Now that bs work has next to no cost, I see a lot more bs work being done, and often on pointless bureaucratic activities involving generating questionnaires and answering them. It's as if the activities add up to a big net zero.
Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
11–20 of 113 posts
Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
#12To me it seems that LLMs are a tool that only increase productivity for given headcount in dimensions that were neglected in the past. For example, everyone now writes emails with perfect grammar in a fraction of a time. So now the expectation for emails is that they will have perfect grammar. Or one can build an interactive dashboard to visualize their spreadsheet and make it pleasing. Again the expectation just cha…
I don't have time to read paragraphs of AI slop emails. Please keep them short and to the point. No need to send it through an LLM.
Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
#13LLMs are very useful tools for software development, but focusing on employment does not appear to really dig into if it will automate or augment labor (to use their words). Behaviors are changing not just because of outcomes but because of hype and expectations and b2b sales. You'd expect the initial corporate behaviors to look much the same whether or not LLMs turn into fully-fire-and-forget employee-replacement to…
> LLMs are very useful tools for software development That's an opinion many disagree with. As a matter of fact, the only limited study up to date showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%. Let's reserve opinions and link studies. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... My anecdotal experience, for example, is that LLMs are such a negative drain on…
I’m 15 years into my career and I write Haskell every day. I’m getting a massive productivity boost from using an LLM.
Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
#14To me it seems that LLMs are a tool that only increase productivity for given headcount in dimensions that were neglected in the past. For example, everyone now writes emails with perfect grammar in a fraction of a time. So now the expectation for emails is that they will have perfect grammar. Or one can build an interactive dashboard to visualize their spreadsheet and make it pleasing. Again the expectation just cha…
I don't have time to read paragraphs of AI slop emails. Please keep them short and to the point. No need to send it through an LLM.
Corporations will require everything going through an LLM to meet company standards.
Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
#15Any Board which supports management hollowing out future profits by either firing, or not hiring junior staff deserves to have their bonus rescinded.
Think like a forestry investor, not a cash crop next season.
Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
#16LLMs are very useful tools for software development, but focusing on employment does not appear to really dig into if it will automate or augment labor (to use their words). Behaviors are changing not just because of outcomes but because of hype and expectations and b2b sales. You'd expect the initial corporate behaviors to look much the same whether or not LLMs turn into fully-fire-and-forget employee-replacement to…
> LLMs are very useful tools for software development That's an opinion many disagree with. As a matter of fact, the only limited study up to date showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%. Let's reserve opinions and link studies. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... My anecdotal experience, for example, is that LLMs are such a negative drain on…
I wouldn't call myself an 'experienced' developer, but I do find LLMs useful for once-off things, where I can't justify the effort to research and implement my own solution. Two recent examples come to mind:
1. Converting exported data into a suitable import format based on a known schema 2. Creating syntax highlighting rules for language not natively support in a Typst report
Both situations didn't have an existing solution, and while the outputs were not exactly correct, they only needed minor adjustments.
Any other situation, I'd generally prefer to learn how to do the thing, since understanding how to do something can sometimes be as important as the result.
Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
#17LLMs are very useful tools for software development, but focusing on employment does not appear to really dig into if it will automate or augment labor (to use their words). Behaviors are changing not just because of outcomes but because of hype and expectations and b2b sales. You'd expect the initial corporate behaviors to look much the same whether or not LLMs turn into fully-fire-and-forget employee-replacement to…
> Hard to generalize from before/after performance.
While this is true, there are ways to test (open models) on tasks created after the model was released. We see good numbers there as well, so something is generalising there.
Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
#18LLMs are very useful tools for software development, but focusing on employment does not appear to really dig into if it will automate or augment labor (to use their words). Behaviors are changing not just because of outcomes but because of hype and expectations and b2b sales. You'd expect the initial corporate behaviors to look much the same whether or not LLMs turn into fully-fire-and-forget employee-replacement to…
> LLMs are very useful tools for software development That's an opinion many disagree with. As a matter of fact, the only limited study up to date showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%. Let's reserve opinions and link studies. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... My anecdotal experience, for example, is that LLMs are such a negative drain on…
That's a skill issue. That lone study was observing untrained participants.
It's no surprise to me that devs who are accustomed to working on one thing at a time due to fast feedback loops have not learned to adapt to paralellizing their work (something that has been demonized at agile style organizations) and sit and wait on agents and start watching YouTube instead, as the study found (productivity hits were due to the participants looking at fun non-work stuff instead of attempting to parallelize any work).
The study reflects usage of emergent tools without training, and with regressive training on previous generation sequential processes, so I would expect these results. If there is any merit in coordinating multiple agents on slower feedback work, this study would not find it.
Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLMs are very useful tools for software development That's an opinion many disagree with. As a matter of fact, the only limited study up to date showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%. Let's reserve opinions and link studies. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... My anecdotal experience, for example, is that LLMs are such a negative drain on…
I’m 15 years into my career and I write Haskell every day. I’m getting a massive productivity boost from using an LLM.
[deleted]
Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]
#20LLMs are very useful tools for software development, but focusing on employment does not appear to really dig into if it will automate or augment labor (to use their words). Behaviors are changing not just because of outcomes but because of hype and expectations and b2b sales. You'd expect the initial corporate behaviors to look much the same whether or not LLMs turn into fully-fire-and-forget employee-replacement to…
> LLMs are very useful tools for software development That's an opinion many disagree with. As a matter of fact, the only limited study up to date showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%. Let's reserve opinions and link studies. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... My anecdotal experience, for example, is that LLMs are such a negative drain on…
LLMs help a lot in doing 'well defined' tasks, and things that you already know you want, and they just accelerate the development of it. You still have to re-write some of it, but they do the boring stuff fast.
They are not great if your tasks are not well defined. Sometimes, they suprise you with great solutions, sometimes they produce mess that just wastes your time and deviates from your mission.
To, me LLMs have been great accelerants when you know what you want, and can define it well. Otherwise, they can waste your time by creating a lot of code slop, that you will have to re-write anyways.
One huge positive sideffect, is that sometimes, when you create a component, (i.e. UI, feature, etc), often you need a setup to test, view controllers, data, which is very boring and annoying / time wasting to deal. LLM can do that for you within seconds (even creating mock data), and since this is mostly test code, it doesn't matter if the code quality is not great, it just matters to get something in the screen to test the real functionality. AI/LLMs have been a huge time savers for this part.