Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

https://human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev/replies-to-comments-on-my-llms-are-eroding-my-career-post/

by omblivion • 1 month ago

186 244 1 month ago

human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev

https://web.archive.org/web/20260608100644/https://human-in-...

omblivion• 1 month ago

I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools and their growing potential. We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

graemep3• 1 month ago

We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

Until they go wrong because they are not good inside.

an0malous2• 1 month ago

I don’t know, I don’t think anyone really cares. I can’t unmute videos on Twitter/X on iOS, it’s been like that for over a year. I get a new disclosure that my data was leaked about every month. Palantir and possible Claude targeted a girl’s school for missile strikes. I still have to tell Claude what day or time it is right now sometimes, or it’ll give me medical advice for my dog and the dosing or some important number is 2-5x off. At my last job, at a YC company, I was explicitly told to stop working on vulnerabilities that let you do things like arbitrarily change a user’s email address through unprotected admin endpoints. Ten years ago I would’ve gotten a raise for this.

We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.

jazz9k• 1 month ago

This is true. I have artist friends that are boycotting any company using AI art for their flyers/ads.

I looked at some examples and couldn't tell the difference.

foobarbecue• 1 month ago

I think you can't tell the difference until the "art" shows details of something you know well -- a place you've been, out a hobby or sport you do.

I'm thinking of this awful slop "art" I saw on Wayfair yesterday. As a surfer, it's hilarious. That's not how you stand on a board. It's not even a board. And the wave is terrible-- nobody wants to surf shorebreak like that! https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-art-4-hawai...

I guess it could be a useful signal-- if you meet someone and they have it up in their home, you know they don't surf.

More generally, I think anything AI produces that's dense with factual details is inherently trash.

pc864• 1 month ago

I was just reading comments the other day where people who dragging a company because they apparently used AI for some low level copywriting stuff. No art assets, no code (so far as anyone knows), not actually writing copy but more like "is everything spelled right, does the copy structure flow, have all these points been addressed, etc." Not only that but the only reason anyone even knew is because the company was completely up front and transparent about what they used AI for and what they didn't.

There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.

vrganj3• 1 month ago

The outside world itself will stop working if we replace labor with LLMs.

Mass unemployment equals riots equals an end to the status quo.

pc864• 1 month ago

This doesn't seem at all related to the above comment - or anything, for that matter. Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.

peterspath• 1 month ago

The next big revolution probably involves burning down datacenters.

DoctorOetker2• 1 month ago

riots lead to hiring more police, so loyalty, prostitution, and sponsored eunuchships will be future career list. Those who are lucky can become a rent-a-pal.

avaer• 1 month ago

The outside world doesn't even care that things work, they care that it looks like it works long enough. Investors don't care that it's snake oil, as long as they're not left holding the bag.

AI is really good at making things that look like they work.

This is a steelman of your argument.

onraglanroad• 1 month ago

Well yes. This has been the history of the web. Frontpage generated really crappy code but people still used it to create websites. They didn't care about code quality just how it looked.

red75prime4• 1 month ago

This is a sentiment a highly skilled framework knitter could have shared. Investors don't care if those newfangled steam-powered knitting machines produce inferior textiles as long as people buy it.

Parallels to the industrial revolution are apparent. And this is disturbing.

Younes86• 1 month ago

fully agree with that and it's exactly the problem and it's getting worse with muti agent.

it's look like clean and polished but its full of mess, and duplicate code, no conventions..

we're generating code faster but at what price. but the real and deep project intelligence still a bottleneck.

archagon2• 1 month ago

Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days. Slop code will only accelerate this trend.

For the most part, people don’t need a thousand new features; the investment class does. Nobody gets mad at Craigslist.

mschuster91• 1 month ago

Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days.

The problem is... what can we practically do? When the village fish monger 200 years ago sold shoddy fish, you could go to him, give him a few whacks with his fish, and even if the fish monger didn't improve the quality of the fish he sold in response, you at least got some kind of feeling you got justice.

Nowadays? For most of the world, those responsible for the bad software aren't in the same village any more, for 95% of the world's population the USA is on an entirely different continent. Can't do anything to hold anyone accountable, with the exception of cancelling a 5$/month subscription LOL and yelling at some poor Filipino or Indian callcenter grunt. If you're among the lucky 5% that lives in the US, sure, you can file lawsuits if the problem is egregious enough, but that's expensive and consumer protection has been gutted. And doing a copy of a plumber's brother event? Might give you people treating you like jesus-come-to-earth but in the end you'll still face capital punishment for it, if you don't get taken out by the private security of the uber rich before you can even raise your gun.

Whatever the eventual solution to the problem you raise will end up being, it is certain it will not be pretty... bottled up rage is not good for any society.

bigstrat2003• 1 month ago

We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

How good something is inside is directly responsible for how well it works. Your customers might not care about the former, but they will care when your cuts to the former impact the latter (and they always do impact it, in the end).

genezeta• 1 month ago

I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age, incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever.

If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this:

  I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart

And it never does.

lukan2• 1 month ago

Some knowledge does set you apart - the ability to ship things, people pay for.

Not producing holy code in the academic best language.

catmanjan• 1 month ago

Ability can't really be compared to knowledge... e.g. you might lose the ability to play the piano, yet retain the knowledge about how to

lwhi6• 1 month ago

I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent to wayfinders.

People who _can_ see the wood for the trees, and are able to understand multiple (sometimes conflicting) requirements and work out a way through that solves the problems that arise, for all involved parties.

An understanding of domain, the ability to communicate effectively and a mind that can think laterally, will all be vital.

csomar2• 1 month ago

In a perfect world, yes. However, the current tech world is akin to a flea market. Those who shout out more stand out more.

lelanthran4• 1 month ago

I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent to wayfinders.

In the future, those who succeed will be the owners of capital.

RugnirViking6• 1 month ago

does it never? seems to me that people pay me precisely for my knowledge, learned over many years. The knowledge translates into action, sure. But thats like the old parable about a plumber being paid €150 for a 5 minute consult that involves turning a single screw. "i could have turned that screw!" the customer cries, ignoring that yes, they could have. But they didn't know to.

I think perhaps the problem is instead "I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart, forever, without me having to learn anything else"

esikich• 1 month ago

There's a good chance the apprentice plumber could've fixed it just as quickly. That's where we are now.

altmanaltman• 1 month ago

I think a more sane minded customer would not mind paying for the assurance and having someone to blame in case things go wrong, not necessarily because of their domain knowledge.

I could theoretically learn everything about plumbing but would still rather call a professional for the peace of mind that it was done "correctly" and it the process goes wrong, I would have an instant fix instead of trying to go back and educating myself on plumbing more.

Could you consider that as part of knowledge? Yeah and also no. Because the knowledge can be copied and put into a LLM but legally a LLM cannot sign off on things like NDAs or take accountability like a human has to in these roles.

dist-epoch• 1 month ago

This is the old China fallacy.

"Oh, we'll just ship production to China, and do the design and marketing in US, this is where the real value is anyway, China will never be able to do design and marketing as well as we do".

Literally same thing:

"Oh, we'll just let LLMs code, and we'll just do Taste. LLMs will never be able to do Taste"

pmg101• 1 month ago

It certainly seems similar.

Except China is just humans in a different location so it shouldn't be surprising they can do things humans in the US can do.

LLMs are a totally distinct type of thing. It's possible they'll be able to do Taste but it's also quite possible they'll never be able to.

kristjank2• 1 month ago

Knowledge often does not produce competence, especially in the applicable market. I work on the system administration side of things, and I have encountered many output-competent developers that were immeasurably stupid, but very little incompetent ones with tons of cryptic knowledge and intuitive understanding of the systems they worked on.

It seems to me that knowledge doesn't always imply competence, but the lack of knowledge often very well explains incompetence. And, since the LLM is replacing the competence part without imprinting any knowledge on the one that wields it, it generates a lot of competent imbeciles that pass interviews and appear as though they not only do things, but know things as well. And once you reach that critical mass, sheeeeesh

dag1006• 1 month ago

Knowledge often does not produce competence

From your example, perhaps you mean "competence does not imply knowledge" or more accurately in fact "lack of competence implies lack of knowledge" i.e. !competence -> !knowledge, in that competence && !knowledge is common but !competence && knowledge is rare.

kamaal• 1 month ago

>I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart

The whole leetcode movement was designed to sell this idea that knowing a solution that can be looked up in a matter of minutes on the internet some how puts you astronomically ahead of those who don't. Strangely enough go look at that site itself and thousands submit working solutions to those problems.

Knowing a solution discovered by somebody the first time, is no test of capacity or ability to get work done. It would probably matter if you discovered solution to a novel problem by yourself. How does knowing the end result of a long process by other people decide your ability to do anything at all?

During interviews I have seen companies go to absurd lengths to justify these tests. Including asking candidates to imagine they might not have internet and might need to know these solutions.

The only skill that really matters in our line of work is today most popularly known as high agency lifestyle. And delivery skills largely depend on ownership. In my decades of experience with software work, not knowing a thing isn't even a correlating factor in getting things done.

nlawalker• 1 month ago

My concern is less about knowledge and more about the ability to communicate and make good decisions. I'm not sure how well it holds up against technology that can sometimes make a good showing at it, but is most importantly automated, cheap and subservient.

AndrewKemendo2• 1 month ago

Everyone but insane people like me want some kind of durable stability to their life

they don’t want to be forced to reinvent themselves every five years because the world is changing faster than it ever has

While I understand where people are coming from to an extent that’s just never been my lifestyle and so when I see people looking for some kind of long-term stability I just kind of baffled at what makes them think that that was ever possible.

It’s like the propaganda from the American 1950s nuclear family idealism really got locked in in a way that people believe that there was a real thing

And while it was certainly true that American baby boomers got to ride the economic pax Americana that happened from 1949 to today, that period is over

While it is still possible for you to have a career your career is most likely going to change every 5 to 10 years now and that’s just a fact of the society that we have built

we did not build society intentionally

It was built via attrition and the current leaders are the ones who are fully committed to monetary based global domination

Npovview• 1 month ago

Red Queen hypothesis is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology proposed in 1973, that species must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species.

Why do we always assume environments and other agents will always remain static.

yankee_dodge• 1 month ago

Knowledge depreciates, so it is clarifying to add time explicitly: I thought this knowledge would set me apart...

Forever? That seems over-optimistic for all occupations in all eras.

For the rest of my working career? This really hasn't been true in a long time either, especially in software, where technology changes on the order of years.

For the duration of my mortgage? The fondest hope, but pretty much like the above.

For the next 10 years? Here is the big change. Even for fields like medicine, where knowledge really did set you apart. The AI can adapt faster. AI is inside the human OODA loop.

sifar• 1 month ago

May be for OO not yet for DA. Existential pressure drives better(fruitful) decisons and actions. AI has yet to incorporate that into training/inference.

OJFord• 1 month ago

The good news I think is that you have to be really really specialist for the specialist knowledge to actually be the important bit; for most it's the ability to obtain specialist knowledge, and apply it.

As long as we can adapt, move on to the next knowledge-needed area, we'll hopefully be alright.

(I think there are many analogies here to things people have always said about undergraduate study – e.g. it's about teaching you to learn, not teaching you the specific things you're taught, to be remembered and applied forever.)

TimTheTinker• 1 month ago

Agreed. The ability to learn new things, and what characteristics their ability to learn has -- that's one dimension that strongly differentiates people in nearly any domain.

But there are other dimensions as well that differentiate people and determine their value to business, like the ability to be handed problems no one else can solve and stick with them through sheer stubbornness until solutions begin to emerge.

matheusmoreira4• 1 month ago

If knowledge doesn't set us apart, then what does? How do we make it in this brave new world?

Anomie is at an all time high. It feels like the world's unreadable right now. No idea what to do.

rowbin• 1 month ago

I agree, his takes should not be dismissed lightly. I'm not sure about "demand is fixed" though. I feel like software demand has been declared saturated at least a few times.

jameshart• 1 month ago

I have been making software professionally for 25 years and in all that time i have never run into the problem that we have run out of things to do.

rglullis• 1 month ago

Do not use past events to predict the future, or you risk end up becoming a turkey: https://peteweishaupt.medium.com/talebs-tu-e406eb8859a8

pixel_popping3• 1 month ago

Exactly, if we look at what projects are on-going now, look at Startups, they are practically solving all the same thing and most of them will be dead soon, we need to finally reach the era where tools to "zeroshot" anything becomes widespread to create new problems, but even by then, we will have an oversupply of tech workers, many will have to convert to a different field, many will not want to be paid based on callcenter type of work which is prompt-as-much-as-you-can, understandably.

It's quite hard to predict what will happen, but in a few years, I bet the unemployment rate of tech workers will be really high, we can just look at how many jobs are currently already replaceable but the owner of it is just lagging in the implementation of automation, it's probably already the large majority of tech jobs.

leoncos• 1 month ago

Agreed. The limitations of human context window and communication bandwidth restrict the complexity of large-scale software.

LLM will have an extremely large context window and extremely high communication bandwidth in the future. Therefore, even more complex large-scale software will emerge.

lelanthran4• 1 month ago

I feel like software demand has been declared saturated at least a few times.

It's never been declared saturated, with one exception in the six months following the dot-com crash.

I've been in the industry since the mid-90s. I have not seen automation with the potential to automate away everything for the average office worker.

DonsDiscountGas2• 1 month ago

"fixed" is definitely incorrect but there's probably a ceiling on how fast the demand can grow, just because other bottlenecks will take over at some point.

pixel_popping3• 1 month ago

I agree with all of it, and I think author did a really good job at actually saying what's true, it's almost like developers don't want to hear it.

I feel that OP has reach that point because he went out of the basic tooling like Claude Code (at least in its default state) and embrace multi-model, automatic reviewing, fuse, loops and so-on, when it's done right, well, failure rate to solve issues is <1%, this is exactly why you arrive to that kind of depressing thoughts afterward and it's spot-on.

Many people will disagree because they are still at the vibe coding stage, not "as much as I can prompt will be automatically done stage". Claude Code imo is deliberately not implementing the best ways for users to work, they have recently implemented Workflows but that's almost a year late, many companies are doing this since always and that's just part of basic tooling nowadays.

People talk about models and benchmarks score while genuinely I'm baffled because they seem to ignore that that same benchmark can reach 99% by levering tooling intelligently, we don't really need better models (at least for coding), we just need adoption of proper methods. The day developers will discover that they are already able to solve 300 issues in a single day with ZERO supervision in complex Rust codebases, I'm sure they'll change their mind.

Our bottleneck in our team is currently just having the mental bandwidth to type as much as possible, it's kinda sad, it is becoming all absurd.

If you are still watching the output of the model for coding tasks, I bet you haven't challenged your own methodologies, yet.

sixtram• 1 month ago

Just 300 a day? That's only one ticket every 1.5 minutes. I hope in a year we can fix an issue under 30 seconds with ZERO supervision.

pixel_popping3• 1 month ago

We will, most work can be parallelized, the same way as developers are able to work together on large codebases, tools can as well.

canadiantim• 1 month ago

May I ask what are some of methods you’re using for this level of productivity?

thunspa• 1 month ago

Also interested.

grebc8• 1 month ago

Your argument boils down to: it’s different this time.

pc864• 1 month ago

Isn't that a perfectly fair argument if you can articulate why?

grebc8• 1 month ago

There’s not much articulation except some personal snippets about someone caught in the hype cycle of a product, that the hive mind is buzzing about deafeningly.

Tools/improvements have rarely been negative in such a massive way except rare instances, and even then society moved on and past those tools to bigger & better things.

How many people today seriously consider agriculture as a career prospect but almost all humans who lived in the last 2000 years worked as peasant labor on a farm. We are thriving in comparison to that period of time.

petesergeant• 1 month ago

ok, so?

grebc8• 1 month ago

It rarely is.

contrast• 1 month ago

Did you read it?

The argument boils down to: this is exactly the same as other times. And provides multiple examples.

watwut4• 1 month ago

He literally did not provided multiple examples of such a thing.

noodletheworld2• 1 month ago

Yes; that is literally the opposite of what this article does.

raincole• 1 month ago

The article: it's different this time because X and Y.

You: you're saying "it's different this time."

I don't know. It looks like AI really rots people's brains. As if that they just shut down their minds when they see an anything AI-related. Imagine if this article were about anything else, like:

Article: the stock bubble is going to burst because...

Comment: your argument boils down to "the stock bubble is going to burst."

It'd be so stupid. But somehow when it comes to AI this kind of weird comment is tolerated even celebrated.

jappgar• 1 month ago

Some food is mass-produced in factories.

It tastes bad, and poisons you slowly.

Some (less) food is produced on farms and kitchens.

It tastes good, and keeps you healthy.

I don't really care who/what wrote the code. I don't even really care about the code at all. What I care about is the end product.

The problem is not "code quality" the problem is that billionaire sociopaths have removed human judgement (and human morality) from the dev loop. This started long before AI.

Coders are hyperfocused on style and missing the substance. We are entering a world where rich bastards can produce evil software without any checks whatsoever.

At least when humans were required to write the code, they had to find and retain unscrupulous humans. Now they're completely unfettered, and we're soon going to learn the precise shape of the digital prisons they're constructing.

scotty79• 1 month ago

Every freelancer that switched to AI feels exactly what happened even if they can't name it.

We became for AI what our clients were for us. Some hate it, some love it.

To feel safe in life our clients needed to have an actual business. Now when we are the clients of our AI we are scared, because now we need to have an actual viable business. Economic machine that works. Because the old model of just selling our time and effort to a client no longer works, when we are the clients.

noodletheworld2• 1 month ago

I don't entirely disagree, but as with many other posts on this topic…

They will come for finance, biology, law, marketing, all knowledge work. That's their stated goal and they're already teasing it with "ChatGPT for Health" and similar launches. They're working on "harnesses" for other fields, it's just a matter of time before we have "Claude Finance Analyst" or something.

…

Beg to disagree. The models will learn good engineering principles at some point.

…

Stop and think, don't try to predict the future using (bad) past examples.

Don't try to prediction the future based on the past.

Also, here is my doomsday prediction.

Thats kind of ironic.

Heres a more thoughtful take: everything is an s curve.

Things start out fast, then they slow down.

It happens in learning, in tech, in literally everything.

The question (unanswered) is where we are in that curve.

Will they get better? Yes.

A lot better? A bit better? /shrug

danieltanfh95• 1 month ago

The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit.

No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.

red75prime4• 1 month ago

And when the required complexity of software to do the task gets high enough, you assign an agent to do the task instead.

rafaelmn• 1 month ago

Entropy makes sure that you can't scale systems into infinite completely.

Schiendelman• 1 month ago

We have thought that a few times with earlier technologies - a smaller chip requires less local reduction of entropy than a room sized computer. This may keep going for a long time yet.

steveBK123• 1 month ago

Exactly and this is true of many things. Much of the world is not zero sum, otherwise we'd have fallen into the "malthusian trap" several productivity booms ago.

lelanthran4• 1 month ago

> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit.
No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.

There's an upper limit on everything. Maybe there's no ceiling on incidental complexity for s/ware development, but there sure as shit a ceiling on the essential complexity.

naveen99• 1 month ago

s/complexity/entropy

No ceiling.

GeoAtreides• 1 month ago

but, as the layoffs demonstrate, there is a ceiling for employed software engineers...

therealdrag06• 1 month ago

Clearly there isn’t infinite money to spend on infinite complexity.

vanuatu2• 1 month ago

it is subject to market forces, but there's no clear ceiling you can draw like copywriting, or textiles, or horses and cars

with abstractions and complexity there's essentially infinite demand for software

dspillett2• 1 month ago

There is no ceiling for complexity.

There are perhaps limits to useful complexity.

There are certainly limits to complexity people are willing to pay for. So if you are looking to make a living in development the fact that anyone will soon be able to do the basics and customise it for themselves is going to be a problem for you. Not directly, but because you'll be competing for fewer and fewer more interesting jobs that pay less and less over time (as development increasingly becomes a commodity task like waiting tables and stacking shelves), with the rest of us (maybe not me, I've already been unhappy in tech for years as remote work isn't good for my mental health, so I might bail early and beat the rush for those cushy table waiting jobs!).

rfgplk4• 1 month ago

You're assuming the current ensemble of commonly used software stacks is the most optimal there is. This assumption is simply wrong. Even looking at something simple like the office suite you can probably find countless areas where improvements can be made.

star-glider• 1 month ago

100% software doesn't take up space; there's always something more that can be automated or improved: https://loadhigh.jtylergriffin.com/devs-are-fine/

ryanackley6• 1 month ago

AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given

* The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace

* AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure

* there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced

There are strong headwinds to all three of these.

Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a lot of tech people simply overlaying the progress curve of previous tech booms which is reductive.

hyperpape• 1 month ago

The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace

I guess this is trivially true if you say "maximalism" (hell, the maximalists think it will speed up as the AI becomes a super-AI-researcher), but as long as the rate of change is positive and not miniscule, it's hard to predict what 2035 looks like in software development.

These things are very hard to quantify, but making the progress that happened from Jan 2025-December 2025 repeat twice in 10 years would be enough for me to say I couldn't predict the day-to-day of a software engineer in 2035.

onlyrealcuzzo3• 1 month ago

* The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace

Frontier AI is already good enough to be very useful for engineering. It's too costly for many places where it could be useful today.

The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months.

And likely again in the following 18-24 months.

At the same time, the cost per watt is going to down ~25%, and at the same time speed will increase (also valuable since time is money).

coffeefirst• 1 month ago

The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months.

How do you know that?

In 2026 the prices have been spiking. It now costs orders of magnitude more than it did in November.

DonsDiscountGas2• 1 month ago

AI/LLMs have been dramatically improving for 7+ years. There's now a lot more funding to support continued improvement. You're correct this is an "assumption", but continued improvement at the same pace (or faster) for the next 3+ years is just extrapolating a trend. Believing we've hit the top today is based on nothing at all. Continued improvement is much more likely.

cloche• 1 month ago

You can only tell which part of the S-Curve you're on in retrospect. It's not something you can tell while you're experiencing it. Both scenarios of AI maxing out or continuing to improve are both likely.

hodgehog114• 1 month ago

Others have commented on the rate of AI improvement. It doesn't need to be current rate for it to be an even more serious problem in the very near future. That's irrespective of prior booms.

Regarding AI companies having capital to expand infrastructure; this is largely irrelevant. The cat is out of the bag, and you can already make serious gains by finetuning to local problems on a desktop machine. There is enough hardware out there to run these things en masse; it's more a question of power. Regardless, this stuff will always keep progressing, regardless of who is doing it.

Regarding the economy, it may be largely irrelevant if we, the people, don't do something very soon. The wheel keeps spinning as long as there are productive workers; it's just that those workers are being replaced by machines. The last year has increasingly demonstrated that you don't need normal people to buy your stuff to remain afloat. You can just keep selling amongst your rich friends while the masses starve, as long as _something_ is still producing what the wealthy want, and enough systems are in place to protect them.

ryanackley6• 1 month ago

You’re just hand waving. No actual facts in your argument.

Sure, if you have a desktop with 175GB of unified memory, you can run deepseek 4 locally. Not completely out of reach but pretty close for almost everyone. There are smaller models but we’re talking about state of the art stuff that can reliably be used to do serious work right?

Also, even in a mad max style dystopian future, the elite need the working class to enjoy their luxuries. There is a long supply chain of experts and workers to build a yacht for example. It’s kind of ridiculous to imagine robots and AI replacing that entire supply chain. It would be extremely fragile. While conceivable, it’s also an unrealistic extrapolation grounded in sci fi instead of reality

alfalfasprout2• 1 month ago

This is probably one of the more level headed takes in the comment thread. There's been a concerted marketing push to frame AI maximalism as an inevitability. More or less a "it's going happen anyways so let's go all in".

It's hardly an inevitability though (nothing is... and analogues to the industrial revolution are iffy at best, we haven't ever had an attempted replacement for intelligence itself before).

Society is doing this at an unprecedented cost and it's clear a large portion of the population is uneasy with it. Whether society in the US, Europe, and Asia will continue to allow such investment at the expense of everything else remains to be seen.

ryanackley6• 1 month ago

The capital outlay is eye watering and it feels like an over extension. Neither of the two major pure AI providers are close to profitable (OpenAI, Anthropic) while having valuations close to a trillion dollars.

Their ROI is paradoxical. If they succeed in disrupting knowledge work. Who will be around to use or buy their product?

ekjhgkejhgk3• 1 month ago

Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.

This is a particularly ignorant thing to say.

philipwhiuk3• 1 month ago

It's classic https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/physicists.png

(Also, both might be out of reach of the current AI architectures)

ekjhgkejhgk3• 1 month ago

Software engineers have the same attitude, but are dumber.

tedtimbrell• 1 month ago

To me the author was saying that the cross-domain knowledge needed to collaborate is easier to pick up not that other domains are easy

keybored3• 1 month ago

> This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless"
> So blog with single post hyping LLMs. Oh and the domain name "human-in-the-loop". Call me suspicious.
If after reading what I just said in the reply above you still think I'm an "AI shill" or "lab shill", there's nothing I can do for you.

Yes there isn’t. Because they look indistinguishable.

Replacement Inevitability with a human face, along with all the human concern; “I am part of it and it scares me.”

Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm one of the engineers who's constantly committing to improve our agentic tooling, I use different models to do adversarial code reviews, I keep a toolbelt of skills and prompts, etc. I have effectively become the so-called "AI-native engineer" (gosh, I hate that term).

Some CEO gloating about replacing all-knowledge-work gets skepticism, eye-rolls and resentment. Someone in the trenches having human feelings about it generates both sympathetic and ecocentric fear.

---

And maybe autor intent does not matter? The original submission was massively “popular”. It served its purpose.

watwut4• 1 month ago

This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry.

Literally today I got like 4 AI ads literally mocking "old people still using excel", trying shame and insecure people into some AI whatever product.

This is literally the first technology that is trying to scare and mock me into using it. All it actually does is that I am growing to hate it, honestly along with tech industry itself. Which I used to like.

recitedropper• 1 month ago

I am having a similar sentiment change about our industry as well. The more AI's marketing plays purely on fear and shame, the more I want to see it fail. If Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other power players continue in this direction, I hope the graduation speech boos are just the start.

Altern4tiveAcc• 1 month ago

Agents used to be bad at this kind of stuff in my workplace as well, but newer models + agent-friendly documentation + AGENT.md begging agents to read the fucking docs before coding changed this landscape for us here.

Wouldn't that be true for humans as well? If you have documentation explaining a rule and you read it, you may not need to reach out to coworkers.

Otherwise I think the author's concerns are 100% valid.

ufocia2• 1 month ago

"I'm finding LLMs also competent at explaining and giving advice on other domain stuff I'm totally new to, which I have cross-checked with Legal/Product Managers and is usually right."

"Usually" is the keyword. Until it becomes "always" (counterintuitive for heuristic systems) or "almost always" some human experts will (/may?) be needed to babysit.

P.S. "_are_ usually right" since they are "LLMs". Methinks running the response through an LLM could've made it more "right".

daveshistory3• 1 month ago

I think technically it's referring to the advice, which is in the singular.

"These AIs are usually right about things I don't know anything about" sounds like the textbook example of risky thinking though.

Delk• 1 month ago

Maybe it's the advice that's usually right.

philipwhiuk3• 1 month ago

The models will learn good engineering principles at some point.

This is just silly. It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits and that they just aren't that good. We're seeing lots of other AI and software engineering brought to bear, but there's nothing 'inevitable' that means this is close.

"at some point" is so vague as to be irrelevant. Fusion might be the dominant source of electricity "at some point". Equally, AI knowing good principles could be 30 years away.

Don't assume that hard intellectual challenges are solvable on faith. Look at what's currently possible.

AI has always been a field where https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png applies heavily.

Ukv5• 1 month ago

It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits

Maybe, but people have been saying deep learning is about to hit a wall since 2012, and many reasonable-sounding "machines fundamentally can't do X" have since fallen.

Feels like we're standing on a roof with floodwater up to our ankles - maybe it stops rising now, but we didn't foresee it getting anywhere near this high in the first place.

I do agree that progress will probably be more slow/gradual than others seem to predict, no "hard takeoff", but even being decades away is still relevant to someone starting a career in software development.

incomingpain• 1 month ago

You are correct that your career is changing, but it's not like AI is going to go away.

In the 1990s when crypto went to court. It was determined that really anything coming from AI is protected speech. Very few exceptions, AI cant export a few things.

So you're never seeing AI go away, which means you need to transition/adapt.

6510• 1 month ago

Tax I could do to some extend but I once (for laughs) had a go at scripting up Dutch work hour laws because no one could do it in their head. This was so terrifyingly complex that I'm convinced many laws should be rewritten to make it easier to code.

The problem looks something like (not a real example): Type Z hours maximum A per day, B per week, C per month, D per year. E more hours than A is allowed every F weeks but no more than G per month and H per year. More than B is allowed... etc Minimum rest hours I per day, J per week, K per two weeks, L per month. More is allowed every 7.5 days unless it is full moon and maximum hours per day were exceeded at least 3 times in the last 82 days except from solar eclipses or if the Kings is married 12.5 years or if the employee gave birth in the last 472 hours.

My employer has software to make the schedules. It cant tell where shifting around shifts is possible but you can try do it and it will tell you why it isn't possible.

I was hoping to calculate if multiple shifts can be shifted around to facilitate someones day off. Sometimes it just cant be made to work but if people are willing and there is a hole you end up doing it anyway. (I've done a triple shift once because the coworker wanted to bring his wife to the hospital.) Employees earn undocumented days off... and then you end up with multiple schedules, the real one and the official one. Possibly extra copies depending on who knows what is really going on. This cant be the way...

Better just have modern laws that make sense in code.

mexicocitinluez• 1 month ago

If the models (and harnesses) keep getting better at the same pace for the foreseeable years, we are heading to a world where the profession is commoditized to the ground. There's this talk about Jevons Paradox but I disagree. The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit.

This entire section is backwards to me.

The current state of a lot of different domains I've been in is that they tend to center around 2-3 major, generic products that all get retrofitted to fit those smaller/medium-sized businesses. Now that the economics have shifted, it makes sense for those businesses to bring on software devs to build software tailored to their problem specifically.

And you can't compare copyrighting. It's a totally different field, with different goals and different time tables.

sam_lowry_2• 1 month ago

Whenever someone complaints about LLMs eroding their career, I advise them to read The Profession by Isaac Asimov.

TLDR: there will be less programmers and they will be better on average.

an0malous2• 1 month ago

Do you do this because you hate these people? If I recall the story correctly, it’s basically confirming their worst fears

sam_lowry_2• 1 month ago

Because I love sci-fi.

queenkjuul2• 1 month ago

I think people are far too dismissive of just how well-suited programming is to the exact form of LLMs.

Extremely formal syntax, limited ambiguity, simple verifiable testing procedures, and colossal well-documented training sets.

I don't yet buy that the successes of coding agents will apply nearly as well to other professions. "Correct more often than not when asked a random accounting question" really isn't any indication to me that they'll get there.

ekjhgkejhgk3• 1 month ago

And what's the most important aspect, in my opinion: In programming the LLM can make an hypothesis, try, get feedback, and refine the hypothesis, until it works.

This isn't the case in most areas. For example in Law, where everythign is text, you can RL so that an LLM produces an argument which a human would believe to be more reasonable, but you can't get a really fast loop of: make an argument, test it in front of a judge, refine the argument until you win the case.

stavarotti• 1 month ago

On novel work:
Work that introduces new methods, highly creative ideas, or solutions that have not been used or experienced before. More generally, an approach that introduces an innovative strategy to solve a complex problem.

Something that I've been thinking about for the past year or so is coming to grips with the fact that the vast majority (anecdote) of software engineering work is not novel (and maybe that's okay). Few opportunities lend themselves to doing truly novel work. Other than infrastructure work and highly specialized software, pause and ask yourself when you last encountered software were you said "how the hell did they do that?" or "damn, that's nice" (for me, the most recent was Ghostty). I think much of the angst that people have when they fear for their job is coming to the realization that LLMs can do most of the "standard" work that a lot of highly compensated individuals currently do. We've built livelihoods around this and the threat of that coming to an end is genuinely frightening.

thunky• 1 month ago

I think much of the angst that people have when they fear for their job is coming to the realization that LLMs can do most of the "standard" work that a lot of highly compensated individuals currently do.

Amd do it better in most cases imo. Which is also hard to come to terms with, because there is a good bit of elitism/entitlement going around. The idea that a SWE is working at a higher level, which is beyond the reach of mere mortals, so therefore the high compensation is justified. Meanwhile everyone is, for the most part, doing some slight variation of the same thing as you suggested.

After starting out working minimum wage jobs I've always thought that the work gets easier and easier from there. Compensation and hard work are negativity correlated.

manoji• 1 month ago

This is spot on ! Most of the work we really do is pure boilerplate and should be automated. While there are instances of interesting work those are far and few in between . The most recent instance of "how the hell did they do that?" for me was duckdb.

hackingonempty• 1 month ago

pause and ask yourself when you last encountered software were you said "how the hell did they do that?"

Like every month for the past 5 years? The progress in machine learning is dizzying. It is astonishing what can be done now with text, images, audio, video, code, etc...

If you don't study it, however, you have no idea how it works or how to do it yourself.

oblig. xkcd https://xkcd.com/1425/

rfgplk4• 1 month ago

Something that I've been thinking about for the past year or so is coming to grips with the fact that the vast majority (anecdote) of software engineering work is not novel (and maybe that's okay)

Correction, essentially 0% of software is novel. Git wasn't novel. Chromium wasn't novel. Linux wasn't novel. Even C when it came out wasn't novel. Likewise Unix. They're all permutations of either prior knowledge, or evolutions of already existing concepts. They only might _appear_ novel to people who lack the depth to see what technology really is. Effectively applied physics (which has been solved for... over a few centuries at this point?) which itself is applied mathematics. There is novely to be found in physics and math themselves, but it's far out of scope of practical engineering.

casey2• 1 month ago

All public school students in the US at least are taught how to do basic scientific research. They should be making novel discoveries every day. The only thing that stopping them now is their own laziness.

jmpman• 1 month ago

In my social network, there are two people impacted by LLMs. One was a security operations manager whose company reduced headcount upon introduction of some new LLM powered security tools. The other was UX designer. Both have been unemployed for 6+ months, and neither are likely to land a job in their field. The government hasn't stepped in and provided them with Universal Basic Income, and I wonder what will happen when my career is similarly impacted? Luckily I'm on the verge of retirement and should be able to support myself. However I have other friends who tried to day trade their 401k instead of work, and although back in the workforce, no longer have a nest egg. What's going to happen to them when they're inevitably put to pasture by AI?

waffletower• 1 month ago

"There's this talk about Jevons Paradox but I disagree."

In my position, our team is clearly displaying "increased demand due to increased efficiency". I admit our position may be situational -- but my anecdote seems more substantive and speculative than "I disagree" from my vantage at least.

alfalfasprout2• 1 month ago

A part of the puzzle that rarely gets discussed is something that predated LLMs entirely-- "software engineering" and "programming" have been conflated for a long time now and there's a huge gamut of roles out there.

The practice of writing code, or programming, in recent years has really fallen into two buckets:

The vast majority of folks are given a task, they write code to complete that task, and the task completion then counts towards some objective (eg; a new feature, product or fixing a bug). Perjoratively, they've been known as "ticket takers".

A much smaller group have instead worked in the other direction-- identifying where improvements can be made to a product, piece of infrastructure, or pain point and transformed that into tasks that can then be solved via code.

How much of a role you play in that strategy and formulation has been the real differentiator. Not so much what you know. While these are correlated, they're very different.

At a high level, it's been the difference between "developer" and "engineer" but the reality is the titles have become somewhat meaningless in recent years where many "engineers" are just doing the same CRUD tasks over and over.

The reason this matters is that at some point, you can only abstract so far... the requirements for what to build have to come from somewhere. At the most extreme case, there's only the CEO and a company that's nothing but AI agents. In the least extreme case (today) each line worker could manage 1 or more LLMs/agents.

It's not entirely clear to me or frankly a large portion of those in the industry that we're suddenly on pace for one outcome vs another. But I do think that software isn't particularly unique here other than it was an initial starting point for LLMs to deliver value. All white collar work is at risk including CEOs.

And if that happens it would be outlandish to think a utopia emerges... the opposite is far more likely.

lellow• 1 month ago

Just kudos to OP for coming back. One thing I almost "hate" is that nowadays everyone can put something out there... videos, articles, etc., but when confronted with questions, you never see the discussion continue. YT videos are an example... SO MANY VIDEOS... People genuinely asking some good questions... and radio silence.

Havoc• 1 month ago

Im not (yet) in the firing line but much like OP I’m rather worried as to where this is all going on a societal level.

Programmers may fall first but other knowledge work won’t be far behind.

matheusmoreira4• 1 month ago

I'm quite worried too. I think we're all going to be screwed if we don't achieve the fabled post scarcity society.

insane_dreamer• 1 month ago

since the demand is not infinite, not all of them can be hired to do that. One copywriter is now doing the job of 10, but the demand is fixed. The demand is not going to 10x just because you have 10x more supply.

This is the key insight, and one that I find myself repeating to people over and over. Yeah, you'll still need a HITL for some tasks. But because it only takes 1 person to do 10 people's work, that's a 90% workforce reduction, essentially killing off entire professions.

So "find the next thing" will work for the lucky 10%.

And given the $T of investment including all datacenter and energy to run them (we collectively decided to forget about climate change because AI so shiny), the only way to get the desired ROI is to decimate as many professions as possible.

A couple of days ago talked to a parent of one of my kids teammates and it turns out he's an illustrator who has been able to support his family for the past 10 years on his considerable skill. And all of a sudden, AI has taken it away, not gradually, but almost overnight. No one wants to pay for illustrators because midjourney is "good enough". What is that person supposed to do now? It's not like he can find another company to work for, or move to a city where there are "jobs", it's the end of a career that he spend a couple of decades honing his skills for. It was sobering. Yeah, he could sell his own art on Etsy or something, but there's a limited market -- it's not like people are going to buy 10x works of art on Etsy than before. So essentially, that entire profession is on life support. And lest someone say "use the AI tools yourself, become the prompt engineer", they're missing the point that the marketing person who was hiring illustrators no longer wants to do so because they can just prompt-design it themselves and no one cares about quality anymore anyway.

hootz• 1 month ago

The reports I get from people I know are that my company is not on the extreme edge of vibecoding, so leaving it for a potentially worse environment is not a good trade.

I'm in a similar situation right now. I might get a job offer for a 60% pay raise, however that means leaving a company with conservative views on AI to join an "agent-first" AI focused one.

teleforce• 1 month ago

I think the replies were pre-mature since when I commented on HN the comments total still has not reached 1000, but he already linked the replies already in the blog. Perhaps should have waited the comments to settle down in the original HN post, so that he can chose the most relevant and the interesting comments before posting the replies.

Personally, I'd really appreciate it if the original OP article author can respond to my comment in the previous post [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442851

Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

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