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Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev

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Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#71
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good chance the apprentice plumber could've fixed it just as quickly. That's where we are now.

right. Apprentices will always grow, and so too must you, if you want to keep being paid. Their job is to come with new tools and new ideas, and your job is to keep a wider view into what you're doing and why, maintaining trust (you need to build the authority to tell apprentices no when their ideas might flood the customer's house), and keep moving towards other parts of the business and solving harder problems (wor…

Libraries, Google and YouTube were/are not nearly as efficient at conveying _targetted_ _actionable_ expertise as AI is.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#72
post #67
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a perfect world, yes. However, the current tech world is akin to a flea market. Those who shout out more stand out more.

Surely you can judge people by results though?

measuring programmer productivity is notoriously difficult. Does james, who shipped 20 features without testing thoroughly provide more value? or does joe, who patched a security hole in that time and avoided disaster? what about jason, who facilitated communication between them, and kept the infra going so their changes could go into prod without issues?

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#73
post #14

[flagged]

I attribute the excitement of the VC and CEO cast to the same underlying motive, but I think there are at least several other ways all this could play out:

- the Cul-de-Sac: AI progress flattens as scaling data and compute, RL and algorithmic improvements hit diminishing returns.

- democratization: LLMs decentralize, mirroring the shift from mainframes to personal computers.

- AI creates new jobs and thus new dependencies for the capitalist class

- Any combination of the above.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#74
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some knowledge does set you apart - the ability to ship things, people pay for. Not producing holy code in the academic best language.

Ability can't really be compared to knowledge... e.g. you might lose the ability to play the piano, yet retain the knowledge about how to

I don't know (also english is not my first language), but to me it takes knowledge to know what is the right tool for the job. To know what is required to make the client happy. To know where great code matters and where quick and dirty or nowdays vibe code is sufficient. And that knowledge can be complex. It usually requires knowing how people think and act, who don't know how to open a terminal. Because those are the main people using software.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#75
> The models will learn good engineering principles at some point.

This is just silly. It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits and that they just aren't that good. We're seeing lots of other AI and software engineering brought to bear, but there's nothing 'inevitable' that means this is close.

"at some point" is so vague as to be irrelevant. Fusion might be the dominant source of electricity "at some point". Equally, AI knowing good principles could be 30 years away.

Don't assume that hard intellectual challenges are solvable on faith. Look at what's currently possible.

AI has always been a field where https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png applies heavily.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#76
You are correct that your career is changing, but it's not like AI is going to go away.

In the 1990s when crypto went to court. It was determined that really anything coming from AI is protected speech. Very few exceptions, AI cant export a few things.

So you're never seeing AI go away, which means you need to transition/adapt.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#77
post #38
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. I have artist friends that are boycotting any company using AI art for their flyers/ads. I looked at some examples and couldn't tell the difference.

I was just reading comments the other day where people who dragging a company because they apparently used AI for some low level copywriting stuff. No art assets, no code (so far as anyone knows), not actually writing copy but more like "is everything spelled right, does the copy structure flow, have all these points been addressed, etc." Not only that but the only reason anyone even knew is because the company was c…

I would imagine it is like transcribing, an industry I was in for a little bit when I was younger. I saw the same transition there and imagine it will be elsewhere. First it's a bunch of people saying "AI can't take our jobs, our jobs are thinking jobs." Then it's "Sure, you could use AI, but there's no real advantage to it because it makes so many mistakes."

But pretty soon after that it's "Why am I paying a transcriptionist $3/minute when I can just have the machine auto-transcribe it and then my admin assistant can just scan it for mistakes."

Even if there still IS a quality difference between great writers and AI product, "good enough" is good enough for most customers, especially if you have to pay professional rates to get better.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#78
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right. Apprentices will always grow, and so too must you, if you want to keep being paid. Their job is to come with new tools and new ideas, and your job is to keep a wider view into what you're doing and why, maintaining trust (you need to build the authority to tell apprentices no when their ideas might flood the customer's house), and keep moving towards other parts of the business and solving harder problems (wor…

Libraries, Google and YouTube were/are not nearly as efficient at conveying _targetted_ _actionable_ expertise as AI is.

I agree that it is easier than ever to start doing stuff, instead of reading. I don't think that means its easier to jump right to doing large projects. The problems to be solved there are often subtler, of a different class, and manifold, and a layman may not realise what has gone wrong until long afterwards or never (this also happened before, many people took on projects they weren't ready for and reinvented the wheel trying to solve issues they ran into)

it's oft debated, but I do fall on the side of "you should still know maths even in the age of the calculator/matlab/llms". I have found productive employment, and indeed tickets to speak to the big boys in their gilded palaces many times because graphs and charts are their favorite toys and knowing maths got me there. They have always been able to make things with excel, with matlab etc. Often they actually can make charts themselves, but they don't care to become experts in what data is important and what isn't.

The LLM isn't yet good enough to tell you what data matters. People act like LLMs are magical gods that do everything, but it is but another tool. It has limitations, just as it has strengths. It is not ultimately convincing, it is not infallible, and experts will keep finding edge cases all the damn time. Anyone working with them every day knows this, and you need to know it too.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace Frontier AI is already good enough to be very useful for engineering. It's too costly for many places where it could be useful today. The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months. And likely again in the following 18-24 months. At the same time, the cost per watt is going to down ~25%, and at the same…

> The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months. How do you know that? In 2026 the prices have been spiking. It now costs orders of magnitude more than it did in November.

> How do you know that?

Historic trends, every 18 months, performance for the same level of quality has gone down 90%.

See: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1gpr2p4/llms_co...

And Chart 13 here: https://www.rdworldonline.com/ais-great-compression-20-chart...

And here: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends

The technology already exists now on the algorithmic front for the next 10x drop between everyone adopting DeepSeek's MLA, MoE (mostly already done), Medusa (a better version of Google's speculative decoding), Kimi's Attn Residuals, and Mimo's Sliding Window Attn, and (possibly) Microsoft's 1.58b (this may be a nothing burger).

Historically, algorithmic gains are only ~30% of the pie, but there's enough out there to get to 10x, with just what's available already. The other ~70% of the pie is better training data (often synthetic) and distilling frontier knowledge. There's no sign we are tapped out on that front.

> In 2026 the prices have been spiking.

That's not for the SAME level of output...

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#80
post #22

I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools and their growing potential. We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

The outside world doesn't even care that things work, they care that it looks like it works long enough. Investors don't care that it's snake oil, as long as they're not left holding the bag. AI is really good at making things that look like they work. This is a steelman of your argument.

This is a sentiment a highly skilled framework knitter could have shared. Investors don't care if those newfangled steam-powered knitting machines produce inferior textiles as long as people buy it.

Parallels to the industrial revolution are apparent. And this is disturbing.

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