Comment by fedupnow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fedupnow | Hacker News Reader

Im 35, Im screwed if they get their way. I'm not going to go to the trades, I quit construction when I was 27 because of how much I loved programming. I wanted to kill myself basically everyday working in the construction industry. I drank my twenties away because of how much it sucked. Ive been sober for years now entirely because of programming and actually loving what I do. But this company is stealing that from me, in many different ways.

I invested a ton of my life and my entire life savings into this transition. Now Im being screamed at everyday to go be an electrician because Anthropic claims they're going to solve the halting problem in some round about way, they dont even have to do what they claim. They just have to convince 20% of industry that they will, and guys like me will never get a chance to work long enough to retire.

I really don't think they'll suceeed, but if they do, Im going to be homeless coding from the public library because im not starting over again.

A lot of people think more jobs overall will be created from this. I sort of agree. However, our day to day has changed so much. The problems that I found fulfilling to solve are now handed off to LLMs, but at the same time I can build the things I want to build easier and faster. There are tradeoffs for sure. I'm trying to stay positive though.

Yeah, there are conflicting views in the industry about whether LLM's will make more jobs overall or kill off jobs. The ostentatiously virtuous thing is the ability for developers to make software faster.

I've built some tools that genuinely help me manage my life tasks that improve my quality of life irl, but a lot of stuff I've built has been built to allow me to build more things like itself faster... And I ask myself, for what? Haha

yeah like I've used AI to build me app to automate editing short clips which would have taken me a long time to make, if I coded them by myself. This is good but then it make you question why a software firm would hire you or keep you if there is a tool that can do this.

Define developer in the age of LLMs

I think this depends on the individual you're asking, I mean if you can prompt you can build right. Though the way I see it is a developer is someone who can leverage AI to help them complete tasks more efficiently then if they were doing those tasks manually like system design and architecture or finding bugs much faster than a professional developer could.

> A lot of people think more jobs overall will be created from this.

Be sure to distinguish between "jobs" and "good jobs" (that are enough to survive and even prosper on). Jobs that pay pittances can be created til the cows come home.

I think it will create a lot of jobs (overall) that pay twice the median wage.

The fact that some of those jobs would have paid 3-5x the median wage in 2021 isn’t a scathing indictment of AI, even if it’s inconvenient for the slice of the world who could have made 4x the median wage and now only makes double it.

I am also not totally stoked about this whole LLM thing. But it's still hard for me to imagine all of the programming jobs going away. Even with all of the advancements they've made, I really cannot imagine a non-programmer doing my job.

Even though opus 5.5 is like a goddamn genius, and I don't really even feel like I need to check the code, I still absolutely could not imagine a PM taking over most of my tasks. Not even close

Hang in there! What you can build knowing how to code is drastically different from what promptards can build. Imagine trying to build a car without knowing anything about car building - you’d just get the most generic boring clunker anyone can design.

But anyone can decompile it, now, too.

I think the answer is: Think of yourself as a maker, not as a programmer, and you'll be good.

I feel like a good chunk of my skills that I honed over decades as a software engineer are obsolete: programming, debugging, navigating code. But there are other skills and especially experiences that, at least with the current level of tools, allow me to do much more than someone who doesn't have them: knowing what computers can and cannot do, or only inefficiently; distributed systems; deployment; CI/CD pipelines.

> I feel like a good chunk of my skills that I honed over decades as a software engineer are obsolete: programming, debugging, navigating code.

I have been having a different exp with it. Those are even more important. These things are creating some wild code. Then sticking to its guns in some cases and just rewriting the same bug over and over.

Just this week I literally showed the thing where it was breaking. I wanted it to trace where the error was coming from. Instead it immediately wrote guard code and patted itself on the back. Not a bad idea but does not give me the reason of why something was broken. As where it broke is just part of the problem. Turns out I had a data issue. Guarding the error was the wrong plan in what I was looking for. The user needed his data fixed. Without tracing and debugging I am pretty sure AI would not have found it. Not without me prompting even more. It had twisted itself silly trying to make the error good instead of root cause. Took me an hour or so before I realized it was doing that.

Trust by verify. These things make all sorts of assumptions unless you are very accurate in your prompts.

Interesting. Two thoughts:

1. Are you using the latest frontier models? I know that feeling: "These things are creating some wild code. Then sticking to its guns in some cases and just rewriting the same bug over and over." But that was a few months ago. With Opus 5.5, it's gone.

2. For debugging, I give Claude read-only access to the prod DB, and it has access to logs and traces (Signoz in our case). With this, it has amazing debugging skills. Orders of magnitude faster than myself, and it has yet to fail finding the cause of an issue.

I feel ya. I've been grappling with the fact how this field has been completely uprooted. On one hand, I see this as another layer of abstraction: I don't know assembly, yet I can command the processor to do stuff via python. LLMs can be seen as another layer of abstraction that allows us to write higher volumes of even more complex software. On the other hand, I can see how programmers can go the route of the chimney sweepers. I try to be optimistic but feel fearful as well.

> I'm not going to go to the trades

I find it unrealistic anyway, that market will be saturated so fast, it won't make a difference for you or me, in the grand scheme of things.

Have you talked with a mental health professional? There's a lot of negativity in your comment that suggests larger issues than your concerns about LLMs.

Feel you bro, same age, same feelings. And even though AI won't replace me, the work is shit now. I like to code, not to babysit some retarded genius.

I don't know what they expect people to do. Start a luxury porn company like Amodei's wife?

I worked in corporate america for years.

They WILL fire some people.

But the entire substrate of corporate america depends on empire building.

People need people.

AI will never fully replace people because PEOPLE literally can't replace people.

Therefore, people will always be needed.

Be likeable. Learn to kiss ass. Be competent. Be aggressive.

You will be fine.

Don’t listen to the BS garbage coming from the tech bros. They have zero clue about how Ai will ultimately shape the future.

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