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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

#681

Post by anon84873628 »

wiseowise wrote: post #422
anon84873628 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of LLM "reasoning" but they sure as hell know a lot. That's what the embeddings are: a giant semantic relationship between concepts.

Encyclopedia and Wikipedia know a lot too. Knowledge isn't much of use on its own, it's about how you use it.

Well Wikipedia can't write an essay for me, and LLMs can.

I'd say they are quite adroit at using their knowledge.

I mean, is Mythos finding all these vulnerabilities not evidence enough? Does AI Studio not clearly understand React and use it artfully?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#682

Post by pear01 »

thinkthatover wrote: post #573
pear01 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said unlimited progress. Let's not revert to straw man claims. If you think the potential of LLMs is overblown feel free to short the market. I don't pretend to know the future. But if I may, I don't think you are framing the debate in the correct terms. Evidence is an important facet of human affairs. So is risk. Best of luck with your predictions.

I really don't like this framing - it's hard to short a market at the best of times, let alone when governments have a vested interest in tech being too big to fail to compete in the global economic arms race - see Intel's stock in the past few months. I agree with you both - undoubtedly there are still massive gains to be made with the frontier models we have today with tooling and iteration, yet I do not believe th…

Just remember you don't need AGI to see massive societal change. Certainly not mass layoffs. AGI is not the bar. By the time we all agree AGI has come the world will have already changed.

You just need AI to be just good enough to win the tradeoff over a human employee. Just take your average office. Then ask yourself if the bar is really that high. AGI strikes me as an extremely nebulous concept. Better to just list everyone at your office and bucket them with a guess of how soon you think AI will replace them. Or weaken their market power. This is what every corporate boss in America is already doing. I'm merely suggesting rather than hope a graph curves in our individual favor we try to act more collectively as a species. Of course, I don't hold my breath.

I also don't find myself compelled by the notion that the danger to humanity is "AGI". The true danger is as it always has been - each other.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#683

Post by bluefirebrand »

esafak wrote: post #671
bluefirebrand wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reviewing code is still way faster than writing code. Writing code results in a much better understanding of the code than reviewing it In fact I would say that in large complex codebases, in order to develop the same understanding of what the code is doing might actually take longer than writing it from scratch would have

But it's written to your spec; there should be no surprises!

That's the fun part! The surprise is that it's actually not written to your spec at all! It just kinda smells similar to your spec

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#684

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

camdenreslink wrote: post #391
incognito124 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people think there will be fixing AI slop software? I see that opinion here and there on HN. The cost of codegen is next to nothing. It makes no sense to spend large sums of money having an engineer fix something that could be generated over and over until gods of stochasticity come in your favour. We've entered a period of single-use-plastic software, piling up and polluting everything, because it's cheaper t…

If the AI slop software managed to get a user base, then you can't just throw it away and completely start over. You need to modify it in a way that is seamless for your users. If all code becomes single use, are users generating it for themselves? Do you think a dentist office will vibe code their own scheduling software?

> Do you think a dentist office will vibe code their own scheduling software?

They really do think that. (Absolutely bonkers.)

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#685

Post by anon84873628 »

koonsolo wrote: post #384
anon84873628 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of LLM "reasoning" but they sure as hell know a lot. That's what the embeddings are: a giant semantic relationship between concepts.

I agree with you, but a big drawback is that the accuracy or confidence of their output can't be estimated. So they surely know a lot, but you are never sure if the info is correct or not.

They can estimate confidence based on distances in that state space.

But yes, it gets tricky.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#686

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

jongjong wrote: post #558

Engineering boils down to figuring out what is important and prioritizing. This requires having an understanding of a business domain, economics, human psychology and technology. The competitive aspect of it means that you need to understand these things better than most people and machines. If you don't, then your skills have no value on the market. Will generalist AI trained on public data ever understand these thi…

I don’t have anything to add to your comment, but I have no means to bookmark it either other than by replying. You’ve put into words exactly what I think.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#687

Post by nozzlegear »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #555
AstroBen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not deterministic you can never fully trust it. In a deterministic abstraction I don't need to audit the lower levels.

You fully trust your coworkers?

If you don't, you may want to find a different company to work for.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#688

Post by ehnto »

Lord_Zero wrote: post #648
conductr wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who did they overhire? Like, Covid didn’t just increase the number of people in the field. Prior to Covid there was a so called talent shortage. The hiring that did occur was mostly net zero in aggregate. Workers got poached, grads got hired, compensation went to far up. And, that’s what they mean by overhired. They over paid. They now see the benefits of hiring cheaper talent on another continent. Cheaper talent tha…

Yeah so most of my friends who are dealing with spike in outsourced devs in their work environments are cleaning up the AI slop churned out by offshore people who are slinging code and getting the business requirements all wrong. Their jobs are now to clean up the mountains of code coming in from people who don't really get the problems they are being asked to solve.

Outsourcing seems to come in cycles, where it's tried, fails due to communication issues (resulting in quality issues), then things get inhoused again.

I do think there is some opportunity for AI to smooth out the communication aspect, but I think what we will actually see is larger volumes of poorly guided work coming through for each feature. The AI does not fix the lack of deep systems understanding which is why inhousing is always the antidote to bad outsourcing.

I need to make this clear, there are great devs on either side of the various oceans, the issue is usually communication between two parties with nuturally mis-aligned incentives.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#689

Post by madduci »

hellojesus wrote: post #172
madduci wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that classifies in "developers" and "software engineers". And software engineering isn't going to disappear anytime soon

Weird. I call myself a developer because I don't have an engineering degree from an abet certified engineering program. I recognize, in some capacity, that this isn't the norm and in the US "professional engineer" is protected and not simply "engineer", but it feels akin to stolen valor to me.

I call myself engineer because I have also an engineering degree.

But yeah, the term is mostly misused

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#690

Post by protocolture »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #49
harimau777 wrote: post #20

I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.

The argument is that “that’s what always happened in the past”. Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true. The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation. At a mechanistic level, th…

>But if something approximating AGI does work out, human labor has absolutely no advantage over automation so it’s not clear why the past “automation has created more human jobs” logic should continue.

Human labor still seems to be cheaper. And then theres opex/capex to be considered. Like if they achieve AGI, and AGI isnt affordable its not going to displace much.

>“we have always found other jobs”

It really depends what humans value and what they have to spend. No one could predict that Banks would need more staff to deal with ATMs. It sucks being unable to predict past a coming automation revolution, but that doesnt mean there isnt something there.

>human labor has absolutely no advantage over automation

Humans are currently needed to manage automation. Theres no clear reason why, even with AGI, that we wouldn't want humans in most loops. Thats before cost and quality.

>The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation.

Malthus is a pretty great example. We did sort out food production. There are risks with the scale at which we have done it. Malthus wasnt able to predict technologies to aid food production, but he did forecast the need.

When I see people complaining the jobs dont exist I find its the same. We dont know what the jobs are, but that doesnt mean the prediction of all of humanity being out of work are correct.

Actually the worst part of this whole thing will be that any incoming job losses being catastrophised as if the whole world is ending due to AI.

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