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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

#361

Post by DanielHB »

torginus wrote: post #314
DanielHB wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If junior devs are productively producing software that then goes unused then how productive were they really Most ways of measuring productivity across an economy (in macro sense) takes into account only the transfer of capital. Meaning someone paying for something. So in this case it will be measurably zeo in most macro-economics studies.

Wonder if that means if I knock out an app using a Claude Code sub in an afternoon, that would've taken me a week previously, and the result is better than what I could've done, does that mean that gross productivity went down? - I didn't make money, since I got paid for my time - Anthropic didn't make money, since the amount I paid them for AI is tiny This sounds wrong to me.

If the same amount of people bought your app at the same rate as if you hand-written it, then no. In fact your productivity would have grown 10x (half a day vs 1 work-week). The actual costs paid to Anthropic to make said app would have net-zero effect I believe (not an expert in macro economics).

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

#362

Post by simonw »

jarek-foksa wrote: post #358
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…

> General agents (OpenClaw, ...) started working even later than that. There is nothing special about the OpenClaw thing other than the enormous astroturfing campaign that benefited various "crypto" influencers and other scammers. Anyone who endorses it is either manipulated or trying to manipulate you.

Indeed. That's why I pointed out that OpenAI and Anthropic have entire own provides that serve the same purpose now.

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

#363

Post by Alpha3031 »

3ff3 wrote: post #341
grim_io wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

People's right to make stupid decisions end when they reach public roads and/or borrow children to make a point. That's why we have things like driver's licences.

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

#364

Post by chrsw »

aintnolove wrote: post #308
chrsw wrote: post #264

The biggest impact of AI at my job are LLM code generators for software engineers. That's only scratching the surface of what AI can do for enterprises. My company doesn't yet have the orientation, inclination or technical expertise to unlock the true power of AI for our business goals. We're stuck buying packaged solutions from third parties and aren't integrating layers of intelligence in our environment. I doubt w…

Plenty of companies didn't have any online presence until 10+ years after the dotcom boom, and they were fine. An HVAC service working on existing contracts? No website no problem. But AI is becoming much more pervasive than websites. And the level of friction isn't as high as you might think, because people are already constantly on phones. It's only a matter of time before MS Copilot gets so good that even the leas…

AI diffusion will be slow not because the models aren’t good enough, but because everything else will have to adapt. ChatGPT was released 3 and a half years ago. I work with people whose jobs haven’t changed at all.

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

#365

Post by CuriouslyC »

3ff3 wrote: post #343
CuriouslyC wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capex is still "early" for sure (i.e. data centers are still being planned and built out, we're hardware/energy constrained). If model scaling holds out, we're "early-ish" in terms of the reliability and performance of these systems, just based on utilization of the compute from the planned capex. If we hit hard diminishing returns and we don't find architectural/data workarounds, that would put a wrinkle in thin…

[dead]

Where did you hear me mention AGI? I'll settle for fully automated software engineering and math, which are both most certainly coming.

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

#366

Post by ModernMech »

Kiro wrote: post #261
ModernMech wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What measurable thing would convince you?

Exactly, "productivity" and similarly "efficiency" are meaningless weasel word unless they're qualified and measured against something. So which measurable things? Let's start with just anything really because then we could ground the conversation in something real rather than just feelings of being more productive, which can be deceptive.

AnimalMuppet in their reply to my OP comment makes the point that these things haven't been around long enough to measure end-to-end productivity gains and come to a conclusion either way, and I agree with that. But we can still at least be measuring something.

For example, in my case AI has allowed me to write 10x more LOC than I usually would in a similar amount of time. But having to review it all, I've also deployed 1/4 the number of releases I normally would in the same period. By one measure I'm more productive, by another I'm less productive.

People could claim to be more productive by skipping the review. But in that case did AI make you more productive or did you lower standards? People could say they're using AI to do the review but is the impact of that being measured and has that caused more or fewer bugs? If more bugs, has the time to fix those been factored into overall productivity? In my experience it's common for people to eagerly count immediate productivity gains and discount long-term productivity sinks.

For this reason I think case studies are the best convincing thing, because they properly contextualize the usage and consider a longer-term window. They're also backwards looking instead of in-the-moment, so have the benefit of hindsight. But they're harder to come by and we probably won't see any meaningful case studies for a thing that people say happened in November.

But the very least people can be doing is just defining what they mean when they say "productivity" because otherwise everyone is talking past one another.

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

#367

Post by StilesCrisis »

noosphr wrote: post #326
StilesCrisis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPUs in the 90s were amazing! They were over-specced for "everyday tasks." Our problem is that we overbuilt CPUs too much, so software is now written with ten unnecessary layers of abstraction because there's no real reason to simplify.

3gb of ram aren't enough everyday tasks at any sane resolution. That we still don't have 1200 ppi desktop monitors is as stupid as using black and white screens in 2000.

1200ppi! The Apple Studio Display is 218ppi and it's amazingly sharp. What do you need 1200ppi for?

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

#368

Post by wolvesechoes »

simianwords wrote: post #359
wolvesechoes wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about DHH, Max, Nolan, Steve, Mitchell Oh yes, dev celebs that rely on constant validation through social media. Very reliable source of data.

What about Uncle Bob of clean code? This is a bit embarrassing for you.

Uncle Bob was a dev celeb before there were dev celebs.

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

#369

Post by wolvesechoes »

simianwords wrote: post #360
wolvesechoes wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should stop using social media as your yardstick. Yes, don't believe people posting on HN.

What about terry tao?

Who?

But in all seriousness - you can even bring up Pope himself. Don't care. Show me data, show me the leaps our software made with all this 100x productivity boost. Show me a myriad of better LLVM projects, new usable kernels, and so on. Show me sharp decline in bugs and defects in existing projects.

Keep blog posts and HN comments.

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

#370

Post by elteto »

pjmlp wrote: post #354
nozzlegear wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many studies do we need showing that AI isn't causing massive job loss before you'll believe it? This isn't the first one showing these results.

I won't believe in it, because I have seen it happen in agency work. What used to be contracts for translations or asset creations for CMS projects, is now handled by the AI tooling of CMS products. The adoption of SaaS, iPaaS and serverless, meant delivery projects could be done with smaller teams. Now with iPaaS adoption of agentic workflows, and AI tooling to transform those serverless actions into MCP tools, the…

I think non-software creative work has indeed been completely decimated by AI usage, particularly on the small business end. But this has been going on for a while now, I think since the image generation models got good enough to write down text with hallucinating nordic runes.
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