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What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

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

#181

Post by ModernMech »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #180
ModernMech wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A benchmark doesn't prove "although we said it before, this time it's true". People pointed to the benchmarks then as well.

Anecdotes aren't real. Don't believe any of them if you don't want to.

Okay thanks. But what I'm saying is all of these anecdotes should add up to something measurable if there's something to the idea that an inflection point was reached in November 2025, right? There's a lot of marketing and hype and motivated reasoning going on, so that's why I don't trust broadly-reported notions.

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

#182

Post by caminante »

aakresearch wrote: post #76
caminante wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use it in your favor. You just have to get past the recruiter/talent acquisition where everyone else is getting auto-rejected. You should be doing that anyway.

If decision-makers put up a front of recruiters and talent acquisition "specialists", don't they send a very explicit message that going past those is unwelcome and won't be considered?

Not really.

In practice, skipping the line is THE approach. How many times do you hear people say to fill out online job postings? Never. It's just scaring off good/bad candidates and bums who dont have an employee referral.

It's not even cynical to say a lot of postings are performatory compliance steps when they've already got internal candidates lined up.

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

#183

Post by asdf88990 »

newsomix9xl wrote: post #73

Employees have no incentive to meaningfully implement AI to increase productivity, and if they do so, they have no reason to share it. If AI means job cuts and not using AI means job cuts but no one really tracks AI impact that means performative adoption of AI is safest, and real gains are to be sandbagged as innate magic hand waving. At my work I'm one of the few who says "I made this with Claude" and the near impo…

You’re underestimating the competitive ground and how these companies create an environment of do or die.

Once the talk of “we will be laying off people based on productivity in upcoming months” starts; probable go kamakazi.

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

#184

Post by fipar »

fathermarz wrote: post #4

Recently poked around the job market to see what I qualify for in this day and age. Working as a solo builder in my org I would say that I have done enough in the last 18 months to consider myself “with it”. What I found was pretty brutal. Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon? Then it hit me. Oh they are all making shit up now and have no bar that anyone can hit because they are believing in…

There’s a big problem with hype now, that’s for sure, but what you’re describing also reminded me of the companies that were asking for 5 years of Java experience in 1999.

I guess maybe they were all trying to hire Gosling and his colleagues? …

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

#185

Post by simonw »

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…

GPT-5.3 is a last-generation model (which is wild to say when it came out in February this year, but it's true).

How does GPT-5.6 Sol or Claude Fable 5 or Claude Opus 5 do on that Cinema 4D code?

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

#186

Post by simonw »

janussunaj wrote: post #107
simonw wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I produce code that is significantly higher quality with the assistance of coding agents, because I no longer succumb to the temptation to cut corners due to lack of time. One example: everything I do is properly tested and documented now, even the most trivial of changes. Previously I would have weighed those tradeoffs and sometimes decided not to bother with the tests because they weren't worth the time.

> because I no longer succumb to the temptation to cut corners due to lack of time No offense, but that says much more about the way you approach programming than about the quality of LLM outputs. In my experience, LLMs are the ultimate corner-cutting tool. With LLMs, I now succumb to the temptation to cut corners, build something I haven't properly researched and don't fully understand, prioritize shipping quantity…

Software engineering is about tradeoffs. The single most important tradeoff is always time: this feature would be better if I did X, but doing X would take me Y hours, is it worth the time or should I spend that time on something else?

Not having to type in and then iterate on the code manually has a material effect on those time calculations.

I absolutely agree that you need to understand the domain and code and tools. That's what I want to spend my human time on - not typing in the code and sweating over every line of syntax.

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

#187

Post by lelanthran »

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.

> 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.

While that is true, there's a large difference you are ignoring: a company can survive this type of rot indefinitely if it takes place at a certain rate. Their customers get time to acclimatise , the processes take into account the breakage, and adapt to compensate, etc.

If the AI boosters are to be believed (2x, or 10x or even, in some cases, devs claiming 100x productivity), stuffing 2 decades of rot into the next two years could prove fatal.

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

#189

Post by simonw »

ModernMech wrote: post #137
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.

If it's so evident, why can't someone prove it with something more than "it seems better and everyone agrees"?

Have you ever seen evidence of a productivity improvement that you have found convincing for any software tool, independent of LLMs?

What shape did that evidence take?

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

#190

Post by simonw »

dgellow wrote: post #138
simonw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody was saying coding agents started working in 2023 or 2024, because the category was defined by Claude Code which was first released in February 2025.

I would say that Aider is what defined coding agents. That was at least multiple months before Claude code. I remember seeing a coworker use aider for a hackathon project Adeline November-December 2024 , and it was already decent and pretty close to the DX we consider coding agents to have

Aider was missing a key feature: automatically executing code. That write-execute-fix loop was the big unlock.

I believe Aider avoided adding that for safety concerns. Claude Code demonstrated that throwing safety to the wing somehow kind of worked out.

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