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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

#171
post #33
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem at all related to the above comment - or anything, for that matter. Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.

> Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs. I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying? Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?

> Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?

Even if code typing goes away, a new breed of engineering will take it's place.

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

#172
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…

Knowledge depreciates, so it is clarifying to add time explicitly: I thought this knowledge would set me apart... Forever? That seems over-optimistic for all occupations in all eras. For the rest of my working career? This really hasn't been true in a long time either, especially in software, where technology changes on the order of years. For the duration of my mortgage? The fondest hope, but pretty much like the ab…

May be for OO not yet for DA. Existential pressure drives better(fruitful) decisons and actions. AI has yet to incorporate that into training/inference.

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

#173
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.

targeted, expertise, fast... pick 2

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes. This has been the history of the web. Frontpage generated really crappy code but people still used it to create websites. They didn't care about code quality just how it looked.

My mom was generating web pages with dreamweaver 25 years ago. People used it sure, but people certainly did care about the quality because it produced unmaintainable code. If people truly didn’t care about the quality people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005.

> people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005.

They did. Now it's all JSX or htmx or some other favored template or DSL monstrosity. Most people do not write HTML or CSS, and haven't in decades. You're spot on.

This says nothing about quality, however. Quality of HTML/CSS is purely subjective. A website's presentation layer cannot meet any technical standard metric for quality in engineering or manufacturing such as durability, reliability, efficiency, or safety.

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

#175
"There's this talk about Jevons Paradox but I disagree."

In my position, our team is clearly displaying "increased demand due to increased efficiency". I admit our position may be situational -- but my anecdote seems more substantive and speculative than "I disagree" from my vantage at least.

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

#176
A part of the puzzle that rarely gets discussed is something that predated LLMs entirely-- "software engineering" and "programming" have been conflated for a long time now and there's a huge gamut of roles out there.

The practice of writing code, or programming, in recent years has really fallen into two buckets:

The vast majority of folks are given a task, they write code to complete that task, and the task completion then counts towards some objective (eg; a new feature, product or fixing a bug). Perjoratively, they've been known as "ticket takers".

A much smaller group have instead worked in the other direction-- identifying where improvements can be made to a product, piece of infrastructure, or pain point and transformed that into tasks that can then be solved via code.

How much of a role you play in that strategy and formulation has been the real differentiator. Not so much what you know. While these are correlated, they're very different.

At a high level, it's been the difference between "developer" and "engineer" but the reality is the titles have become somewhat meaningless in recent years where many "engineers" are just doing the same CRUD tasks over and over.

The reason this matters is that at some point, you can only abstract so far... the requirements for what to build have to come from somewhere. At the most extreme case, there's only the CEO and a company that's nothing but AI agents. In the least extreme case (today) each line worker could manage 1 or more LLMs/agents.

It's not entirely clear to me or frankly a large portion of those in the industry that we're suddenly on pace for one outcome vs another. But I do think that software isn't particularly unique here other than it was an initial starting point for LLMs to deliver value. All white collar work is at risk including CEOs.

And if that happens it would be outlandish to think a utopia emerges... the opposite is far more likely.

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

#177
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes. This has been the history of the web. Frontpage generated really crappy code but people still used it to create websites. They didn't care about code quality just how it looked.

Right. But where are Frontpage and Dreamweaver now ?

They were replaced by other WYSIWYG website editors like Wix and Squarespace. These replacements are evidence in favor of the original claim. The specific products are irrelevant.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those were mostly the same billionaires 20 years ago.

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

#180
post #157

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.

In the case of Gates at least, it definitely came in part from having access to the right people.

Gates famously came from a rich family, but Bezos did too - he used hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments from his immediate family members to get Amazon off the ground. Maybe 1 to 2% of Americans would be able draw that much from their family members if they were to launch a startup. If we define "bootstrapped" wealth as starting from an economic background within one standard deviation of the national average, then he doesn't count.
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