Posted by poisonfountain 21 hours ago
That's an extremely niche specialty though. 99% of software development jobs are web frontend/backend or mobile/desktop apps and they are more at risk from LLMs.
why would i ever want to use a tool that remove the part of my job that brings me joy? Fuck productivity, we were already doing good, when we were able to actually do our job, i.e.: not wasting hours in useless meetings, or doing customer care to idiots who could not be bothered to follow instructions, which i shouldn't be doing in the first place. let the LLM do that, or let the human assisted by the LLM do that. Not my job.
The bosses are out to force people like you to use AI. And have been for months.
Maybe not your boss yet, but it swept through my office dramatically. Maybe two or three months from limited tests to now today FORCED usage of AI (people going around the office asking constantly if there's any AI that can help today).
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This has a few toxic effects.
1. You are not allowed to complain about code quality issues anymore. Any complaints are met with okay, we will get the AI to fix it.
No discussion, no elaboration. No one in the office is even interested anymore. AI solves everything.
2. You are basically in a position where you are forced to use AI, whether you want it or not.
3. I expect code quality at my office to drop dramatically as fewer and fewer office mates give a shit
We won't miss them
I’ve lately just turned to having Claude do a quick /review, spot checking it, doing my own review and the. firing up some web agents to make the needed changes and just ignoring the back and forth because they don’t give a fuck anyway.
Just waiting for someone to notice and ask the obvious question at this point.
But that’s not the real goal, is it? The goal is to inflate the stock value, take the cream off the top, and dump the whole business on the pension funds, maybe creating a too-big-to-fail scenario where the government steps in an bails out the industry as with the airlines during Covid.
This is why all the testimonials and narratives are so suspect - nobody knows what fraction of online posts were created simply to sell the narrative that LLMs are this incredible disruptive tool that will change the world, solely in order to create FOMO in the investor class.
In this particular case, I’d like to see links to samples of LLM created codebases for “PCI compliance, double-entry ledgers, escrows, reconciliation, payment lifecycles, bank transfer idempotency”. It should be easy to put an open-source LLM-generated version up on github, right? And if not, why not?
Say you are Anthropic and want to shake up the world of law or medicine or whatever. What will you need? Product managers? You need tooling, software, infrastructure and a lot of it and quickly and you need to iterate really F fast on it as well.
If you automate the development of software itself you will enter a new era in which automation of All The Things becomes an engineering problem instead of a pipe dream. Besides software engineering there is (AI) research/science and robotics. That is the holy trinity. Crack that and it's over.
BTW: "double-entry ledgers, escrows, reconciliation, payment lifecycles, bank transfer idempotency", these all sound like solved problems and also things that are festering with accidental instead of essential complexity. I won't bet my career on those things. Now if you say something like physics or geology, that's a tougher nut to crack.