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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

#791

Post by weakfish »

rfgplk wrote: post #712
p2detar wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it stop with just developer layoffs? When software companies rely on LLM providers to run their business, I’d argue we‘ll see a massive bust of these companies around the world - from on-prem products to SaaS. Customers may build the software they need entirely in-house or via prompt-engineer consultants, without the need to buy software tools like today. It could be a very very different world.

> Customers may build the software they need entirely in-house or via prompt-engineer consultants, without the need to buy software tools like today. It could be a very very different world. Already happening. I know of a few places that have gotten such large gains from LLMs that they know have their engineers working on creating homegrown ports of popular services (Docker etc.).

Oh. Oh my. In-house Docker gives me hope for my future as a cleanup consultant.

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

#792

Post by lmz »

hparadiz wrote: post #500
thewebguyd wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. IME this is less the fault of IT and more so bad auditors that won't consider, or just don't understand, what compensating controls are. If it doesn't meet their little checklist exactly, they fail the audit.

It's cause IT never has to live with the consequences of their decisions. Who cares if the other department keeps bleeding talent because you twisted the knobs so hard no one wants to work in your system?

Why would they care? They take the blame when it gets hacked, but don't really get any upside for bending the rules to make people work easier. CYA rule-following is just to be expected.

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

#793

Post by ilaksh »

suttontom wrote: post #506
ilaksh wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah yes, the magical equivalent of "you are a senior software engineer who writes bug-free code". IME people would benefit greatly from the process, albeit tedious and time-consuming, of testing out the same prompt sequence/session with the exact same model multiple times. It becomes clear extremely quickly how capable but unreliable and inconsistent a model can be even when given the same context. If you have ever co…

Change the temperature to 0 and it will be more consistent.

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

#794

Post by weakfish »

rfgplk wrote: post #711
techblueberry wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your theory of when AI gets to 100%. PMs and business analysts build all the software? Or just like a 700 or so 1-founder companies in the world and everyone else is without work? The matrix?

> Or just like a 700 or so 1-founder companies in the world and everyone else is without work? This. But instead of 700 it's more likely that everyone will be a founder (more or less). It's already scary how easy it is to launch an MVP or produce prototypes with the latest models.

Then why don’t we see a bunch of amazing software for sale that solves every niche issue?

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

#795

Post by itemize123 »

dakiol wrote: post #84
iandanforth wrote: post #18

Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks…

> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track. But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading t…

don't agree with your logic at all - agree with your conclusion. your logic is deeply flawed - a) you've to justify mediocre engineers not been necessary, the mechanism they are pushed out by LLM matters. b) relative ranking is useless - it's the difference between absolute ability and that is close for say top 50% most likely. This might mean half of us will lose jobs, and half see compensation pressured but it's not as certain as your argument make it out to be.

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

#796

Post by latentsea »

Aeolun wrote: post #428
solenoid0937 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 and haven't suffered from hallucinations in months. But we also put a lot of effort into our harness.

Opus 4.8 and gpt constantly hallucinate stuff as well. If you haven’t encountered or caught it that’s something different. Of course these days it’s mostly confidently asserting a wrong thing.

They said that they hadn't "suffered" from hallucinations in months due to effort they put into harness engineering. It's not quite the same thing as saying hallucinations are never happening for them.

I find hallucinations happen for us with those models, but we've worked on baking in guardrails and fact checking against sources of truth, so that it's less of a problem.

We're engineers. We just try to engineer out the failure modes.

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

#797

Post by itemize123 »

ksenzee wrote: post #786
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. LLMs are going to show that there's a huge divide in "engineers" between people who love "coding" and people who like "engineering". The group of people kicking and screaming the most are the people who love code and don't want to see their coding go away. These are typically the build vs buy folks. "We can't use any…

I disagree with most of this. I'm kicking and screaming pretty hard, and yet I'm not one of the "I can do it better" folks. My whole career has been in open source. I'm all about choosing the right tool. I'm also tech lead on a team of seven, so I'm not writing a lot of code anyway. What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get…

Would you explain this - " I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot." ?

Interesting to see if you why you see it destructive. I can certainly see that a lot of the times, copiloted solutions are working but less than ideal

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

#798

Post by cookiengineer »

iandanforth wrote: post #18

Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks…

An LLM agent will only be as good as the environment it operates in.

If you build your environment to be specification based, you have to make sure you have good specifications. If your "memory solution" uses freeform markdown notes, you already lost from the start.

Also choose languages with good unit testing built-in, and languages with unified code styles, and unified toolchains. If you use C++, assume that there's a million ways to build your algorithm. If you use JS, assume 10 different build pipelines. If you use java, assume bloat by dependency hell.

LLMs mimic the ecosystem's variety and variadicity(?). Languages like Go shine so well because it's a very opinionated language, where there's only one proposed way on how to implement things. And that's a good harness to begin with. LLMs are like children on the playground. You have to build better rulesets and fences to make them behave how you expect them to.

Also, check out qwen3.6 coder and heretic models. 30b is the sweet spot for coding and unit testing. For planning and designing, gemma4 is pretty good.

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

#799

Post by latentsea »

msm_ wrote: post #434
oceanplexian wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it such a dramatic statement for Boris to claim that he no longer writes code? Are people on HN still typing out functions by hand one character at a time? It would be like a developer in 2020 claiming that he only writes assembly because compilers can’t be trusted. No one is taking that person seriously. If you chose a career in tech you made a decision to work in one of the fastest moving fields in human his…

>Are people on HN still typing out functions by hand one character at a time? Well I use tab completion, of course. And I copy-paste snippets from LLM more often than from SO now. But otherwise not much has changed in my career in the last 5 years. Is this different for you? I'm not fundamentally opposed to code generation, and I use LLMs for some taks, but I don't see myself vibecoding whole pages of production code…

Our whole team has transitioned to agentic engineering around the start of this year. We've been heavily investing in harness engineering to ensure final outputs are production quality and not slop.

These days it very much feels like the task has shifted from "building the system" to "building the system that builds the system".

It only looks to be trending one way.

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

#800

Post by esalman »

alexpotato wrote: post #391

I've posted this before but worth posting again: I work in DevOps at a firm that has been very enthusiastic about using LLMs (in the good sense). The phases were basically: - try out having the LLM do "a lot" - now even more - now run multiple agents - back to single agents but have the agents build tools - tools that are deterministic AND usable by both the humans (EDIT: and the LLMs) The reasons: 1. Deterministic t…

This is pretty much how I've been operating. While the C-suits have been always encouraging everyone- technical and non-technical folks alike- to use AI, the ask from my manager and skip level has always been for deterministic output. Before last December or January I was mainly using LLMs for autocomplete, whereas now it looks more like "given this input write script to generate this output", and after some corrections, "summarize/update this session into a skill". Script for future humans, skill for future agents.
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