPO

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

#654

Post by Anoian »

spicyusername wrote: post #644
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 also noticed the too much code issue. The open question for me is whether too much code is actually a problem. These tools are a fact of life now. If we can solve problems or debug faster, and the software is less buggy, than it's not too much lines of code, it's just right.

Too much code means more complexity for humans and LLMs to comprehend. More complexity means harder to change and more prone to bugs.

This is not just right, no matter on which side of the argument you are.

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

#656

Post by cejast »

slyzmud wrote: post #637
cejast wrote: post #57

> All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable. Is it really though? Access to information is quicker, but you still need to know what ‘good’ looks like to leverage it effectively. I can prompt my way to a medical diagnosis, but I’d still want to run it by a doctor.

I don't think that's a good analysis. If the LLM is wrong and gives you a wrong medical diagnosis you end up hurting your health. If an LLM gives you a wrong debugging answer you've just lost 5 minutes. Software engineering is the only knowledge work where mistakes are usually inexpensive except for data breaches. Outside for that nobody cares for bugs. That's not true in most other knowledge jobs. If a lawyer uses A…

That’s my point though? Debugging a 5-minute problem is in the shallow end of the spectrum, the real complexity sits where they lean on their domain experience. Finance and payments software mistakes can absolutely be expensive.

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

#657

Post by rsalus »

coldtea wrote: post #647
rsalus wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, even if AI allows two engineers to do the work of six, companies will likely just use that efficiency to expand their scope. I think we'll see short-term layoffs and a more stratified engineering field during the transition, but the fundamental need for deep technical expertise isn't going away.

> I don't know, even if AI allows two engineers to do the work of six, companies will likely just use that efficiency to expand their scope. Not really. It will be a cuttthroat landscape, and the scope wont matter as much anymore. First because everyone else will equally be able to throw LLMs at the scope, but also because the scope has natural limits: your market fit, customer expectations, and (for software/hw prod…

AI usage will directly impact said margins. Moreover, for the scenario you describe, companies need to have the capability to precisely estimate the cost of a given deliverable - not something possible with current tooling + models. You're also underestimating the market trend towards vertical integration: companies are not going to be constrained by a sector or niche. They will expand to capture as much value as they can, because now their capacity to do so is partially decoupled from labor.

It will certainly be a cutthroat landscape for engineers, but companies will be building _more_ capacity, not less. In other words, the demand won't disappear for skilled technical labor, it will just move higher up the value chain.

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

#658

Post by dodu_ »

zkmon wrote: post #269

> I don't know what to do. Ride the wave. You rode it when websites/webapps were the wave. I came into software industry before internet, kept changing my horse. You are never too old to learn new tricks. The new wave create new kind of work and workers. Be one of them. Ride the beast, master the tools. It's the same game again.

[flagged]

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

#659

Post by bluefirebrand »

rybosworld wrote: post #607
rglover wrote: post #587

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 acc…

For most companies that I've worked for, pushback is normal and expected as long as you've built some trust/rapport with your management chain. However with AI, it feels different. I have seen both technical and non-technical managers tell engineers something to the effect of "you aren't prompting correctly" if they aren't able to get the task done within some preferred time frame. We are seeing the industry revive m…

> If you're an IC, I do think the best thing to do is just go along with it

I personally think the best thing to do is start retraining now so you aren't screwed by the time this all topples

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

#660

Post by jgilias »

oytis wrote: post #636
jgilias wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was in the world where making software was _prohibitively_ expensive.

Well, alright, scalability + expensiveness create ideal conditions for monopolization. Assuming it's cheap now, scalability still doesn't go away. So it's a) cheap b) easily reusable, you make it once cheaply and quickly and it stays with you forever, and can be used by others too - I don't see a condition for lots of job creation in software engineering here.

One could argue that scalability matters more when software is expensive to make, as you need to reuse it to make the cost worthwhile.

So, for context, two data points I have that make me want to argue for the opposite side.

First, some time ago I worked for a startup that had a B2B offering that in most cases involved integration costs to align with whatever the client was already using. We tried to eat this as much as possible, but we still had to have some “integration price” we asked. More than once we had a potential client who just couldn’t lift it. They needed the software but just didn’t have the cash buffer for the initial cost (us neither). With how things are now, we’d have onboarded all of them. And much faster than it normally took. And yes, they still would have bought our solution instead of rolling their own (see the next point).

The next point that kind of ties into the previous one if you squint. I’m in a position now where I see non-technical people building stuff with AI. _Most_ can’t. As an example, the AI says they need a database. But they don’t really know what that is, and deploying one sounds scary, so they ask the AI if they can build it without a database. And the AI happily complies and makes a “CRUD” API that “persists” data in RAM. And the AI is not being dumb here. The best, most perfect model is still an LLM at the end of the day, so it completes the context window. Sure, you could make a mod that “sticks to its guns” more, but that comes across as the model being “non-compliant” and “difficult”. Now, I’ve also seen non-technical people who have succeeded. But then they have the kind of a mindset that they could’ve been engineers in the first place in different circumstances. But also, even they build fragile monstrosities that they don’t understand.

So, going back to the first point. Our clients were deeply nontechnical for the most part. Most of them wouldn’t even have attempted to build their own. But also, getting the system up and working involved more than just code - relationships with suppliers, some legal stuff, etc.

So, I can totally see how the amount of software produced might grow exponentially leading to “pre-AI” engineers being worth their weight in gold due to that. That doesn’t exclude a painful transition though.

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