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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

#291

Post by bojan »

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…

> Although, even then, my PM (!) used Claude to boost the efficiency of one of our more complex Postgres queries by up to 5x

Would you be kind to describe what test set-up do you have that a PM felt safe enough to deploy the changed query without the fear they'll break something?

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

#292

Post by cjbgkagh »

HPsquared wrote: post #282
cjbgkagh wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My field is lightly regulated but it is regulated and LLMs have helped massively in producing the documentation but also in reviewing the same documentation on the regulators side. This was always a disadvantage for small companies where the fixed regulatory cost couldn’t be amortized over a larger staff size and now because of LLMs it is less of a disadvantage.

I think we are living in a temporary window where the volume of bureaucracy hasn't caught up with token processing rates. In a few years it'll be increased, I'm sure.

I’m sure there will be attempts but I think our future will be dominated by separatist / spinoff societies. There is an economy of scale in functions of governance as well as a diseconomy of scale in bureaucracy. Using LLMs to make the expensive parts cheaper makes smaller self governing societies much more viable.

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

#293

Post by keeda »

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…

I would deeply implore you to not put to much faith in this technology as there are many very dangerous edge cases, including as I personally experienced, jumping red lights after coming to a full stop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928102

And this is not anecdotal, there are enough reports that an investigation is ongoing: https://autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-environment/articles/tesl...

I keep saying, FSD being marketed as FSD is going to get people killed and I can't believe more is not being done to prevent this.

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

#294

Post by dolebirchwood »

codinhood wrote: post #247
simonw wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this attitude baffling. Things are allowed to get better more than once! The idea that "yeah, you said technology had improved in the past, and now you're saying it has improved again" is a gotcha just seems incoherent to me.

I keep running into this as well. Someone shared a link to a study from last year telling me that AI doesn't make programmers as productive as they think. The study was obviously done months prior to it's release. So evaluating the state AI even further back. But this didn't seem to concern them. The study said X, therefore it applies to today. I'm just not sure it's worth it to argue with others about it at this poi…

> I'm just not sure it's worth it to argue with others about it at this point.

This is the correct response. Let closed-minded people do their thing. Makes them less competitive against you. There's nothing for you to gain by trying to help them understand what they are missing.

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

#295

Post by californical »

Shacklz wrote: post #270
Turfie wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're finding it hinders, you're using it wrong. Terrence Tao is living proof, that it cannot hinder even the most elite. There's always something you can do with it.

Tao can use LLMs on his own terms, on his conditions. Under those circumstances, it's an absolutely fantastic tool. In an enterprise, everyone gets to use LLMs. Everyone can create slop. In an enterprise environment, this can lead to weird situations where the senior has to put in extra efforts to contain the slop of others... so I can kind of see where the "hinders seniors" is coming from.

I don’t think it’s even “seniors” containing slop of others.

I think it’s those who still care about quality (which seems to be decreasing in the industry overall) trying to keep the whole thing running, in a sea of people who think going really really fast and not understanding their code is fine because LLMs can make sense of it and clean it up later.

Just look at the condition of open source contributions recently

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

#296

Post by grim_io »

qwerpy wrote: post #238
grim_io wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is responsible for any accident happening while you use your phone during FSD? It's not FSD until the human is no longer responsible. This half measure bullshit is a joke.

The fact of the matter is that it drives reliably end to end. I don't care who's responsible or what it's called. I only care about the benefit it provides my family, which is immense. If it gets into a crash I know I'm responsible, but given that I consider it a better driver than I am now, this is an improvement over before.

I'm not going to tell you how you should keep your family safe, or not.

It's just absolutely crazy to me that you trust this experimental feature more than the manufacturer does.

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

#297

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #240
jcranmer wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since so many people are doubting you here, here is a post from ~a year ago that's pulling the same "LLMs 6 months ago were crap, now they're awesome" shtick: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ . There's more posts along this vein being put out from 2024 on or so.

I find this attitude baffling. Things are allowed to get better more than once! The idea that "yeah, you said technology had improved in the past, and now you're saying it has improved again" is a gotcha just seems incoherent to me.

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by chewbacha »

gcanyon wrote: post #286
chewbacha wrote: post #196

Big caveat to the productivity claim is that it’s concentrated in lesser experienced engineers and vanishes or goes negative with highly experienced engineers. This intuitively makes sense and generally agrees with my experience. LLMs move your baseline towards the mean. If you are below average it improves and if you are above it hinders. But also in my experience, my memory retention of the work done with an LLM is…

> my memory retention of the work done with an LLM is worse than doing it myself self Do you think this is more because you are less close to the work? Or because there is simply more work being done/more to remember, so you're remembering a similar amount, but a smaller fraction? Or both, or something else?

I believe it’s mostly due to closeness to the work and actually turning the problem over in my mind. When I use an LLM to code much of the context is lost and my understanding of the solution is diminished. The longer I use it in a code base the less and less aware of the code base I become.

This is also born out in the research which has demonstrated reduced retention of content when authoring was facilitated by an LLM. Over the long term, I believe this is widen a chasm between experienced and inexperienced engineers.

While not all CEOs will feel this way, it will not surprise me that knowledge workers will be treated as disposable, even if their work is invaluable. If they can hire a junior escort for the AI they will. That junior will also be scale goated when things go wrong.

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

#299

Post by HPsquared »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #292
HPsquared wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are living in a temporary window where the volume of bureaucracy hasn't caught up with token processing rates. In a few years it'll be increased, I'm sure.

I’m sure there will be attempts but I think our future will be dominated by separatist / spinoff societies. There is an economy of scale in functions of governance as well as a diseconomy of scale in bureaucracy. Using LLMs to make the expensive parts cheaper makes smaller self governing societies much more viable.

Then you have to deal with the combinatorial complexity of interactions between each splinter.

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

#300

Post by suzzer99 »

zahlman wrote: post #232

I open this discussion thread and literally the first two top-level comments I see contradict each other: > I find that productivity follows a Pareto distribution (80:20 rule) and that AI is a sharper tool in that it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive and this effect increases as the intelligence of AI increases. So 80:20 becomes a 90:10, 95:5, 99:1 etc. > Big caveat to the productivi…

> it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive

I finally got a real feature to develop and started using Codex a couple weeks ago. Before that, I was just using ChatGPT for small things. For the most part, I was doing a lot of monkey-patching and deep troubleshooting that I didn't think Codex would be good at.

I was wrong. I had no idea how smart these tools are.

I now realize, as the tech lead on a large project with me, 2 front-end developers, a full-stack-ish developer, a tester, two product people, and a PM - that I could do this entire project more efficiently with just me and the tester.

I'm doing SQL for the first time in 20 years, which would have slowed me down in the past, but not now. It used to take me an hour to program a new feature and two hours to get it to look right, if I had to do the CSS myself. Now I can do that w/o anyone's help. Writing tests used to take as long as writing the code. Maybe it still does, but that's an hour instead of a day. And it's so much less painful. There's no satisfaction of the aha moment when writing tests. It's just a slog.

We're a very small shop that usually only has 1-2 devs on a project. So we're not set up to do big projects, we aren't doing agile, and it's just a mess. We waste probably 80% of our effort just communicating.

The product team was needed/useful in the beginning to define the broad scope of the project and lay down the UI/UX patterns. But now it's like pulling teeth to get them interested in our internal client's ever-evolving wishlist. I can handle that, and always come to the product team with very specific asks when I need UI design help. Just give me the tester, who's so thorough it's annoying, to catch the weird edge cases I hadn't thought of.

I'm not saying I'm God's gift at any of these things, just that I'm reasonably competent at them. It's kind of terrifying what a seasoned full-stack dev with a decent feel for UX and the ability to manage stakeholders can do with this.

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