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

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

#161

Post by zdragnar »

marcosdumay wrote: post #158
fasterik wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think history bears this out. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs of the computer age, none of them started out as owners of capital. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs: yes, they had some level of privilege and opportunity, but they didn't start out as billionaires. Their success came from their ideas.

The fact that you had to separate them into an age should tell you something. Something happened in the 80s, and it wasn't "the dawn of a new technology". It happened specifically in the US, and was done by their government.

Does it surprise you that wealth takes time to accumulate? None of those people had a get rich quick scheme that made them billionaires in their 20's.

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

#162

Post by cloche »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #102
ryanackley wrote: post #28

AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace * AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure * there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced There are strong headwinds to all three of these. Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a l…

AI/LLMs have been dramatically improving for 7+ years. There's now a lot more funding to support continued improvement. You're correct this is an "assumption", but continued improvement at the same pace (or faster) for the next 3+ years is just extrapolating a trend. Believing we've hit the top today is based on nothing at all. Continued improvement is much more likely.

You can only tell which part of the S-Curve you're on in retrospect. It's not something you can tell while you're experiencing it. Both scenarios of AI maxing out or continuing to improve are both likely.

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

#163

Post by dspillett »

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #25

> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.

> There is no ceiling for complexity.

There are perhaps limits to useful complexity.

There are certainly limits to complexity people are willing to pay for. So if you are looking to make a living in development the fact that anyone will soon be able to do the basics and customise it for themselves is going to be a problem for you. Not directly, but because you'll be competing for fewer and fewer more interesting jobs that pay less and less over time (as development increasingly becomes a commodity task like waiting tables and stacking shelves), with the rest of us (maybe not me, I've already been unhappy in tech for years as remote work isn't good for my mental health, so I might bail early and beat the rush for those cushy table waiting jobs!).

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

#164

Post by somebodythere »

cloche wrote: post #162
DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI/LLMs have been dramatically improving for 7+ years. There's now a lot more funding to support continued improvement. You're correct this is an "assumption", but continued improvement at the same pace (or faster) for the next 3+ years is just extrapolating a trend. Believing we've hit the top today is based on nothing at all. Continued improvement is much more likely.

You can only tell which part of the S-Curve you're on in retrospect. It's not something you can tell while you're experiencing it. Both scenarios of AI maxing out or continuing to improve are both likely.

That is not true. You can tell you are on the latter part of the S-Curve you are on, if the rate of change of capabilities has decreased compared to before. That is not what we are seeing right now. The rate of change is increasing, or is at best, stable.

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

#165

Post by TimTheTinker »

genezeta wrote: post #3

I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age , incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever. If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this: I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart And it never…

Agreed. The ability to learn new things, and what characteristics their ability to learn has -- that's one dimension that strongly differentiates people in nearly any domain.

But there are other dimensions as well that differentiate people and determine their value to business, like the ability to be handed problems no one else can solve and stick with them through sheer stubbornness until solutions begin to emerge.

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

#166

Post by mschuster91 »

archagon wrote: post #148
omblivion wrote: post #2

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.

Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days. Slop code will only accelerate this trend. For the most part, people don’t need a thousand new features; the investment class does. Nobody gets mad at Craigslist.

> Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days.

The problem is... what can we practically do? When the village fish monger 200 years ago sold shoddy fish, you could go to him, give him a few whacks with his fish, and even if the fish monger didn't improve the quality of the fish he sold in response, you at least got some kind of feeling you got justice.

Nowadays? For most of the world, those responsible for the bad software aren't in the same village any more, for 95% of the world's population the USA is on an entirely different continent. Can't do anything to hold anyone accountable, with the exception of cancelling a 5$/month subscription LOL and yelling at some poor Filipino or Indian callcenter grunt. If you're among the lucky 5% that lives in the US, sure, you can file lawsuits if the problem is egregious enough, but that's expensive and consumer protection has been gutted. And doing a copy of a plumber's brother event? Might give you people treating you like jesus-come-to-earth but in the end you'll still face capital punishment for it, if you don't get taken out by the private security of the uber rich before you can even raise your gun.

Whatever the eventual solution to the problem you raise will end up being, it is certain it will not be pretty... bottled up rage is not good for any society.

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

#167

Post by rfgplk »

stavarotti wrote: post #118

> On novel work: > Work that introduces new methods, highly creative ideas, or solutions that have not been used or experienced before. More generally, an approach that introduces an innovative strategy to solve a complex problem. Something that I've been thinking about for the past year or so is coming to grips with the fact that the vast majority (anecdote) of software engineering work is not novel (and maybe that'…

> Something that I've been thinking about for the past year or so is coming to grips with the fact that the vast majority (anecdote) of software engineering work is not novel (and maybe that's okay)

Correction, essentially 0% of software is novel. Git wasn't novel. Chromium wasn't novel. Linux wasn't novel. Even C when it came out wasn't novel. Likewise Unix. They're all permutations of either prior knowledge, or evolutions of already existing concepts. They only might _appear_ novel to people who lack the depth to see what technology really is. Effectively applied physics (which has been solved for... over a few centuries at this point?) which itself is applied mathematics. There is novely to be found in physics and math themselves, but it's far out of scope of practical engineering.

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

#168

Post by rfgplk »

dspillett wrote: post #163
danieltanfh95 wrote: post #25

> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.

> There is no ceiling for complexity. There are perhaps limits to useful complexity. There are certainly limits to complexity people are willing to pay for. So if you are looking to make a living in development the fact that anyone will soon be able to do the basics and customise it for themselves is going to be a problem for you. Not directly, but because you'll be competing for fewer and fewer more interesting jobs…

You're assuming the current ensemble of commonly used software stacks is the most optimal there is. This assumption is simply wrong. Even looking at something simple like the office suite you can probably find countless areas where improvements can be made.

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

#169

Post by margalabargala »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #137
Ukv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price of the current frontier may vary, but price for a given level of capability tends to drop pretty fast. April of last year you'd get 1431 ELO[0] from o3-2025-04-16 for $8.00 per million output tokens. April of this year you can get 1436 ELO from deepseek-v4-flash for $0.2 per million output tokens. [0]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/arena-leaderboard

Sure, but i don't think it's reasonable to hold given level of capability constant in a landscape where a give consumer of AI also has competitive pressures. I can't use last year's SOTA model when my competitors can use the current SOTA model. This is also baked in the eye watering valuations of model companies.

> I can't use last year's SOTA model when my competitors can use the current SOTA model.

Lots of people can. Tools don't need to be top of the line to be useful. Snap-on may exist, but they don't put Harbor Freight out of business.

Advanced IDEs exist but complex projects were still built in vim.

The more capable the budget models get, the lower the marginal gains from using the frontier models, even if the frontier models always stay 6 months ahead.

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

#170

Post by rfgplk »

daveshistory wrote: post #77
pc86 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transcr…

Exactly, time amortized LLMs are already unbeatable at this point.
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