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> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me sinc

> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my entire field that I've dreamed about for the past decade isn't about to get torched. With the pace that this field is getting solved I probably won't even have enough time to "pivot" to anything before they also get solved or upturned as well. Call me a doomsday prepper, but frankly I haven't heard a compelling argument against this line of thinking that is actually in line with the absurd development curve I've seen. 4 years ago these models weren't capable of stringing together a TODO app. I really, really want to be wrong. I really do.

toprerules 2y ago
This must be your first hype cycle then. Most of us who are senior+ have been through these cycles before. There's always a 10% gap that makes it impossible to fully close the gap between needing a programmer and a machine doing the work. Nothing about the current evolution of LLMs suggests that they are close to solving this. The current messaging is basically, look how far we got this time, we will for sure reach AGI or full replaceability by throwing X more dollars at the problem.
- throw83288 2y ago
  So Work=0.1^Ct where C is the development pace. Everything points to the C of AI being large. How quickly does Work become a rounding error? Sure, C=log(t), but it could also be C=ke^t. Everything to me feels like it's the latter, I really want to be wrong.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    Why all these approaches have not succeeded is that to close the gap, you have to backtrack on all the effort made so far. Like choosing a shortcut and stumbling on an impassable ravine. The only way is to go back.
  - wholinator2 2y ago
    Cmon man, look at nature, exponential curves almost never are actually exponential. Likely it's the first part of a logistic curve. Of course you can sit here all day and cry about the worst outcome for an event in the long list of things no one can predict. It sounds like you've made your mind up anyways and refuse to listen to reason, so why keep replying to literally everyone here telling you that your buying into the hype too much. You're young, and so we'll give you a pass. But as stated, _the entire point of tech is evolving methods_. Are you crying because you can't be one in a room of hundreds feeding punchcards to a massive mainframe? Why not? It's _exactly_ the same thing! Technology evolved, standards changed, the bar raised a bit, everyone still went to work just fine. Are you upset you won't have a job in a warehouse? Are you upset you aren't required to be a farmer to survive? Just chill out man, it's not as terrifying as you think it is. Take a page out of everyone who ever made it and try to actually listen to the advice of people who've been here a while and stop just reflex-denying any advice that anyone gives you. Expand your mind a bit and just consider the idea that you're actually wrong in some way. Life will be much easier, less frantic, and more productive
    - throw83288 2y ago
      Honestly I think moving up in a layer of abstraction is not the same as something resembling an intelligent agent.
      - BarryMilo 2y ago
        If "resembling" intelligence was enough, all programmers would've been replaced long ago. I've said this on here before, but replacing programmers means replacing our entire economy. Programming is, by and large, information processing. Guess how many business's services can be summed up as "information processing"? I'd wager most of them. So maybe you're fucked, yes, but if so, we all are. Maybe we'll just have to find something to do other than exchange labor for sustenance...
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      People keep telling students basically to “think happy thoughts” and are not being honest with them. The field is contracting today while more people with experience are chasing fewer jobs and then AI is hallowing out the low end. Every single opening gets 1000s of applicants within the first day. It’s almost impossible to stand out from the crowd if you are either new to the industry or have a generic skillset.
  - daotoad 2y ago
    The thing is the total amount of work to do keeps increasing. We're putting firmware in lightbulbs now. When everything includes software, someone needs to write and maintain that software. If software becomes cheaper, we'll just use even more of it.
  - rstuart4133 2y ago
    > So Work=0.1^Ct where C is the development pace. Did you see the bit where he said "Most of us who are senior+ have been through these cycles before". They rolled out similar equations in previous hype cycles. The LLM's were released about 3 years ago now. Over the weekend I made the mistake on taking their word on "does GitHub allow administrator to delete/hide comments on PR's". They convincingly said "no". Others pointed out the answer is of "yes". That's pretty typical. As far as I can tell, while their answers are getting better and more detailed, what happens when they reach the limits of their knowledge hasn't changed. They hallucinate. Convincingly. That interacts with writing software in an unfortunate way. You start off by asking questions, getting good answers, and writing lots of code. But then you reach their limits, and they hallucinate. A new engineer has no way to know that's what happened, and so goes round and round in circles, asking more and more questions, getting complete (but convincing) crap in response, and getting nowhere. An experienced engineer has enough background knowledge to be able to detect the hallucinations. So far, this hasn't changed much in 3 years. Given the LLM's architecture, I can't see how it could change without some other breakthrough. Then they won't be called LLM's any more, as it will be a different design. I'm have no doubt it will happen, but until it does LLM's are a major threat software engineers.
nickstinemates 2y ago
If you want to thrive in this world you need to change your attitude ASAP. New tech waves happen all of the time. Embracing them is the path.
- throw83288 2y ago
  How? Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. I don't have any ideas anyway (I have only one "idea", and it's someone elses and I have no faith that it'll get me a foothold). Robotics will be solved pretty soon by 10x reasoners if this development curve continues. Everything I can "change to" has a 2 year delta and that is a 100x capability change within the AI space right now.
  - anon3459 2y ago
    Just use AI to learn what you want to pivot to and don’t be cry baby please
    - throw83288 2y ago
      It's not knowledge but applications of knowledge to actually work in the field. I don't know how to meaningfully make the applications to succeed.
  - mhnthrow 2y ago
    what are you attempting to achieve with this idea? what kind of foothold? ideas are everywhere, they are cheap. the idea plus the execution, timing, marketing, and approach are all factors in something being successful. maybe you are thinking you need to make a startup or something to be successful. i understand the feeling you have a little bit, but agree with the others that you don't need to despair too much about the industry, there is still a great need (and will be) for humans to understand the systems we are using and be able to get in the weeds to solve problems. totally agree we might need less people writing/wrangling code, and it might put downward pressure on salaries... on the other hand, there might be upward pressure on salaries as developers will have a higher output and the ROI for hiring an effective developer in this environment will go up. especially when production is on fire, the AI that wrote the code that is on fire might not be the best source of how to solve it. to me this is all basically a big unknown, without substantial reason to panic though, even if it feels overwhelming and hopeless from a certain perspective at the start of a career. currently a lot of development feels pretty sluggish to me, we fight with build tools and multiple languages and eke out these incremental improvements - if developers can work much much faster, that's great, but then we hit a limit to like... OK we need to let the product changes "settle" for a while and get user feedback about the changes, we can't actually ship 14 major product updates in a week because users will have no idea what the fuck is happening. but maybe we can do more advanced things with rapid split testing and automated success metrics to deploy pages that "self-optimize" or something, and there might be new second and third order ideas that come from this where it takes a human to manage and direct and build and solve things at that level.
semi-extrinsic 2y ago
> Any "normal" engineering field will be solved with the right domain knowledge. Oh no, don't worry. Nobody will be trusting GenAI only for Real Work like aerodynamics, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, plasma physics, you name it. For sure there will be (already is) AI-based surrogate models, fast preconditioners, superresolution methods etc. But you will for the duration of our lifetime need humans who understand both physics and programming to actually use the damn tools and ensure they are used correctly.
- throw83288 2y ago
  Required time to move into a regulated engineering field is 4 years. 4 years in the AI world is currently a 10^4 = 10000x capability delta. It's not like the engineering and academia curmudgeons will replace their employees as much be utterly destroyed by the AI labs hiring maybe one or two tenured professors per field to make an internal startup and then letting them oversee what the megascaled reasoners spit out at breakneck pace with a sufficiently low hallucination rate. I really wish to be wrong here.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    You'd better get out of tech then. Change is inherent in the field. It's the whole point.
    - BarryMilo 2y ago
      Yeah kinda seems like this guy would be better off pivoting to landscaping or baking or something. Maybe construction, there's always work in construction. Pays well too!
mywittyname 2y ago
I've been in the industry long enough to have been around for a few crashes. My outlook is: this industry has always faced threats that looked like it was going to spell the end of our careers, but we always come out the other side better than ever. I don't think LLMs are fundamentally more threatening than off shore developers were. Sure, we lost jobs during that time, but businesses realized eventually that the productivity was low and they wanted low level people who were responsible. I think that will continue. We'll all learn to control these agents and review their code, but ultimately, someone needs to be responsible for these agents, reviewing what they produce and fixing any shitshows they produce. I won't rule out the possibility of LLMs that are so good that they can replicate just about any app in existence in minutes. But there's still value in having workers manage infrastructure, data, etc.
- throw83288 2y ago
  Your logic works for seniors, but honestly I'm unsure how it works for anybody that just wants to break in.
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    I was a junior after companies had already decided to out source low-level development roles. And I also faced the roadblock of lacking a degree, or any college at the time, so internships were not an option. What I did was learn the skills that companies were hiring for and kept applying until I finally found some tiny company willing to pay me peanuts ($8.50hr, I'm not joking, I continued to work two jobs that entire year). They got a cheap worker, and I got experience that I leveraged into a better job. How does that translate to your situation? If you're in college, find internships, it's the easiest way to get your foot in the door. Are you out of college or never went? Time to look at job postings, evaluate the skills they are looking for, and learn those skills. Yeah, it sucks but that's also a fact of life in this industry. I have to "reskill" every few years too, because not every job I've had segues into another job. In reality, every senior developer decays over time into a junior because the tech landscape changes pretty quickly, and your choices are to mitigate that decay through learning the tech that's being hired for, or become a people manager. I'd suggest working on your defeatest attitude though. As someone with pretty low self-esteem myself, I get it. Just four hours ago I was calling myself an idiot for making a mistake, but instead of wallowing, I took the time to "prove it" and verify that I was the root cause of the the issue. If I was, I would take those findings and learn from them, but it turns out, all I proved was that I was not responsible and I got to pat myself for building out a system that allowed me to figure this out. You're going to have to find a way to tell yourself that you're proud of what you've done. Nobody else is going to say it. And rejection sucks. You have to learn to graciously accept rejection, and objectively look at what you've done and compliment yourself. I take the "shit sandwich approach" of finding two good things about what I've built, and one point of improvement. YMMV there, but it definitely helps with the mental health to compliment yourself when you deserve it.
konart 2y ago
>Call me a doomsday prepper >Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. Don't worry. As the other commenter said it: we've seen it all a few times already. I clearly remember how some people reacted to Ruby on Rails as if it's going to replace them just because it provides... well a framework. LLMs won't replace even a junior dev anytime soon. Not to mention senior dev etc. People who's main job was creating landing pages and simple shops might be in trouble.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  LLMs won't replace even a junior dev anytime soon. Not to mention senior dev etc. except of course they have already … in many places … and counting :)
  - Degorath 2y ago
    Actually curious - where have they? Zuck's claim didn't seem to be true. I'd imagine a few places that have low technical acumen have tried, but I'll want to see how much they pay for SWEs willing to clean that codebase after they let LLMs run amok on it.
  - konart 2y ago
    Any examples maybe?
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  Oh man the hype around RoR was nuts. You’d get these enterprise Java developers getting their first taste of a “python/php/ruby” language and they’d all make gushing blog posts about how quickly they put together some (rather simple) app. They’d all say how many orders of magnitude more productive they were thanks to RoR. And to be fair they weren’t wrong. RoR was one of the first “opinionated” platforms of its kind, really. (Well, that isn’t really true but we’ll just pretend it is… it sure was hyped that way). It did make a lot of the pain points of web apps easier… it handled database migrations, testing, ORM stuff, template stuff, etc. It was opinionated. It had some very vocal people pushing it (DHH of 37signals). It was the zeitgeist of the time. Hell Twitter was started on rails, from what I remember. Eventually they turned into a java shop but yeah. But that was going to be the natural progression. People found all the edges of RoR and we learned what worked and what didn’t and where to apply it and where it doesn’t belong. But things like RoR didn’t make developers less valuable it made them more valuable. And to somehow tie it back to LLM’s… it will be the same thing. Software will eat the world and all LLM’s will do is accelerate it. But we don’t know all the edges yet because the story is still unfolding. But I promise it won’t be the end of developers… anybody who uses LLMs daily can already tell you they’ll never be able to replace a dev. They are developer assistants not replacements no matter what the hype says. …end ramble (which is clearly not the output of an LLM)
sangnoir 2y ago
> Call me a doomsday prepper, but frankly I haven't heard a compelling argument against this line of thinking that is actually in line with the absurd development curve. Are the current economics viable indefinitely? I think not. This AI investment exuberance will be curbed as soon as investors start demanding returns, and we've already seen harbingers of that (the Deep Seek market scare). What appears to be a quadratic growth curve inevitably turns out to be sigmoid. Right now, the Hype train is at maximum speed and seems unstoppable. Despite the early hype, the Internet didn't replace colleges or brick and mortar stores[1], iPads didn't kill computers[2], and AI won't replace software engineers. This is not to say there will be no impact, but it's being oversold. 1. Khan academy and Amazon notwithstanding. But physical retail stores are still here and doing okay, and have adjusted to leveraging the new paradigm. 2. Leading up to peak iPad, it was believable that the iPad would kill PCs - it was an unstoppable juggernaut lifting Apple profits to record heights https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-21/ipad-the-pc-killer https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-21/ipad-the-...
deleted 2y ago
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fhd2 2y ago
I could tell you not to worry, but I don't think I will. How about embracing it? Think it all the way through: If software development completely disappears as a profession, what impact would it have on other possible jobs, on society? What are the potential bad outcomes from that? What would that mean for your ability to survive and enjoy yourself? What would you do? You'd find a way to make the best of it, I suppose. And the best is as good as it gets. Maybe this imaginary new world sucks, maybe not. You're young, from the sound of it. You get to be around for the future, when I'm long gone, that's kinda cool. I'm sure you'll find a way, you seem like a clever person. I find there's something powerful about thinking the worst case scenario through, and feeling somewhat prepared for it. Makes it easier to focus on the present.
mystified5016 2y ago
It will be fine. It may not be what you expected, and it may be harder than you expected, but programming and software engineering won't go away. The job is changing and we all have to either change with it or find something else. Typist used to be a career. People's entire jobs revolved around being able to operate a typewriter quickly. That skill became obsolete as computers were introduced, but the role didn't go away (for a long time anyway). Plenty typists learned to use computers and kept doing transcription or secretarial work like they always had done. Some refused to learn and took other career paths while a new generation of computer users came in. This has happened quite frequently in this industry. The skills we use now are about to be made obsolete, but our roles will still largely exist. The scary part is that we know right now that our skills are about to be obsolescent, but we don't yet know what the next thing is actually going to be. It's hard to prepare. I'm still fairly early in my career. I plan to cope by learning how to use these new AI tools. My core engineering skills will always be useful to some degree, but I have to stay with the times to stay competitive. That's it, that's the plan. Learn about the new thing as it's being built and try to stay ready.
suyash 2y ago
Never loose hope, I'm assuming you are young if you're a student right now. Time is on your side, no matter where the industry goes, just flow with it, try to learn the new technologies so you're never behind others who are competing for same positions.
- throw83288 2y ago
  I want to learn, but I can't display that I learned them. You know the whole thing where real projects are more valuable than simply "I did a tutorial"? I struggle to find ways to apply LLMs practically beyond like one project (which is basically someone else's anyway). That's my struggle.
  - BarryMilo 2y ago
    Do you not see the contradiction in what you're saying? "LLMs will replace us all... I can't find a use for LLMs". Get to replacing us already. It's a gold rush, someone needs to get rich selling shovels.
    - throw83288 2y ago
      I'm not trying to express that, it's that I can't find many meaningful projects with them.
      - mhast 2y ago
        If you can't figure out something innovative and ground breaking to do as a project try to copy something which already exists and you find useful. It can be an app or website, or something else. By trying to replicate something you will begin to learn and understand what the limitations and opportunities in these tools are. Developers hanging out on eg Hacker News are the very tip of the wave. 99% of all developers don't visit sites like this. It will take a long time (10+ years.) before AI moves through all fields. Companies which are inherently software focused will be first. But that's not where the long tail of software is. The long tail is in companies which does no software currently. Places where software is something you buy to do inventory or keep track of invoices or time sheets. I use these tools everyday now and they are both magically awesome and stupendously stupid, sometimes in the same reply. Things always change less in the short term (say less than 5 years), and more in long term (10+ years). Just as it was with smartphones, arguably the most recent big revolution which is now integrated everywhere. To reiterate. To find a project chose something which already exist and you use and have use of. Then copy it. Then improve it (to better for your use.) Personally I think this new revolution will make software exponentially more abundant and infinitely customizable and adaptable to individuals. My guess is also that in 10-20 years we will have more people than today who do "programming". A lot of tasks which are now hacked together in Excel sheets will be a lot easier to make into "proper" programs. In this world the people who know enough about many things to efficiently use agents to accelerate them will be the most valuable.
rurp 2y ago
In addition to the good responses you've gotten about not overreacting to hype cycles I'll add that you should also try to spend less time worrying about the unknown. I understand the appeal of a straightforward career path of college major -> internship -> junior role -> mid-level -> senior all in the same field. That works out great for many people, but you should also be aware that there are a lot, and I mean a lot of people whose path ended up looking nothing like that and are leading happy comfortable lives. Even if the worst case happens and the field gets wrecked by AI it won't be the end of the world. There will always be work for smart and reliable people. You might end up having to learn some new skills you weren't expecting to, but hey that's life. I have quite a bit of sympathy for someone with 30-40 years of experience who sees their career swiped away; retooling and getting hired in a new area can be quite hard at that stage. But for someone in their early 20s? There's absolutely nothing that can prevent you from adapting to whatever the new economy looks like in a few years.
aja12 2y ago
Pivot into cybersecurity? As a pentester, a mountain of security bugs in a mountain of AI produced slop that no one understands is the ideal provider of job security, I guess Maybe pentesting can be partly automated, but "the devil is in the details" and a pentester's primary quality is to look where the automated software won't. I don't know, truly. The future is somewhat foggy.

toprerules 2y ago

This must be your first hype cycle then. Most of us who are senior+ have been through these cycles before. There's always a 10% gap that makes it impossible to fully close the gap between needing a programmer and a machine doing the work. Nothing about the current evolution of LLMs suggests that they are close to solving this. The current messaging is basically, look how far we got this time, we will for sure reach AGI or full replaceability by throwing X more dollars at the problem.

throw83288 2y ago
So Work=0.1^Ct where C is the development pace. Everything points to the C of AI being large. How quickly does Work become a rounding error? Sure, C=log(t), but it could also be C=ke^t. Everything to me feels like it's the latter, I really want to be wrong.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Why all these approaches have not succeeded is that to close the gap, you have to backtrack on all the effort made so far. Like choosing a shortcut and stumbling on an impassable ravine. The only way is to go back.
- wholinator2 2y ago
  Cmon man, look at nature, exponential curves almost never are actually exponential. Likely it's the first part of a logistic curve. Of course you can sit here all day and cry about the worst outcome for an event in the long list of things no one can predict. It sounds like you've made your mind up anyways and refuse to listen to reason, so why keep replying to literally everyone here telling you that your buying into the hype too much. You're young, and so we'll give you a pass. But as stated, _the entire point of tech is evolving methods_. Are you crying because you can't be one in a room of hundreds feeding punchcards to a massive mainframe? Why not? It's _exactly_ the same thing! Technology evolved, standards changed, the bar raised a bit, everyone still went to work just fine. Are you upset you won't have a job in a warehouse? Are you upset you aren't required to be a farmer to survive? Just chill out man, it's not as terrifying as you think it is. Take a page out of everyone who ever made it and try to actually listen to the advice of people who've been here a while and stop just reflex-denying any advice that anyone gives you. Expand your mind a bit and just consider the idea that you're actually wrong in some way. Life will be much easier, less frantic, and more productive
  - throw83288 2y ago
    Honestly I think moving up in a layer of abstraction is not the same as something resembling an intelligent agent.
    - BarryMilo 2y ago
      If "resembling" intelligence was enough, all programmers would've been replaced long ago. I've said this on here before, but replacing programmers means replacing our entire economy. Programming is, by and large, information processing. Guess how many business's services can be summed up as "information processing"? I'd wager most of them. So maybe you're fucked, yes, but if so, we all are. Maybe we'll just have to find something to do other than exchange labor for sustenance...
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    People keep telling students basically to “think happy thoughts” and are not being honest with them. The field is contracting today while more people with experience are chasing fewer jobs and then AI is hallowing out the low end. Every single opening gets 1000s of applicants within the first day. It’s almost impossible to stand out from the crowd if you are either new to the industry or have a generic skillset.
- daotoad 2y ago
  The thing is the total amount of work to do keeps increasing. We're putting firmware in lightbulbs now. When everything includes software, someone needs to write and maintain that software. If software becomes cheaper, we'll just use even more of it.
- rstuart4133 2y ago
  > So Work=0.1^Ct where C is the development pace. Did you see the bit where he said "Most of us who are senior+ have been through these cycles before". They rolled out similar equations in previous hype cycles. The LLM's were released about 3 years ago now. Over the weekend I made the mistake on taking their word on "does GitHub allow administrator to delete/hide comments on PR's". They convincingly said "no". Others pointed out the answer is of "yes". That's pretty typical. As far as I can tell, while their answers are getting better and more detailed, what happens when they reach the limits of their knowledge hasn't changed. They hallucinate. Convincingly. That interacts with writing software in an unfortunate way. You start off by asking questions, getting good answers, and writing lots of code. But then you reach their limits, and they hallucinate. A new engineer has no way to know that's what happened, and so goes round and round in circles, asking more and more questions, getting complete (but convincing) crap in response, and getting nowhere. An experienced engineer has enough background knowledge to be able to detect the hallucinations. So far, this hasn't changed much in 3 years. Given the LLM's architecture, I can't see how it could change without some other breakthrough. Then they won't be called LLM's any more, as it will be a different design. I'm have no doubt it will happen, but until it does LLM's are a major threat software engineers.

nickstinemates 2y ago

If you want to thrive in this world you need to change your attitude ASAP. New tech waves happen all of the time. Embracing them is the path.

throw83288 2y ago
How? Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. I don't have any ideas anyway (I have only one "idea", and it's someone elses and I have no faith that it'll get me a foothold). Robotics will be solved pretty soon by 10x reasoners if this development curve continues. Everything I can "change to" has a 2 year delta and that is a 100x capability change within the AI space right now.
- anon3459 2y ago
  Just use AI to learn what you want to pivot to and don’t be cry baby please
  - throw83288 2y ago
    It's not knowledge but applications of knowledge to actually work in the field. I don't know how to meaningfully make the applications to succeed.
- mhnthrow 2y ago
  what are you attempting to achieve with this idea? what kind of foothold? ideas are everywhere, they are cheap. the idea plus the execution, timing, marketing, and approach are all factors in something being successful. maybe you are thinking you need to make a startup or something to be successful. i understand the feeling you have a little bit, but agree with the others that you don't need to despair too much about the industry, there is still a great need (and will be) for humans to understand the systems we are using and be able to get in the weeds to solve problems. totally agree we might need less people writing/wrangling code, and it might put downward pressure on salaries... on the other hand, there might be upward pressure on salaries as developers will have a higher output and the ROI for hiring an effective developer in this environment will go up. especially when production is on fire, the AI that wrote the code that is on fire might not be the best source of how to solve it. to me this is all basically a big unknown, without substantial reason to panic though, even if it feels overwhelming and hopeless from a certain perspective at the start of a career. currently a lot of development feels pretty sluggish to me, we fight with build tools and multiple languages and eke out these incremental improvements - if developers can work much much faster, that's great, but then we hit a limit to like... OK we need to let the product changes "settle" for a while and get user feedback about the changes, we can't actually ship 14 major product updates in a week because users will have no idea what the fuck is happening. but maybe we can do more advanced things with rapid split testing and automated success metrics to deploy pages that "self-optimize" or something, and there might be new second and third order ideas that come from this where it takes a human to manage and direct and build and solve things at that level.

semi-extrinsic 2y ago

> Any "normal" engineering field will be solved with the right domain knowledge. Oh no, don't worry. Nobody will be trusting GenAI only for Real Work like aerodynamics, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, plasma physics, you name it. For sure there will be (already is) AI-based surrogate models, fast preconditioners, superresolution methods etc. But you will for the duration of our lifetime need humans who understand both physics and programming to actually use the damn tools and ensure they are used correctly.

throw83288 2y ago
Required time to move into a regulated engineering field is 4 years. 4 years in the AI world is currently a 10^4 = 10000x capability delta. It's not like the engineering and academia curmudgeons will replace their employees as much be utterly destroyed by the AI labs hiring maybe one or two tenured professors per field to make an internal startup and then letting them oversee what the megascaled reasoners spit out at breakneck pace with a sufficiently low hallucination rate. I really wish to be wrong here.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  You'd better get out of tech then. Change is inherent in the field. It's the whole point.
  - BarryMilo 2y ago
    Yeah kinda seems like this guy would be better off pivoting to landscaping or baking or something. Maybe construction, there's always work in construction. Pays well too!

mywittyname 2y ago

I've been in the industry long enough to have been around for a few crashes. My outlook is: this industry has always faced threats that looked like it was going to spell the end of our careers, but we always come out the other side better than ever. I don't think LLMs are fundamentally more threatening than off shore developers were. Sure, we lost jobs during that time, but businesses realized eventually that the productivity was low and they wanted low level people who were responsible. I think that will continue. We'll all learn to control these agents and review their code, but ultimately, someone needs to be responsible for these agents, reviewing what they produce and fixing any shitshows they produce. I won't rule out the possibility of LLMs that are so good that they can replicate just about any app in existence in minutes. But there's still value in having workers manage infrastructure, data, etc.

throw83288 2y ago
Your logic works for seniors, but honestly I'm unsure how it works for anybody that just wants to break in.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  I was a junior after companies had already decided to out source low-level development roles. And I also faced the roadblock of lacking a degree, or any college at the time, so internships were not an option. What I did was learn the skills that companies were hiring for and kept applying until I finally found some tiny company willing to pay me peanuts ($8.50hr, I'm not joking, I continued to work two jobs that entire year). They got a cheap worker, and I got experience that I leveraged into a better job. How does that translate to your situation? If you're in college, find internships, it's the easiest way to get your foot in the door. Are you out of college or never went? Time to look at job postings, evaluate the skills they are looking for, and learn those skills. Yeah, it sucks but that's also a fact of life in this industry. I have to "reskill" every few years too, because not every job I've had segues into another job. In reality, every senior developer decays over time into a junior because the tech landscape changes pretty quickly, and your choices are to mitigate that decay through learning the tech that's being hired for, or become a people manager. I'd suggest working on your defeatest attitude though. As someone with pretty low self-esteem myself, I get it. Just four hours ago I was calling myself an idiot for making a mistake, but instead of wallowing, I took the time to "prove it" and verify that I was the root cause of the the issue. If I was, I would take those findings and learn from them, but it turns out, all I proved was that I was not responsible and I got to pat myself for building out a system that allowed me to figure this out. You're going to have to find a way to tell yourself that you're proud of what you've done. Nobody else is going to say it. And rejection sucks. You have to learn to graciously accept rejection, and objectively look at what you've done and compliment yourself. I take the "shit sandwich approach" of finding two good things about what I've built, and one point of improvement. YMMV there, but it definitely helps with the mental health to compliment yourself when you deserve it.

konart 2y ago

>Call me a doomsday prepper >Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. Don't worry. As the other commenter said it: we've seen it all a few times already. I clearly remember how some people reacted to Ruby on Rails as if it's going to replace them just because it provides... well a framework. LLMs won't replace even a junior dev anytime soon. Not to mention senior dev etc. People who's main job was creating landing pages and simple shops might be in trouble.

bdangubic 2y ago
LLMs won't replace even a junior dev anytime soon. Not to mention senior dev etc. except of course they have already … in many places … and counting :)
- Degorath 2y ago
  Actually curious - where have they? Zuck's claim didn't seem to be true. I'd imagine a few places that have low technical acumen have tried, but I'll want to see how much they pay for SWEs willing to clean that codebase after they let LLMs run amok on it.
- konart 2y ago
  Any examples maybe?
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
Oh man the hype around RoR was nuts. You’d get these enterprise Java developers getting their first taste of a “python/php/ruby” language and they’d all make gushing blog posts about how quickly they put together some (rather simple) app. They’d all say how many orders of magnitude more productive they were thanks to RoR. And to be fair they weren’t wrong. RoR was one of the first “opinionated” platforms of its kind, really. (Well, that isn’t really true but we’ll just pretend it is… it sure was hyped that way). It did make a lot of the pain points of web apps easier… it handled database migrations, testing, ORM stuff, template stuff, etc. It was opinionated. It had some very vocal people pushing it (DHH of 37signals). It was the zeitgeist of the time. Hell Twitter was started on rails, from what I remember. Eventually they turned into a java shop but yeah. But that was going to be the natural progression. People found all the edges of RoR and we learned what worked and what didn’t and where to apply it and where it doesn’t belong. But things like RoR didn’t make developers less valuable it made them more valuable. And to somehow tie it back to LLM’s… it will be the same thing. Software will eat the world and all LLM’s will do is accelerate it. But we don’t know all the edges yet because the story is still unfolding. But I promise it won’t be the end of developers… anybody who uses LLMs daily can already tell you they’ll never be able to replace a dev. They are developer assistants not replacements no matter what the hype says. …end ramble (which is clearly not the output of an LLM)

sangnoir 2y ago

> Call me a doomsday prepper, but frankly I haven't heard a compelling argument against this line of thinking that is actually in line with the absurd development curve. Are the current economics viable indefinitely? I think not. This AI investment exuberance will be curbed as soon as investors start demanding returns, and we've already seen harbingers of that (the Deep Seek market scare). What appears to be a quadratic growth curve inevitably turns out to be sigmoid. Right now, the Hype train is at maximum speed and seems unstoppable. Despite the early hype, the Internet didn't replace colleges or brick and mortar stores[1], iPads didn't kill computers[2], and AI won't replace software engineers. This is not to say there will be no impact, but it's being oversold. 1. Khan academy and Amazon notwithstanding. But physical retail stores are still here and doing okay, and have adjusted to leveraging the new paradigm. 2. Leading up to peak iPad, it was believable that the iPad would kill PCs - it was an unstoppable juggernaut lifting Apple profits to record heights https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-21/ipad-the-pc-killer https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-21/ipad-the-...

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fhd2 2y ago

I could tell you not to worry, but I don't think I will. How about embracing it? Think it all the way through: If software development completely disappears as a profession, what impact would it have on other possible jobs, on society? What are the potential bad outcomes from that? What would that mean for your ability to survive and enjoy yourself? What would you do? You'd find a way to make the best of it, I suppose. And the best is as good as it gets. Maybe this imaginary new world sucks, maybe not. You're young, from the sound of it. You get to be around for the future, when I'm long gone, that's kinda cool. I'm sure you'll find a way, you seem like a clever person. I find there's something powerful about thinking the worst case scenario through, and feeling somewhat prepared for it. Makes it easier to focus on the present.

mystified5016 2y ago

It will be fine. It may not be what you expected, and it may be harder than you expected, but programming and software engineering won't go away. The job is changing and we all have to either change with it or find something else. Typist used to be a career. People's entire jobs revolved around being able to operate a typewriter quickly. That skill became obsolete as computers were introduced, but the role didn't go away (for a long time anyway). Plenty typists learned to use computers and kept doing transcription or secretarial work like they always had done. Some refused to learn and took other career paths while a new generation of computer users came in. This has happened quite frequently in this industry. The skills we use now are about to be made obsolete, but our roles will still largely exist. The scary part is that we know right now that our skills are about to be obsolescent, but we don't yet know what the next thing is actually going to be. It's hard to prepare. I'm still fairly early in my career. I plan to cope by learning how to use these new AI tools. My core engineering skills will always be useful to some degree, but I have to stay with the times to stay competitive. That's it, that's the plan. Learn about the new thing as it's being built and try to stay ready.

suyash 2y ago

Never loose hope, I'm assuming you are young if you're a student right now. Time is on your side, no matter where the industry goes, just flow with it, try to learn the new technologies so you're never behind others who are competing for same positions.

throw83288 2y ago
I want to learn, but I can't display that I learned them. You know the whole thing where real projects are more valuable than simply "I did a tutorial"? I struggle to find ways to apply LLMs practically beyond like one project (which is basically someone else's anyway). That's my struggle.
- BarryMilo 2y ago
  Do you not see the contradiction in what you're saying? "LLMs will replace us all... I can't find a use for LLMs". Get to replacing us already. It's a gold rush, someone needs to get rich selling shovels.
  - throw83288 2y ago
    I'm not trying to express that, it's that I can't find many meaningful projects with them.
    - mhast 2y ago
      If you can't figure out something innovative and ground breaking to do as a project try to copy something which already exists and you find useful. It can be an app or website, or something else. By trying to replicate something you will begin to learn and understand what the limitations and opportunities in these tools are. Developers hanging out on eg Hacker News are the very tip of the wave. 99% of all developers don't visit sites like this. It will take a long time (10+ years.) before AI moves through all fields. Companies which are inherently software focused will be first. But that's not where the long tail of software is. The long tail is in companies which does no software currently. Places where software is something you buy to do inventory or keep track of invoices or time sheets. I use these tools everyday now and they are both magically awesome and stupendously stupid, sometimes in the same reply. Things always change less in the short term (say less than 5 years), and more in long term (10+ years). Just as it was with smartphones, arguably the most recent big revolution which is now integrated everywhere. To reiterate. To find a project chose something which already exist and you use and have use of. Then copy it. Then improve it (to better for your use.) Personally I think this new revolution will make software exponentially more abundant and infinitely customizable and adaptable to individuals. My guess is also that in 10-20 years we will have more people than today who do "programming". A lot of tasks which are now hacked together in Excel sheets will be a lot easier to make into "proper" programs. In this world the people who know enough about many things to efficiently use agents to accelerate them will be the most valuable.

rurp 2y ago

In addition to the good responses you've gotten about not overreacting to hype cycles I'll add that you should also try to spend less time worrying about the unknown. I understand the appeal of a straightforward career path of college major -> internship -> junior role -> mid-level -> senior all in the same field. That works out great for many people, but you should also be aware that there are a lot, and I mean a lot of people whose path ended up looking nothing like that and are leading happy comfortable lives. Even if the worst case happens and the field gets wrecked by AI it won't be the end of the world. There will always be work for smart and reliable people. You might end up having to learn some new skills you weren't expecting to, but hey that's life. I have quite a bit of sympathy for someone with 30-40 years of experience who sees their career swiped away; retooling and getting hired in a new area can be quite hard at that stage. But for someone in their early 20s? There's absolutely nothing that can prevent you from adapting to whatever the new economy looks like in a few years.

aja12 2y ago

Pivot into cybersecurity? As a pentester, a mountain of security bugs in a mountain of AI produced slop that no one understands is the ideal provider of job security, I guess Maybe pentesting can be partly automated, but "the devil is in the details" and a pentester's primary quality is to look where the automated software won't. I don't know, truly. The future is somewhat foggy.