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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

#771

Post by Chu4eeno »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #289
galactushonor wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required Did it do the correct job once you put the regulations doc(s) in the context?

What I usually do when in doubt is challenge the AI. “Please quote the section of regulation the product is non compliant with”. It usually admits it hallucinated the whole thing.

You should just hit retry, usually they either latch onto the correct part of the latent space (surprisingly often) or they admit they don't know (or call a tool, depending on the model).

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

#772

Post by _heimdall »

rfgplk wrote: post #712
p2detar wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it stop with just developer layoffs? When software companies rely on LLM providers to run their business, I’d argue we‘ll see a massive bust of these companies around the world - from on-prem products to SaaS. Customers may build the software they need entirely in-house or via prompt-engineer consultants, without the need to buy software tools like today. It could be a very very different world.

> Customers may build the software they need entirely in-house or via prompt-engineer consultants, without the need to buy software tools like today. It could be a very very different world. Already happening. I know of a few places that have gotten such large gains from LLMs that they know have their engineers working on creating homegrown ports of popular services (Docker etc.).

Homegrown ports of calendly or jira seem feasible, and arguably a good business decision. Homegrown versions of docker seem ridiculous as a starting point, even if its possible to do today there is much lower hanging fruit to go after first.

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

#773

Post by camdenreslink »

rdbl27 wrote: post #536
SoftTalker wrote: post #274

> I spent 10 years (even more when you account for non-profession experience) getting good at things that are becoming less and less valuable. This is just how it is, and has always been in this industry. And it takes about 10 years to realize it. When I started my career in software, businesses were still writing new code in COBOL. 10 years later those skills were pretty much useless, except for dwindling maintenanc…

Sure, but those are cherrypicked cases where a technology became obsolete. There are many counterexamples of decades-old technologies that are still actively chosen for greenfield work today, in 2026. SQL was first released in 1973. More new SQL is being written today than ever. C++ (1985) is the de facto standard implementation language for web browsers, JavaScript engines, networking stacks, telecommunications, vid…

Even Python is very old (in programming terms), version 1.0 was released in 1994. Many here weren't born yet.

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

#774

Post by protocolture »

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…

I once worked on a data compliance job, and the auditor would fail everything he possibly could. He was there for data destruction compliance, but like many such people, he came from an engineering background. He would complain about everything. Gaps between pallets. OHS. Whatever he could to justify his decisions. He never found a bit on a disk out of place and he still made our lives hell. Failure for the floor didnt feel solid enough. Failure because he didnt feel comfortable in a warehouse environment. And when the management had had enough and decided to refuse him entry and ask for someone else, we had to hold ourselves to an even higher standard to compensate.

Later I worked in a role, attempting to achieve PCI compliance. The Auditor was a really nice guy, but there was always a short list of 10 things that he wasn't quite happy with. We kept increasing the scope of compliance to keep up with him. Everyone talked about him (Semi famous local celebrity security consultant/researcher/lecturer) and claimed that if we just stuck it out we would be super duper compliant and basically unassailable. Except that it never ended. Went 12 months with the guy. Then they just stopped paying his bills and brought in another auditing firm. Compliant immediately. You never know in a situation like that whether we were actually compliant or if there was graft. But we got there. Knowing that organisation I lean towards graft. They then failed their first audit after achieving compliance.

I have done a few PCI compliance operations since. And what I have found that you cant control for the auditor, so what good IT management does, is make every single requirement completely unassailable. If you cant write a very obvious compensating control in 5 sentences, then you just move heaven and earth to comply with the letter of the requirement (even if the project to become compliant, is itself a compensating control for a while). If you get an over achieving auditor, you wont spend 200 billable hours arguing about compensating controls. If you have a shit auditor, you know you are compliant even if they aren't being as thorough as they could possibly be. Its the only ethical way to navigate the situation.

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

#775

Post by mlinhares »

antonvs wrote: post #584
thewebguyd wrote: post #471

Earlier 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…

That's actually pretty important, if you're an eng doing compliance work and you don't have legal counsel working side by wide with you you might be putting yourself up for legal troubles down the line. I'm glad I can always rely on legal do do their job here when doing this kind of work, I wouldn't want to do work like this just out of my ass.

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

#776

Post by calvinmorrison »

feelamee wrote: post #473
josephg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software. People are increasingly associating “AI art” with cheap slop. I wonder if the same will ever happen to programming.

I think this can happen in technical communities - people who can write/read/understand code. Who really cares about software size/performance/usability/minimalism. This is a small part of the whole users, but.. why not. People who value hand-by wood goods are also a small part. Also, there are also communities which slow down AI integration - like Zig. Maybe they will alive

sure and there are chair phreaks and headphone phreaks but meanwhile ikea sells 10 million of the mass produced chair and headphones are $1 at the dollar store

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

#777

Post by calvinmorrison »

jgilias wrote: post #594
oytis wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software boom due to SMEs looks very unnatural to me, because what makes software so special is its ability to scale, so it naturally tends to monopolization

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

Right so you might see a CTO, a CDO (development?) CAI? I dont know.

basically small and medium business mostly do not invest in having programmers on staff. Maybe you have an IT guy, half the time its someone whos real job is accounting, warehouse, etc and he knows printers and can type without looking

My bet is more software then ever, more dispersed and more lego like than ever.

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

#779

Post by adi_kurian »

hmokiguess wrote: post #259

I 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…

Yes. This is good insight.

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

#780

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

I'm probably a good candidate to direct a platoon of agents. I'm a generalist and I think in terms of business requirements. But I'm not sure I want to. Coding captures my imagination, and directing agents just plain doesn't.

Or maybe it's more than that: maybe I'm off-put by people who have no need to be in the immediate AI race spending a lot of money to get ahead without asking what near-term problem they are trying to solve. It's depressing and makes the whole field more depressing. My advice for them (if they cared) would be that soon all this will be even more batteries-included, to where any dunce can dial up a production-ready app with a sentence. There's no need to rush; when it happens you'll be better off not having wasted millions trying to be on the bleeding edge.

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