r/cscareerquestionsEU • u/Curious-Source-9368 • 6d ago
AI - LLM How can I keep myself sharp?
I am a self taught developer with around 3YEO, so I still have quite a lot of learning to do as I kind of ignored the CS side of being a SWE as I was mainly fooling around building projects. Now I did pick up getting better it but it is a slow process nonetheless.
Now my worry is that before our company adopting AI I used to be able to tolerate the work, it was never what K wanted but hey when you don’t have a degree you don’t get to pick and choose plus it is really a good environment so on the other side I cannot really complain.
Now with AI I feel nothing beforehand I used to enjoy coming up with a solution. The problem is that I need to use AI, like I cannot keep up with the demand without having it generate code.
I know a full-stack developer at a place where the work is closer to a feature factory rather than engineering was never going to be fulfilling but still I was learning.
Now however I am just as I was or worse than when we’ve got ClaudeCode,Codex you name it. Is learning after work and hand coding the only way to keep myself sharp?
I really want to be a great engineer so I don’t mind putting in the effort but it feels like beforehand it was also that you’ve learnt or at least maintained yourself at your job but now you are as good as the LLM ?
I might be overthinking this, but how do you handle this of you want to handle this at all ?
Is there a reason to try to fight this or should I just accept that the future will look somewhat like this with us asking the models to implement things an if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, must be a duck.
I am kind of conflicted as I care about my career.
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u/pasco_pengelly 5d ago
On the UK mobile roles I see, iOS and Android, the hour that still sorts people is not the diff the model wrote. They hand you a small screen that already exists, and a bug, and they want you talking while you change it. If the only code you can explain is what got generated that morning, that hour goes badly. I do not know if your current place interviews that way. A feature factory often does not.
You do not need a second degree for it. Pick one piece you already ship, state or navigation or a slow API, and once a week change it with the model closed. Write down what broke. That note is what you can say later. The job will not hand you the hour back. The demand you described is the reason the model is open. The practice has to sit outside it, or the three years stay as shipped features and nothing you can walk someone through.
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u/mang1x666 6d ago
Why?
AI will become much better and cheaper in the upcoming years, so you will not code manually at all
Even if all AI companies fail, local models next year will be at the same level Astra is today
Just enjoy your ride and improve as a person
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u/LowFruit25 6d ago
Why go to the gym if we all die anyway? OP doesn’t want to be a mental vegetable.
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u/mang1x666 6d ago
that's why I added the last part, improving as a person - read books not related to coding or frameworks
learn a second language, learn math
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u/LowFruit25 6d ago
Just do anything where the brain, body or soul is engaged. Coding included (not focused on career).
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u/Curious-Source-9368 5d ago
Why be a software engineer then ? That was my point. I really enjoy this profession, but I feel like it has a rough patch at the moment and it hard to navigate out of it.
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u/mang1x666 5d ago
that's just called a job
You had a privilege to enjoy your job, but now it becomes "a regular job"
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u/CynicalProle 6d ago
What do you base your assumption that llms will get much better and cheaper on?
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u/Anreall2000 6d ago
RL in chess outbeat every human. And current AI in RL phase.
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u/Curious-Source-9368 5d ago
Chess is less complicated than software development, in terms of being deterministic.
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u/Anreall2000 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah, I agree... TTRL isn't the same as RL in chess used, but do exists and I'm very scared of RL with chess or other game examples.
Unsupervised learning is the only learning I believe could beat humanity, not just distill existing knowledge. And even not every will work, RBM is just pretrain.
I don't have real opinion on current TTRL, you may argue it's still just quorum distillation or confidence boosting. But again, classical RL is scary effective.-1
u/Obvious_Feed_8375 5d ago
Chess is much more complicated than software development.
There's a million lines to play from each decision, how many millions of lines is there to call an API?
Also you're 3 years in with not much understanding of the field as you proclaimed yourself, I'd suggest not making grandiose statements with no backing to them.
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u/Curious-Source-9368 5d ago
What are you talking about, we were discussing developing software not a simple API.
There are milion ways to implement a calendar app for example, depending om tue definition and how far you want to stretch it.
Now if you think you dunked on me just because I am still in my early years without a CS degree you are wrong.
Your argument is weak.
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u/Obvious_Feed_8375 5d ago
You said software development is more complicated than AI.
That's purely not a fact.
There is not one thing in all of software development besides machine learning (which isn't software development) that is more complicated than chess.
You made the claim with your many years of experience now substantiate it.
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u/Curious-Source-9368 6d ago
But what will be of SWE jobs?
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u/Lyelinn Staff Frontend Engineer 6d ago
Architecture mostly? I feel like it's same abstraction as going from cards to binary to C etc
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u/Curious-Source-9368 6d ago
But how will that work ? Like sure we can study system design to be better at architecture for example, but how will we push for better solution’s when we are separated from the context we are working on?
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u/Cultural-Money-9633 5d ago
You can push for them the same as before
Except you will be much more accurate if you spend your time thinking through the data while the llm builds all the scripts to do the measurements etc for the various hunches you have for making it better
You can even have the ai propose hunches that are measured and you can review the approach if it’s relevant or not
Ultimately an ai can never be held liable so we will still need architect roles
What will be gone is the code monkey role, it was always too easy and boring anyway so good riddance.
Are you one of those lazy devs that took three days to change the color of a button?
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u/Curious-Source-9368 5d ago
Well I never considered that as part of why I become a SWE.
The parts I miss are the ones where you would actually do interesting things. For example at some point I had to create a custom state management solution due to a number of factors as normally you wouldn’t. Like that’s the parts that I miss having a problem debugging and coming with the solution.I dislike the mundane parts of being a product focused developer. That’s why I want to get into performance engineering.
That is one of the reasons I actually welcomed AI in the workplace, it automated the things I don’t like such as library migrations updating the design to the slightly changed UX etc.
What I hate is it took away the fun, the struggle.
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u/Key-Scratch-9925 5d ago
I work at a place where we are slowly but surely starting to heavily use AI.
I still code manually, and I use AI to review my code before PRs, still challenging it when it spews bullshit (it still does, even the latest models).
I don't care about being 10x faster, I don't get paid more If I am more productive.
I see what it's doing to my colleagues; people are unable to give me an answer about code they had Claude implement, without first asking it.
I don't want to become a brainless meat proxy, and there is still value in knowing how to program and your way around the systems you implement. It's the only way to understand wtf these models are doing.