Depends a lot on how expensive they are to run
Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
#32Even if we assume extreme case where coding is only done by 99% LLMs in the future Who is the best possible person you could hire to operate the LLM? Who has a good mental model of what its doing underneath and has the best expertise to direct/guide it? IMO no one is better positioned to use these tools than software engineers
"IMO no one is better positioned to use these tools than software engineers" Yes.1 where there used to be 1000.And they are the cream of the crop.Their time is precious because their skills are equally so. Are you out coding the LLM's even now, or do they already do what took you weeks, in hours? While you are scoping out the scene and hesitating whether to tell the boss you will have it in two or three weeks, LLM go…
My goal is to cope until retirement
Re: Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
#33[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
#34Re: Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
#35Stepping back from LLMs, look at other jobs that could have been fully automated using technology, but haven't. Some jobs, like a grocery cashier could be automated with self check, or waiters could be replaced with phone ordering. We still have humans in these roles, decades after they could have been replaced.
Even in the US which lags behind in this area it would be obscene to claim that grocery cashiers aren't being actively replaced. That's just not connected to reality. Most grocery stores I've been in have essentially 1 open lane with a human where there used to be a half dozen. You might as well say that airline ticket agents haven't been replaced.
My exact wording was "fully automated". Yes actively replaced, but cashiers have not been fully automated. That would mean no more cashiers at any grocery store, convenience store, because all they have are self checkout machines. That has not happened except at Amazon Go, and they closed all those stores. So my claim is accurate.
Re: Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
#36Let me ask you this: would people accept a nuclear power plant whose safety control software is vibe coded? Would a CFO of a public company sign off on financial statements created entirely by AI?
I'm fully into agentic coding, and I'm actively studying agent reliability. I can make all kinds of deterministic guarantees about agentically produced code, but no, I would not accept either of these, or many other examples.
We write code (or we used to, before AI), so we naturally value that. But the code is one small part of a deployed system, and this has always been the case. Numerous studies have shown that writing the code is actually the cheapest part.
All the most important things that you need to know about what makes the code correct, both before it is written and after it is deployed, are not in the specs. They come from walking around and talking to people. Looking them in the eye, sussing out what their real requirements are, and figuring out how to address their concerns with empathy.
Until LLMs can do that, I'm not worried. Let them write the code, that's the least important part.
Re: Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CEO of the company is not going to be directing the LLM At minimum you at least need CEO -> product person -> LLM There can any number of agents/loops after that but someone has to translate the requirements to the LLM and monitor/verify the results. What I'm saying is in the extreme case the SE evolves to become the product person. If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-…
> The CEO of the company is not going to be directing the LLM Why not? Many CEOs are prompting LLMs and coding agents directly. What happens when the CEO -> LLM interaction is more efficient than CEO -> product person -> LLM? > If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-fi Why couldn't a software company be completely automated with sufficiently powerful LLM-run agents? What fund…
The barrier is who gets legally liable if things go wrong. An llm cannot go to prison.
Re: Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CEO of the company is not going to be directing the LLM At minimum you at least need CEO -> product person -> LLM There can any number of agents/loops after that but someone has to translate the requirements to the LLM and monitor/verify the results. What I'm saying is in the extreme case the SE evolves to become the product person. If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-…
> The CEO of the company is not going to be directing the LLM Why not? Many CEOs are prompting LLMs and coding agents directly. What happens when the CEO -> LLM interaction is more efficient than CEO -> product person -> LLM? > If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-fi Why couldn't a software company be completely automated with sufficiently powerful LLM-run agents? What fund…
Re: Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
#39Let me ask you this: would people accept a nuclear power plant whose safety control software is vibe coded? Would a CFO of a public company sign off on financial statements created entirely by AI? I'm fully into agentic coding, and I'm actively studying agent reliability. I can make all kinds of deterministic guarantees about agentically produced code, but no, I would not accept either of these, or many other example…
> They come from walking around and talking to people. Looking them in the eye, sussing out what their real requirements are, and figuring out how to address their concerns with empathy.
This claim depends on humans remaining the bottleneck to high-leverage information, necessitating a humanhuman interfacing role that solicits requirements, ascertains intent, etc.
I don't deny that that is very important and cannot be done by AI now. However, my concern is that AI will be much better at any domain of information processing, and organizations that gate important decisions being made by a network of barriers and information silos dependent on "talking to people" will be outcompeted by largely autonomously run AI agent organizations, which have, by their very design, far higher throughput, auditing, memory, parallelization, etc.
It's kind of like saying that machines could never make fabric because it is impossible for a robot to replicate the complicated motion of a human threading a needle. The industrial revolution was prompted by creating machines which redesigned the entire process to account for machine limitations, and allowed the superior speed and scale of machines to drive higher productivity, delegating humans to a role of maintenance and simply feeding the machines their needed input.
Re: Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?
#40Let me ask you this: would people accept a nuclear power plant whose safety control software is vibe coded? Would a CFO of a public company sign off on financial statements created entirely by AI? I'm fully into agentic coding, and I'm actively studying agent reliability. I can make all kinds of deterministic guarantees about agentically produced code, but no, I would not accept either of these, or many other example…
> They come from walking around and talking to people. Looking them in the eye, sussing out what their real requirements are, and figuring out how to address their concerns with empathy. This claim depends on humans remaining the bottleneck to high-leverage information, necessitating a human human interfacing role that solicits requirements, ascertains intent, etc. I don't deny that that is very important and cannot…
Yes, at some point AI will be fully integrated into society so that there are entire autonomous sections. But society doesn't move at the same pace as technology.
The output of agents has to have economic value, and for the foreseeable future this means someone is going to have to buy something.
Right now, it is humans who ultimately make the economic decision. Even if you have fully autonomous agentic organizations selling to each other, there are one or more humans at the end of the of the chain who agree to exchange money for value.
Science Fiction writers have envisioned futures where some currency other than money is used to track value, but so far as I can tell we are nowhere near moving to anything like that.