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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

#881

Post by mellosouls »

mikeocool wrote: post #651
mellosouls wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

As in my reply to the sibling comment, I am not disputing that engineer expertise remains important; I'm saying the nature of it is now different and will continue to rapidly change in its place in the business stack.

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

#882

Post by odeono »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #628
odeono wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Once you're building something that genuinely hasn't been built before, LLMs cannot be trusted with any architectural decisions. I'm building a product based around various physics simulations, so it's purely first principles, but without active research, thinking, and challenging, it produces computational code literally hundreds of orders of magnitude slower WHILE implementing absurd fallbacks and shortcuts t…

Sure. But where do you think AI will be in a year? Or do you think that AI is just an advanced Markov chain? Like “AI will never be able to write code. Ok AI will never be able to debug code. ok ai will never be able to write design docs. Ok AI will never be able to architecture. Ok ai will never be able to do distributed systems architecture. Ok ai will never be able to design new products completely from scratch. O…

[dead]

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

#883

Post by treszkai »

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…

> If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution

Steve Jobs didn't mean "writing good code" as "execution", he meant "making things that align with how people want to use the product". Frontier LLMs are not solving Steve Jobs-level execution (even in the near future) because what that would mean understanding human nature – something that Steve Jobs or Henry Ford were much better than most in the industry today, so at best we're going to see LLMs making things that are as good as the majority of products. Because AI does not see whether something is perfect-according-to-Steve-Jobs or merely good-code-according-to-engineering-practices.

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

#884

Post by tenthirtyam »

t34t34r43 wrote: post #113
iandanforth wrote: post #18

Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks…

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…

> anyone who's using them to actually ship product without a human actually digging into it is opening themselves up to a world of risk.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems that companies will happily take existential risks to get a better bottom line short term. Either you're too big to fail or you've already privatised any profits and subsequent losses (due to the risks becoming manifest) are socialised. The motor industry seems to be particularly egregious in this aspect, but also the food industry, construction industry etc.

Seems to me even governments make the same choices in many ways - cut back health-care, policing, education, public transport and let the next government deal with the consequences.

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

#885

Post by philipallstar »

tenthirtyam wrote: post #884
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…

> anyone who's using them to actually ship product without a human actually digging into it is opening themselves up to a world of risk. Maybe it's just me, but it seems that companies will happily take existential risks to get a better bottom line short term. Either you're too big to fail or you've already privatised any profits and subsequent losses (due to the risks becoming manifest) are socialised. The motor ind…

> Seems to me even governments make the same choices in many ways - cut back health-care, policing, education, public transport and let the next government deal with the consequences.

Definitely - defund the police was an astonishing rallying cry that made the communities it pretended to help much more dangerous for their residents.

But the opposite is far more likely, and far more destructive long-term: it's easier to buy votes by spending more on social programmes and rack up debt and/or inflation to cover it, and then spend even more to fix that problem for enough voters that the people paying for it all can't vote it away, and the people who vote for it over the decades just don't understand why their pot feels so uncomfortably warm all of a sudden.

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

#886

Post by alkonaut »

I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so.

As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a model to create this for me. It almost one shotted it. After a couple of iterations and 30 minutes I had made what I made over two years. The total AI cost (deepseek api, so entirely usage based) was $0.5.

Now, I didn't enjoy making this AI guided version. And I didn't learn anything. But terrifyingly it has removed the drive to make another 2 year project "by hand". The end result (the runnihg demo) was never the goal. But still I can't now make myself hand-craft what an AI can spit out in an hour for $1!

This is what bothers me the most. I'm old and senior enough that I don't fear for my job. But the AI thing just swallowed my hobby.

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

#887

Post by cheesecakegood »

ksenzee wrote: post #786
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. LLMs are going to show that there's a huge divide in "engineers" between people who love "coding" and people who like "engineering". The group of people kicking and screaming the most are the people who love code and don't want to see their coding go away. These are typically the build vs buy folks. "We can't use any…

I disagree with most of this. I'm kicking and screaming pretty hard, and yet I'm not one of the "I can do it better" folks. My whole career has been in open source. I'm all about choosing the right tool. I'm also tech lead on a team of seven, so I'm not writing a lot of code anyway. What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get…

Why is everyone acting like this is unknowable? Can’t you just look and see what the team’s output was like 2-3 years ago? Of course there might be long term risks that have a time lag and are thus not visible yet, but it shouldn’t be a complete mystery

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

#888

Post by port11 »

alkonaut wrote: post #886

I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so. As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a mod…

You shouldn’t be bothered that someone else does your hobby better. It’s a hobby, it’s meant to be for you, for no purpose other than fun, experimentation, entertainment, what have you. The outcome isn’t as important as the process.

That’s my take on this, at least. I’ll never be very good at Scythe, or the most creative role-player, certainly never managed to do anything beautiful in pottery class (although the glazing is pretty).

That’s fine. I achieve enough in other areas ._.

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

#889

Post by ramblerman »

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.

That's good advice to stay employable.

But I used to enjoy learning - I think most of us did. The existential crisis many are experiencing is about the lack of fulfilment in rolling an LLM slot machine all day in an already dopamine depleting environment.

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

#890

Post by Drakim »

5701652400 wrote: post #211
keyle wrote: post #34

I sympathise with the author being in the same boat, largely. I just want to emphasise a point... Calculators give 100% correct answers and yet we still hire accountants; for the simple fact that we don't want all to be accountants. People will hire software engineers for the simple fact that they do not want to be software engineers.

"calculator" ("computer") was a profession. not anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

Doesn't that support the point?

Computers came in and "took" the job of calculating numbers (I assume usually budgets and finances), but instead of every layman just using a computer to organize their company's finances, they still hire a professional to use the computer to organize the company's finances. The role shifted, but it wasn't eliminated.

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