Ever since LLMs took over everything I'm working or have worked on, I no longer have fun, no longer feel joy, or challenged to solve issues.
My question is, what now? What's the backup skill or job to develop next and still feel joy with it?
Thing is I don't know on which one to focus on as a backup, I wanted to hear some ideas from the HN community
If you have time, start developing your public speaking skills. This will give you the edge over other engineers within your company, especially if you know how to use it. Additionally, you'd be able to survive if you are layed off by either moving to an adjacent field (pre-sales, sales, CTO...etc) or just start attending and presenting at conferences. Hope this helps
For some you may be even able to leverage your software skills.
Not sure what to recommend for you though.
Is it you though?
Last week "I" have chased down a really sneaky performance bug in a shutdown routine of one of our applications, if it went to prod it would cost us a lot of grief. How did I do it? Well, I didn't, I gave Claude access to kubectl, described the behavior and how to trigger it, and went for a coffee. After 10 minutes of didly-dalling I took a sip of coffe, then copy-pasted 100% spot-on response to a JIRA ticket and sent it to developers for a fix.
I did maybe 2% of work there.
I created here something similar to how intranets work, where I can easily define a service as public or internal in k8s through the ingress class
If it's internal, it's accessible only through tailscale, if it's public, it's accessible by anyone, now for some reason internal services have insane delays or very very bad bandwidth, never understood why and couldn't figure out how to even debug this
Ran codex, gave access to the whole node, ah yeah just lower the MTU to this value, lo and behold it fixed everything
The other day I got a cheap thermal printer with the only way to use it is through an app, I thought ok I'll try to reverse engineer it, try to understand the protocol, then write a script to print, few days later and progress was very slow, I thought let's try to let an LLM so it
It reversed the entire protocol, wrote me a web app where I can print whatever I want, I got what I needed, but feel zero accomplishment
Just a personal view, but I feel great when I get that result. I had an effing problem that was a pain but is now fixed after a short conversation. I get to check and confirm that results are good for me. And it gets done without spending hours with random tech support ("did you try reinstalling your OS"?). My 2c.
I didn't 100% think through every decision in the implementation but I am 100% responsible for ensuring the problem was solved. What tool I used to solve the problem doesn't diminish my work.
I get these and the fix ai suggests is often wrong or hallucinated!
The answer you're looking for is not on Hacker News.