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I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Right now we have LLMs and they're a very far cry from any for

I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Right now we have LLMs and they're a very far cry from any form of AI that could replace a software engineer wholesale. In my little corner of the software engineering universe I have not seen any credible hiring manager say they were going to fire developers and replace them with LLMs (I have seen this threat from one or two of the least credible and least successful hiring managers I know, which I think speaks volumes). Here is what I would worry about, as a software engineer if you are not using an LLM as part of your workflow and using it well, yeah you may ultimately lose your job and you may even deserve to lose it. Despite their flaws they're immensely powerful simply because they represent a whole new class of tooling. The tools in this industry change all the time and you never get to stop learning, this is just another example. But how someone could look at all this and have it factor into their decisions about whether to have children... is beyond me. I think that person has to be living in the realm of speculative fiction, not in the present material universe. We don't have AI. We don't really have a clear path to the general AI that would be a thing you could just swap in for a random employee. I don't know who this chick is who wrote this article, I hate to throw shade but she's like a young mother who thinks about things and is worried? What is her specific experience with hiring and with AI? "Fire and replace with AI" is not a real hiring trend. I don't even think the software industry as we know it is under threat... I think LLMs might 10x our productivity when we iron out the kinks but the demand for more software in the world will simply grow with them. I am referring to Marc Andreessen's observation about a decade ago that "software is eating the world," this is still the case, there is no sign that the demand for software is declining, if anything it's increasing, so if we learn to make software cheaper with robot helpers it's unlikely the dev job market is going to be decimated (sure maybe it could stagnate but a job market in the doldrums is hardly a reason to not have a kid or the start of the apocalypse).

threedark 3y ago
>I think LLMs might 10x our productivity Think about this logically. Assuming demand for software engineers remain the same this reduces available jobs by 10x when the productivity of one engineer goes up by 10x. > there is no sign that the demand for software is declining There's been layoffs. Tons of layoffs. I'm curious how many people actually still agree with your positive sentiment. At one point I would call it 50%, but now I think it's past that. I think the view point is largely shifting.
j7ake 3y ago
LLMs do not need to replace a software engineer wholesale for engineers to be worried. Even if half of the junior software engineering positions become obsolete because of LLMs, it’s already a huge issue for the entire profession. Of course if you’re in the top of your profession, there’s nothing to worry. But on aggregate one can expect deteriorating conditions. Mostly this will disproportionately affect juniors.
- safety1st 3y ago
  That's where the second half of my comment comes in. I am positing that if LLMs are able to increase the output of developers, the demand for software will increase along with it. The economic term for this is induced demand, and the classic example is roads, when you build more of them the number of cars on the road increases because there were people who used to stay home or take other modes of transportation, and now they drive because there are more and less congested roads. It's not what most regular people believe but it's also not my idea, it's the basis of a ton of tech investor successes. I think we are in that position with software. Increase the supply of programmer output, virtual or not, and the demand for it goes up, because there's a lot of demand on the sidelines today (like maybe programmer output is too expensive for them now and LLM tooling makes each unit of output cheaper, which in turn makes new customers appear). Again Marc Andreessen to name just one guy who wrote a famous essay about it has made billions of dollars in large part by betting on this phenomenon which most people don't understand or believe in. If you look at things from the perspective of the job that you have today, depend upon and which might go away, yeah a job is a fragile thing so it's easy to get scared. But if you look at it from the perspective of there being these guys who keep betting on the idea that software demand will increase and then reality has proven them right and made them rich, this idea of software jobs disappearing is less scary.
deleted 3y ago
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the8472 3y ago
> I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Can you explain what underpins this position? Is it about timelines, likelihoods, not taking preparative actions in general or what?
- safety1st 3y ago
  Sure, I don't think the likelihood is high. I think it's unlikely we'll develop an AI any time soon which can consistently solve critical thinking problems that even a junior developer can solve. LLMs exhibit very little of that problem solving behavior. They synthesize information from existing information and often what they produce is nonsensical. When people have argued that there is some kind of reasoning going on there, I haven't found it convincing. I use an LLM every day, it makes me more productive, it speeds up a lot of tasks. It doesn't replace the executive thinking that I hire people for (even pretty junior people), like delegating a problem, having them go off and think through various angles and come up with a really good conclusion... an LLM won't ever do this on its own, it can assist the person who's doing it though. I can see a scenario where everyone working for me becomes twice as efficient with an LLM (me too) and it translates to a dev hiring freeze and a tougher job market, maybe for years even. As I mentioned in another comment I think devs who don't stay on the cutting edge will be at risk of losing their jobs. But fundamentally there's a lot of room for software to be solving more problems than it is today, grow the supply and the demand will likely grow with it, so the "human developers will disappear so quickly I shouldn't have a child" scenario is hyperbole and kinda toxic tbh.
  - the8472 3y ago
    I think that's a too-narrow focus on LLMs. Of course they're not good at problem-solving because that's not what they're optimized for. That they can approximate any problem-solving at all is already impressive. Consider that there are also models that are actually trained to act as agents in an environment via reinforcement learning. Something they do for robotics and game-like simulations. It's not a bigger version of today's models we should consider but broader ones that integrate more capabilities and training regimes.

threedark 3y ago

>I think LLMs might 10x our productivity Think about this logically. Assuming demand for software engineers remain the same this reduces available jobs by 10x when the productivity of one engineer goes up by 10x. > there is no sign that the demand for software is declining There's been layoffs. Tons of layoffs. I'm curious how many people actually still agree with your positive sentiment. At one point I would call it 50%, but now I think it's past that. I think the view point is largely shifting.

j7ake 3y ago

LLMs do not need to replace a software engineer wholesale for engineers to be worried. Even if half of the junior software engineering positions become obsolete because of LLMs, it’s already a huge issue for the entire profession. Of course if you’re in the top of your profession, there’s nothing to worry. But on aggregate one can expect deteriorating conditions. Mostly this will disproportionately affect juniors.

safety1st 3y ago
That's where the second half of my comment comes in. I am positing that if LLMs are able to increase the output of developers, the demand for software will increase along with it. The economic term for this is induced demand, and the classic example is roads, when you build more of them the number of cars on the road increases because there were people who used to stay home or take other modes of transportation, and now they drive because there are more and less congested roads. It's not what most regular people believe but it's also not my idea, it's the basis of a ton of tech investor successes. I think we are in that position with software. Increase the supply of programmer output, virtual or not, and the demand for it goes up, because there's a lot of demand on the sidelines today (like maybe programmer output is too expensive for them now and LLM tooling makes each unit of output cheaper, which in turn makes new customers appear). Again Marc Andreessen to name just one guy who wrote a famous essay about it has made billions of dollars in large part by betting on this phenomenon which most people don't understand or believe in. If you look at things from the perspective of the job that you have today, depend upon and which might go away, yeah a job is a fragile thing so it's easy to get scared. But if you look at it from the perspective of there being these guys who keep betting on the idea that software demand will increase and then reality has proven them right and made them rich, this idea of software jobs disappearing is less scary.

deleted 3y ago

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the8472 3y ago

> I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Can you explain what underpins this position? Is it about timelines, likelihoods, not taking preparative actions in general or what?

safety1st 3y ago
Sure, I don't think the likelihood is high. I think it's unlikely we'll develop an AI any time soon which can consistently solve critical thinking problems that even a junior developer can solve. LLMs exhibit very little of that problem solving behavior. They synthesize information from existing information and often what they produce is nonsensical. When people have argued that there is some kind of reasoning going on there, I haven't found it convincing. I use an LLM every day, it makes me more productive, it speeds up a lot of tasks. It doesn't replace the executive thinking that I hire people for (even pretty junior people), like delegating a problem, having them go off and think through various angles and come up with a really good conclusion... an LLM won't ever do this on its own, it can assist the person who's doing it though. I can see a scenario where everyone working for me becomes twice as efficient with an LLM (me too) and it translates to a dev hiring freeze and a tougher job market, maybe for years even. As I mentioned in another comment I think devs who don't stay on the cutting edge will be at risk of losing their jobs. But fundamentally there's a lot of room for software to be solving more problems than it is today, grow the supply and the demand will likely grow with it, so the "human developers will disappear so quickly I shouldn't have a child" scenario is hyperbole and kinda toxic tbh.
- the8472 3y ago
  I think that's a too-narrow focus on LLMs. Of course they're not good at problem-solving because that's not what they're optimized for. That they can approximate any problem-solving at all is already impressive. Consider that there are also models that are actually trained to act as agents in an environment via reinforcement learning. Something they do for robotics and game-like simulations. It's not a bigger version of today's models we should consider but broader ones that integrate more capabilities and training regimes.