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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

#891

Post by agumonkey »

alkonaut wrote: post #886

I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so. As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a mod…

I oscillate around that sentiment. And am very bruised by 2026 LLM capabilities. But at times there was a small positive effect knowing that the LLM found a path to my problem. Without even looking at it, it gave my brain more certainty that there was indeed a path and that I could then keep walking. And a few times it made me try to see if I could even be as fast by optimizing my thinking ans organisation (foolish I know but still).

Such fuzzy times...

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

#892

Post by NichoPaolucci »

jesterson wrote: post #813
dwh452 wrote: post #255

There are lots of positives that have resulted from using AI in software engineering. (1) No more long repetitive text editing sessions. I.e. changing namespaces or replacing deprecated APIs with the "correct" ones. AI will make nearly perfect text modifications with ease. (2) No more bike-shedding code reviewers nitpicking over every tiny coding decision. I.e, "you should use std::format instead of std::stringstream…

> Now average folk can solve problems and avoid dealing with Microsoft for a spreadsheet program. You seriously believe some vibecoder can write anything remotely similar to MS Excel, which took probably thousands man-hours to create?

I'm also a little hesitant to accept that this is the future. Why build excel with someone in house? It'll probably take at least a few weeks to build it, and now they need to maintain a spreadsheet platform in house???

Google sheets is free - Excel subscription is pretty much standard in many businesses and is not super expensive... Feels like the ROI just doesn't exist for most scenarios. Microsoft already DID all of the hard work, why redo it.

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

#893

Post by jesterson »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #892
jesterson wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now average folk can solve problems and avoid dealing with Microsoft for a spreadsheet program. You seriously believe some vibecoder can write anything remotely similar to MS Excel, which took probably thousands man-hours to create?

I'm also a little hesitant to accept that this is the future. Why build excel with someone in house? It'll probably take at least a few weeks to build it, and now they need to maintain a spreadsheet platform in house??? Google sheets is free - Excel subscription is pretty much standard in many businesses and is not super expensive... Feels like the ROI just doesn't exist for most scenarios. Microsoft already DID all…

There certainly will be influx of low quality tools from vibecoders. With their limited understanding how things work, they would think they can create anything compatible to Excel (or any other tool with thousands of man/hours to make).

Once they realise they can't make anything remotely like Excel, and - more importantly - like you have said, world doesn't need another Excel, we will likely get back to decent products

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

#894

Post by __alias »

port11 wrote: post #888
alkonaut wrote: post #886

I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so. As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a mod…

You shouldn’t be bothered that someone else does your hobby better. It’s a hobby, it’s meant to be for you, for no purpose other than fun, experimentation, entertainment, what have you. The outcome isn’t as important as the process. That’s my take on this, at least. I’ll never be very good at Scythe, or the most creative role-player, certainly never managed to do anything beautiful in pottery class (although the glaz…

> you shouldn't be bothered that someone else does your hobby better

I don't know, I'd feel this way a little. if it's something that's not obvious how much effort goes into the underlying process, it can feel pretty deflating if the craft behind it has felt like it's eliminated.

I can't really think of a good example, but if my hobby was glueing precision glueing little 3d models, then suddenly the hobby has exploded because 3d printers have made it easy, it suddenly feels like it's devalued my collection of manually crafted plastic models

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

#895

Post by kypro »

emodendroket wrote: post #429
kypro wrote: post #267

This was a good summary. I feel similar. At this point I think 95% of the skills I've developed over the 2 decades are basically useless. Prior to 2023 I felt like every new skill only made me more employable, but now I don't really see any software skills that are safe from AI today. Even the ones that are very likely won't be in a year or two so there's no point in learning. I've said this in other threads, but it…

Well, are they? I think two things are at work: 1) How long has full self driving been just six months away? The last mile often tends out to be the hard part. 2) If the catastrophic scenario comes true where white collar work essentially disappears, what does "preparing" actually mean? There's not a whole lot I can do about that. It's like trying to make plans for what I'm going to do if I get into a coma.

> 1) How long has full self driving been just six months away? The last mile often tends out to be the hard part.

I agree. I'm not arguing there will be no human drivers, no human coders, etc. I'm arguing there will be much, much less demand to the point where it will be like trying to obtain a career as a Hollywood actor or something. It's not that there are no actors, and if you want to be an actor realistically you might be able to find the odd job here and there, but the demand won't be there like it is today and you'll struggle to live if that's what you're betting your income on.

> 2) If the catastrophic scenario comes true where white collar work essentially disappears, what does "preparing" actually mean? There's not a whole lot I can do about that. It's like trying to make plans for what I'm going to do if I get into a coma.

Catastrophic scenarios are largely unavoidable, I'd agree with that. Some possible scenarios of AI however not catastrophic, but extremely bad – political corruption, poverty, civilisation collapse.

You can and should prepare for stuff like this to some extent. One specific risk you can prep for is attacks on critical infrastructure (energy, food, water) – and arguably these may become quite likely in the near future.

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

#896

Post by RugnirViking »

entropyneur wrote: post #861
zkmon wrote: post #269

> I don't know what to do. Ride the wave. You rode it when websites/webapps were the wave. I came into software industry before internet, kept changing my horse. You are never too old to learn new tricks. The new wave create new kind of work and workers. Be one of them. Ride the beast, master the tools. It's the same game again.

The new tricks seem to be "ultrathink" and "you are a rock star software architect". That's not the stuff careers are made of.

you are not successfully riding the wave if you think prompting better is what they're talking about. They're talking about understanding the social structures your work happens in, how they're changing, and learning what you need to to be successful in that. Product and dev are getting closer together. Reviewing is becoming more important (and people don't have good theories about how to review, maybe you can make them.). New processes - and roles! are being created to deal with the vastly increased amounts of code produced, and the increased need for documentation and verification. Performance isn't a strong suit of the AIs, they get too rigidly stuck in existing architectures and fancy tricks, and often miss low hanging fruit that requires going and talking to some people to change the system. If you've got a statistics brain then metrics, logging and verification are booming (never met a manager who doesn't love a CHART). QA and testing are also bottlenecks of the new system, and unlikely to go away soon (ai can make tests, but it can't take the responsibility to say "this will work in production". You can!)

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

#897

Post by zaphirplane »

gdiamos wrote: post #106
zaphirplane wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How strange or at least unintuitive. Buying should be cheaper than creating for a customer of 1

Think about the worst enterprise SaaS apps you have used…

rewrite SAS, salesforce or SAP, will never have the breadth and business know how

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

#898

Post by kypro »

dfffsdfdsfds wrote: post #329
kypro wrote: post #267

This was a good summary. I feel similar. At this point I think 95% of the skills I've developed over the 2 decades are basically useless. Prior to 2023 I felt like every new skill only made me more employable, but now I don't really see any software skills that are safe from AI today. Even the ones that are very likely won't be in a year or two so there's no point in learning. I've said this in other threads, but it…

The fact the whole world is going down with me is of some help actually. I can't stop the world. There is no preparing for that. We'll figure something out and if not, then not. My non-tech friends will not suddenly be able to run servers or oversee AI systems. They will come to me with their ideas and I will turn the crank. My role will probably be named differently, something like "Intent Manager" or "Architecture…

> The fact the whole world is going down with me is of some help actually. I can't stop the world. There is no preparing for that. We'll figure something out and if not, then not.

Depends on the scenario. If most humans are economically useless your primary risk is going to be starvation and the consequences of civilisation collapse. These are things you can prep for to some extent.

If you don't have a family then I understand not caring and letting whatever comes come. If you have people you love however, then I believe you have a duty to at least try to protect them from what's coming. But that's just the way I see it.

Also consider there are ways to prep without creating a bunker.. Can you collect and sterilise water? Can you grow/produce some food? Do you have assets that will be valuable in such a crisis (gold, etc)? Do you have a first aid kit or two? Do you have fuel/energy sources in case the grid goes offline?

I think it's probably worth thinking about some of the scenarios here and seeing which you can reasonably prep for, assuming you agree with most experts that there's a reasonable chance this will all go horribly wrong.

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

#899

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#900

Post by stefandesu »

alkonaut wrote: post #886

I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so. As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a mod…

How many of the learnings over the past two years went into the prompt that you gave the model? Is it possible that you wouldn't have been able to prompt it so well without those learnings?
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