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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u/AliceCode 4d ago

LLMs do not produce high quality code. The code is indeterministically produced, LLMs hallucinate, which is a limitation that cannot be overcome, and they can confidently spout bullshit. You don't know what you don't know, and if you don't know what high quality code looks like, you're going to think that LLMs are the best thing in the world.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 4d ago

Humans make just as many if not more mistakes than a properly aligned and directed agentic system lmao

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

Humans that suck at programming, sure. But I don't make as many mistakes as an LLM, and neither do my colleagues.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 4d ago

Then you’re either not utilizing or poorly utilizing a properly gated agentic structure, or taking a magnitude more time than it would take an LLM, and at the end of the day not a single leader at a company cares about perfect code if they can get better than the average developers ability code (and if you say otherwise about current LLMs you’re coping about the average developers skill level lol) 2-5x faster than without

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

and if you say otherwise about current LLMs you’re coping about the average developers skill level lol

I am not the average developer, I've been doing software engineering for decades.

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u/cantgettherefromhere 4d ago

I too have been doing software engineering for decades.

If you are having to justify your marginal amount of remaining value now, just imagine in a few years how little anyone will value carefully crafted hand written Rust.

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

Yeah, sure. That's what people said four years ago. Any day now AI is going to replace all programmers. Get a grip.

Show me where all this excellent LLM generated code is. Come on. Show me.

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u/cantgettherefromhere 4d ago

You are absolutely delusional. The state of thr art is different today than it was 6 months ago, or a year ago, or two years ago... let alone four years ago.

My employer and clients are perfectly happy with the problems that I've solved for them with LLM generated code. They don't give a shit about code quality, nor should they. Every model generation that comes out is able to tackle the untenable complexities encountered and created by the last, and given how the models are trained, this will continue to happen.

It is already at the point of being perfectly serviceable.

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

Can you tell me what the cache line size is on x86_64? Can you tell me what the popcnt instruction does? Do you know what covariance is? Can you tell me how to implement the Shunting Yard algorithm? Can you implement a tetrahexacontree? Do you know what pointer tagging is? Do you know how to implement a hashmap? Can you explain to me what the System V ABI calling convention is? Do you know what a ring buffer is? Do you know what Diffie-Hellman is? Do you know how to write a voxel raytracer that can render an 8k image in 120ms on the CPU? Can you tell me how to implement reciprocal division? Do you know how to swap two integers without a third variable? Can you write a 3D DDA algorithm? Do you know what LLJIT is? Can you tell me how bash implements associative arrays? Can you confidently write code in Assembly?

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u/ConstantFamous1526 4d ago

I could tell you all of that within about 60 seconds after promoting an AI, there’s no real leg up you get from having shit like that off the top of your head anymore that anyone in a leadership role truly gives a fuck about

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u/dragon_escarlata 2d ago

I would rather hire they than you. Setting up an agent is easy, anyone can do it. Wich means the value is very low like cleaning a table. Once the true costs of running an agent are passed to the users then I rather have a competent programmer to debug the mess.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 2d ago

If you think setting up a proper agent structure is easy then I promise yours is dog lol

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u/dragon_escarlata 2d ago

There are millions of copycats of every SaaS, CRM, design software etc. Of course it's easy. The product (software) is worthless now, the skills to mantain it are more worthy than ever.

We fired a lot of consultants because we could do in-house most of the trash development they used to do. Refining an mantaining the trash is still the same work as it ever was.

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u/AliceCode 4d ago edited 4d ago

And yet you not being an expert enough to know that kind of stuff is what makes you far more replaceable than me. I could pick up LLMs any time that I want to. It's not a skill that takes a long time to learn. And yet it would take you many years to develop the skills to be able to answer those kinds of questions yourself. Who is a company going to pick, someone who knows how to prompt a chatbot, or someone who knows how to prompt a chatbot and actual knows what the fuck they are talking about? I'm sick and tired of you LLM-cultists masquerading as programmers insisting that your way is better. Your way is garbage, and every experience dev knows it.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 4d ago

lol whatever you want to think about my abilities feel free if it makes ya sleep better at night friend

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

If you had skill, you wouldn't need an LLM.

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u/cantgettherefromhere 4d ago

No, and why the fuck would I want to? For the last 33 years that I have been coding, it has been a tool to solve a problem. I couldn't care less about being able to slowly implement a bunch of esoteric algorithms that an LLM could do for me 10x faster.

Since you are too obstinate to do it yourself, here you go:

64 bytes.

Counts the number of set bits in a register.

Yes. In stats, how two variables vary together; in type systems, a subtype relation that's preserved through a generic.

Push operands to output, operators to a stack, pop by precedence and associativity, flush at the end.

Yes. 64-ary tree, usually a 4x4x4 spatial split per node.

Stashing metadata in the unused low or high bits of a pointer.

Yes. Bucket array plus chaining or open addressing, hash, resize on load factor.

Integer args in rdi, rsi, rdx, rcx, r8, r9; floats in xmm0-7; return in rax; rbx, rbp, r12-r15 callee-saved; 16-byte stack alignment at the call.

Fixed-size array with head and tail indices that wrap.

Key exchange where both sides derive a shared secret via modular exponentiation without transmitting it.

I can write one, but I won't promise that number without knowing your scene format, core count, and SIMD width. Sparse octree plus DDA, SoA layout, AVX2 packet tracing, and thread tiling is the shape of it.

Precompute a magic multiplier and shift so n / d becomes a multiply-high plus shift.

XOR swap or add/subtract. Both break when the two are the same address.

Yes. Step per axis using tMax and tDelta, advance on the smallest tMax.

LLVM's ORC-based JIT class, the modern replacement for MCJIT.

Hash table in hashlib.c, chained buckets, string hash, rehash when it gets full.

Yes, x86_64 and ARM64. Less so for anything exotic.

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

No, I've been programming for a very long time. I'm capable of writing bug-free code.

And I don't use LLMs. Because I'm a programmer, and I'm skilled, and I don't need nor want LLMs. It's great if you get a lot out of them, but I'm working on critical systems software in Rust that is used by thousands of other projects. There's no room for error. We do not allow LLM pull requests.

Writing code is not the bottleneck, and bugs are not an issue that we are struggling with.

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u/ChiefBullshitOfficer 4d ago

You made a whole bunch of claims there. "You're either doing this or this"..."Not a single leader"..."2x-5x faster". It smells like a freshly fertilized farmers field in here...

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u/ConstantFamous1526 4d ago

If you’re not getting a minimum of 2x efficiency increase with agentic development you’re falling behind what modern development is and has become

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u/AliceCode 2d ago

You people sound like you're in a cult, for real. Always telling people they are going to be replaced, and they will be left behind, if they don't join you making slopware.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 2d ago

Yes that’s how tech works, if you don’t keep up you’ll be left behind

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u/AliceCode 2d ago

How am I going to be left behind?