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Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

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Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#121

Post by [deleted] »

sdf2df wrote: post #120
thewhitetulip wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep requirement gathering takes forever Then validation takes forever Writing code is lesser problem than figuring out what we want when we want, and to get stakeholders at one place.

Finally, a fella who gets it. Apple has already shown this decades ago - they got the iPhone and iPod developed and out the door in relatively short-time scales given the impact of the products on the world. Once you know what you want, exactly what you want, things moves fast - really fast.

[deleted]

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#122

Post by falkensmaize »

jiggawatts wrote: post #79
nl wrote: post #64

This is a pretty interesting report. The TL;DR is that there is little measurable impact (and I'd personally add "yet"). To quote: "We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations" My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/…

> My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle. Gemini 3 and Opus 4.6 were the "woah, they're actually useful now!" moment for me. I keep saying to colleagues that it's like a rising tide. Initially the AIs were lapping around our ankles, now…

I don’t see definitive evidence that there is some kind of Moore’s law for model improvement though. Just because this year’s model performs better than last year’s model doesn’t mean next year’s model will be another leap. Most of the big improvements this year seem to be around tooling - I still see Opus 4.6 (which is my daily driver at work) making lots of mistakes.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#123

Post by 20k »

bandrami wrote: post #115
httpz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a classic case of Productivity Paradox when personal computers were first introduced into workplaces in the 80s. A famous economist once said, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

That's only certain if investments in tech infrastructure always led to productivity increases. But sometimes they just don't. Lots of firms spent a lot of money on blockchain five years ago, for instance, and that money is just gone now.

I find it odd the universal assumption that AI is going to be good for productivity

The loss of skills, complete loss of visibility and experience with the codebase, and the complete lack of software architecture design, seems like a massive killer in the long term

I have a feeling that we're going to see productivity with AI drop through the floor

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#124

Post by LPisGood »

lovich wrote: post #81
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

> so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Are you hiring?

My company has been hiring a ton over the last year or so. Jobs are out there

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#125

Post by keeda »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #98
keeda wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist. And that's the key problem, isn't it? I maintain current organizations have the "wrong shape" to fully leverage AI. Imagine instead of the scope of your current ownership, you own everything your team or your whole department owns. Consider what that…

> Imagine instead of > Now imagine > Imagine what that would do Imagine if your grandma had wheels! She'd be a bicycle. Now imagine she had an engine. She could be a motorcycle! Unfortunately for grandma, she lives in reality and is not actually a motorcycle, which would be cool as hell. Our imagination can only take us so far. To more substantively reply to your longer linked comment: your hypothesis is that people…

> No productivity studies of individual developers tackling tasks show a 10x speedup; results tend to be anywhere from +20% to minus 20%.

The only study showing a -20% came back and said, "we now think it's +9% - +38%, but we can't prove rigorously because developers don't want to work without AI anymore": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142078

Even at the time of the original study, most other rigorous studies showed -5% (for legacy projects, obsolete languages) to 30% (more typical greenfield AND brownfield projects) way back in 2024. Today I hear numbers up to 60% from reports like DX.

But this is exactly missing the point. Most of them are still doing things the old way, including the very process of writing code. Which brings me to this point:

> There have been absolutely zero indicators that this is true.

I could tell you my personal experience, or link various comments on HN, or point you to blogs like https://ghuntley.com/real/ (which also talks about the origanizational impedance mismatch for AI), but actual code would be a better data point.

So there are some open-source projects worth looking at, but they are typically dismissed because they look so weird to us. Here's two mostly vibe-coded (as in, minimal code review, apparently) projects that people shredded for having weird code, but is already used by 10s of 1000s of people, up to 11 - 18K stars now. Look at the commit volume and patterns for O(300K) LoC in a couple of months, mostly from one guy and his agent:

https://github.com/steveyegge/beads/graphs/commit-activity

https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/graphs/commit-activity

It's like nothing we've seen before, almost equal number of LoC additions and deletions, in the 100s of Ks! It's still not clear how this will pan out long term, but the volume of code and apparent utility (based purely on popularity) is undeniable.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#126

Post by fnordpiglet »

bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

My employer is pretty advanced in its use of these tools for development and it’s absolutely accelerated everything we do to the point we are exhausting roadmaps for six months in a few weeks. However I think very few companies are operating like this yet. It takes time for tools and techniques to make it out and Claude code alone isn’t enough. They are basically planning to let go of most of the product managers and Eng managers, and I expect they’re measuring who is using the AI tools most effectively and everyone else will be let go, likely before years end. Unlike prior iterations I saw at Salesforce this time I am convinced they’re actually going to do it and pull it off. This is the biggest change I’ve seen in my 35 year career, and I have to say I’m pretty excited to be going through it even though the collateral damage will be immense to peoples lives. I plan to retire after this as well, I think this part is sort of interesting but I can see clearly what comes next is not.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#127

Post by linsomniac »

thewebguyd wrote: post #50
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

Same here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI. I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time,…

You're missing something.

I've been in ops for 30 years, Claude Code has changed how I work. Ops-related scripting seems to be a real sweet spot for the LLMs, especially as they tend to be smaller tools working together. It can convert a few sentences into working code in 15-30 minutes while you do something else. I've given it access to my apache logs Elastic cluster, and it does a great job at analyzing them ("We suspect this user has been compromised, can you find evidence of that?"). It's quite startling, actually, what it's able to do.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#128

Post by bandrami »

cute_boi wrote: post #110
lovich wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Are you hiring?

My friend used to say that, and he got quietly fired and outsourced because now someone in India can use ChatGPT to produce similar code, lol. IMO AI will make 70-80% job obsolete for sure.

But, as I said above, I don't produce code; I administer it (administrate? whichever it is).

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#129

Post by greyw »

sdf2df wrote: post #116
stevenhuang wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 months I won't be surprised if there's not much change. But in 5 years? 10? Anything can happen. It is presumptuous to think you can project the future capabilities of this technology and confidently state that labour markets will never be affected.

You prove my point. Guys like you dont get it. You think OAI, Amazon etc can freely put large amounts of money into this for 5-10 years? Lmao - delusional. Investors are impatient. Show huge jumps in revenue this year or you no longer have permission to put monumental amounts of money into this anymore. Short of that they'll just destroy the stock price by selling off; leaving employees who get paid via SBC very unha…

Such are reductive and superficial way of thinking on how investments works. Makes me confident you dont really are able to make a good prediction

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#130

Post by kranner »

httpz wrote: post #111
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

This is a classic case of Productivity Paradox when personal computers were first introduced into workplaces in the 80s. A famous economist once said, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

> There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come.

Predictions without a deadline are unfalsifiable.

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