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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#581

Post by roncesvalles »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #439
roncesvalles wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days nobody bangs their heads over typos. LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation. Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.

You can't possibly believe this, or you and me (and many others) are doing something different. LLMs have created an entire new - huge - set of bang-your-head moments, as they go off half-cocked in a million simultaneous directions, chasing their tail, or just making shit up. And since the vast majority of work is on existing - often ancient - codebases, let's find out if you feel the same way in 18 months.

That's only if you do agentic coding.

I use LLMs in the following ways:

1. Copy-pasting code into the web chat UI and asking for something (bugfix, add a feature, refactor, explain, review it etc), including entire source code files. A $20/mo Gemini subscription goes a long way (never been rate-limited). I only use the highest model. I often just copy-paste the entire source file between 3 backticks.

2. Cursor Tab. I do have hotkeys to enable and disable it; it's disabled most of the time otherwise it gets annoying.

3. Single-file changes directly from Cursor's AI sidebar. I only do this for simple, predictable stuff because even their auto-routing "Premium" setting is not as good as pasting stuff into Gemini 3.1 Pro.

That means I have only two $20/mo subscriptions: Gemini and Cursor.

I don't use Claude Code, it's really for people who don't know how to code. I don't use Plan Mode; I make and track the plan myself (if at all). I only tell the LLM granular tasks to execute. I don't use `claude.md` or `agents.md` or anything like that. If I don't like a particular output, I reset everything, modify my prompt and try again.

I believe this is the only way to fully leverage LLMs without losing any product quality. If you're trading off quality for "speed" (in quotes because over the long term, a low quality codebase is a massive drag on productivity) then there's no point.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#582

Post by ljm »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

We switched to 'software engineer' to encapsulate that, I think. You can receive requirements and churn out code or you can go up a level and think about the solution. Go another level up and think about the problem. Another level and it's the context of the problem. Further than that and it's the priority of it. And even higher up is how it fits in the product roadmap and the architectural decisions.

At some point you stop developing and start weighing up the requirement against your understanding of the system and the environment it works in.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#583

Post by xracy »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

There's an old Chemistry joke, that I've reapplied to Software Engineering, and it goes something like:

A New Engineer (NE) shows up on their first day on the job, notebook in hand ready to learn. They get assigned to shadow an Experienced Engineer (EE) for their first day.

EE: Now, the thing is, for any project on our team, you only need to change about 3 lines of code. NE, preparing to write down notes: Which 3? EE: Well, it depends.

(Originally about Material Safety Data Sheets, and there only being 3 relevant lines on them).

I think this is what people miss about Software Development.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#584

Post by jghn »

koonsolo wrote: post #373
AlexCoventry wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think AI is going to be able to understand things and apply their ability to formulate solutions better than you, in the near future?

In 2000 I learned about this old technology called "neural networks". AI really depends on long winters and rare breakthroughs. Deep neural network was the most recent breakthrough. The iterations you currently see it just adding more storage, but the fundamental neural network structure doesn't change. I'm confident AGI will not be achieved by the LLM architecture, and when the next AI breakthrough is, is anyones gu…

Yes, same. In the late 90s through early aughts then I was taught over and over and over again that neural networks were a dead end concept and would never amount to anything.

Just like all the preceding AI booms, this one will hit its maximal point, the hype train will fizzle, the best parts will just become "normal", and then a couple of decades later something new will come to push the boundary again.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#585

Post by steve_adams_86 »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #216

> AI-users thus become less effective engineers over time, as their technical skills atrophy Based on my experience, I think this will prove more true than not in the long run, unfortunately. Professionally, I see people largely falling into two camps: those that augment their reasoning with AI, and those that replace their reasoning with AI. I’m not too worried about the former, it’s the latter for whom I’m worried.…

I work with people who generate solutions without really looking at what was produced (group A). They click around the app or run some tests and decide if they're content with the result, then ship it. You can see Claude's fingerprints all over the PR and it's safe to assume they didn't change much of anything.

Then I have coworkers who work through the problems, build harnesses to test the changes and verify results, work through multiple solutions, synthesize ideal outcomes into a single one, benchmark, refine, test the result thoroughly, and provide sane verification processes in the PR. This is group B.

They're entirely different versions of using AI. One seems passable for now (look how fast we're going!), and the other is arguably a new version of what's possible (in a given time frame at least) and defines a totally new normal for software engineering that I virtually never saw outside of exceptionally professional contexts. You don't move as quickly as group A, but you still move faster and produce better software than most people have in virtually every company I've worked for.

I see group A being totally pushed out of the field fairly quickly. LLMs let you work incredibly effectively if you care to learn how. That kind of rigor is going to be the default (group B), and might become the only way humans can still be a useful component in the loop. Group A is likely to become replaceable with frontier models before very long.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#586

Post by jplusequalt »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #433
flatline wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't have to come for everything to feel like it's taking everything. If it eliminates 10% of white collar jobs over the next decade, the impact will be felt everywhere.

Sure, but who doesn't think that 10% of white collar jobs are mostly bullshit anyway?

The roughly 15-20 million people who would suddenly be without a job?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#587

Post by darepublic »

jimbokun wrote: post #524
7e wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.

So the infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters approach.

aka "swarms". cool sounding name for.. throw yet more mud at the wall. at unprecedented scales

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#588

Post by davenci »

Danox wrote: post #369
malfist wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told the past four years that AI is coming for my job. And thats just not true. Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.

It is the lament of every generation of humans to think that they are the pinnacle of everything that has come before, we are just at the start of the so-called AI era, many very smart people coming up still haven’t really got their hands on all of the material available from a hardware and software standpoint. We are still at the early stages. I am very optimistic. I just wish I was younger to take advantage like Ju…

What makes you optimistic? Geniunly curious as I’m looking for how to take advantage of the ai disruption

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#589

Post by jplusequalt »

BurningFrog wrote: post #435
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in the current state of world affairs outside of IT do you think is indicative of that potential for huge improvements in human standard of living?

It's what I mentioned: If we double productivity per worker, we have twice as much wealth on average. I know there are angry people convinced that this will all be consumed by billionaires and jews, but historically that is not at all the track record of the last 250 years, and I expect that to continue.

>If we double productivity per worker, we have twice as much wealth on average.

That's not true. There are other factors at play such as demand.

If we make the average IT worker twice as productive, that doesn't mean now every IT worker is being paid twice as much, because most users aren't going to care if there are twice as many options on the app store, or twice as many bug fixes per release.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#590

Post by megous »

skydhash wrote: post #346
evilduck wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hubris. I don't mean this as a snarky jab. It's coming for anything software. I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend APIs, systems programming, embedded programming, they all seem equally threatened it's just a matter of time. Front end is easy to see in the AI web front end…

> I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend That is not hard. It’s just tedious and very slow to do manually. The hard part would be about designing a usb dongle and ensuring that the associated software has good UX. The reason you don’t see kernel devs REing devices is not bec…

Whether something is tedious depends on the person and situation. If you're already an expert, you may find a lot of work that goes into your 4th USB device (especially if it's based on yet another chip and bespoke SDK) quite tedious, since lot of it is based on standard requirements/designs that you can't change.

You may also find re-ing stuff not tedious, due to what may be motivating you.

In any case, any work will have some things you just know how to do, or what to do, but previously (before LLM agents) no easy way to plow through them without pressing a lot of keyboard keys over long period of time.

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