Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by ath3nd » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 11:11 AM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #30

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…

People who suck at typing are better off writing by hand as well. I don't need to argue, I'll let history pick a winner.

People who get overly excited from every new shining thing also thought that NFTs and Crypto and web3 (whatever the heck it means) are the next coming of Jesus.

If LLM boosters were not so preachy about it, I'd left them off the hook easier. But at the current moment:

- Only study up to date shows experienced developers have 19% less productivity when using LLMs https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

- There are studies showing that using LLMs regularly makes you dumber https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

- The fresh study from MIT shows 95% of AI pilots fail https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

- The companies developing LLMs don't have that part of their business profitable nor any path for profitability. You can see it with Anthropic's constantly changing token limits and plans, and with Microsoft and OpenAI not able to reach a deal https://www.ft.com/content/b81d5fb6-26e9-417a-a0cc-6b6689b70...

- Hell, Sam Altman himself admitted that the current Ai market is just a bubble https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/18/openai-sam-altman-warns-ai-m...

When the LLM cultists wake up during the bubble pop, I wonder what they are gonna jump on next. The world is running out of hype bandwagons to jump on. Maybe... LLM NFTs?

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

#82

Post by adroniser » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 11:15 AM UTC

bgwalter wrote: post #75

TomMasz wrote: post #74

>early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks. As a professor of software engineering, I'm feeling an existential crisis coming on. Are we preparing students in vain? Last term was the first time I had senior project students who didn't have a job lined up in the Fall of their final year.…

I would say it's time to fight back. Politicians need to be educated that "AI" is plagiarism and is used as an excuse to scale back the workforce. It also ruins the thriving intellectual landscape. Since you are a professor, they might listen to you.

didn't hackers used to be for piracy?

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

#83

Post by tkel » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 11:17 AM UTC

digitcatphd wrote: post #64

I had a team of developers and essentially told them all 'either learn to code with Claude' or you're out. What I found is the more junior developers started 'vibe coding' resulting in a net decrease in performance, where the more senior ones used it to accelerate their speed cautiously and selectively. My conclusion was senior engineers were better because they were used to managing developers and taking on more man…

maybe they left because they thought you're an idiot

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

#84

Post by lelanthran » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 11:23 AM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #80

The first figure alone is insane, for me it helps explain why some friends feel like the market has fallen out from under them (early career) while others aren't having such a tough time. It seems like so far, for folks 30+ AI hasn't really changed things radically (yet). The series in figure 6, though, I think suggests that we may just be seeing a time-delayed effect and eventually everyone's going to be impacted.

> The first figure alone is insane, for me it helps explain why some friends feel like the market has fallen out from under them (early career) while others aren't having such a tough time. It seems like so far, for folks 30+ AI hasn't really changed things radically (yet).

Not just early career, also independent devs who are any from early-career to late-career.

I did a thing for a client a few weeks ago (embedded, with prototype board + code for industrial sensor containing multiple sensor types, using wifi to both configure and monitor the device, and to retrieve sensor values).

They balked at a two-week bill; their argument was that this should have not been more than a 2-day bill (literally, 2 days for everything from soldering up the prototype board to writing the code).

Their frame-of-reference was that their in-house dev (or similar, not sure now) could do that in two days with an arduino or ESP32 devkit.

My suspicion is that because their in-house dev took only two days to get claude code to write a ping program for a esp32 dev board (no soldering, sensors, etc. Purely WiFi comms and nothing else), their expectations were that this should have been the same.

(I eventually accepted the payment for only 2 days worth of dev, of which at least half was expenses for me - driving, meetings with them, purchases, etc.)

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

#85

Post by rightbyte » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 12:02 PM UTC

ath3nd wrote: post #63

sokoloff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if you’d worked for a decade as a dev using Notepad as your code editor (in a world where that was the best editor somehow). You’d developed your whole career in Notepad and knew very well how to work with it Then, someone did a two week study on the productivity difference between Notepad, vim, emacs, and VSCode. And it turns out that there was lower observed productivity for all of the latter 3, with the sm…

> citing of that study is astonishing and somewhat comical I would like to see your study, one that's not sponsored by OpenAI or github, that shows LLMs actually improved anything for experienced developers. Crickets . So, to summarize: 1. An actual study shows that experienced developer's productivity declines 19% when using an LLM. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... 2.The recent actual…

> is the same as good ol' scrum: a bunch of fanatic gaslighters.

Oh no, please no. I can't take it one more time. Is it just me or are devs the absolute worst profession in the regards of self-inflicted dogmas?

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

#86

Post by whamlastxmas » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 12:04 PM UTC

adroniser wrote: post #82

bgwalter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's time to fight back. Politicians need to be educated that "AI" is plagiarism and is used as an excuse to scale back the workforce. It also ruins the thriving intellectual landscape. Since you are a professor, they might listen to you.

didn't hackers used to be for piracy?

Yeah the corporate bootlicking around all of this is weird. We’ve hated patent trolls and Disney’s abuse/corruption of the copyright system and record label lawsuits, but suddenly intellectual property is great?

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

#87

Post by ath3nd » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 12:04 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #66

ath3nd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> citing of that study is astonishing and somewhat comical I would like to see your study, one that's not sponsored by OpenAI or github, that shows LLMs actually improved anything for experienced developers. Crickets . So, to summarize: 1. An actual study shows that experienced developer's productivity declines 19% when using an LLM. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... 2.The recent actual…

My argument is limited to “we don’t know and one study with significant limitations with regards to participant adaptation doesn’t settle anything definitively for the long-term”. Your argument seems to project significantly more certainty and spittle.

The LLM crowd always sees themselves as messianic and victims, eerly reminding me of the NFT crowd back 1 year ago. I would not be surprised if a lot of those are the same folks.

The burden of proof is on the ones saying a new concept/tool (LLMs/NFT) is revolutionary or useful. I provided studies showing not only the new concept is not revolutionary, but that it is a step back in terms of productivity. Where are the studies and evidence proving that LLMs are a revolution?

NFT boosters tried for years to make us believe something that wasn't there. I will take the LLM crowd more seriously when I actually see the impact and usefulness of LLMs. For now, it's simply not there.

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

> Your argument seems to project significantly more certainty and spittle.

I am not surprised that a bunch of folks outsourcing their critical thinking to a fancy autocomplete don't have any arguments nor studies though, to refute a pretty simple argument with some receipts behind it. Spittle? Please, at least there is an argument and links.

From the LLM cult crowd there is usually nothing, just crickets. Show me the studies, show me the links, show me the proof that LLMs are the revolution you so desperately want it to be.

Until then, I got the receipts that, if anything, LLMs are just another tool but hardly a revolution worth paying attention to.

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

#88

Post by bgwalter » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 12:46 PM UTC

adroniser wrote: post #82

bgwalter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's time to fight back. Politicians need to be educated that "AI" is plagiarism and is used as an excuse to scale back the workforce. It also ruins the thriving intellectual landscape. Since you are a professor, they might listen to you.

didn't hackers used to be for piracy?

Generic piracy is for example distributing a commercial unmodified video with full attribution. You don't normally create a derivative work.

Plagiarism is training on generously licensed open source software and creating a derivative work without attribution.

Not all hackers were in favor of piracy, the majority of open source hackers have always been pretty protective of their licenses, which were written before the existence of the laundromats.

Taking all IP and using it against its creators is entirely new and does not match the piracy issues.

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

#89

Post by CuriouslyC » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 1:06 PM UTC

ath3nd wrote: post #81

CuriouslyC wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who suck at typing are better off writing by hand as well. I don't need to argue, I'll let history pick a winner.

People who get overly excited from every new shining thing also thought that NFTs and Crypto and web3 (whatever the heck it means) are the next coming of Jesus. If LLM boosters were not so preachy about it, I'd left them off the hook easier. But at the current moment: - Only study up to date shows experienced developers have 19% less productivity when using LLMs https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experien…

If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault, yet if people crash LLMs, that's the LLMs fault. If a study showed 95% of people crashed jets without training, I wouldn't take that as a sign jets are a flawed idea.

As it is, I have no problem with your naysaying, I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that, in fact I find it more amusing than anything.

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

#90

Post by helsinki8 » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

ath3nd wrote: post #81

CuriouslyC wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who suck at typing are better off writing by hand as well. I don't need to argue, I'll let history pick a winner.

People who get overly excited from every new shining thing also thought that NFTs and Crypto and web3 (whatever the heck it means) are the next coming of Jesus. If LLM boosters were not so preachy about it, I'd left them off the hook easier. But at the current moment: - Only study up to date shows experienced developers have 19% less productivity when using LLMs https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experien…

And other people said the Internet was a fad and a bubble and cell phones were just for people who wanted to look important and solar panels would never work.

History is full of people making wrong predictions in both directions about new technology.

As the most obvious parallel, pets.com went bust in the first dot com bust and so did webvan. Today chewy is successfully replicating pets and ordering groceries online for delivery is common.

We might see 1,000 different AI companies go bankrupt in the next few years, but still have AI be a huge chunk of the economy throughout the 2030s.