Comment by rootnod3

Comment by rootnod3 3 days ago

I would wager that it will get better soon. Once the LLM/Agent hype has died down and a few years of junior developers went down the drain untrained and unmentored, the demand for experienced seasoned developers will rise again.

This is not to dismiss LLMs entirely, but they always get touted as “they can do ABC, as long as an experienced dev reviews the output”. And with LLMs hindering the growth of juniors in one way or another, I can definitely see a market for “senior” developers down the road.

ryandrake 3 days ago

I'm looking forward to a nice part time side-hustle during retirement, cleaning up vibe-coded messes. In a few decades, we might have an industry full of 20-40 year old software engineers who don't know how computers work and don't know how to write or fix code beyond begging an LLM to do it and hoping it produces something that works.

Maybe I'll be wrong, and in 2050, there won't even be human software engineers anymore, but I'm not so sure that will be the case.

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eldaisfish 3 days ago

you see this in other engineering fields as well. Government, for example, is chock-full of people designing renewable energy policy who have never even seen a solar panel and barely know how one works. There are engineering companies where wind turbine designers have never climbed a wind turbine or seen one in operation.
This is how you get disasters like Ocean Gate where management would rather hire fresh college grads than listen to experienced hires point out mistakes.

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knutzui 3 days ago

I've seen this take on LLMs many times, and I don't share the certainty that LLMs hinder the growth of engineers using them.

Sure, if you want to use an LLM to produce code that works you need to have enough knowledge and experience to be able to review and, if necessary, request changes.

However, another (IMO, even more powerful) aspect of LLMs, is their utility as a learning tool. They excel at imparting knowledge about new concepts, because they act as a personalized teacher.

I find it doubtful that use of LLMs will result in less experienced and knowledgeable engineers in the future.

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flustercan 3 days ago

You sound like someone who has developed a good work ethic and is comfortable with struggle. Likely because you didn't grow up with a magic thinking box to ask for help at the first bit of mental friction.

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tasuki 3 days ago

> Once the LLM/Agent hype has died down

Excuse me?

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rootnod3 2 days ago

Remember the first AI winter? I could also ask "excuse me?!" about the usage of LLMs.
Give the whole thing 5-10 years until the impact of juniors learning nothing and having the perseverance and attention span of about 10 minutes and the effects will show in the industry. Yes, LLMs + agents have value here and there, but remember on where they get that value from: they learn from the internet. And papers already show that if LLMs learn from their own output, the quality degrades quickly.
So, more code written by LLMs on Github equals subsequent generations for LLMs learn from subpar examples.
Furthermore, they mostly learn from "en vogue" languages because they have lots of examples. But I wouldn't trust an LLM with a 10 foot pole doing Lisp or Cobol or any RTOS related C code with safety requirements.
I wouldn't trust an LLM to write a proper GPU or CUDA driver. But if there's nobody around knowing how to do that, how do you expect future drivers to be implemented?

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