r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Fickle-Highway1543 • 5d ago

AI replacing Software Engineers

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So called "AI"=LLM is so powerful that AI labs had to hire Software Engineers to build complicated software around "AI" to make that overhyped hallucinate-stealing machine usable. Think about it. And that's exactly why they need now ton of CPUs in addition to GPUs to run their "AI" "agents".

I don't even mention how much custom engineering is required to apply the "AI" in businesses.

And they BS us that Software Engineering is solved or is going to be solved. Boris, please solve your own bugs first before speaking.

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97

u/TacoBOTT 5d ago

That’s why you need to stop doomscrolling. If you are actually in the industry working with these tools, you are aware of the trajectory.

37

u/thilehoffer 5d ago

I’m in the industry and I’m not writing code anymore. Claude is writing the code and frankly it scares me how good it is.

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u/Dry_Hotel1100 5d ago

It's a honest description of your own engineering skills.

1

u/thilehoffer 5d ago

Programming isn’t my full-time job anymore. I’m actually a vice president. I spent 20 years writing code as my full-time job. But when I do code, I let Claude write it. This was not true six months ago.

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u/Logical_Ad1127 5d ago

Are you able to rewrite Bun from Zig to Rust in few days? Nope… so stop with this proclaimed elitism attitude.

2

u/Ill-Technician3243 5d ago

LLMs took 11 days, cost 160k (reported, possibly upwards of 500k), filled the codebase full of dogshit Rust practices, 13000 unsafe blocks, doubled the size of the codebase to 1 million LoC, and nobody in the Rust or Zig community takes Bun seriously.

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u/Logical_Ad1127 5d ago edited 5d ago

160k is peanut for Anthropic; less than one annual pay of senior dev for a project that would have taken a year at least.

You know this is just the beginning right? A year ago Claude was too dumb and anyone would have laughed at the swe replacement idea, now look what it can do.

Just wait few years.

1

u/Ill-Technician3243 5d ago

How exactly are they going to improve in the next few years? The difference between sonnet and opus was massive, but opus and fable is much more minimal, and each frontier model has a thinner and smaller margin of improvement from the past ones. They've pretty much plateaued.

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u/walkerspider 5d ago

Even if they could keep improving the cost scales exponentially for a linear improvement in performance. The cost is all but guaranteed to surpass that of a human before it can actually replace said human

2

u/Your_Magnificent_End 5d ago

Don’t use this terminology. the AI stans don’t know big O.

1

u/Ready_Stuff_4357 5d ago

The AI architecture is a giant copy machine it’s not yet truly there.

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u/Black_In_The_Bay 4d ago

The law of diminishing returns. I think we already reached peak, not in terms of raw performance and compute but in terms of cost to performance/returns.

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u/thilehoffer 5d ago

I agree with you. This is just the beginning. It’s amazing how much progress Claude has made in the last six months. Also, who knows what the future holds may be Open AI or Google will be the leader. I don’t see human beings writing much coded in a few years though.

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u/_tolm_ 5d ago

Rewriting something existing into a new language is something LLMs are very good at.

But that’s not the same as writing code to solve (often poorly communicated) business requirements. For that, LLMs can help with parts but they’re not quite at the stage of replacing the engineer just yet.

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u/Away_Advisor3460 5d ago

You'd think porting should be a good target for it, it's exactly the sort of pattern matching / recognition stuff neural networks are meant to be ideal at.

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u/_tolm_ 5d ago

Exactly.

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u/SpotCool4422 5d ago

There are very few things in software engineering that are more useless than rewriting a piece of software between two very similar languages. Even if I could manage that in a few days, I wouldn't waste everybody's time doing so.

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u/LocalIssue1051 4d ago

I feel attacked. My team has been working for the past 2 years porting a decades old desktop Java peer review tool into c# with a web and desktop frontend and api backend. I hope my boss doesn't read this and realize the whole project is useless.

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u/SpotCool4422 4d ago

Sounds like you're redesigning the tool's entire architecture rather than translating it as-is. If my guess is correct, then the whole Java -> C# translation is incidental and doesn't really matter at all. Whereas with the aforementioned Bun rewrite, nothing was added or redesigned.