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

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

#521

Post by jppope »

ilaksh wrote: post #494
t34t34r43 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting this under a burner so I don't dox myself: I work in FinTech on a regulated product. We have access to Mythos. Mythos identified part of our codebase that it confidently asserted was not complaint with a particular regulation and we were at grave risk by allowing it to operate the way it was. Except this was not the case, it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required (I know this because…

3 years max. Maybe 5 if you are lucky.The models will continue to improve. The exponential gains in compute efficiency that have been ongoing for 70+ years will continue and that will result in even smarter models. There are dramatic hardware changes in the pipeline. But really that particular issue could have been solved by literally just telling it in a markdown file or instructions something like "verify all facts…

Stuff like that is risk tolerance... its not strictly codified and its more akin to probability. Different companies at different stages, in different industries will all interpret their risk differently... how will a smarter model improve that?

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

#522

Post by ceejayoz »

mattbee wrote: post #169
9dev wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'd still question it. The experience of just… knowing how a good architecture looks like without being able to really put it in words is what makes a good engineer to me. These people can pick up relevant regulations or industry terms and deliver value quickly enough.

How is "without being able to really put it in words" a mark of experience ? Surely an engineer should be able to justify why an architecture should be arranged the way it is!

There are plenty of deeply skilled, experienced people (in all fields, not just ours) who struggle to explain that knowledge to others. Being a practitioner and being a teacher aren't the same skill.

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

#523

Post by Quothling »

realusername wrote: post #244
micromacrofoot wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a year ago I would have agreed, but the gap is getting smaller all the time... these things can do 90% of the work, and how many people does a company really need for the remaining 10%? certainly not as many as they needed before

The things can do 90% of the work ... but only if used by the right people. I've seen first hand what less experienced developers produce using the same models, your 90% accuracy suddenly drops to 50%...

With opus 4.8 we're frankly aproaching the 100% of the work, but only if tasked by the right people. A decade ago I worked as an enterprise architect and left it because I preffered coding. Now I'm an enterprise architect again, and we're at the point where I've setup a Microsoft Fabric and integrated a ADLS Gen2 with a Lakehouse building Dimension and Fact tables for our Business Intelligence people with Cowork. A month ago I didn't know what Dimension and Fact tables were in a datawarehouse and now I've not only setup a flow for it I've made it more accurate than what they had before because I understood how BC365 worked and the previous consultants didn't.

We had a PoC in place to get fabric, it had like 500 hours allocated for what I did in a week with cowork, and my product is actually on secure vnet network with Azure identity security with both a test and a production environment delivering actual data.

Cowork even made the damn powerpoint slideshows for decision makers.

The single saving grace right now is that it apparently isn't easy for everyone to do this yet. But I didn't use a whole lot of my knowledge on software engineering to make any of it happen, not even the pandas and arrow code that moves the data behind the scenes. I mainly used my knowledge of NIS2 compliance and general data architecture in a step-by-step process. To me anyone with common sense should be able of doing this, and I really don't think I'm special... but then I teach other people AI at our company and they can barely get it to create a running program. Which is fine for now, but I have to work another 20ish years before I retire, and by then a lot of young people will have grown up with AI, and like I said, I'm not special. I think the only thing that differentes me is that I mash the buttons until it works but also have decades of security and compliance hammered into me.

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

#524

Post by physicsguy »

odeono wrote: post #420
torben-friis wrote: post #56

My career path is suprisingly similar to the author's. Weirdly enough, what he takes as the first pillar to fall is the one I see most undamaged currently. LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations. They're great at refactoring, translating between languages, tracing bugs on existing code even, but there is…

This. Once you're building something that genuinely hasn't been built before, LLMs cannot be trusted with any architectural decisions. I'm building a product based around various physics simulations, so it's purely first principles, but without active research, thinking, and challenging, it produces computational code literally hundreds of orders of magnitude slower WHILE implementing absurd fallbacks and shortcuts t…

I have had similar when trying it too. I couldn't even drive Claude Opus 4.7 to get PETsc to compile properly (with all the optional dependencies)

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

#525

Post by epolanski »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #467
epolanski wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well almost 70% of the developers in the industry can't write a fizz buzz. But, besides coding skills (which some possess), the engineering, social, and business ones are close to non existent.

Did you pull this 70% out of your ass or from some other place? It's quite obviously not reality.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

There was also another study I cannot find where 56% of engineering graduates struggled to write a fizz buzz.

I think people highly underestimate how long is the average developer, closed in their bubbles of mostly well established software teams that forget that for each of them there's 10 software consultants in southern Europe glueing APIs with trial and error on Java 8 monstrosities.

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

#527

Post by lcb13 »

“We were taught that generalists and specialists will always have their roles. But now the market is shaping everyone into becoming a generalist.”

I see this as a negative, the whole once everyone has everything than everyone has nothing type of argument. The company I work for believes strongly in keeping humans in control and in the loop which is something I’m grateful for but at the same time who knows how long that will last. Companies are starting to get their AI bills and realizing how much this AI usage actually costs so only time will tell but I hope, for the sake of everyone, that those with the knowledge described in this article make effort to keep their brains in shape.

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

#528

Post by DrewADesign »

bilater wrote: post #504

The bitter lesson is that there is no domain that will be left which AI won't get good at eventually. So really you have two options: if you actually believe the timeline is long you can keep retreating to the sectors that will be taken over last (emotional support nurse etc) or you can just say if you can't beat me join em and try to supercharge your career/project/life with AI now so it improving helps you rather t…

The supercharge bit missed an important fact: that strategy is very temporary. Getting expertise in software development takes a long time. Getting expertise in these LLM tools takes a lot less time— the combination of LLM expertise and dev expertise is the useful part. If LLMs make working developers, say, 35% more efficient, that’s going to be many thousands of people out of work, many of them being the most experienced and expensive we have. It’s not like those people are all going to give up immediately and become DoorDash drivers — they’re going to fight tooth and nail to get a job that uses their existing hard-won expertise. That means they’re going to level up their LLM knowledge, be willing to work for a LOT less money, and bring down everybody’s wages in the process. Companies don’t pay people based on the amount they bring to the company — they pay people based on the going market rate. That’s about to be a whole lot lower. So no matter how much you supercharge, you’re only buying yourself a little while until the labor market catches up. Nobody in development is safe. The entire field was so busy seeing how fast they could saw branches off of a tree that they didn’t realize they were standing on the wrong side of the cut, and the business side of the industry could not be happier about it. You’re basically working as a manufacturing engineer in the 90s US specializing in moving processes to offshore facilities. Probably felt pretty clever for a few years until they got the pink slip.

Honestly, the only hope that the dev field has is this all being so economically inefficient that the industry as we know it collapses after the VC subsidies run out, and we’re going to pivot towards much more reasonable interventions with local models and such.

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

#529

Post by physicsguy »

9dev wrote: post #132
hliyan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles. There was an entire thread a week ago about how domain expertise has always been the real moat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340411

And I'd still question it. The experience of just… knowing how a good architecture looks like without being able to really put it in words is what makes a good engineer to me. These people can pick up relevant regulations or industry terms and deliver value quickly enough.

> If the author's vision of the future is correct, then competent software engineers are safe. Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.

I think this is true in some things and less true in others.

It's a pretty high moat getting into stuff like simulation software because the people working on numerical methods overwhelmingly have PhDs and it's a mixed skill set. Domain expertise here requires you to know maths to a high level. Even mechanical engineers often struggle here; it's often applied mathematicians and physicists turned devs that work on this stuff.

I worked on a fairly gnarly signal processing thing a while back that required bringing together knowledge of physics and software and maths and I found explaining it to people was tricky as their eyes glazed over at some point because their knowledge typically only covered one part of those.

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