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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

#671

Post by alchemism »

Applejinx wrote: post #592
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Suno's incapable of making psytrance, which is mind-boggling as that is an intensely repetitive, machine-like genre that should be water off a duck's back to produce. The problem is that it's doing it by diffusion techniques, so all its high percussion is totally vague and indistinct. Hell, it can't even do a decent psy kick because that too is unspecific and you can't have a psy track that is vague and blunted. Turn…

That is an illustrative failure. It might be absurdly simple 4/4 pattern progressions which a calculator should be able to automate. But inducing a trance requires consciousness; electrical activity in a meat brain. They will never understand such things.

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

#672

Post by skeledrew »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #661
skeledrew wrote: post #192

Yeah the writing is on the wall. Not just for knowledge work, but for jobs in general, as I've been saying in other comments. The era of wage labour, and this dominant economic system, is coming to an end. There's no way it can coexist with AI, but it also needs to continuously push for better AI, which means there's no stopping it. The only thing to do really is brace for the disruption - which will likely be pretty…

> The only thing to do really is brace for the disruption - which will likely be pretty rough - and hope governments play their role properly to ease the transition. What this sounds like to me is "sit and wait to get bulldozed now that your economic value to the elites is gone"

That's exactly what I'm hoping won't happen. But I honestly don't have that much hope. The people in a position to make things easier love the way things are too much.

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

#673

Post by tobyhinloopen »

drsopp wrote: post #79
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #3

I think this is the first time I saw someone describe so clearly my concerns and experience with LLMs. I have little to add to it, except that I agree completely. Not sure what’s next

Many people share this sentiment, many people don't. Who you belong to depend on at least two things: A) How knowledgable is the AI on what you are working on, B) How well do you wield these new tools to work better than before? (Better here can mean many different things).

(A) I spent day and night using and making tools with and for LLMs. (B) As much as I humanly can.

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

#674

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

spacechild1 wrote: post #649
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Right now, people effectively spend ~0% of their time entertaining themselves with their own music, art, writing, film, etc. First, the 0% figure is not true. People do write stories, play instruments or draw pictures. Second, everybody who really feels a desire to express themselves creatively has akready been able to do so. Nothing was stopping you from writing poems, drawing pictures or picking up an instrument.…

> Nothing was stopping you from writing poems, drawing pictures or picking up an instrument. Recording music has never been so easy.

And who said it has?

You seem to imply that you can't have created any art ever in your life if you ever did anything with AI.

It's almost as if you can do both, and it's almost as if you're open-minded you can appreciate either when it's worth appreciating.

Sorry, I've seen just as much thoughtless garbage from humans as from AI...

The human touch is not automatically genius, and the AI touch is not automatically derivative trash...

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

#675

Post by zelphirkalt »

leoncos wrote: post #6

The last sentence in the article is correct: "Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession." As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game. In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People…

> In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People will no longer focus on utility alone, but instead on the enjoyment of the process of writing code itself.

Great, if someone will find it in them to pay me. Real bad, if not.

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

#676

Post by coldtea »

rsalus wrote: post #657
coldtea wrote: post #647

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. 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 the…

>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.

They will still totally be, because the capacity to do so was never coupled to labor, it was coupled to domain knowledge, client network, other players dominating the market, and so on...

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

#677

Post by WhyNotHugo »

Woodworking sounds like a solid way to steer a career. Un-impacted by LLMs, or any trend/hyper or that matter. Great for keeping the body active after decades of sitting all day. Your produce (literally) tangible products. And above all: there's always a need for more skilled carpenters.

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

#678

Post by fragmede »

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.

> compensating controls

How to say you deal with PCI compliance without saying you steal with PCi compliance.

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

#679

Post by mrandish »

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…

> 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

Absolutely true, many things will continue to improve in significant ways. However, if we look at the modern history of rapid disruptions driven by technology (a side interest of mine), persistent patterns emerge. Similar to avalanches or flash floods, such periods of very rapid disruption are often triggered by one or more significant breakthroughs in certain technologies. Early rates of change tend to be fast and furious but eventually begin to taper as recently unlocked low-hanging fruit is harvested and those racing through newly found terrain encounter all-new significant barriers and points of friction. Early in such periods, extrapolating the recent extraordinary rates of change forward has poor predictive power. Sudden extreme bursts tend to regress back toward the long-term trend line.

Arguably, the current disruption in LLMs can be traced to post ~2010 research slowly building to the 2017 transformer paper and the adjacent work it quickly inspired. So today is, arguably, mid or late-ish in the LLM rapid burst phase. The rate of fundamental, broad-based breakthroughs lifting all LLM applications has clearly slowed with many of the most impactful recent discoveries being in scaling, optimization, tuning and productization toward specific domains. That doesn't mean there can't be another transformer breakthrough tomorrow but, historically, black swans rarely travel in flocks.

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