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Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

digitaleconomy.stanford.edu

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Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#41

Post by godelski »

ludicrousdispla wrote: post #37
majormajor wrote: post #2

LLMs 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…

It's funny the lengths to which companies will go in order to avoid work.

It's also funny how much they'll spend to save a few pennies

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#42

Post by meowface »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #26
black_knight wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find the quality of the Haskell code produced by LLM? Also, how do you use the LLM when coding Haskell? Generating single functions or more?

I'm stuck in my ways with vim/tmux/ghci etc, so I'm not using some AI IDE. I write stuff into ChatGPT and use the output, copying manually, or writing it myself with inspiration from what I get. I feed it a fair bit of context (like, say, a production module with a load of database queries, and the associated spec module) so that it copies the structure and patterns that I've established. The quality of the Haskell c…

Try Claude Code.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#43

Post by Terr_ »

ardit33 wrote: post #20
ath3nd wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

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…

I get the impression that the software scenarios where LLMs do the best on both reliability and time-saving are places where a task was already ripe (or overdue) to be be abstracted away: Turned into a reusable library; as as a default implementation or setting; expressed as a shorter DSL; or a template/generator script.

When it's a problem lots of people banged their head against and wrote posts about similar solutions, that makes for good document-prediction. But maybe we should've just... removed the pain-point.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#44

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

meowface wrote: post #42
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm stuck in my ways with vim/tmux/ghci etc, so I'm not using some AI IDE. I write stuff into ChatGPT and use the output, copying manually, or writing it myself with inspiration from what I get. I feed it a fair bit of context (like, say, a production module with a load of database queries, and the associated spec module) so that it copies the structure and patterns that I've established. The quality of the Haskell c…

Try Claude Code.

Why?

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#45

Post by johnfn »

borzi wrote: post #36

The 10% reduction in hiring for young workers is entirely because industry (software, manufacturing) at least in the united states (and probably the world) is contracting and in recession, while the services and government sector has been the main sector growing since a long time now - completely due to economic and geopolitical reasons, nothing to do with AI.

Genuine curiosity: how do you know that software is in a recession? What measures do you use to determine this? And how do you know that the recession is not AI driven? I don't think it is either, but it's more of a feeling; I'm not sure how I would make that argument more grounded.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#46

Post by ath3nd »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #18
ath3nd wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

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…

Interesting take. I suggest an alternative take: it's a skill issue if LLMs help a developer.

If the study showed that experienced developers suffered a negative performance impact while using an LLM, maybe where LLMs shine are with junior developers?

Until a new study that shows otherwise comes out, it seems the scientific conclusion is that junior developers, the ones with the skill issues, benefit from using LLMs, while more experienced developers are impacted negatively.

I look forward to any new studies that disprove that, but for now it seems settled. So you were right, might indeed be a skills issue if LLMs help a developer and if they do, it might be the dev is early in their career. Do LLMs help you, out of curiosity?

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#47

Post by dathinab »

majormajor wrote: post #2

LLMs 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…

> like this should have the context of SWE-Bench not existing before November, 2023.

Given the absurdly common mal practice(1) of training LLMs on/for tests i.e. what you could describe as training on the test set any widely used/industry standard test to evaluate LLMs is not really worth half of what it claims it is.

(1): Which is at least half intend, but also to some degree accident due to web scrabbling, model cross training etc. having a high chance to accidentally sneak in test data.

In the end you have to have your own tests to evaluate agent/LLM performance, and worse you have to not make them public out of fare of scientific malpractice turning them worthless. Tbh. that is a pretty shitty situation.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#48

Post by osn9363739 »

manmademagic wrote: post #10
whatever1 wrote: post #4

To 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…

It's an interesting dilemma, since if I know that an email was written mostly with AI, it feels to me like the author didn't put effort in, and thus I won't put much effort into reading the email. I had a conversation with my manager about the implications of everyone using AI to write/summarise everything. The end result will most likely be staff getting Copilot to generate a report, then their manager uses Copilot…

My experience has been interesting. I have been sending super short, mostly dot point emails since before LLMS. Pre ChatGPT I used to cop a bit of shit about it. Now thought, people love it.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#49

Post by tommyengstrom »

black_knight wrote: post #23
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 15 years into my career and I write Haskell every day. I’m getting a massive productivity boost from using an LLM.

How do you find the quality of the Haskell code produced by LLM? Also, how do you use the LLM when coding Haskell? Generating single functions or more?

I'm in a similar situation. I write Haskell daily and have been working with Haskell for a bunch of years.

Though I use claude code. The setup is mostly stock, though I do have a hook that feeds the output of `ghciwatch` back into claude directly after editing. I think this helps.

- I find the code quality to be so-so. It is much more into if-then-else than the style is to yolo for my liking. - I don't rely on it for making architectural decisions. We do discuss when I'm unsure though. - I do not use it for critical things such as data migrations. I find that the errors is makes are easy to miss, but not something I do myself. - I let it build "leaves" that are not so sensitive more freely. - If you define the tasks well with types then it works faily well. - cluade is very prone to writing tests that test nothing. Last week it wrote a test that put 3 tuples with strings in a list and checked the length of the list and that none of the strings where empty. A slight overfit on untyped languages :) - In my experience, the uplift from Opus vs Sonnet is much larger when doing Haskell than JS/Python. - It matters a lot if the project is well structured. - I think there is plenty of room to improve with better setup, even without models changing.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#50

Post by tommyengstrom »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #44
meowface wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Claude Code.

Why?

I use similar style as you. neovim with ghci inside, plus hls, and ghciwatch.

Claude code is nice because it is just a separate cli tool that doesn't force you to change editor etc. It can also research things for you, make plans that you can iterate before letting it loose, etc.

Claude is also better than chatgpt at writing haskell in my experience.

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