16
Your Career Isn't Eroding - You're Just Holding the Wrong Moat (blog.herlein.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 10 points 5 months ago (7 children)

There is one other thing not mentioned that LLMs are bad at: being accountable. When your customers come complaining at 2:30 in the morning that the payments are failing, your manager isn't going to the LLM to ask what the fuck broke and why the fuck he's awake after 3 hours of sleep. He's going to you to do that. And when you're able to tell him that your downstream service is having an outage because AWS shit the bed again, he's going to trust your word. Will he choose to replace you with a LLM? Maybe, but he'll never be able to put out those fires without you.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Never? Never is a long time.

    That said, by the time you can actually run a significant software company without any programmers it seems likely that you could also run most white collar firms with vastly fewer employees and then we're going to have bigger problems.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Never? Never is a long time.

    Yep, it is.

    You can't solve people problems without people. It doesn't matter how fancy your calculator is, whether it can only do addition or it's capable of simulating the universe. Someone has to take the blame (and accept the credit).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    Why? You could have an entire company run by a single person if that is required for legal purposes. Or even multiple companies.

    It would pretty much require strong AI / AGI, but are you really suggesting that we will never have AGI?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    No one can tell whether AGI in the form of something akin to biological brains will happen. How will we build something we can't comprehend the architecture of?

    Also, I think their point was not that AGI will never happen, it's more that it doesn't matter whether it happens or not, because AI/AGI will not solve our problems (well, it will solve some, but create so many more that in the end we've really achieved nothing).

    I think we are further from AGI than people think. I doubt I will live to see it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Also, I think their point was not that AGI will never happen, it's more that it doesn't matter whether it happens or not, because AI/AGI will not solve our problems

    This exactly. AGI can never solve people problems because those problems are inherent to people. Social problems, for example, don't magically disappear because you have a magic box that does everything.

    I think we are further from AGI than people think. I doubt I will live to see it.

    I would go far enough as to say that most people alive, if not all, definitely won't see AGI in their lifetime. That's of course besides the point, but still...

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    your manager isn’t going to the LLM to ask what the fuck broke and why the fuck he’s awake after 3 hours of sleep.

    My manager actually does that, even for mid-day outages when the whole team is available. He just prefers to ask a chatbot instead of his own staff 🙄

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago

    he’ll never be able to put out those fires without you.

    Why do you say that? I would guess that we are very few years away before we have AI systems monitoring for downtimes and such that can quickly diagnose and fix issues that occur completely automatically - in fact I would not be surprised if this already exists today.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent