Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 1001 posts

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

#901

Post by wccrawford »

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…

I've had the same basic experience.

I also don't fear for my job, but it's because I was already laid off 1.5 years ago, right at the start of this AI boom. :/

However, I love coding with the AI. I can get it to handle all the crap that I know what it should look like, but don't want to spend the time doing myself. Instead, I get to focus on making the thing work well and do what I want. I am so much happier coding with it than without it.

Now if I can just find a job to do it in, I'll be set. :/

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

#902

Post by clktmr »

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 knew exactly what you wanted, since you already built it. All decisions were already made, all tradeoffs reached. LLMs are definitely helpful, but try exploring something new with them and you'll slow down significantly.

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

#903

Post by arkadiytehgraet »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #411
oceanplexian wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it such a dramatic statement for Boris to claim that he no longer writes code? Are people on HN still typing out functions by hand one character at a time? It would be like a developer in 2020 claiming that he only writes assembly because compilers can’t be trusted. No one is taking that person seriously. If you chose a career in tech you made a decision to work in one of the fastest moving fields in human his…

It is because HN is contrarian and behind the times. I work at a big tech company and I don't know a single person that still hand writes code. Most people haven't hand written code for at least half a year now. I do wonder what sort of bug is making its rounds on HN that people here find this so shocking and unbelievable.

solenoid0937 is not working at any big tech company, instead they are being paid by Anthropic to spread unfounded LLM-hype. They have a history of doing that. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270186 for more info.

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

#904

Post by aws_ls »

clktmr wrote: post #902
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 knew exactly what you wanted, since you already built it. All decisions were already made, all tradeoffs reached. LLMs are definitely helpful, but try exploring something new with them and you'll slow down significantly.

Its surprising, how this key insight is lacking, even in the best of developers.

It happened fast, as you prompted it just the right way. Another person, who doesn't have all that context in the mind, would fail quickly.

For example I have decades of Software experience, but wont know where to even begin what OP did.

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

#905

Post by sigotirandolas »

Yokohiii wrote: post #280
dakiol wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track. But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading t…

> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. I don't think this is true. A good engineer doesn't have infinite throughput. In my opinion the best engineers should be constantly bottlenecked because they solve difficult problems. They don't have time for grunt work. Every company needs less than perfect engineers, AI assisted or not.

Perhaps that's true of the top 5% engineers. But the question is if the top 40% of engineers can replace the bottom 60%.

The LLMs don't need to be perfect, they just need to be good enough so that the cost of fixing their code is lower than the communication overhead and the 'lost in translation' overhead from delegating tasks to mediocre engineers.

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

#906

Post by ai_brain_rot »

Cherryontop11 wrote: post #713
techblueberry wrote: post #688

Earlier 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?

See my issue with these comparisons is that it always compare AI to 100%. When 100% does not exist. Most software out there has issues, bugs, compliance problems, security weaknesses, scaling, redundancy, availability issues...etc. A lot of this is not actually related to how good or bad software engineers are. It's about costs and time to ROI. Greed is an issue too. So people seem to have this idea that software cre…

I don’t think that’s the comparison.

The point is when you pay for human made software from a saas, those problems are not your problem!

You get the saas company to fix it, and it they won’t you go to one of their competitors. If you reroll in house you’re now responsible for every bug

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

#907

Post by pcthrowaway »

serge_blanc wrote: post #342

Well, not a single 20th-century science fiction novel features programmers; instead, there are platonologists, biologists, and linguists. Humanity is twenty years behind in development because the previous twenty years were spent solely on e-commerce.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but lots of 20th-century novels featured programmers. Snow Crash being the first to come to my mind.

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

#908

Post by pjmlp »

dakiol wrote: post #84
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…

> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track. But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading t…

Agreed, this is the fallacy of current discourse, the guys getting fired due to AI improvements are on the other team, "nothing will happen to me" seems to be the current mindset.

I have seen teams being reduced in size due to offshoring, move into cloud, move into SaaS and iPaaS products, this is the next step and no one is safe.

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

#909

Post by Markstar »

davedx wrote: post #590
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…

Ha. I've worked in a fairly strongly regulated sector (energy, in the Netherlands), where I collaborated closely with our head of compliance, and she heavily over-interpreted the regulations while I often tried to find more pragmatic solutions. I think adherence to regulation and compliance is nothing to do with whether you're a SWE, a risk officer, or C-level, and everything to do with your own principles, ethics, p…

It's not even limited to SWE - there are so many regulations in almost every trade (which sometimes contradict each other) that it often eventually boils down to your experience and your decision which rule to follow and which to 'bend' (for example in "traditional" architecture there are so many rules that the building authority itself has to compromise on following the law by the book).

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

#910

Post by lo_fye »

I have 25 years of experience with a single programming language that’s still in broad modern use. My employer recently moved me to a project that doesn’t use that language. The new language is completely foreign and hard for me to read. BUT we are supposed to maximize our AI usage. I made a few agents and skills to automate workflows, and now I can just say “$do-ticket ABC-1234”, and it gets done using TDD and hands me a report on what changes it made and why, along with an open Pull Request that automatically gets reviewed (again) by Codex. And the code works the first time 98% of the time. I don’t know the language, and it seems like people would prefer that I not know it, because then my AI use is necessarily maximal, but what am I even doing? Just telling AI to do a ticket? I see developer salaries trending toward minimum wage in the near future, and it’s scary, so I’m learning and leveraging LLM stuff, but even that will only help for so long. It’s a crazy time in our industry.
Post reply on HN