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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

#761

Post by WorldMaker »

anon84873628 wrote: post #678
WorldMaker wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embeddings are still mostly just vectors into n-dimensional K-means clusters. It isn't "knowing" two things are related and here's the evidence, it is guessing two things are statistically likely to be related, based on trained patterns, and running with it without evidence. It has no "semantic understanding" as we would define it. It's just increasingly good at winning cluster lotteries because we've increased the a…

Can you explain how you "know" two things are related? If I ask you the similarities between a cat and a dog, is your answer based solely on an understanding of their genetic phylogeny and how those genes express traits? Grouping vectors in concept space is exactly how you create semantic understanding. The proof is in how good they are at creating semantically valid text. The fact that it took massive amounts of dat…

> is exactly how

We don't know that. It seems like great hubris to declare we know how the human brain works. You are asking me to explain how we know things and then telling me we've already figured it out in the same breath, and that's hilarious.

It doesn't take massive amounts of language data to train a baby human. It is almost entirely just: "Look. Here's a cat. Can you say cat? Cats go meow." "Over here, your aunt has a dog. Dogs go woof."

There's generally a flood of non-lingual contextual data in such moments such as sights, smells, sounds, movements, touch but that also only further underscores how different LLM training is from anything we'd consider human learning. Our memories aren't just "conceptual spaces of linguistic topics", they are complex sensory maps where a smell can remind you of the first dog you ever met. There is so much of our human knowledge that is not and never been encoded in most of our languages.

The fact that LLMs take massive amounts of linguistic data is relevant, because it shows how far we still have to go in barely scratching the surface of how the human brain seems to work. (Which again, we know only the barest details. Anyone who tells you they know 100% of how the human brain operates so far tends to be a snake oil salesman.)

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#762

Post by antisthenes »

jodrellblank wrote: post #664
antisthenes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Malthusian observation can still be true...It only has to be true once, and the only reason people say it isn't right now is due to industrial…

> " the only reason .. industrial fertilizers " canned food, tractors, combine harvesters, mechanical refrigeration, freezers, chilled trucks, ocean liners, aircraft, antibiotics for farm animals, milking machines, genetically modified crops, satellite/computer weather prediction, modern pesticides, Pasteurization, vitamin and mineral fortification...

Yes, I appreciate the expanded list.

I should have clarified that industrial fertilizers (and other modern Ag) come from non-renewable fossil fuel exploitation, just as the 90% of the things you listed.

Antibiotics and GMO crops are nice too, but if you don't have the energy inputs to grow and distribute the food, it all goes tits up.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#763

Post by jodrellblank »

antisthenes wrote: post #762
jodrellblank wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " the only reason .. industrial fertilizers " canned food, tractors, combine harvesters, mechanical refrigeration, freezers, chilled trucks, ocean liners, aircraft, antibiotics for farm animals, milking machines, genetically modified crops, satellite/computer weather prediction, modern pesticides, Pasteurization, vitamin and mineral fortification...

Yes, I appreciate the expanded list. I should have clarified that industrial fertilizers (and other modern Ag) come from non-renewable fossil fuel exploitation, just as the 90% of the things you listed. Antibiotics and GMO crops are nice too, but if you don't have the energy inputs to grow and distribute the food, it all goes tits up.

Malthus wrote in 1798 when world population was 1 billion. It's now 8 billion and famine is rarer, food is more abundant and more food is wasted every day than ever before. Industrial fertilizers do come from fossil fuels, but they aren't fossil fuels. Nitrogen fertilizer uses natural gas for its Methane content, and we can make Methane using electricity, seawater and make Nitrogen fertilizer from that, and we can make electricity from solar, wind and nuclear.

> just as the 90% of the things you listed.

90% of the things I listed only use fossil fuels because they are the cheapest energy, not because they are dependent on fossil fuels specifically. Freeze-dried food doesn't need coal power. The idea that 8 billion humans are just gonna shrug and go "oh well, guess there's no food now, we'll just all give up and die" and not try to invent any way to carry on, is silly.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#764

Post by mkoryak »

incanus77 wrote: post #552
eweise wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is pretty good at figuring out what the right thing to do is.

AI is pretty good at pulling from the body of existing solutions of what the right thing to do is.

I find that it often pulls a solution that is good enough for this problem today. Sometimes that is great, and other times it's just creating a pile of shit

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#765

Post by alabut »

mainmailman wrote: post #265
jayd16 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, AI doesn't feel like it's affecting hiring needs from the trenches. We don't have engineers sitting on their hands because AI wrote up everything the leadership could imagine. Instead, we get an economy that feels like it's on the cusp of a fall or at the very least a roller coaster. Poor tax incentives to hire. ZIRP is long gone. And the hiring managers are overrun with slop. But bosses are happy to say it…

Thank you, it's been all but confirmed that lot of "AI layoffs" are due to reaching a workforce equilibrium from Covid era over hiring. Saying AI for anything, good news or bad news, is a get out of jail free card for execs who want to appease shareholders.

Don't know why this is getting downvoted. AI as air cover for layoffs seems very plausible for at least some companies, especially the ones that were already predisposed to doing layoffs pre-ai.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#766

Post by leptons »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #659
leptons wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs create typos in the code they create all the time. Claude 4.7. Maybe you are using some next-gen super-AI nobody else has? Or you're just lucky.

So get the LLM to test and fix those typos. Why are you letting it mis-spell things?

Maybe you aren't familiar with how AI works. It writes the code for you. Nobody is "letting it mis-spell things". You run the code it wrote, it fails. You look through the code the AI wrote and find the typo it put in there, or give the AI the error for it to fix - but it still created the typo, and that is the main point here. AI often ignores the rest of the document and does what-ever-the-fuck it wants to make you stop prompting it, without any real concern for correctness.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#767

Post by nomel »

AllanSavageDev wrote: post #466
nomel wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perspective here is "lifetime career", so you need to project out 30 years here, for a meaningful argument. I think, much sooner than that, you'll have AI pumping out practically complete implementations that meet the requirements of function , set by the people who desire that function. THOSE people will be the developers, and will be more akin to technical "creatives", more on the product side, than the develop…

Someday people are going to get tired of "programming in English" with prompts, getting inaccurate output, etc and someone is going to invent a higher level kind of CODE that allows the user to directly specify the actions the computer should take to solve the problem. Later someone will invent a kind of tooling that COMPILES these CODES into a runnable thing skipping the prompt part all together. It might be called…

Programming is moving to programming by stated and understood intent, rather than syntax. Maybe contracts/legalese, but definitely not compilable code. Sure, some people will compile code, and more than some will be reading generated code, but that will be increasingly exceptional.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#768

Post by munksbeer »

kakacik wrote: post #362
therealdrag0 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a staff level engineer that has dozens of other engineers banging away at code projects you help define?

I am not, yet actual coding is miniscule part of workflow. The rest is cca un-automable by any llm - politics, meetings, discussions, brainstorming, organizing testing teams, stakeholders and so on. This is how big corporations look like, not some SV startups.

I agree. And that stuff is soul destroying. I have done it, and right now I work in a place a little smaller, but we get so much done without all the cruft. And we get it done better. I spend much more time writing code now (*) than at the big corps, and we do a much better job because we can iterate.

(*) Well, now claude spends a lot of time writing code, I spend a lot of time designing and steering it. Claude can write remarkably sophisticated code with the correct steering.*

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#769

Post by tracker1 »

I think the biggest issue is there's a lot of difference between someone with a few decades of experience and someone who is just out of school who leaned on AI heavily to even get through school. When you are starting out, you don't have the experience to know when the AI is going in a wrong/bad direction in order to redirect appropriately. And in relying so heavily on AI, you may not even learn the right lessons to help you from the mistakes.

While an exaggeration, it's kind of like the gap displayed in Ideocracy. You just get used to how things are and society kind of atrophies as a whole. Then you get the results of AI feeding itself, basically reinforcing the same mistakes that have the general affect of in-breeding. Eventually the more experienced will age out, and what gets left behind?

The code is relatively easy... it's properly understanding the problem and how a solution is meant to work that is the hard part.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#770

Post by Shocka1 »

hatthew wrote: post #621
PizzaBorsch wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can do everything you listed except chats with coworkers and slacking off. I just don't think you've utilized the most recent versions of codex or claude.

It's definitely theoretically possible, but not there yet. I use cursor, claude (opus 4.7), and several proprietary LLMs/LLM frameworks at my job. The institutional knowledge I have wouldn't fit in the context window, and AIs lack my mental index/intuition of where to look for answers. When my AI makes a PR, I generally have to make some important changes, without which it's solution would be fundamentally broken. AI…

Many things at my software engineering job are like this, which require constantly changing human institutional knowledge that is almost always undocumented, or changing so quickly that it isn't relevant anymore. By the time you decide to automate it, the process changes. Tribal knowledge used to be something I hated seeing senior engineers keeping to themselves, but now it seems like an asset.
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