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…
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#952The bitter lesson is that there is no domain that will be left which AI won't get good at eventually. So really you have two options: if you actually believe the timeline is long you can keep retreating to the sectors that will be taken over last (emotional support nurse etc) or you can just say if you can't beat me join em and try to supercharge your career/project/life with AI now so it improving helps you rather t…
The supercharge bit missed an important fact: that strategy is very temporary. Getting expertise in software development takes a long time. Getting expertise in these LLM tools takes a lot less time— the combination of LLM expertise and dev expertise is the useful part. If LLMs make working developers, say, 35% more efficient, that’s going to be many thousands of people out of work, many of them being the most experi…
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#953Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I have worked on highly regulated areas in finance (risk). Compliance is a highly creative art, often requiring lots of out-of-the-box thinking and non-obvious solutions. The people I found worst at this were IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. My guess is the model makes the same mistakes as the programmers: taking 'rules' literally, un…
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#954Earlier 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'm sure the very large (and very small) businesses will keep their absolute need for (or the lack of) inhouse developers, but everything in between will probably get compressed to one or two inhouse architects in direct contact with the stakeholders and the rest will be contractors working with Codex-like automation.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#955Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 yo…
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#956Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#957Earlier 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…
Sounds like a "your team" problem, and not a tool problem...
I hate to break it to you...
If your team can write crap in Ruby, they can write crap in Rust, too.
And if they can write crap with AI, they can write crap without it, too.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#958> 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.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#959We are in trouble. Not from a "no more devs" side, but from a "we only need one of you 7 to remain .." side
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#960Isn't the solution to learn business skills? My challenge is seeking good resources for the business skills. I'm doing sales for a passion project for the first time, and it's teaching me a lot. I'm just confused still on why it feels so hard and why I can't find an easier way.
> My challenge is seeking good resources for the business skills. I'm doing sales for a passion project for the first time, and it's teaching me a lot. I'm just confused still on why it feels so hard and why I can't find an easier way. Sales are going to be drowned by AI soon enough. The low end is already getting yeeted by webshops, dropshippers and AI powered bots and a lot of B2C and B2B sales are shifting off of…
And that level of proximity, humanity, empathy maybe? That isn't being approached very well by these AI or offshore services and probably never will. Thoughts?