Yes, but my company does not pay me every 5 years. I don't know about you, but if I wait 5 years, I won't get a salary in the meantime.

If I wait until tomorrow, though, my company won't see the difference.

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Jtarii a day ago | parent [-]

Sure, but depending on what your job is it can make the work feel even more meaningless than it was prior to LLMs.

All the work most people are doing it just going to be Ctrl+A deleted and replaced with someone else's LLM slop using Opus 8 in an afternoon.

All the shit people are building right now just feel ephemeral, like its going to float away on a breeze.

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palata a day ago | parent | next [-]

Well it's getting philosophical. Even before AI, I would argue that the vast majority of software was meaningless. Actually the most successful software on Earth is hurting society and the environment, in exchange for profit for a few humans.

I don't know any software engineer who can say "if I was not doing what I do, society would get a little worse".

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ifwinterco 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also even before LLMs, a lot of software was already kind of semi-disposable.

You write an app, maintain it for a few years, then once the code starts getting a bit old and messy developers start advocating for writing a new version from scratch in the latest shiny language/framework and rinse/repeat.

That was already completely normal in the 2010s before LLMs in my experience, most developers don't want to maintain other people's old code and will try and manoeuvre politically to avoid it

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dutchiesareok a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I console myself that while the products we make are useless and probably even harmful the activity itself just represents the world Geist familiarizing itself with computation and its possibilities and thus growing richer in the process.

In the worst case.. sometimes you learn what's best by experiencing what's not.

	▲	whoanoway a day ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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edoceo a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The folk keeping Wikipedia running?

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palata 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe not part of the "vast majority"? The idea of "the vast majority" is that it's not "everybody".

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edoceo 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Of course not. I was responding to your second paragraph.

	▲	palata 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, I see. Well I don't know any software engineer who works at Wikipedia :-).

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tosapple a day ago | parent | prev [-]

sad.

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palata a day ago | parent [-]

Well it's not just software engineers. The majority of people in developed countries work in offices. And when you work in an office, it's highly likely that your work is not fundamentally useful.

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utternerd 21 hours ago | parent [-]

> And when you work in an office, it's highly likely that your work is not fundamentally useful.

This seems wildly inaccurate.

	▲	palata 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, for some definition of useful of course. If you find it wildly inaccurate, maybe you don't have the definition that matches :-).

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ifwinterco a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You might be right in the end, but the middle of a massive outage probably at least somewhat exacerbated by LLMs, being debugged by (presumably) human software engineers is kind of a weird time to make this point