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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

#271

Post by chrsw »

fcatalan wrote: post #92
gymbeaux wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t start using Claude Code until late 2025. Prior to that I would use ChatGPT to give me snippets of code but I was still doing most of the actual code writing. Coworkers told me in late 2025 about how they hadn’t written a line of code in “months” and just use Claude Code/agentic “whatever” so I tried out Claude Code and was pleasantly surprised. It is passable to have entire apps written by LLMs (I’ve made se…

For me it feels a lot like generated images or video. I've made lots of things now, but those that are 100% LLM written "work" but are uncanny, weird and the details are wrong everywhere you care to look in detail.

This has been my experience has well. For code generation, you have to really constrain these LLMs on your coding style, design goals, test cases, and overall expectations. I mainly use these tools to help my understanding of the code and to generate code for very specific problems. Even after all that setup and careful review I'd say it's still a net big speed up for certain software engineering tasks.

Jason Turner gave an excellent talk at last year's CppCon explain how he thinks tools can be used to make generative AI coding assistance safer and more productive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCuRUjxT5L8

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

#272

Post by jvanderbot »

bicx wrote: post #248
jvanderbot wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so contradictory if you peel back a couple layers 1. For junior engineers a 50% increase might be less than a 10% increase for senior engineers. So the % comments are consistent with the pareto argument. Diminishing returns _can produce_ a pareto tradeoff. 2. Saying gains are "concentrated" to junior engineers can also be a function of the work assigned to junior engineers. A senior engineer might get 1000%…

Yes, I’m a senior engineer at a 3-engineer startup, and there isn’t “junior-level” or “senior-level” work here. It’s all just work. Claude allows me to tear through the kind of gruntwork I’ve been doing ad nauseam for the last 15 years. If my tasks were things like squeezing 3% more efficiency out of an algorithm, that might be different. Although, even then, my PM (!) used Claude to boost the efficiency of one of ou…

Yeah those single points of failure/bottlenecks are prefect focal points for people with floating responsibilities and a good understanding of how to use claude.

The system-sweeping features I still would ask to review, but you can't argue with a DB query just getting faster.

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

#273

Post by SoftTalker »

asdff wrote: post #111
exabrial wrote: post #56

Prior to the weaving loom and sewing machines, a factory might be able to make like 20 t-shirts a day with 50 workers. After mass production, factories generally employ the same amount of workers, but people aren't hand-sewing things. Instead roughly 50 people are producing thousands of tshirts a day leveraging giant machines. Most of HN recognized the "We're firing people because AI makes people efficient" as one of…

If there was 100x on the table for you, why weren't you already at 100x scale just with more headcount? That is the other side of this coin. Demand is a factor. Productivity goes up? Great, if there is demand to satiate that you can meet. I doubt that is the case otherwise you'd already have scaled to meet it if it were actually on the table for the taking if only you could output more volume.

At least in software, 100x headcount does not get you 100x productivity, due to communication complexity (see Brooks).

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

#274

Post by lenkite »

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.

Our production incidents have dramatically increased over last 2 years after management pushed AI. In 2023, we never failed our SLA. Now, we continuously keep failing it due to some stupid outage. There was no real change in architecture or strategy - only the adoption of AI.

There have already been several high-profile AI-root-cause incidents at many companies this year. I guess we can look forward to even more deterioration in the next 2 years.

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

#275

Post by randcraw »

giantg2 wrote: post #209
exabrial wrote: post #56

Prior to the weaving loom and sewing machines, a factory might be able to make like 20 t-shirts a day with 50 workers. After mass production, factories generally employ the same amount of workers, but people aren't hand-sewing things. Instead roughly 50 people are producing thousands of tshirts a day leveraging giant machines. Most of HN recognized the "We're firing people because AI makes people efficient" as one of…

"factories generally employ the same amount of workers" Not really. The stats should show that factory workers as a percent of the workforce has been declining. Thw leadership at my company has said they plan to do more with the same people rather than lay off. But they also seem to have reduced hiring and are removing certain types of roles.

Agreed. When tools evolve significantly the old production process has to be reworked into a new process and that takes time. In complex production lines that will include changes to subcontracting, supply chains, and even finance models. The changes arising in software production today will take years to stabilize into a new normal, even longer if the tools continue to advance in capability as LLMs are doing. And many software-dependent companies will fail in that time for moving either too fast, too slow, or most likely, too short-sightedly.

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

#276

Post by dahart »

jvanderbot wrote: post #268
dahart wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you’re right.. the dots! I still don’t understand why the smoothing makes covid symmetric when the underlying data is asymmetric. A too-large smoothing window, I guess. They must have been trying to smooth out the seasonal job unemployment rates for the labor-heavy jobs.

If you drop the peakiest peak, the data is quite symmetric. Zoom in on 2015-2026 on bls chart. It's pretty symmetric.

Hmm, I’m not seeing what you are, unless you mean ignore all data from Apr 2020 to Dec 2021. It took almost 2 full years for unemployment to return to the pre-covid norm. The spike is immediate in apr 2020, then it falls quickly for 6 months to Dec 2020, and then falls more slowly for the next year. That lump from Dec 2020 to Dec 2021 is very asymmetric, compared to Mar 2020 and the preceding year. I’d think even a year-wide smoothing window would capture that asymmetry.

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

#277

Post by jvanderbot »

dahart wrote: post #276
jvanderbot wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drop the peakiest peak, the data is quite symmetric. Zoom in on 2015-2026 on bls chart. It's pretty symmetric.

Hmm, I’m not seeing what you are, unless you mean ignore all data from Apr 2020 to Dec 2021. It took almost 2 full years for unemployment to return to the pre-covid norm. The spike is immediate in apr 2020, then it falls quickly for 6 months to Dec 2020, and then falls more slowly for the next year. That lump from Dec 2020 to Dec 2021 is very asymmetric, compared to Mar 2020 and the preceding year. I’d think even a y…

https://x.com/jodavaho/status/2081416737883353417?s=20

(shame x is the easist way I have to post two images quickly)

dots seem to fit bls pretty well. Just to bound the effect of the spike, that is a +10% jump, so over a 3 year window it would produce a +3% bump. If they do a backwards only, it'd lag by up to 3 years. So, it's plausible/feasible, maybe not definitive.

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

#278

Post by jason_oster »

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.

It's safe to say that most people romanticize their past experience. Anyone's "golden age" is someone else's "end times".

Software has always sucked [1]. "Software crisis" was coined in 1968. There has been no period of time since that it got any better. Trauma just doesn't carry the same way that triumphs do.

Perhaps people do not actually learn from their mistakes after all.

[1]: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

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

#279

Post by sumeno »

qwerpy wrote: post #110
ben_w wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan it really got ”good enough” recently with version 14. The tipping point was suddenly, much more often than not, it can drive end to end from start (my garage) to finish (parked at destination) with no interventions. I can text and watch videos on my phone and as long as I glance up once a minute, it doesn’t complain. Handling highway driving with lane changes was…

You are going to get someone killed. You should not be allowed on the road

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

#280

Post by Chance-Device »

simonw wrote: post #228
iLoveOncall wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't get it. What point do you think those make? They read to me like an accurate report on the progress of these models and tools. In May 2025 Claude Code could help me debug a WordPress installation. In July 2025 I reported on someone managing to get it to build them a macOS app. I got that working for myself in February 2026 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/present/ Also in July 2025 I was successfully usi…

Your detractors don’t care about the facts Simon, as you’re probably well aware. They’re afraid of LLMs and need to deny that they can do anything well or have any potential to take their jobs.

In their world AI never has an impact on jobs, just like AI can never be an equivalent to a human, and the goalposts move every time a goal is scored.

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