Posted by signa11 4 days ago
Ouch. There's an idea that I've seen a few times now that there are two key types of developers: developers who thrive on building products and solving problems through the existence of code, and developers who thrive on the process and the low-level puzzle of getting that code to work and then to work well.
The former are having a really great time right now. The latter are feeling justifiably threatened.
Hard not to see it as tech killing competence in general, and cheering it on.
Kinda wish I'd gone to med school instead. Tech has only shown itself to be more unserious as time has gone on.
> I don’t see myself as a programmer who is also an expert in a niche area; I see myself as exclusively a low-level coder,
> If anyone can point an LLM at slow code and it automatically finds a hot loop and uses a trick it found somewhere on the 'net to vectorize it, there is little point in hiring someone with a focus on that.
We're no longer in an age where this kind of aggressive specialization makes a lot of sense. And, honestly, that's a good thing. The best thing is to have T-shaped knowledge. Go deep in a few areas, shallow in many.
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
Wrote a post some time ago on how we'd be helped by segmenting and ranking the domains of our systems so we can be deliberate about where we stop short of full automation: https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/blog/cost-of-cognitive-debt.html
So as market pressure goes, that leaves employers. I do see the occasional oddball project that resists this wave, but "doing things correctly even if it takes longer" is not a value you're really allowed to have in an economy where the make or break factor for your business is usually getting investment capital, and capital is, as a population, probably the most all-in on LLMs of anyone, to the point where I believe they'd push for vibecoding even in instances where they can't find numbers that justify doing so.
A ton of people not in tech hate genAI so much that they say they'll, for example, not purchase a game if they know someone used it for any part of it, and yell about it online, and such, but games are pretty much the only consumer-facing software people make purchasing decisions about, so maybe that moves a needle there, but gamers failed to rally against microtransactions, DLC piecemealing, or even things like always-on DRM or revoking purchases that literally remove their ability to play their games, so I doubt that's going to materialize a change in something that could be more easily obfuscated in response to this pressure like the provenance of the software
Market pressures require at least a somewhat free market, and the overall american market for software is drastically distorted by various oligopsonies that by and large has a vested interest in LLMs (and specifically the corporate black box ones) being used for as much as possible
We have tailors around the world, but Zara and other brands do the lion's share of business.
Automation in physical labour resulted in less work for physical labour. There are still some people producing hand crafted work, but the market doesn't need that many of them.
A much smaller group of people can serve the needs of an entire state.
It is a giant interpolation machine. It is very good at remixing stuff, but is is hapless when it comes to novel things.
Consider this: an llm was trained on physics, but the training data was cut in 1904. That is just a year before Special Relativity was published. The LLM was then shown papers of SR, GR, and Heisenberg's paper from 1925 that established quantum mechanics, and similar foundational papers of what we call "Modern Physics".
The LLM has systematically "disproved" all of them, and rejected as false.
So even if you show it a novel idea, it's still going to reject it.
It is by design limited to remix existing ideas.
The recent "novel" mathematical proofs are also just remixes. What I mean it uses two or more established math frameworks together to generate a viable bridge. The result is undeniably a new proof, but not a novel idea.
People with novel ideas will always be needed.
There will still be some nerd jobs. Some. Fewer over time. The future is not you telling an LLM what to do. That was the brief "prompt engineering" era. It's an system of LLMs and agents telling each other what to do. Most likely with a bro in charge.
Get used to sand kicked in your face. Or, to quote Orwell, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever".
Ask someone who used to have a good union job what life is like now.
Over the years, I’ve transitioned from building “beautiful” stuff to nowadays building stuff that works. I still want it to be perfect but now not for me but for the user. If I think it’s ugly, but the user wants it that way, then who am I to decide against it? They will have to use the software, not me. Seeing a user be happy with the software is super nice. Way more enjoyable than me just making stuff for myself.