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Comment by tags2k | Hacker News Reader

I was with the article - especially the bit about the 10% an LLM loses and how that loss can be de-amplified across eventual meaning, but then...

"My first instinct is to laugh and shake my head. One need not look very far to find indignant software developers absolutely certain that their jobs cannot possibly be automated away by the very tools their industry contemporaries are creating to replace them. I suspect you’d also not have to look far into their posting histories to find those same people comparing cabbies to buggy whip makers."

What a rude and callous comment. I'm one of those developers, I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails. Laugh at me as I defend my lifelong career, why don't you? I'm also one who decries such things as the removal of local services, taxi and otherwise, for those in the cloud. Screw you, man.

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Not the OP but this line really got my attention

> I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails

If you don't mind could you please elaborate on what tasks or knowledge your job requires that you feel an LLM isn't even _fractionally_ capable of? I understand if you said that out of emotion and frustration, but if you're serious I'm intensely and genuinely curious because nowadays it seems like the frontier models are capable of more programming tasks than not with the proper harness and engineer. When was the last time you tried?

I just want to emphasize that this is not a further provocation, just potentially in awe of what you do at your job and would like to know more.

If you want to be in awe of basic support tasks then sure! I frequently need to assist with support tickets, communicate between departments to solve customer queries and sometimes manually fix slop that AI has put in there. No LLM rig can do that for me, nor does anyone want it to.

Not GP but honestly I don't even spend 10% of my time writing code - even if these tools were perfect code generators that could read my mind (instead of having to prompt) it wouldn't significantly impact my work.

If we're truthful, yes the LLM ("agent") can't do much by itself, but thanks to all the theft which no one was compensated for, they can do something based on what was done.

classic example of the goomba fallacy - "all software engineers are one single person-caricature I have in my head and are therefore a stupid walking contradiction whenever two of them express different opinions".

Do these hypothetical laid off software engineers with no empathy for buggy drivers exist outside the imagination of people who hate software engineers? I know in my education we had a bunch of mandatory courses about automation and the effects on workers, how to consult with workers on how to lift them up rather than be antagonistic, and consider different stakeholders (where "the business" or "product" was but one of many) etc.

Is this sarcastic or do you just not see the irony?

There’s no irony. Author made a straw man of some bad, bad developer laughing at poor cabbies and it all clicked once VCs came for the fellow professionals.

It's not easy being a developer right now. We went from being dorky and unpopular in school to being superstars (at work) and now the writing's on the wall. I can sympathize, but I'll concede that our recently developed attention for the state of nature and the fair distribution of capital is .. interesting.

I don't disagree, but the absolute hubris to think that our job is particularly difficult is also ridiculous. One by one our responsibilities will be able to be shifted into highly leveragable software, whether it's years or decades away.

I think you wanted to be offended and didn't even understand the point. Maybe I'm also being rude.

Tech bro lamenting and berating developers how immoral and hypocritical they’re for “laughing” (has this ever happened?) at other professions, while doing the same. Story as old as time.

Article literally says their first instinct was to laugh. I'm not a tech bro, just a guy with a job (for now) and I made it clear from my comment that I have never laughed at tech taking the jobs of others, or made it happen myself. Try reading again.

I was talking about the article, though. I'm agreeing with your comment, in case it's not clear.

The point of this sentence is to show that there are Software Developers who are looking at this in a short-sighted way. There doesn't seem anything rude about it.

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