Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I’ll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don’t believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of “vibe-coding”, but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can’t spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What’s even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would’ve taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn’t a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It’s a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don’t know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don’t think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
This year has been interesting. A couple years ago, I dabbled with using LLMs for fill-in-the-middle (FITM) completion before I deciding I was more effective without them. I relegated LLMs to one-off tasks like transforming text. This worked well for a year or so, until I was asked to evaluate agents so we could determine guardrails for other team members. I realized then the models and harnesses had matured substantially. The writing was on the wall, and the business needed us to adapt to keep up with competitors.
Now I’ve become much more accustomed to developing with agents, and I dare say I’m pretty effective at it. I have my ethical concerns like many folks here, but I can also be too idealistic given the chance.
I’ve been developing and working with technology since the 90s, and I have been fortunate to get my hands dirty in many facets. One of the reasons I enjoy technology is the constant change, even though the rate of change is much greater recently.
I haven’t experienced the despair that others have, and I wonder if it is related to the path I’ve taken. I started a computer engineering degree many years ago, but did not finish. I wanted to learn too many things at once and spent too much time working (developing internal software for the university). I’ve blazed a trail over the years instead, so I guess my profession has always been somewhat nebulous.
This is the exact same thing that happened with luddites, which today we know as ‘idiots who oppose technological progress’ thanks to capitalist propaganda.
It was never about efficiency, quality, quantity, or accessibility. It’s almost exclusively about getting people to stop doing things for themselves, and instead rely on expensive machinery owned exclusively by the capitalist class for everything.
Most average people used to make and fix their own clothing, which meant they had little need for corporations that produce the same clothing, but lower quality. So capitalists forced everyone to use machines, until nobody remembered how to make clothes without them.
Same with software, languages, and a lot of other skills and office jobs right now. Educated people who know how to do stuff are not only unprofitable, but also dangerous. Make them all use AI until they forget everything and have to rely on megacorporations for the tiniest thing.
This is all the more reason to keep reading books, learning, DIY as much as possible, coding your own software, and even learning stuff like woodworking, sewing, farming, etc.
Being educated, informed, knowledgeable, and skilled is among the easiest, but at the same time most effective acts of resistance.
Do not let them turn you into mindless slaves.
If your job can be taken by a chat bot, it wasn’t a real job to begin with…
Downvoters realizing they’ve been doing the job of a bonzibuddy lmao
Don’t act like you’re not mad Abt the down votes lmao
Why would I be, lmao? I think it’s hilarious this is the only reply compared to the downvotes!
Y’all have literally no defense 😂
Do you always come back to your own comments hours later to check the votes and comment on them? Rip.
Do you have any other marketable skills? Do you know how to make anything? RIP
WHAT? Lmao that came out of no where, I must have hit a soft spot. Go touch grass.
That’s literally what this whole thread is about. Try and keep up next time, lol.
OP, im really quit sympathetic to you here. I’m among the knowledge workers who haven’t been fully replaced yet, but I’ve done some of the training meant to replace me. It’ll be a little while, but not that long, before I’m nearly unemployable.
The only solice here is the gift of limited forewarning. We can see the writing on the wall. Cobblers, per an example in another comment, didn’t see it coming. We have precedent set, including manufacturing sector jobs outsourced to counties with cheap labor, to look at, only 30 years ago! You can fight it and hope to be within a small group of privileged few who knew the right people, or you can tell your kid to pivot now and get ahead of the decade of tragic and sad “wha-wha-whaaaat?” that will inevitably follow. It’s not an easy choice.
I’m not sure what records and stories exist from these past eras that we can read and apply to now. Maybe a book of those tales is an opportunity for catharsis and reflection in the current moment.
All I can do is wish you luck and good judgement as this brave new world forms around us.
Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process
maybe as a professional and a computer scientist you should have already made sure that this is not the case or warned your stake holders that this is an inherent risk
sounds like your job has not disappeared quite yet
A shovel stuck in the ground does not move earth until it is used to move ground.
We are currently stuck in being amazed that the shovel goes so quickly and deep, now we must reckon how to make it move what it wrought.
It will cause a massive loss of human knowledge, nobody would learn how because it’s just a prompt
And it’s not only for coding. Yesterday I was shown that because they probably stole a lot of parametric designs Claude can even do 3d files from photos and quotes, it spits out an openscad file and compiles it. I was shocked, it added chamfering and small details, from a rough sketch photo. Who’s going to learn how to use a cad program if it can be done in 3 minutes from a prompt? And the process of learning taught you all the quirks , but in the future who’s going to be a pro?
And in the future you will depend on a handful of companies to give you access to this knowledge, which they stole off the internet.
This is how I feel too. I’m in several work chats where everyone seems to be pretending that Claude doesn’t have its arm shoved up their ass, wielding them like a puppet.
Several of the projects I am working with are just AI generated. In fact, if I need to suggest any fixes, they will be denied unless it’s AI generated.
I’m tired. I’m depressed. I used to take so much pride in solving problems, but all of that is gone now.
I’m going to try to ride it out and see where it takes me, but the work is mind numbingly boring and the trades look better and better every day.
Keep holding on. LLMs are still in the operate-at-a-loss-to-control-the-market stage. Once they start charging the real cost, human software engineers will be more in demand. That and refocus. All of human history is careers reinventing themselves as new tools become available.
There is no chargeable “real cost”. Chinese companies are making highly effective distilled models that can run on any decent hardware. The second the AI companies start cranking up the cost, methods of using the free models will come forward.
So basically we have a technology that puts everyone out of a job and doesn’t even make any money for the producers. Stunning.
Huh? Both the “decent hardware” and electricity to run the models are chargeable costs. I sincerely don’t understand your argument.
The hardware to run them on an individual level is relatively cheap, the required passthrough for anthropic/openAI is that they reclaim their training costs.
Cheap hardware? Where?
There are already industries balking at having to pay for the chatbot tokens even while the chatbot companies are still hemorrhaging money. It will quickly become non-viable for almost every industry.
The only ones that should continue to worry are the entertainment industry. If companies can get the copyright laws changed to be able to own chatbot content, they will go hard into making it impossible for actual people to make money in the arts.
Then again you have industrialism and the slave labor that took a century of labor unionizing to cut down to a modest 8 hours excluding bathroom breaks and weekends and then you got robber barons and magnates and political meddling and bribery and HEYYYY…
In my experience that’s only been the case for functionally non-unique software.
At my job we write software that’s effectively unique. There isn’t a pattern to fall back on.
It makes a lot more mistakes very frequently, since the nature of it keeps trying to guide it to the known path. It’s great for debugging since the manner that some check failed is chasing through known logic, and it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t see the existing code as probable or fitting a known pattern if the shape of a switch statement is still the same.In my personal projects I’ve even run into issues getting it to do stuff like vulkan synchronization barriers in a way that doesn’t continuously devolve into what you see in tutorials, with an ultimately unstructured pile of adhoc resource allocation and barriers.
Same, I don’t find “vibe-coding” very useful. It just produces slop. With enough back and forth with an LLM I can usually get something that “works,” but works poorly. I don’t have the motivation to read the slop it produces, so I don’t know if it’s doing things correctly or not (when I do investigate, it often is not). I often feel like the time I spent prompting the LLM in English would’ve been better spent “prompting” the compiler or interpreter in a language designed for software development.
Tokens are still insanely underpriced, especially on these bigger models/projects.
Look at what you can do locally with a couple of 5090’s. That’s probably what’s reasonable at the moment.
They’re currently sending through tokens in batches to clusters running balls to the walls but the cost is WAY higher than the $20 a mon you can get for Claude or midjourney.
We may find a happy medium after a pretty sharp collapse where AI assist development is somewhere in between you writing your own loops and you just rubber-stamping something else’s code.
It’s not as bad as you think. Anthropic is running at a loss at max usage. Openai isn’t. And even Anthropic profits if you use 20% of your quota or less each month. They would only have to move the price up if it became a real issue. Or cut usage cap down (that’s mostly how openai does it, $20 gets you less total tokens, there’s nuance to whether this is automatically worse though). But not as dramatically as you might think. It would lock out many hobbyists, but not companies that have come to rely on it.
They just cut the usage and increased prices? And we don’t know if they are profitable, they never made any of the books public.
Sure, but assuming we can trust what we have been told so far. Regardless IPO is very soon, there they can’t easily lie or hide anything. If the first part is meant to be “see, you agree”, my point is the amount they need to change by isn’t necessarily as big as some might think.
In any case what happens is what happens, I just like to weigh as much evidence as possible when looking at these things before making assumptions.
Sure, but assuming we can trust what we have been told so far
We have no reason to trust people who have dismantled the hardware industry to keep people from running their own models.
They certainly don’t want people running their own models but it’s a stretch to say they orchestrated it rather than it being a side effect of what they were doing anyway.
In any case I’m largely referring to what we have been told by independent researchers. Yes anyone in the field should be taken with a grain of salt but it is far more ridiculous to make entire conclusions based on nothing but vibes and a dislike of AI.
just like to weigh as much evidence as possible when looking at these things before making assumptions.
You literally are not, because given 0 evidence you claimed something - in this case profitability of certain plans.
There is no such evidence.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscriptions-offer-5x
Yes there is such evidence. You can argue all day about whether the evidence is up to your standard, but it does exist. Remember that evidence does not have to be hard, absolute facts directly from a primary source. It can be inferences based on the information we have available to us.
When deciding whether someone committed a crime, for example, we do not need them to tell us directly or have footage of them doing it to have evidence we can weigh.
The only source cited is their own AI model.
You just found some paid propaganda :)
They don’t own an AI model, and there are objectively 2 different models owned by 2 different companies in that article. I have no idea what you think you are reading.
The article you linked says nothing about profitability.
It’s an ad to a subscribe tool to try to lower your token spent cost.
Are you an idiot or a bot?
If you aren’t even going to attempt to read things I don’t know how to help you much more. Them selling something doesn’t make the research automatically wrong.
I’m done with this conversation now. I’m fine with people disagreeing with me but you are not even trying to discuss in good faith.
here i am in the game industry watching practically the entire industry move overseas. I’ve given up.
Man I feel for you. There are so many slop on Steam nowadays and their time to develop is essentially a couple of weeks.
I’m finishing my thesis in software engineering and at this point it’s hard to justify it. 6 years of my life pretty much wasted. At least I don’t have any debt
My friend, that amount of education, your diligence, fortitude, intelligence, and determination to see it through was NOT wasted. You learned how to think, reason, analyze, perform. Those are invaluable skills that will forever set you apart from anyone who didn’t follow that path.
You will always find gainful employment, because your studies shows that you are a force to be reckoned with, and a serious person.
In fact I think that you may be precisely on time to make the best use of your studies that you could ever imagine.
You’ll be fine, kid.
LLMs are an algorithm. There will be times it should be used and times it shouldn’t be used because it’s to inefficient and/or to expensive. Then there’s the whole field of decidability… lots of halting problems that have no solution. Who will decide when to make the call that enough tokens have been used and should stop the agent because there’s probably no solution?
Who will decide when to use LLM (and which model) and when it makes more sense use another algorithm instead?
Deciding which algorithms to use sounds an awful lot like the job of a software engineer.
I am for some reason reminded of glass making by this. If you wanted glassware a long time ago it came from people that made it by hand, the glass blowers. Industrial methods were invented and made a big chunk of industry obsolete. But years and years later some people still want to know how to hand blow glass, learn how, then market it to people who want hand made stuff. It is pretty niche, but does still exist, and the factory made stuff does not compare.
All considered, this is so fucking bleak hahahahaha
My uncle is a glass blower artist, it’s crazy how much he gets for even small pieces and he just sells his stuff on Instagram. He mostly does art but also makes some sick bongs, if weed ever becomes legal federally I’m buying a bong from him.
My company is in the process of buying a vendors “autonomous software factory”.
It’s over… doesn’t even matter if it produces pure slop, the business and sales team wants engineering to move faster.
