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I'm not worried about AI job loss

davidoks.blog

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Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#351

Post by dyauspitr »

dakolli wrote: post #332
dyauspitr wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take is atleast 6 months old. I would say 90% of the stuff my team puts out now comes straight out of Claude and coverage, performance, latency, MTTF, velocity have never been better.

You make slop, congrats. Your father's pacemaker isn't made by Claude, the software in your phone that keeps the battery from catching on fire isn't made with Claude. Sorry the world of software isn't just http handlers.

It isn’t but 70-80% of corporate software is essentially “http handlers”. If it can replace that much of software development today, I don’t see why it can’t do highly performant stuff in the future.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#352

Post by molsongolden »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

Another component or view of this is that automating the rote work is "eliminating the boring parts" (I love this and have worked extensively on this) but it is also eliminating the less cognitively demanding work.

Once you have automated extensively, all of the remaining work is cognitively demanding and doing 8 hours of that work every day is exhausting.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#353

Post by wtetzner »

sarchertech wrote: post #279
joshgachnang wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cloc says ours is ~350k LoC and agents are able to implement whole features from well designed requirement docs. But we've been investing in making our code more AI friendly, and things like Devin creating and using DeepWiki helps a lot too.

If you have agents that can implement entire features, why is it only 350k loc? Each engineer should be cranking out at least 1 feature a week. If each feature is 1500-2000 lines times 10 engineers that’s 20k lines a week. If the answer is that the AI cranks out code faster than the team can digest and review it and faster than you can spec out the features, what’s the point? I can see completely shifting your workfl…

Since when do we measure productivity by lines of code?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#354

Post by tudorconstantin »

next_xibalba wrote: post #298
Gigachad wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.

Economies of scale were realized in the tv, but not the house. Maybe bc they aren’t realizable in housing, maybe bc regulation, maybe bc of the nimby veto, etc.

I think it’s rather because of scarcity: you can’t scale and automate land/prime-location land

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#356

Post by georgemcbay »

mbgerring wrote: post #330

Something I don’t see enough people talking about is how AI will reduce barriers to entry. One of the things that drove the tech boom in the 2010s was cloud computing driving the cost of starting an internet company into the ground. What happens when there’s software you think should exist, and you no longer need to hire a bunch of people at $150k-$250k per year to build it?

> What happens when there’s software you think should exist, and you no longer need to hire a bunch of people at $150k-$250k per year to build it?

What happens when 200 out-of-work former software engineers take a look at your software and use LLMs to quickly build their own version each undercutting everyone else's prices in a race to the bottom?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#357

Post by reg_dunlop »

qgin wrote: post #40

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

Why do people make arguments like this?

"Work" isn't a finite thing. It's not like all the people in your office today had to complete 100% of their tasks, and all of them did.

"Work" is not a static thing. At least not in positions of many knowledge-worker careers.

The idea of a single day's unit of "work" being 100%, is really sophomoric.

Also, If 100% of a labor force now has 80% more time...wouldn't it behoove the company to employ the existing workforce in more of the revenue generating activities? Or find a way to retain as much of the institutional knowledge?

Doom, fear-mongering and hopelessness is not a sustainable approach.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#359

Post by WillPostForFood »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #281
jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment. AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because: - Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline. - Quality bec…

"it is already showing up as stagnant or declining Western salaries"

Real median salary, and real median wages are both rising for the last couple years. Maybe they would have risen faster if there was no AI, but I don't think you can say there has been a discernible impact yet.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#360

Post by fishpham »

sarchertech wrote: post #339
fishpham wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's an unlimited amount of work to do. This is the same reason you are not fired once completing a feature :-) The point of hiring a FTE is to continue to create work that provides business value. For your analogy, FTEs often do that by hiring temp, and you can think of the agent as the new temp in this case - the human drives an infinite amount of them

Why hasn’t any of the software I use started shipping features at a breakneck speed then? The only thing any of them have added is barely working AI features. Why aren’t there 10x the number of games on steam? Why aren’t people releasing new integrated programming language/OS/dev environments? Why does our backlog look exactly the same as when I left for posterity leave 4 months ago?

Questions posed in bad faith can only be answered by the author.
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