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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

#981

Post by 5701652400 »

Drakim wrote: post #890
5701652400 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"calculator" ("computer") was a profession. not anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

Doesn't that support the point? Computers came in and "took" the job of calculating numbers (I assume usually budgets and finances), but instead of every layman just using a computer to organize their company's finances, they still hire a professional to use the computer to organize the company's finances. The role shifted, but it wasn't eliminated.

there are literally no more people "computing" by hand. job as defined by "perform calculations by hand" is totally gone. none. nada.

this "shifting-role" rhetoric is very dangerous. making definitions fluid is a very slippery slope. you can arrive at any conclusion you want and support any point you want by changing defintions. seeing it in AI from C-level leaders is very concerning.

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

#982

Post by Drakim »

5701652400 wrote: post #981
Drakim wrote: post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't that support the point? Computers came in and "took" the job of calculating numbers (I assume usually budgets and finances), but instead of every layman just using a computer to organize their company's finances, they still hire a professional to use the computer to organize the company's finances. The role shifted, but it wasn't eliminated.

there are literally no more people "computing" by hand. job as defined by "perform calculations by hand" is totally gone. none. nada. this "shifting-role" rhetoric is very dangerous. making definitions fluid is a very slippery slope. you can arrive at any conclusion you want and support any point you want by changing defintions. seeing it in AI from C-level leaders is very concerning.

Do you object against calling people "farmers" because their way of operating is not the same as how farmers operated 500 years ago?

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

#983

Post by oldnewthing »

jval43 wrote: post #970
oldnewthing wrote: post #622

Hey, I agree with you. I and my team have the same existential worries. This was one reason why I bought my own subscriptions to Claude and Codex to learn and skill up. I have been using that to intensively do side projects, curating prompts and workflows to see how these new tools fit in my toolbox. I have been bringing back the learnings to my team so that they can upskill as well. For context, I use Claude and Cod…

Problem-solving is not the same as engineering or computer science though. Problem-solving can be done by an "analyst" or whatever these types of jobs are usually called.

Not sure what value your comment added. Software engineering is also problem solving. Are you arguing it is not?

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

#984

Post by mistercow »

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…

> And I didn't learn anything.

So first off, I mean, of course you didn't, right? You had already learned most of what you were going to learn from this specific project by doing it by hand.

But yes, if you use AI to do projects that might have been at the edge of your abilities pre-AI, you will learn a lot less. The solution, I've found, is to get more ambitious until you're back to the edge of your abilities even with AI. You should be asking the agent questions like "has anyone tried?" and keep pushing until it isn't sure, and you're not sure you have any idea what you're doing. Then ask questions until you feel like you sort of know what you're doing, and verify your understanding by directing the agent to build.

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

#985

Post by [deleted] »

oldnewthing wrote: post #983
jval43 wrote: post #970

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem-solving is not the same as engineering or computer science though. Problem-solving can be done by an "analyst" or whatever these types of jobs are usually called.

Not sure what value your comment added. Software engineering is also problem solving. Are you arguing it is not?

[deleted]

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

#986

Post by [deleted] »

oldnewthing wrote: post #983
jval43 wrote: post #970

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem-solving is not the same as engineering or computer science though. Problem-solving can be done by an "analyst" or whatever these types of jobs are usually called.

Not sure what value your comment added. Software engineering is also problem solving. Are you arguing it is not?

[deleted]

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

#989

Post by monegator »

dragontamer wrote: post #514
monegator wrote: post #448

Hear me out: what about just refusing to use them? why would i ever want to use a tool that remove the part of my job that brings me joy? Fuck productivity, we were already doing good, when we were able to actually do our job, i.e.: not wasting hours in useless meetings, or doing customer care to idiots who could not be bothered to follow instructions, which i shouldn't be doing in the first place. let the LLM do tha…

My boss came up to me and said a coworker using LLM tools has shipped more customer solutions in a week than basically what I've done in 3 months. The bosses are out to force people like you to use AI. And have been for months. Maybe not your boss yet, but it swept through my office dramatically. Maybe two or three months from limited tests to now today FORCED usage of AI (people going around the office asking consta…

Ah, if (2) happens i will just walk out. No more brain. I refuse to work on those conditions.

And if that's the situation everywhere, i'll just go back being a tradesman, i love working with my hands, and there's been abundance of work for any skilled individual in any trade for more than a decade.

Now, my attitude may change when we get back to decent prices for hardware capable of running local models. I can be fine with local models, but not the current corpo owned shitshow. See what's happening with anthropic. They reserve the right to keep the chats for security concerns if you use bad words in the prompt, even if they are breaking contracts. Gee, who would have fucking guessed? Their most valuable asset is their training data and OF COURSE they're going to suck up new brain activity from everywhere they can. (like who was really surprised when it came out that microsoft was training copilot on private repos?)

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