I say this every time: if the LLM is saving you on time, its time to rethink how you spend that time which includes reading the code, reviewing documentation of your preferred stack / programming language, re-learning concepts you feel like you've gotten stale on, and just keep your mind growing on these things. Some of the best devs I ever knew before LLMs were always reading official documentation and reviewing existing code.
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#682It's not just about it taking the technical competence away from our job, it's taken away the joy [1] which I wrote about. I feel like many of my peers are beating around the bush on this topic and in denial. Even if you accept it can do a large portion of the technical part of our work, we are just supervisors at this point making sure it doesn't do any stupid shit. What is the point? Where is the fun in this? Where…
The challenge is enduring the hype and pulling through until enough people left the field so we can make more money
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#683> 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.
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I think there will always be some sort of mastery element to communicating with AI. You can see that nowadays with juniors who blow through tokens and still don’t produce good results. There will always be some group of people using AI better than others. Maybe the results will be equal in the far future, but some other dimension like cost may be better used by some people
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#684> 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.
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these tools cannot read your mind. every time you prompt it you condition what it will give you on what you gave it. there will either always be a limit to how good that will be or none of this will matter because no human will ever matter again.
so far the skill is to condition it to give you the best results.
there used to be a time where you had to hack together silly idiosyncratic prompts to get the model to do what you wanted. now you just go into the engineering and describe the object you want it to conjure for you in as much detail as possible (including the high level description of the internals if able) and any constraints you want on it.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#685I 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 disrup…
Progress happens in a series of S-curves. While your observation is correct that advances occur initially rapidly then taper off, the next step tends to arrive sooner than the previous, and with greater magnitude [1]. Tim Urban's article from 2015 has a great explanation of this phenomenon [2].
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/technology-long-run
[2]: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#686There are lots of positives that have resulted from using AI in software engineering. (1) No more long repetitive text editing sessions. I.e. changing namespaces or replacing deprecated APIs with the "correct" ones. AI will make nearly perfect text modifications with ease. (2) No more bike-shedding code reviewers nitpicking over every tiny coding decision. I.e, "you should use std::format instead of std::stringstream…
Re. 1) Ai will often hallucinate new APIs therefore creating more text editing.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#687Earlier 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,…
> But as always, further working on it proved extremely difficult, as it always tried to go back to making generic stuff, ignoring the details you give it. It's like any LLM, it's not a tool for if you know exactly what you want with all these knobs and fine grained controls. > The most interesting result I had was actually when I managed to get it off rails, a bug more or less. I asked it to mix two very different g…
> I don't think that's a bug or unexpected
In this particular case, it really gave some "uncanny valley" feeling. That is, on the surface, it sounds like something familiar, but something is off. The wrongness was completely unintended, not prompted for, but interesting, in the same way that eldritch horror is interesting.
I wanted to mix heavy metal and hardstyle, the idea I had in mind was to imagine a battle, one side being represented by one style, and the other, by another style, each side responding to the other. It didn't give that much thought to it, but it sounded fun. And instead of getting the back and forth I expected, I got... weirdness.
I then tried to add some matching lyrics, that is, something similarly uncanny, also using AI. It also turned out to be somewhat difficult and not all LLMs managed to pull it off (ended up with GPT-5.5). That is, for many LLMs, especially the small, self-hosted ones, I couldn't get the effect I wanted, even after trying different prompt strategies. Scary words, spooky scenes, etc... no problem, but that's the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted something subtly wrong, not an B movie horror scene. Also, by adding the lyrics to the song, Suno lost a bit of an edge to the song.
If you are interested, here are the links, with and without lyrics. Don't expect anything good, it is just a little experiment: https://suno.com/s/Amu1FcrjkHsB2WTt , https://suno.com/s/gXMfNnv1g453PiaS
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#688I 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…
What is your theory of when AI gets to 100%. PMs and business analysts build all the software? Or just like a 700 or so 1-founder companies in the world and everyone else is without work? The matrix?
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#689Earlier 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…
> he people I found worst at this were IT. My experience as IT in modern banks was the opposite. The legal department were absolute assholes when it came to software features. And I'm talking absolutely 100% ok features, like paying your bills from the banking application. The least fun, trigger happy, cover their buts people I've ever seen. Like all they could ever say was NO. I guess they were heavily incentivized…
Auditing is assumption of blame or responsibility to another party.
They are incentivized to strike the best balance of certifying (who wants to go to a place that never certifies) and validity (rubber stamp mills reflect the blame).
Yes, it is meant to be adversarial, to a point.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#690We are finally getting past the denial phase