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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

#801

Post by latentsea »

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.).

> 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.).

Sounds like a good way to eventually erase those gains.

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

#802

Post by Eridrus »

hyperadvanced wrote: post #558
Eridrus wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same criticism of AI writing too much code. It's surprisingly effective to just tell the AI to cut the (prod) line count in half and look at whether there are other libraries it could reuse. I think you could probably also have a refactor bot that spots duplication and pulls it out. None of this comes out of the box atm, but it's not clear that it's not possible.

I do this several times per week. You can ask Claude to hunt down duplication, brittle scripty code, overly defensive fallbacks, and footguns.

It's kind of dumb that we have to do this as a separate process, which introduces even more churn and review burden, rather than having this out of the box in the code generation process.

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

#803

Post by latentsea »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #784
george_max wrote: post #617

I see many comments saying, "AI can't do X with 80-100% accuracy; therefore our professions are in good hands." While I don't want to sound overly pessimistic, the models are improving at a rapid rate. If asked ~3 years ago where the state of the models are today, it would sound like sci-fi if answered, "the models are creating full MVP apps in ~30 minutes with one prompt". The hurdles the models are facing now, like…

>If asked ~3 years ago where the state of the models are today, it would sound like sci-fi if answered, "the models are creating full MVP apps in ~30 minutes with one prompt". The first one-shot app was created with ChatGPT in June 2023 - 3 years ago. In my experience, the current result of one-shotting apps is just as bad today as it was back then. What “full MVP app” are you talking about? I know of none that have…

> The first one-shot app was created with ChatGPT in June 2023 - 3 years ago. In my experience, the current result of one-shotting apps is just as bad today as it was back then.

Hard disagree. Take a good SaaS starter template and do a bunch of harness engineering. You can get an agent to shit out production grade stuff. You might argue that's cheating, but there's nothing stopping you from doing it, and it works. It's only getting better too.

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

#804

Post by Chu4eeno »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #356
GuB-42 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff I played with it a bit, and no, it doesn't! And I am talking as someone with limited music culture, musicians are likely to be even more critical. For the first few tries, it sounds impressive and the tunes are catchy. It used to sound wrong in the background but they mostly (but not completely) fixed that. However,…

Suno is completely incapable of producing heavy metal. I can't speak for other genres bc I don't listen to them, but what it produces is completely hollow and devoid of what makes metal metal. I also think most metal fans will categorically reject AI-made metal on principle.

Just tested google's (lyria, integrated into gemini), and it made an honestly not bad progressive death metal song with female vocals alternating growling and melodic (though I accidentally used gemini pro to forward the prompt to the actual music gen model, so I assume it augmented with something to make it not "generic heavy metal").

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

#806

Post by petesergeant »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #784
george_max wrote: post #617

I see many comments saying, "AI can't do X with 80-100% accuracy; therefore our professions are in good hands." While I don't want to sound overly pessimistic, the models are improving at a rapid rate. If asked ~3 years ago where the state of the models are today, it would sound like sci-fi if answered, "the models are creating full MVP apps in ~30 minutes with one prompt". The hurdles the models are facing now, like…

>If asked ~3 years ago where the state of the models are today, it would sound like sci-fi if answered, "the models are creating full MVP apps in ~30 minutes with one prompt". The first one-shot app was created with ChatGPT in June 2023 - 3 years ago. In my experience, the current result of one-shotting apps is just as bad today as it was back then. What “full MVP app” are you talking about? I know of none that have…

> In my experience, the current result of one-shotting apps is just as bad today as it was [three years ago]

Hard to respond to this with anything other than "no, you're wrong".

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

#807

Post by iso1337 »

grokcodec wrote: post #570

Maybe denial is a river in Egypt, but I (most of the time) believe that the glass is half full and we will need MORE humans as LLMs gain in ability. My thesis: 1. most jobs are created by small to medium size enterprise 2. the throttle for new SMEs has been people, money and ideas, in that order 3. with LLMs being a force multiplier, fewer technical people are needed but some people still ARE needed 4. with less thro…

A lot of jobs are at SMEs but they’re low quality service jobs…

Your local restaurant with thin margins and underpaid staff is an SME

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

#808

Post by DANmode »

t34t34r43 wrote: post #113
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…

Posting this under a burner so I don't dox myself: I work in FinTech on a regulated product. We have access to Mythos. Mythos identified part of our codebase that it confidently asserted was not complaint with a particular regulation and we were at grave risk by allowing it to operate the way it was. Except this was not the case, it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required (I know this because…

> the code in question had already been reviewed by human counsel

You sure?

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

#809

Post by jakeydus »

latentsea wrote: post #803
IAmGraydon wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If asked ~3 years ago where the state of the models are today, it would sound like sci-fi if answered, "the models are creating full MVP apps in ~30 minutes with one prompt". The first one-shot app was created with ChatGPT in June 2023 - 3 years ago. In my experience, the current result of one-shotting apps is just as bad today as it was back then. What “full MVP app” are you talking about? I know of none that have…

> The first one-shot app was created with ChatGPT in June 2023 - 3 years ago. In my experience, the current result of one-shotting apps is just as bad today as it was back then. Hard disagree. Take a good SaaS starter template and do a bunch of harness engineering. You can get an agent to shit out production grade stuff. You might argue that's cheating, but there's nothing stopping you from doing it, and it works. It…

The original comment asked for someone to name one and you didn’t, though.

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

#810

Post by jakeydus »

petesergeant wrote: post #806
IAmGraydon wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If asked ~3 years ago where the state of the models are today, it would sound like sci-fi if answered, "the models are creating full MVP apps in ~30 minutes with one prompt". The first one-shot app was created with ChatGPT in June 2023 - 3 years ago. In my experience, the current result of one-shotting apps is just as bad today as it was back then. What “full MVP app” are you talking about? I know of none that have…

> In my experience, the current result of one-shotting apps is just as bad today as it was [three years ago] Hard to respond to this with anything other than "no, you're wrong".

What’s the production mvp app that ai made in 30 minutes then? That was the original question no?
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