“The hard part of writing software has never been the writing.”

I’m tired of these endless articles on HN about software engineers trying to reinvent their identity while trying not to lose touch with reality.

One way of dealing with LLMs is to deny the skill level of LLMs. Claim they can’t code as well as you. This excuse works to a certain extent but it also fails because not only are their multitudes of cases where the LLM IS intrinsically worse than me… but there are multitudes of cases where it is better. So this excuse cannot be universally true.

The other way is to claim software engineering was never the hard part of engineering and that other things were harder and that was always where your primary skill was located. This excuse is also idiotic. First, Software engineering is hard. It is genuinely not something that anyone can pick up very quickly. Second, all those other “skills” like “domain expertise” are STILL targets for the LLM. It’s not like the LLM exclusively is only good at software.

Just face the goddamn truth. AI is on a trajectory to dominate. That’s what all the trendlines say. It’s not currently dominating, but it’s close, and the trajectory points to an endgame where it is fundamentally better. The trendline could be wrong but the trendline is the best quantitative predictor we have and it’s been trumping all the half baked theories on HN where people were claiming self driving cars would never happen and AI could never code. HN was historically wrong… the trendlines and the VCs who made those bets have been right. So who’s the bigger idiot? Those VCs creating the AI bubble or HNers who have been continuously wrong about everything? (Minus crypto, HNers were right about crypto).

If the trendline is true our skills as engineers not just the software part is on track to being dominated by an artificial intelligence. The tools trivialize your skills until all the moats are gone. Not only that… AI is becoming better at art. Poetry, writing, paintings, music… AI shows us how trivially reproduceable all of it is. That is the truth. We aren’t not unique and all the meaning behind being human is just an algorithm. It’s all reproducible. Even your self delusional attempt to deny and delude yourself away from these truths is predictable. I can see someone formulating a retort right now.

Good comment but I think the timelines are not clear. Humans are an algorithm. This was true before AI. In certain domains (playing chess e.g.) machines have already surpassed humans. Humans still play chess though and chess is more popular than ever.

I still drive my car and self driving cars have yet to displace human drivers. I think the sentiment on HN and other places when Google started talking self driving cars circa 2009 is that it's harder than it looks. Typically the first 80% of progress is easy and the rest isn't as easy. We're almost 20 years after a "pretty good self driving car" and we're still not at "self driving cars outperform humans under all situations".

Today humans use AI. You can't fire up Claude and ask it "what do you want to work on today". The amount of context we have as humans is vastly larger than the context LLMs have. If you give LLMs vague context they're completely lost. They are mind blowing in many ways but they are not anywhere close to AGI. They're also not close to being able to build complex software only guided by someone who has no idea what software is and how computers work. They can do some of that but I've yet to see any major successful piece of software built that way. They also consume vast physical resources to get the job done.

Before LLMs I think it was a given that at some point we would have AGI that's smarter than us. Machines we build aren't constrained by the biological constraints we are subject to and can evolve faster than we have. But when that's gonna happen, whether that's actually LLM-like in architecture, and what things will look like once that happens, are fairly open questions at this point. In the mean time LLMs can certainly generate a lot of code and we can use them to build more stuff.

Have you considered becoming a residential electrician? Good job, pays well, lots of problem solving, and it won’t be replaced with an AI. I’m serious!

There's certainly a whole lot of "it was never the coding that was our value" articles about right now. I agree that they represent a degree of self delusion to an extent. But it's also a useful examination of where your value might lie in this new AI age. I think there will be a role for humans in it - where exactly it lies is obviously up in the air.