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Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

throwaway_43793 Monday, December 16, 2024

LLMs are becoming a part of software engineering career.

The more I speak with fellow engineers, the more I hear that some of them are either using AI to help them code, or feed entire projects to AI and let the AI code, while they do code review and adjustments.

I didn't want to believe in it, but I think it's here. And even arguments like "feeding proprietary code" will be eventually solved by companies hosting their own isolated LLMs as they become better and hardware becomes more available.

My prediction is that junior to mid level software engineering will disappear mostly, while senior engineers will transition to be more of a guiding hand to LLMs output, until eventually LLMs will become so good, that senior people won't be needed any more.

So, fellow software engineers, how do you future-proof your career in light of, the inevitable, LLM take over?

--- EDIT ---

I want to clarify something, because there seems to be slight misunderstanding.

A lot of people have been talking about SWE being not only about code, and I agree with that. But it's also easier to sell this idea to a young person who is just starting in this career. And while I want this Ask HN to be helpful to young/fresh engineers as well, I'm more interested in getting help for myself, and many others who are in a similar position.

I have almost two decades of SWE experience. But despite that, I seem to have missed the party where they told us that "coding is not a means to an end", and realized it in the past few years. I bet there are people out there who are in a similar situations. How can we future-proof our career?

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