Comment by 999900000999
2 months ago
We're going to be in our 70s still writing code because LLMs will dumb down the next generation to the point where they won't be able to get software to work.
Which luckily coincides with our social security and retirement systems collapsing.
Excellent prediction. Seems like it always happens.
In a couple years I'll be in my 70's and starting to write code again for this very reason.
Not LLMs though, I've got my hands full getting regular software to perform :\
For fun ?
Or do you actually need the money.
In my 20s I wanted to retire by 40. Now in my 30s I've accepted that's impossible.
I like programing and working on projects, I hate filing TPS reports all day and never ending meetings.
>For fun ?
Good question, but God, no.
Just to get more out of the electronics where others can't match what I had decades ago. Things have come a long way but icing on the cake is still needed for a more complete solution, and by now it's more clear than ever what to do.
Actually the first year after "retiring" from my long-term employer was spent on music servers as a hobbyist. Then right back to industrial chemical work since. It's been nice not to have any bosses or deadlines though.
>Or do you actually need the money.
Not really, actually waiting until 70 to collect Social Security so I will get the maximum available to me, and haven't even started drawing from my main retirement fund. I plan to start my second company funded entirely by the Social Security though.
>In my 20s I wanted to retire by 40. Now in my 30s I've accepted that's impossible.
This is one area where I am very very far from the mainstream. I grew up in a "retirement community" known as South Florida. Where most people have always been over 65. Nothing like the 50 states from Orlando on up. Already been there and done that when I was young and things were way more unspoiled. When I was still a teenager (Nixon Recession) we were some of the first in the USA where it was plain to see that natives like me would not be able to afford to live in our own hometown. Even though student life was about as easy as the majority of happy retirees. I knew I already had it good, and expected to always continue to run a business of some kind when I got to be a senior citizen, and never stop. There were really so many more examples of diverse old-timers than any other place I am aware of.
>I like programing and working on projects, I hate filing TPS reports all day and never ending meetings.
I actually do like programming too or I wouldn't have done it at all. I started early and have done some pioneering work, but never was in a software company. There was just not many people who could do the programming everywhere it was needed as computerization proliferated in petrochemicals. Now there's all kinds of commercial software and all I have to do is "just" tie up the loose ends if I want to. I mainly did much more complete things on my own, and the way I wanted to. Still only when needed, and not every year. In my business I earned money by using my own code, not selling it at all.
I know what you mean about never ending BS, big corporate industrial bureaucracy was challenging enough to survive around as a contractor, I don't think I could tolerate "lack of progress" reports or frequent pointless meetings for code on top of that, especially when I'm trying to keep my nose to the grindstone and really get something worthwhile accomplished :)
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Yup, just like my dad built his own house, and I have to call a plumber/electrician.
I can do SOME things, but for more advanced, I need to call a professional.
Coincidently the plumber/electrician always complains about the work done by the person before him/her. Kinda like I do when I need to fix someone else's code.
I mean seriously is this the prediction folks are going with? Ok so we can build something like our SOTA coding agents today, breathing life into these things that 3 years ago were laughable science fiction, and your prediction is it will be worse from here on out? Do you realize coding is a verifiable domain which means we don’t technically even need any human data to improve these models? Like in your movie of 2050 everyone’s throwing their hands up “oh no we made them dumber because people don’t need to take 8 years of school and industry experience to build a good UI and industry best practice backend infrastructure”. I guess we can all predict what we want but my god
That's an INCREDIBLY good point about synthetic training data. During model training, AI agents could pretty much start their own coding projects, based on AI-generated wish-lists of features, and verify progress on their own. This leads to limitless training data in the area of coding.
Coding might be cooked.
> breathing life into these things that 3 years ago were laughable science fiction
LLMs were not fiction three years ago. Bidirectional text encoders are over a decade old.
Coding agents is what I’m talking about, they are also an old idea, everything is an old idea, what is new and a major step change is the realized capability of them in December 2025.
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