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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
991–1000 of 1001 posts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#992Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fin…
Well yeah, that's what the blogpost is talking about.
We are entering the age of forced AI usage or quit the field entirely.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#993I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care e…
Suno is a good example. I've written lyrics for a lot of songs and then "produced" them with Suno, a process that involves dozens to hundreds of remix/cover/extend revisions or a lot of time in their editor to get it sounding the way I want it to. The songs are songs that I like and will listen to in my playlist but they haven't gotten much traction on Suno's algorithm. I haven't tried to promote them much elsewhere…
"getting people to pay attention to and enjoy something that you've created" is a lot harder still if you didn't really create the thing. I'm not trying to be snide, but the tools that allow you to produce that kind of output being available to everyone else kind of makes the point. That's why statistics show that barely anyone on Suno listens to anything but their own stuff.
And of course, especially for music, the human element is pretty much the entire point, so while a lot of people enjoy it for a while as a toy to play around, I don't think many people would seriously consider listening to AI music as being worth their time. It would be like knowingly and deliberately reading fake news.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#994I've wondered about this a lot. I am brand new to software engineering, fully powered by AI coding. Traditional software engineers have to pivot hard or the are going to be left in the dust. The slow, methodical, take two days to put a change on a production site approach are over. I'm shipping exponentially faster than a co-worker who hasn't embraced AI yet.
Come back to tell us how that's been working out 6 or 12 months from now.
You describe yourself as a vibe coder. In other words, you don't understand what you're shipping, and somehow that doesn't seem to concern you.
I'm not worried about your coworker, I'm worried about your employer allowing you to deploy a mess without requiring someone with knowledge to have challenged it, and I'm worried for your customers.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#995I think there are a few important factors to consider (I did not go through all the comments btw so apologies in case, there are too many). Historically lower development costs have also expanded the scope and ambition of what gets built. With LLMs acting as assistants and humans focusing more on architecture and decision-making, teams can explore multiple solutions in parallel and tackle projects that were previously too expensive or complex. That may increase, rather than decrease, the need for people who can manage complex domainy.
There are also practical constraints that could slow or reshape this trend: the growing cost of AI infrastructure and data centers, environmental impact, regulation around copyright and training data, and a likely shift toward specialized domain-specific models instead of a few generic ones. On top of that, if LLMs become the new search engine, advertising and commercial incentives may erode their neutrality.
Finally, LLMs depend on a constant supply of high-quality human-generated data, but they are also reducing the production of that data (e.g., the collapse in Stack Overflow activity). We are also in a very unusual market phase, with a handful of companies heavily investing in and cross-subsidizing each other. It is not obvious that the current pace of scaling can continue indefinitely, or that today's AI landscape represents a stable long-term equilibrium.
There are other factors, like adoption of frontiers LLM in the market that is anyway slow, also the impact of AI in the economy that is anyway based on humans that must be controlled (because it has consequences when it comes pensions, consumptions of goods, etc.. )
Sorry: I used LLM to summarise my points to avoid long wall of text :D
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#996Not only SE career. Many careers which rely on static knowledge accumulated over years.
We have a senior guy who is like a walking cybersecurity library - knowing all the protocols, standards, vendors, threats. He is quite desperate atm. There is nothing he can add to what LLM already knows or can research in 30 seconds. He was building his profile for 30+ years.
I am on the side that AI will change everything. The reason why it has not yet is the lack of skills on the market - no AI transformation leaders. My strategy is to be closer to AI - number of nano startups with few people on board building smth AI related is exploding and they need expertise with AI engineering.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#997Wut? 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…
You pilot LLMs all day but that might not last. A lot of companies are investing money on “ai factories” that are join to automate a lot of software development (that is, steer LLMs) on the basis of jira tickets (or linear/trello cards or whatever).
Funny you mention that, since that's what I pilot LLMs to build :)
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#998I 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 knew exactly what you wanted, since you already built it. All decisions were already made, all tradeoffs reached. LLMs are definitely helpful, but try exploring something new with them and you'll slow down significantly.
no matter how good AI gets, i think it will never reach human-level in our ability to move goalposts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#999[flagged]
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#1000I've wondered about this a lot. I am brand new to software engineering, fully powered by AI coding. Traditional software engineers have to pivot hard or the are going to be left in the dust. The slow, methodical, take two days to put a change on a production site approach are over. I'm shipping exponentially faster than a co-worker who hasn't embraced AI yet.
Come back to tell us how that's been working out 6 or 12 months from now. You describe yourself as a vibe coder. In other words, you don't understand what you're shipping, and somehow that doesn't seem to concern you. I'm not worried about your coworker, I'm worried about your employer allowing you to deploy a mess without requiring someone with knowledge to have challenged it, and I'm worried for your customers.
[flagged]