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What will be left for us to work on?

normaltech.ai

171–180 of 291 posts

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#171
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they can try it out and see if it does what they want.

Sure, but how confident can they be that it doesn't also do things they don't want? Tests can't be exhaustive, whereas even a mediocre developer is likely to possess enough background knowledge to notice risks that a non-developer would not think to test. Some people keep forgetting that we haven't reached AGI yet. These tools can still make serious and sometimes obvious mistakes. Not long ago, vibe-coded software co…

I hear you, but when their choices are “flawed solution that exists” vs “perfect one that doesn’t” they will pick the former most of the time.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#172

We'll be cleaning up tech debt from over-reliance on AI.

We can't do that until we clean up all the tech debt from promotion oriented development.

Maybe we can throw that away and focus the useful stuff that doesn't try to get you hooked all the time.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#173
"Everything really". This industry is still pretty much a cash and planet burning grift that hasn't figured out being profitable yet. We don't even know whether it will cost more to spend tokens or pay an actual human being with critical thinking included for free for useful work in the medium term.

We can start considering to reconsider when we have the begining of an answer to that first fatal issue.

So much brain power, including mine, wasted to this stuff instead of useful or enjoyable stuff, that's quite sad.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#174
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Before we worry about how much work there is left, we have to define what work is "to be done." We're already at a point where an incredible amount of work done isn't strictly "necessary." It's not growing food, it's not making clothing, it's not building houses, or providing other basic needs and comforts... How many man-hours go into various parts of the advertising distribution chain? Though a certain fracti…

> We just need to find the social structures to provide people with basic needs and reserve "work" for things that are vital to society or truly inspired. just?

The hardest engineering problem is getting along.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#175
post #59

You need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work? Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work". Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for th…

This is a very short-sighted, and exceedingly common, take. Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive. This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...

>owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive

And what reason do they have for killing everyone else? Where is this abject nonsense even coming from? You can't just assert that the "owners of the machine" are all cartoonishly evil for some unknown reason.

All else being equal, at least Sam Altman et al. aren't constantly making up fantasies about exterminating people.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#176

The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI. I'm wondering with those two sets of generations who already have a very negative view of AI, how AI can survive that coming tsunami of change. According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall. Sabotage behaviours incl…

> The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI.

They say they are, but they have actually been using it so much that they can't even do they homework without AI at this point.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#177

The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI. I'm wondering with those two sets of generations who already have a very negative view of AI, how AI can survive that coming tsunami of change. According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall. Sabotage behaviours incl…

Some are; you can't make sweeping generalizations about a nuanced topic.

But I do believe (gut feeling) the novelty's worn off for a lot of people.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#178

I think this is an important article that provides a framework how to think and navigate what’s happening. What upset me a bit were phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me. I have read so much Ai generated text recently, that I developed some AI-fatigue or AI-burnout, and I’m wondering if that might hit more fields - making more humans reject Ai work. To be cle…

If it is a common AI pattern, I wonder why the developers haven't taken measures to circumvent tells like that. Unless they keep them there on purpose as like a signature or watermark.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#179
post #7

Question: Does anybody here yet personally has less (to) work 'cause of AI?

Nope, but recently it does feel like I spend less time coding and more on prep work / requirements gathering. But that's n=1, I'm doing something very specific (building a design system with a small team of designers and developers) and recently my skill in writing requirements and doing research has been recognised.

But I'm trying to figure out if this is a thing in my organization. So far the channels discussing AI have been about how they use AI, how to build agents, and complaining they've run out of tokens - but nobody says anything about how much work they finished, how it impacted the product(s), the user, and the company's bottom line.

I don't know if they just don't know, don't care, don't measure, or they don't actually want to admit they're just burning through tokens with nothing to show for it.

That said, right now I'm using AI to extract some code from our app to create a minimal reproduction for an issue we're having with a 3rd party library, it's a huge time saver there - that is, I wouldn't have bothered making a reproduction because of how time consuming it can be.

So to answer your question, it's not that "I have less to do", it's "I do things I wouldn't have done otherwise because they cost less effort/time". Which is also the promise of e.g. automation - the automated loom didn't just reduce how long it takes to make cloth, it made it so people make a bajillion times more cloth.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#180
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never written so much software

Are you the one who wrote it though or just the one who wrote prompts? Not that it matters in the end…

The main thing that matters is who takes responsibility for it. And the other thing is honesty, e.g. "I made this myself" vs "I made this with the help of AI". I'm a bit precious about that though, like, I wouldn't really care if someone used vim or emacs to write code not long ago - the tools didn't matter.
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