Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I'll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don't believe me.

Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of "vibe-coding", but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can't spot any although we are looking intently.

And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What's even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would've taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.

I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn't a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It's a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don't know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.

And it all changed so fast. I don't think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.

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[–] -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

I doubt models are “topping out “. It feels like no prediction about the supposed “fundamental limits” of AI models have held.

Two years ago it seemed like LLMs were fundamentally incapable of doing maths. It’s just a next word predictor! Of course it can’t do maths!

Now it’s solving high profile maths problems left and right faster than any mathematician alive. Still a next word predictor.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I mean the underlying tech still can’t do math. It just has the tooling to call a python script to do it. If you don’t let it execute commands or call tools it can’t do math.

    Also I feel like part of the reason they’re “topping out” is cost. We’re getting “reduced rates” here and it’s still astronomically more expensive to let one of these run free than it is for a human to use one in a targeted fashion.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago*

    Actually I disagree with this. Inference costs are plummeting due to architectural improvements, and there are many more waiting to be tried/implemented.

    Tool harnesses are getting a whole lot better in general. There’s tons of unpicked fruit there.

    But my argument is that pure parameter scaling is leading to diminishing returns in absolute performance. Benchmarks are going up, but many benchmarks are questionable if not useless…

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  • [–] 16 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    Now it’s solving high profile maths problems left and right faster than any mathematician alive.

    This is a controversial take. It's not unlikely that the models simply managed to steal users' research.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    I think it’s unlikely mathematicians happened to have 300+ almost finished solutions to long standing problems, and then that pesky AI snatched them all just in the last moment.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Could be.

    I tend to be more skeptical of AI companies than you in that regard, knowing the total lack of ethics on the part of these systems and the people who build them.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago*

    Reasoning proofs, using formal proof languages, and tool assisted math were always in their realm. They’ve been churning out math proofs, just not big famous ones until OpenAI did that as a marketing stunt.

    The pure LLM is still really bad at the “calculation” part though. In fact it’s worse than predicted: many thought byte-level models would improve that, and… those were never adopted.

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