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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

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Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#141

Post by ChrisLTD »

the_af wrote: post #102
Aperocky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone in 99th percentile in terms of token usage, it's super clear to me where the agent will not be able to replace my judgement, two areas: 1. if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure. 2. LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build. As such, I'm the limit of the numbers of concurrent…

Playing devil's advocate here, I'm not antagonizing you but thinking out loud. > if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure. That's a current technical limitation. Are you so sure it won't be overcome in the near/mid future? > LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build But work is being done…

Does it seem to you like those issues will be solved soon? Does your boss have the time to do this AI wrangling work on top of their other tasks even if they don't have to learn to code?

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#142

Post by Aperocky »

the_af wrote: post #102
Aperocky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone in 99th percentile in terms of token usage, it's super clear to me where the agent will not be able to replace my judgement, two areas: 1. if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure. 2. LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build. As such, I'm the limit of the numbers of concurrent…

Playing devil's advocate here, I'm not antagonizing you but thinking out loud. > if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure. That's a current technical limitation. Are you so sure it won't be overcome in the near/mid future? > LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build But work is being done…

Well if you do nothing you should definitely be worried, because not using LLM is rapidly becoming untenable.

If you do a lot, you'll grow skeptical about some of the claims and hype, and have a sense of where this is leading to.

My position is that if someone use LLM a lot, they maybe right or wrong about the future of LLM. If they don't, then they definitely are not right or are only lucky.

My personal judgement is both of these are hard caps until they invented something that's not a transformer, start from scratch bascially.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#143

Post by ej88 »

rdevilla wrote: post #135
ej88 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

clearly not the same when they were abstracted from the realities of building software and.. directly taking accountability for it! by semantics, i mean the definition and pool of tasks, responsibilities, and outcomes a job is comprised of is shifting so fast that the borders of what is a 'software engineer' and 'business person' are melding together. software engineers are business people in their own way

I don't understand why humans abstract a business leader away from the realities of building software, while LLMs do not. If the rhetoric is to be believed, the set of responsibilities falling to the role of "software engineer" is shrinking to zero, and all engineers are being forcibly "promoted" to the managerial class of shepherding around agents.

i would say theres more nuance than that (disclaimer: dont have a crystal ball)

software engineers who are comfortable doing business work - managing, working with different stakeholders, having product and design taste, being sociable, driving business outcomes are going to be more desired than ever

likewise, business leads who can be technical, can decompose vague ideas into product, leverage code to prototype and work with the previous person will also be extremely high value.

i would be concerned if i was an engineer with no business acumen or a business lead with no technical acumen (not counting CEOs obviously, but then again the barrier to starting your own business as a SWE has never been lower)

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#144

Post by janalsncm »

mrdependable wrote: post #90

I think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.

> They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource

Knowing nothing about how these things work, I wonder if the board will see it the same way? Even today I could see the following play out:

CEO says X. Board member puts a bunch of strategic info into ChatGPT on the spot which argues Y more convincingly than X.

In that moment, the CEO will find themselves arguing against a chatbot, which can gish gallop with plausible bs faster than you can say the word “transformative”.

Maybe they win the argument today, but eventually the CEO will be functionally replaced, and eventually actually replaced or watered down.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#145

Post by Aperocky »

eloisant wrote: post #118
Aperocky wrote: post #26

As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an implementation and it then exist - As long as I thought about the structure/input/output/testability and logic flow correctly and made sure I included all that information, it just works, nicely, with tests. Unix philosophy works well with LLM too - you can have…

I'm excited and scared at the same time. Yes I'm much more productive than before, and I'm convinced we can't get rid of engineers altogether... But how long until my team of 5 gets replaced by a single engineer? Am I going to be the one to keep my job or one of the 4 to be let go?

If the team does the exact same thing, not very long.

The ability to know what to build and what not to build is going to be as important as knowing how to build it. I still think engineers have an edge here. All my childhood dreams of what I should be able to do or build are coming to a reality and the only thing that is blocking me is lack of time. I want to go faster still

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#146

Post by jandrewrogers »

vharuck wrote: post #123
jandrewrogers wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An enormous amount of domain expertise is not legible to LLMs. Their dependence on obtaining knowledge through someone else's writing is a real limitation. A lot of human domain expertise is not acquired that way. They still have a long way to go before they can master a domain from first principles, which constrains the mastery possible.

People need to be careful about buying into the shorthand lingo with LLMs. They do not learn like we do. At the lowest level, they predict which tokens follow a body of tokens. This lets them emulate knowledge in a very useful way. This is similar to a time series model of user activity: the time series model does not keep tabs on users to see when they are active, it has not read studies about user behavior, it just…

The domain expertise I'm referring to isn't vague, it literally doesn't exist as training data. There are no cases of problems and solutions to study that are relevant to the state-of-the-art. In some cases this is by intent and design (e.g. trade secrets, national security, etc) long before for LLMs arrived on the scene.

We even have some infamous "dark" domains in computer science where it is nearly impossible for a human to get to the frontier because the research that underpins much of the state-of-the-art hasn't existed as public literature for decades. If you want to learn it, you either have to know a domain expert willing to help you or reinvent it from first principles.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#147

Post by Aperocky »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #141
the_af wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate here, I'm not antagonizing you but thinking out loud. > if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure. That's a current technical limitation. Are you so sure it won't be overcome in the near/mid future? > LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build But work is being done…

Does it seem to you like those issues will be solved soon? Does your boss have the time to do this AI wrangling work on top of their other tasks even if they don't have to learn to code?

If they never learned to code, it wouldn't be very easy to build or catch the BS that AI generate.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#148

Post by righthand »

pardon_me wrote: post #109
righthand wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We?

The human species. "We" doesn't include everyone and doesn't necessarily imply the process happens through collaboration and planning (conspiracy). The race to automation is happening as expected; outside any group control and bound by competition. Game theory suggests the end result is us being replaced, if we make it that far. "We" as a species are the ones making it happen.

There is a very very small percentage of humanity that’s pushing this stuff on everyone else. In fact most are saying “please stop”.

“We” as a species certainly aren’t making it happen.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#149

Post by simplyluke »

rootusrootus wrote: post #134
simplyluke wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is better positioned to pilot the LLM than a domain expert? "Software engineer" as a job title has included a lot of people who write near-zero-code, at least at the higher levels of the career ladder, for years prior to LLMs. People assuming the only, or even primary, function of the job is outputting code reveal a profound lack of understanding of the industry in my opinion. Beyond the first year or two it has…

> has included a lot of people who write near-zero-code, at least at the higher levels of the career ladder This is something that I would have thought HN readers were pretty familiar with. LLMs can make my code work faster or more prolific, but with 30yoe I spend a fairly significant chunk of my work time doing anything but code.

I'm occasionally reminded the HN's commenting base is much larger than my niche in the industry (VC backed startups + large public tech companies is my background). I had a similar reaction to people thinking Peter Bailis going from CTO at workday to "member of technical staff" at Anthropic was him trading a leadership position for closing jira tickets.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#150

Post by the_af »

Aperocky wrote: post #142
the_af wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate here, I'm not antagonizing you but thinking out loud. > if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure. That's a current technical limitation. Are you so sure it won't be overcome in the near/mid future? > LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build But work is being done…

Well if you do nothing you should definitely be worried, because not using LLM is rapidly becoming untenable. If you do a lot, you'll grow skeptical about some of the claims and hype, and have a sense of where this is leading to. My position is that if someone use LLM a lot, they maybe right or wrong about the future of LLM. If they don't, then they definitely are not right or are only lucky. My personal judgement is…

> because not using LLM is rapidly becoming untenable

Completely agreed. This is not what I'm advocating for. And definitely, there's a lot of self-serving hype (and fearmongering can be another kind of hype) by AI companies. But some of it I think will be true, or enough companies will believe it to be true, which amounts to the same.

I'm just worried, I cannot help it. And I'm not saying "don't use AI", I'm pushing back about the feeling of reckless "excitement".

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