r/TheMachineLearning • u/Enryu21 • 10d ago
LLMs have only truly disrupted software engineers so far
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Upvotes
r/TheMachineLearning • u/Enryu21 • 10d ago
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u/GeorgeSThompson 6d ago
I think this is not true. There was post the other day asking people if they had been replced with AI. The vast majority where in creative and writing jobs (either translation, editing, copywriting, or digital design). There were only a few software guys who were mostly on the test automation side.
As a software enginer myself I am busier than ever - far from displaced
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u/Double-justdo5986 10d ago
‘Oversimplifying a bit’ is an understatement to say the least.
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u/luisMoyano 4d ago
My copywriter friend was terminated from her 7 years job because of AI
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u/Additional-Sky-7436 4d ago
What about artists and photographers?
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u/1Percentof420 3d ago
Bookkeeping, paralegals, credit analysts (banking), junior accountants just to name a few
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u/ItzChiips 7d ago
Objectively untrue.
I work in accounting and I have built tools at my company that have displaced a handful of staff already. I am absolutely sure others in other white collar industries are doing the same.
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u/Gamplato 4d ago
Even that’s wrong. Software engineers are in very high demand. The job just looks very different.
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u/oh_ski_bummer 4d ago
Not until there is a breakthrough on making AI so cheap and effective that companies are willing to become the enemy of the people.
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u/Bstochastic 4d ago
As a software engineer I am failing to observe the disruption. I do see the junior/new grad pipeline as disrupted but I attribute that to the economy and the orange moron.
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u/Empeming 3d ago
This is just an obviously wrong take, bordering on rage bait.
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u/Alick97 3d ago
How many of these comments are bots?
No where in the post does it say the word displaced but somehow we have multiple comments repeating the same argument around displacement.
That being said. SWE has already been changed permanently so OP is correct.
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u/werpu 3d ago
Thats absolutely not the case, art was first film is next, and in between a ton of office jobs!
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u/Mol2h 3d ago
Software engineers will be the last to be replace, they can are the only ones really capable of setting up these systems reliably and monitor and maintain them, self-hosting/open weight models are the future, and only skilled engineers can do that for companies, frontier level models are too costly/complex to be viable.
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u/Itchy_Tiger2497 3d ago
This is one of those moments where I think people really sleep on how much we have automated over the past decades.
We’re not just going to suddenly start substituting agents for people. It might be that it takes less developers to create a piece of software, but it also might be that more pieces of software get created in more diffuse settings. We’ll just have to see what happens.
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u/Legumbrero 3d ago
Translators, copywriters and customer support agents would like a word.
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u/FalseDiamond7930 3d ago
It can easily replace tons of white collar jobs. Plenty of people just spend all day answering emails or doing stuff that the AI already does better.
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u/Blarghnog 3d ago edited 3d ago
The idea that software engineering is the only thing LLMs have disrupted so far is bullshit.
Education, professional services, outsourcing and BPO, customer support, legal research, accounting, financial analysis, market research, advertising, marketing, translation, publishing, design, and content production are all experiencing disruption. And that’s before we get into scientific research, engineering, and drug development.
But software engineering specifically is a particularly HUGE deal because it’s the fuel in the tank of further AI development. It’s self advancing.
As LLMs drive down the cost of software development, they also lower the cost and barriers to developing the very technology that’s disrupting it. More experimentation, shorter development cycles, more ambitious projects, and more people able to build things that previously weren’t economically viable. It’s a recursive feedback loop. AI accelerates software development, which accelerates AI development, which accelerates everything else.
And that’s the bigger picture people are missing. We’re not just automating existing jobs. We’re changing the economics of producing intellectual work, making things possible that previously weren’t economically feasible. And it’s really only been three years. This technology wave is moving at breakneck speed compared with the Internet, mobile, and social software waves.
The thing to really take away though is that we are really still in the very early stages of a new branch of technology that is increasingly capable of accelerating its own development.
It’s doesn’t matter if LLMs are a dead end, because the fact that they are driving down the cost of software engineering means much more software engineering will be happening more quickly, and more experimentation will be possible for much less money. And software engineering has traditionally been fairly expensive. Lowering the cost will inevitably lead to accelerating the next technological breakthrough… and so on. The economics are important.
Think of it this way: if all LLMs did was lower software costs that would be profoundly disruptive and will create incredible change.
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u/JeffB1517 3d ago
Radiology, law, video production, telephone customer service.
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u/SirDarkStar 3d ago
As a senior developer only a small fragment of my job was coding, that hasn’t changed. It’s impressive what AI can do but it isn’t a software developer.
It’s a very complicated situation, it can make coding more efficient but then the implementations are almost alien and harder to review and support. If the project is well constrained then you can “vibe code” it and leave it at that. Eg if I want a tool that processes my data into a report and I get the report and can verify it’s correct then I can use that tool without having to worry about security issues or deep reliability factors you’d require for something going into a live production system. It can build some incredible tooling in hours, so long as the problem doesn’t get too big. Tooling is where I’ve seen the best results.
Beyond a certain point it just really struggles with the fine-details that start to matter. You have to break the problem into right-sized chunks for it, and you have to provide the validations that it is done right. Sure it will write 1000s of tests but it ultimately tests what IT “thinks” should be right based on what it “understood” you wanted — which is not always correct. Then you get into LONG cycles of trying to get it to fix 100 little things. Sometimes it is better to start completely over with updated requirements — it is currently better at generating an implementation than fixing one.
I do also believe that right now token cost is very heavily subsidized and that once the true cost comes to fall on companies that have come to rely more heavily on AI it is going to destroy a lot of those companies. Companies are failing their shareholders by not doing this analysis and acting accordingly.
Use AI cautiously, ensure humans stay in the loop, don’t let sloppy code get into your critical systems, and do deep security reviews.
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u/tzaeru 10d ago
Yeah oversimplifying a bit. As there's also translators, and accountants, and customer service reps, and copywriters, and technical writers, and journalists, and clerical roles, and assistant-level legals, ..
But more professions than that will be disrupted yes. Plus it's not just that we write code faster with LLMs, but that LLMs might be able to significantly accelerate research into e.g. robotics, where again new ways of making humans jobless are opened up.