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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do (human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 16 points 5 months ago (1 child)

The world is changing. It happens from time to time. In this case the change is a particularly big one and it's still ongoing, so I can't make any predictions about where it's going to end. But I can be pretty confident that it's not going to magically change back. So my best advice is to try out the new tools, see whether you can adapt to them and use them to improve your own productivity in new ways, and if not then as a fallback start looking at other directions to take your career.

Harsh, perhaps, but the world does as the world does.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    Author of the blogpost seems to be fully engaged with that, but their worry is that they no longer have a professional edge over the competition because LLMs let less experienced people do all the stuff they spent years developing expertise in:

    Of course, I'm still employable because someone has to review the code and steer the robot. But I'm just another off-the-shelf engineer now. I have no domain expertise that another Sr. engineer steering an LLM cannot match. All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.

    We were taught that generalists and specialists will always have their roles. But now the market is shaping everyone into becoming a generalist. That's not a bad thing per se, until you look under the economics of supply and demand: if everyone is a generalist, the price of a generalist falls if there's no demand to match. And we all know the demand is drying up.

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