Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

siepr.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 412 posts

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#141

Post by w4der »

ben_w wrote: post #85
ballsac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in 2026? 5? 4? 3? Heard this one way too many times.

I get the point having read much the same from Tesla (and fans) regarding self driving cars that still haven't done half the things that Musk said was just around the corner pending regulators a decade ago and repeatedly since then. And myself I keep making comparisons between AI and the progress in 90s video games where every minor improvement got called "photo realistic" and then forgotten with the next game engine…

I digress with your last quote, I feel like some people who are aware of AI are starting to develop a quasi allergic reaction to slop, and while the mistakes might not matter for most of the population, for others it does and will take notice.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#142

Post by sethammons »

nicce wrote: post #13
bloaf wrote: post #7

Organizational inertia is a real thing. There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI. A lot of the answer to "how much impact has AI had" comes down to "how much have we even attempted?" In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet.

> In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet. Interesting to see the impact in the long term when battle tested software gets replaced with vibecoded variants by non-programmers. Does it increase data breaches or quality actually goes up?

The other day, i was fed up with my mac webcam software. I just needed to fix being washed out. Every piece of software I found cost money, several were a monthly subscription.

Over lunch, Claude made a minimal toolbar app that lets me adjust down the brightness.

Often, you don't need battle tested. And you don't need a bunch of features.

The ai could have shipped my video feed somewhere I suppose, if I were unable to read its code.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#143

Post by siva7 »

ballsac wrote: post #27
simonw wrote: post #2

A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people meant early January due to the December break. General agents (OpenClaw, Anthropic Copilot, ChatGPT "Work") started working even later than that. This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using…

> A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in 2026? 5? 4? 3? Heard this one way too many times.

The timescale is well established: Late '25 was the start of agentic ai when capabilities of model + api + scaffold reached autonomous state. Any study comapring events before that timeframe is comparing apples with oranges.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#144

Post by dgellow »

ValentineC wrote: post #20
usef- wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the amount of software increases tremendously

I'm surprised the layoffs worldwide hasn't produced more entrepreneurs building their own software product.

I wouldn’t build my product with an LLM owned by a company at the core of it. That feels way too risky, it’s almost like building on a platform you don’t own. I expect we will see way more entrepreneurial growth once local models become good enough and the hardware to run them becomes more affordable than it is now.

(Though I’m biased, I personally feel it’s an anti-human technology, the world would be better without it)

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#145

Post by 37488484 »

simonw wrote: post #60
Avicebron wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this genuine concern or is it stealth-marketing? It's hard to tell when someone is so publicly benefiting off the hype.

What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here? It's genuine concern. I do not want to live in a dystopia where AI results in mass unemployment. That would suck, even for the people who manage to stay employed.

[flagged]

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#146

Post by layer8 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #116
b112 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so early game, is the real problem. My experience so far, has been that it's barely a junior dev. I've met so many in my career that think reading stackoverflow, or watching a youtube video mysteriously makes them an expert. AI reminds me of this sort. Well anyone can use (prior to AI) a simple linter and learning to code isn't that big a deal. It's learning the pitfalls, the traps, that's the issue. And so far…

> Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases? Yes! And that "yes" holds regardless of whether they use AI or not. Let's not pretend tech debt accumulation is somehow an AI problem. Some of the world's biggest companies routinely ship code that reeks of years of rot and decay.

This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure.

I’m overall skeptical as well, but the argument about tech debt is more nuanced than your comment implies.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#147

Post by ralusek »

Anecdotal: I used to beg my boss to get some help. I wanted 5 engineers and would have been upset if anyone had been hired that wasn't an engineer until I at least got 1-2. That was up until about 3 months ago.

Now, I don't want any additional engineers. Not only because I don't need them anymore, but because the prospect of having junior engineers using AI is absolutely terrifying to me. I can't eyeball their code to get a sense of how good of an engineer they are anymore, and I can't possibly review all of their code because of how much code AI can output now. So they're going to be outputting a ton of mostly high-quality code that could be making horrible mistakes that are much harder for me to catch now.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#148

Post by sethammons »

bluecheese452 wrote: post #19

Every job loss and suicide is a dollar in an AI investor’s pocket.

It would be premature to jump to 1930s style defenestration due to job loss from ai.

Software developers have always been in the job of automation and replacing human work. Capitalism means investors reap (the majority of) the benefit.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#149

Post by asdf88990 »

layer8 wrote: post #146
ACCount37 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases? Yes! And that "yes" holds regardless of whether they use AI or not. Let's not pretend tech debt accumulation is somehow an AI problem. Some of the world's biggest companies routinely ship code that reeks of years of rot and decay.

This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure. I’m overall skeptical as well, but the argument about tech debt is more nuanced than your comment implies.

> This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure.

This is categorically false because time and cost pressure is relative and if anything AI has exacerbated the exceptions for ROI and Turn Around time.

This along with the fact that even state of the art AI tends to generate subpar (albeit working) code extremely fast and in large volume.

You can see the effect of this already in the increased rate of production incidents recently.

This isn’t to say that AI is useless, but the tech debt it generates is unprecedented.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#150

Post by user43928 »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #105
cowanon77 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be true this time though; I have observed it myself and heard it from several experienced developers I personally know and respect. It feels like some threshold was crossed with Opus 4.5 and Gpt 5.3, where the models are now able to reliably solve certain classes of problems that were previously unreliable. Time will tell of course, and it’s early, but inflection points do exist with progress.

Thing is. You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt. And simultaneously, many people expressing their frustration and the shortcomings of “But it’s different this time” - several people, several times over the last couple of years. This is not at all a dig at you, I’m very sorry if it reads that way. My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The way…

I believe it is a widely accepted opinion that agentic coding took off with Opus 4.5 late in 2025.

Why would you attempt to use GPT 5.3 to generate code today and form an opinion on that basis?

I do not think it is even still available in Codex, I believe it only has the smaller, distilled GPT 5.3 Codex Spark.

Post reply on HN