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by fsloth 647 days ago
Agree, SWE as a profession is not going anywhere, unless we AGI, and that would mean all the rules change anyway.

Actually now is really good time to get to SWE. The craft contains lots of pointless cruft that LLM:s cut through like knife through hot butter.

I’m actually enjoying my job now more than ever since I dont’t need to pretend to like the abysmal tools the industry forces on us (like git), and can focus mostly on value adding tasks. The amount of tiresome shoveling has decreased considerably.

1 comments

I'd agree with this take. Everyone is so pessimistic about LLMs, but I've really enjoyed this new era.

A lot of the tasks that used to take considerable time are so much faster and less tedious now. It still puts a smile on my face to tell an LLM to write me scripts that do X Y and Z. Or hand it code and ask for unit tests.

And I feel like I'm more likely to reach for work that I might otherwise shrink from / outside my usual comfort zone, because asking questions of an LLM is just so much better than doing trivial beginner tutorials or diving through 15 vaguely related stack overflow questions (I wonder if SO has seen any significant dip in traffic over the last year).

Most people I've seen disappointed with these tools are doing way more advanced work than I appear to be doing in my day to day work. They fail me too here and there, but more often than not I'm able to get at least something helpful or useful out of them.

Exactly this. The menial tasks become less of a burden and you can just power through them with LLM generated scripts.

If someone expects the LLM to be the senior contributor in novel algorithm development, they will be disappointed for sure. But there is so, so much stuff to do to idiot savant junior trainees with infinite patience.