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

I'm not worried about AI job loss

davidoks.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 582 posts

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#121

Post by codegangsta »

delegate wrote: post #86

Bottlenecks. Yes. Company structures these days are not compatible with efficient use of these new AI models. Software engineers work on Jira tickets, created by product managers and several layers of middle managers. But the power of recent models is not in working on cogs, their true power is in working on the entire mechanism. When talking about a piece of software that a company produces, I'll use the analogy of…

Yeah I’m very much seeing this right now.

I’m a pretty big generalist professionally. I’ve done software engineering in a broad category of fields (Game engines, SaaS, OSS, distributed systems, highly polished UX and consumer products), while also having the experience of growing and managing Product and Design teams. I’ve worn a lot of hats over the years.

My most recent role I’m working on a net new product for the company and have basically been given fully agency over this product: from technical, budget, team, process, marketing, branding and positioning.

Give someone experienced like me capital, AI and freedom and you absolutely can build high quality software and a pretty blinding pace.

I’m starting to get the feeling than many folks struggling with adopting or embracing AI well for their job has more to do with their job/company than AI

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#122

Post by zozbot234 »

gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

> Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying.

Um, you do realize that "the memory" is just a text file (or a bunch of interlinked text files) written in plain English. You can write these things out yourself. This is how you use AI effectively, by playing to its strengths and not expecting it to have a crystal ball.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#123

Post by JetSpiegel »

louiereederson wrote: post #94
matt_heimer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not binary. Jobs will be lost because management will expect the fewer developers to accomplish more by leveraging AI.

Big tech might ahead of the rest of the economy in this experiment. Microsoft grew headcount by ~3% from June 2022 to June 2025 while revenue grew by >40%. This is admittedly weak anecdata but my subjective experience is their products seem to be crumbling (GitHub problems around the Azure migration for instance), and worse than they even were before. We'll see how they handle hiring over the next few years and if th…

Well, Google just raised prices by 30% on the GSuite "due to AI value delivered", but you can't even opt out, so even revenue is a bullshit metric.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#124

Post by ianbutler »

justonepost1 wrote: post #95
ianbutler wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, I think about this at least once a week maybe more often. I think that the technology overall will be a great net benefit to humanity or I wouldn't touch it.

Genuine question: how? I’m younger than most on this site. I see the next decades of my life being defined by a multi-generational dark age via a collapse in literacy (“you use a calculator right?”), median prosperity (the only truly functional distribution system we have figured out is labor), and loss of agency (kinda obvious). This outcome is now, as of 2026, essentially priced into the public markets and accepted…

I really think the doom consensus is largely an online phenomena. We're in a tense period like the early 80s, and that would be true without AI in the mix, but I think its a matter of perspective. We're certainly still way ahead of the 1910s and the 1940s for instance (it's on us btw to make sure we don't fall to that in time).

Every generation has its strains and the internet just amplifies it because outrage is currency. Those strains are things you only start to notice as you start to get older so they seem novel when in reality in the scheme of humanity is basically standard.

Fwiw if the market actually priced it in it would be in freefall since the market would be shortly irrelevant. We are due for a correction soon though.

Internet discourse is a facsimile of real life and often not how real life operates in my experience.

So I see all the discourse around extremes on either end and based on lived experience and working in the field think theres a much neater middle ground we'll ultimately arrive at thanks to people working very hard to land the plane so to speak.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#126

Post by christkv »

gordonhart wrote: post #74
e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of this can be provided or built up by better documentation in the codebase, or functional requirements that can also be created, reviewed, and then used for additional context. In our current codebase it's definitely an issue to get an AI "onboarded", but I've seen a lot less hand-holding needed in projects where you have the AI building from the beginning and leaving notes for itself to read later

Curious to hear if you've seen this work with 100k+ LoC codebases (i.e. what you could expect at a job). I've had some good experiences with high autonomy agents in smaller codebases and simpler systems but the coherency starts to fizzle out when the system gets complicated enough that thinking it through is the hard part as opposed to hammering out the code.

Our codebase is well over 250k and we have a hierarchy of notes for the modules so we read as much as we need for the job with a base memory that explains how the notes work

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#127

Post by zozbot234 »

RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

> I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again.

That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#128

Post by suzzer99 »

RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#129

Post by wenc »

gordonhart wrote: post #74
e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of this can be provided or built up by better documentation in the codebase, or functional requirements that can also be created, reviewed, and then used for additional context. In our current codebase it's definitely an issue to get an AI "onboarded", but I've seen a lot less hand-holding needed in projects where you have the AI building from the beginning and leaving notes for itself to read later

Curious to hear if you've seen this work with 100k+ LoC codebases (i.e. what you could expect at a job). I've had some good experiences with high autonomy agents in smaller codebases and simpler systems but the coherency starts to fizzle out when the system gets complicated enough that thinking it through is the hard part as opposed to hammering out the code.

If you vector index your code base, agents can explore it without loading it into context. This is what Cursor and Roo and Kiro and probably others do. Claude Code uses string searches.

What helps is also getting it to generate a docs of your code so that it has map.

This is actually how humans understand a large code base too. We don’t hold a large code base in memory — we navigate it through docs and sampling bits of code.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#130

Post by zozbot234 »

Jianghong94 wrote: post #24
nphardon wrote: post #12

(In the semiconductor industry) We experienced brutal layoffs arguably due to over-investment into Ai products that produce no revenue. So we've had brutal job loss due to Ai, just not in the way people expected. Having said that, it's hard to imagine jobs like mine (working on np-complete problems) existing if the LLMs continue advancing at the current rate, and its hard to imagine they wont continue to accelerate s…

Maybe I'm being naive here, but for AI (heck, for any good algorithm) to work well, you need some at least loosely-clearly defined objectives. I assume it's much more straightforward in semi, but there're many industries, once you get into the details, all kinds of incentives start to disalign and I doubt AI could understand all kinds of nuances. E.g. once I was tasked to build a new matching algorithm for a trading…

AI can probably tell you how to best explain that idea to the boss. Or even write it up as a memo for you, if you use a more complex model.
Post reply on HN