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Comment by wombat-man | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someday AI will replace developers. LLMs are neat but they aren't that great yet.

I think by the time AI replaces developers, It would have replaced anything else white collar

Software development in banking is second tier anyway. Usually people go to faang tier. If you are good enough, you could get double the pay as software engineer for props trading. You can double the pay again if you are good enough to be a trader, who needs to code btw

I don't think any aspiring software engineers want to work as the cost center in the banking sector unless they are paid accordingly

Nope. Especially if they're aware of the history of that sector and how quickly they may dump them like they did the cobol coders that they later had to hire back.

Yeah, unless you're like, in leadership or building out something new for the bank I haven't heard a lot of great things about working in the sector.

I think in that parallel universe developers would have switched to jobs akin to ghost busters. Hunting down bugs that have evolved from simple incorrect lines of code into living creatures with a mind of their own.

It's not too far off. At a recent job I realize more and more, almost half of what I was doing was tracking down defects (some in 3rd party code, not ours) rather than building new products. At another I was diagnosing and fixing issues in some distributed cloud mess almost as much as adding new features.

LLMs are not capable of replacing developers anymore than Google Translate is capable of replacing professional translators.

It's also much more dangerous to replace developers with an LLM than to replace your translator with Google Translate. Code that is close to correct often doesn't work at all. A bad translation can still be (mostly) comprehensible even if it makes your company look unprofessional and incompetent.

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