> But now the market is shaping everyone into becoming a generalist. This is interesting because in my field of VC everyone says generalists are dying.
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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
751–760 of 1001 posts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#752I 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…
> I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff.
Suno doesn't make music, it makes simulacra of music. Music is only made by humans.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#753Earlier 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.
Morality is a social construct. We created it for ourselves and at its core is our social nature and the ability to feel Empathy for other humans/creatures. Now I lead with that because there are historical cases for both religious and non religious people committing horrific acts, both groups having whatever form of "morals" and still those acts happened. Morals based on the idea of an all seeing eye are also questi…
if somebody feeds the needy out of the belief that they are doing the right thing under an all seeing eye, in what way is that worse than a non all seeing eye believer not feeding the needy?
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#754[deleted]
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> Or just like a 700 or so 1-founder companies in the world and everyone else is without work? This. But instead of 700 it's more likely that everyone will be a founder (more or less). It's already scary how easy it is to launch an MVP or produce prototypes with the latest models.
> It's already scary how easy it is to launch an MVP or produce prototypes with the latest models.
No it isn’t. The things that were hard are now harder. The things that were comparatively easy are now easier. But if you build another piece of vibe-coded crap in a world awash in vibe-coded crap, you will not stand out. Nobody cares about your unpolished, one-shot prototype, so cranking them out faster is not really helpful.
Differentiation is always a problem of effort and care, and this isn’t going to change.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Woah, I cajoled a chatbot into building something I don't understand at all, I'm so good at my job!" That ship sailed when people started using compilers and stopped learning assembly language.
Never really understood this comparison, as it always felt intentionally obtuse to me, but thanks for replying, friend!
Your confusion probably comes down to a well-intentioned but now-obsolete focus on determinism.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 p…
YMMV but an LLM can hullicinate bug in programmed medical devices which may kill people in unexpected ways
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#758Earlier quoted context omitted.
Accountants have specialized domain knowledge (laws, regulations, procedures, bureaucracy etc.) that goes well beyond what a calculator can do. If we apply the same argument to software engineering I think it's a good point... just maybe not the one you intended to make.
Learning a company and it's product is so natural to us that we hardly talk about it. It's a key skill for reliable workers. It's probably impossible for LLMs to learn and apply that wisdom reliably .
Why?
Humans learn this information from documentation and being exposed to all the different systems.
We know LLMs can ingest documentation like a sponge and access all different internal systems, resources and products via MCP Servers?
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones. Turns out brains just aren’t as special as we thought.
I think the manual professions are not far behind. It's just that the development is being done in China, so most readers here are not aware of it.
There is no robot electricians in China jumping up into ceiling crawlspaces running cable with proper adherence to the plethora of law and regulation.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#760Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 leg…
> But a company that does that is basically delegating both compliance and legal functions to IT. No sane company does that.
I was a Software Dev in a small (but fully regulated and licensed) stock exchange. We used to have guidance from legal experts, market experts, and traders, but in the last project I worked on, they just dumped 300 pages of laws and regulations on my desk and asked me what needed to be done. Why? Because the experts we used to have were either fired or left. Along with any product managers. I guess company leadership thought they were no longer needed.
Insane is right. I told them that this is not how it is supposed to work. I can't tell them what needs to be done. I am not a legal expert who can just interpret these regulations.
I was forced out of the company after that, but honestly, no one would want to work in such an environment anyway.