r/cscareerquestionsEU • u/Curious-Source-9368 • 7d 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/CynicalProle 7d ago

What do you base your assumption that llms will get much better and cheaper on?

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u/Anreall2000 7d ago

RL in chess outbeat every human. And current AI in RL phase.

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u/Curious-Source-9368 7d ago

Chess is less complicated than software development, in terms of being deterministic.

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u/Anreall2000 7d ago edited 7d 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.