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I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

seangoedecke.com

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Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#81

Post by Juliate »

Guys guys. I do share the sentiment.

On the other hand. Unless we have a breakthrough hardware/physical innovation, GenAI in its current forecast is not energy-efficient, cost-efficient, compared to human/deterministic methods. It has shown no capacity so far to « create » in the sense we animals do.

And all that, still being: highly subsidized (your subscription does NOT cover the costs of the service as of now, we are still in the market creation/capture phase), and without mesurable economical benefit.

Things are still far from being over.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#82

Post by halper »

Insanity wrote: post #4

In “Ask HN style”, let’s say that software engineering does go extinct in the next X years, what would you do? I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.

I am also quite interested in psychology, but at least in my realm it would take something like 5–7 years of studies etc to become a licensed psychologist, if you want to work directly with humans. That is quite the investment and I am not sure that I have a long enough personal runway for that.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#83

Post by danaris »

xyzal wrote: post #47
suzzer99 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If software engineering goes extinct, a ton of other white-collar jobs will go with it, and we could be in an intractable depression.

No other profession has such a corpus of free training data available.

Really? Have you ever heard of "literature"?

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#84

Post by born2web »

vishnugupta wrote: post #32

Out of curiosity I checked out the author’s resume and this is their current position. Oh the irony!! I built significant pieces of the Copilot onboarding, purchasing, billing and settings flow. For eight months I headed up the Copilot anti-abuse effort. I then led the launch of GitHub Models, and am now working on other Copilot projects.

Irony indeed! After years of seeing no value, i finally cancelled my github copilot subscription. Poor quality product to say the least.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#85

Post by xyzal »

danaris wrote: post #83
xyzal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No other profession has such a corpus of free training data available.

Really? Have you ever heard of "literature"?

In my eyes, prose is meant to convey the complexity of human experience and emotion. LLMs can't succeed here by definition.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#87

Post by vrighter »

nishit130 wrote: post #76
Tade0 wrote: post #69

> In 2026, I’m not sure the software engineering industry will survive another decade. Due to a text predictor ? I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it's amazing at presenting other people's knowledge and reducing cognitive load by filling in the gaps, it's still just a machine that predicts text and that is a limitation which won't be overcome in this generation of such tools which, including resear…

Even if it's "just" a text predictor, it already outperforms the average person in certain domains, particularly software engineering. With all the recent advances in agentic systems like Claude Code and OpenCLAW, these text predictors can iterate and debug faster than the average human. Looking ahead at the next decade, I totally agree with Sean's view here. > I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it'…

it doesn't outperform on any code i ever threw at it. It added more bugs, and invented them when there were none

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#88

Post by Tade0 »

nishit130 wrote: post #76
Tade0 wrote: post #69

> In 2026, I’m not sure the software engineering industry will survive another decade. Due to a text predictor ? I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it's amazing at presenting other people's knowledge and reducing cognitive load by filling in the gaps, it's still just a machine that predicts text and that is a limitation which won't be overcome in this generation of such tools which, including resear…

Even if it's "just" a text predictor, it already outperforms the average person in certain domains, particularly software engineering. With all the recent advances in agentic systems like Claude Code and OpenCLAW, these text predictors can iterate and debug faster than the average human. Looking ahead at the next decade, I totally agree with Sean's view here. > I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it'…

These are strong claims and I would want to see equally strong evidence for them.

My experience is that it's really darn good at producing text, but it's not a logic engine - it's not designed to be one and even the most recent versions make mistakes which indicate it's not actually thinking.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#89

Post by Tade0 »

aryehof wrote: post #74
Tade0 wrote: post #69

> In 2026, I’m not sure the software engineering industry will survive another decade. Due to a text predictor ? I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it's amazing at presenting other people's knowledge and reducing cognitive load by filling in the gaps, it's still just a machine that predicts text and that is a limitation which won't be overcome in this generation of such tools which, including resear…

Well it’s not just a “text predictor” is it? You can pretend that today we still only have ChatGPT 2 and that there is only pre-training on a large corpus of information, but that simply isn’t true?

> Well it’s not just a “text predictor” is it?

It is, by definition, design and architecture a system that produces believable text.

Here's a task to give it which pulls the veil right off:

Ask it to add tests to a piece of code where code coverage is 100%, but it doesn't actually test functionality 100%. You'll start seeing nonsense sooner or later.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#90

Post by Insanity »

chronolitus wrote: post #5

10 years ? These days ten years feel like an absurdly long time in the future.

“Attention is all you need” was published 9 years ago, and gpt3.5 burst onto the scene 4 years ago.

Progress is slower than people seem to think. Of course AI as a field is half a century old.

But on the other hand, AI had a period of rapid acceleration 40-ish years ago and was then hit by an AI winter. We might hit that winter again in a year and all predictions made today are off the table.

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