Real software engineering is as far from "only writing code", as construction workers are from civil engineering. > So, fellow software engineers, how do you f

Real software engineering is as far from "only writing code", as construction workers are from civil engineering. > So, fellow software engineers, how do you future-proof your career in light of, the inevitable, LLM take over? I feel that software engineering being taken over by LLM is a pipe dream. Some other, higher, form of AI? Inevitably. LLMs, as current models exists and expand? They're facing a fair few hurdles that they cannot easily bypass. To name a few: requirement gathering, scoping, distinguishing between different toolsets, comparing solutions objectively, keeping up with changes in software/libraries... etc. etc. Personally? I see LLMs tapering off in new developments over the following few years, and I see salesmen trying to get a lot of early adopters to hold the bag. They're overpromising, and the eventual under-delivery will hurt. Much like the AI winter did. But I also see a new paradigm coming down the road, once we've got a stateful "intelligent" model that can learn and adapt faster, and can perceive time more innately... but that might take decades (or a few years, you never know with these things). I genuinely don't think it'll be a direct evolution of LLMs we're working on now. It'll be a pivot. So, I future-proof my career simply: I keep up with the tools and learn how to work around them. When planning my teams, I don't intend to hire 5 juniors to grind code, but 2 who'll utilize LLMs to teach them more. I ask more of my junior peers for their LLM queries before I go and explain things directly. I also teach them to prompt better. A lot of stuff we've had to explain manually in the past can now be prompted well, and stuff that can't - I explain. I also spend A LOT of time teaching people to take EVERYTHING AI-generated with generous skepticism. Unless you're writing toys and tiny scripts, hallucinations _will_ waste your time. Often the juice won't be worth the squeeze. More than a few times I've spent a tedious hour navigating 4o's or Claude's hallucinated confident failures, instead of a pleasant and productive 45 minutes writing the code myself... and from peer discussions, I'm not alone.