Honestly, we don't really need to learn any more. These days, I mostly copy and paste from tickets to the LLM, and then rubber stamp the output. I have people in my team that try to care about what they're making, but they're generating less code, and filling tickets more slowly, than I am. Even when it comes to system design and architecture, the LLMs aren't great at it, but honestly, they're better than my coworkers (I'd say system architecture is probably at the same readiness level that coding was last year). Expertise wouldn't really help you get things done faster.

You could probably replace me with a minimum wage worker to do some manual testing and copy-paste errors from the console into the LLM, and still be fine.

Let's see how long it is before the next round of layoffs, I guess. For now, the money's fine and the work's boring but ok.

But, no, the LLMs rewarding expertise line is pure cope. Software is not really skilled labor any more.

(obviously, throwaway -- I'm not interested in potentially advertising this to my employer)

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JSR_FDED 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Honestly, we don't really need to learn any more.

Perhaps for your task of closing Jira tickets that’s true - but the you have a decision to make: wait until you’re eliminated or try to anticipate where future competitiveness comes from.

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a2ff6eeb0 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, that's the thing; future competitiveness isn't going to come from learning, at least not from learning about software. The LLMs have that covered, and software is becoming low status work anyways.

It's largely going to come from interpersonal skills and being likeable enough to be the face of the projects and companies. Technical skill is rapidly dropping in value.

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miyoji 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This claim can only be true if LLMs have completely mastered all intellectual aspects of creating and shipping software.

That's so far from being true it's like saying that humans are currently an interplanetary, post-scarcity species.

	▲	a2ff6eeb0 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		All? obviously not, but enough that I can ship more than my colleagues while not really paying attention to the output or fully understanding it. Technical skills aren't unnecessary, they're just becoming something that nobody will pay for. LLMs debug extremely well, generate code well enough, and do high level design acceptably, but fail in weird ways, so my actual work these days (outside of delegating to the LLM) is mostly manual testing. I need to give them nudges sometimes, but a year ago they needed constant nudges. In another year, I expect that it'll be good enough that pasting in a bug report with the right jargon will be all the nudging I need to get something that customers will accept if it gets shipped. They're already close. It's obviously going to remain pretty manual without some breakthroughs, but it's largely not work that needs a ton of intelligence or skill. The world hasn't caught up with software development being a few steps up from burger flipping, so I'm still getting paid well to do it, and I'll keep collecting that paycheck as long as it lasts. But learning about code is rapidly becoming relatively valueless. I wish it was different, I actually enjoyed getting paid to learn, but I play with the cards I'm dealt.