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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

#141

Post by bandrami »

thewebguyd wrote: post #138
linsomniac wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Yeah, it's useful for scripting, but it's still only marginally faster. It certainly hasn't been "groundbreaking productivity" like it's being sold. The problem with analyzing logs is determinism. If I ask Claude to look for evidence of compromise, I can't trust the output without also going and verifying myself. It's now an extra step, for what? I still have to go into Elastic and run the actual queries to verify wh…

The tolerance for indeterminacy is I think a generational marker; people ~20 years younger than me just kind of think of all software as indeterminate to begin with (because it's always been ridiculously complicated and event-driven for them), and it makes talking about this difficult.

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

#142

Post by sibeliuss »

eucyclos wrote: post #134
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.

A tool with a mediocre level of skill in everything looks mediocre when the backdrop is our own area of expertise and game changing when the backdrop is an unfamiliar one. But I suspect the real game changer will be that everyone is suddenly a polymath.

This ^ Exactly it. This will be the change.

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

#143

Post by zmmmmm »

the numbers they show are barely distinguishable from noise as far as I can interpret them.

For me, the impact is absolutely in hiring juniors. We basically just stopped considering it. There's almost no work a junior can do that now I would look at and think it isn't easier to hand off in some form (possibly different to what the junior would do) to an AI.

It's a bit illusory though. It was always the case that handing off work to a junior person was often more work than doing it yourself. It's an investment in the future to hire someone and get their productivity up to a point of net gain. As much as anything it's a pause while we reassess what the shape of expertise now looks like. I know what juniors did before is now less valuable than it used to be, but I don't know what the value proposition of the future looks like. So until we know, we pause and hold - and the efficiency gains from using AI currently are mostly being invested in that "hold" - they are keeping us viable from a workload perspective long enough to restructure work around AI. Once we do that, I think there will be a reset and hiring of juniors will kick back in.

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

#144

Post by bandrami »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #140
20k wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd claim the opposite. Better models design better software, and quickly better software than what most software developers were writing. Just yesterday I asked Opus 4.6 what I could do to make an old macOS AppKit project more testable, too lazy to even encumber the question with my own preferences like I usually do, and it pitched a refactor into Elm architecture. And then it did the refactor while I took a piss. T…

OK so this comes back to the question I started this subthread with: where is this better software? Why isn't someone selling it to me? I've been told for a year it's coming any day now (though invariably the next month I'm told last month's tools were in fact crap and useless compared to the new generation so I just have to wait for this round to kick in) and at some point I do have to actually see it if you expect me to believe it's real.

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

#146

Post by throwaw12 »

kdheiwns wrote: post #97
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.

Yep. All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago, where I could search for something and find actually relevant and helpful info quickly. I've seen lots of people say AI can basically code a project for them. Maybe it can, but that seems to heavily depend on the field. Other than boilerplate code or very generic projects, it's a step above useless imo when it comes to gam…

> how good search engines were 10+ years ago

For me this is a huge boost in productivity. If I remember how I was working in the past (example of Google integration):

Before:

    * go through docs to understand how to start (quick start) and things to know
    * start boilerplate (e.g. install the scripts/libs)
    * figure out configs to enable in GCP console
    * integrate basic API and test
    * of course it fails, because its Google API, so difficult to work with
    * along the way figure out why Python lib is failing to install, oh version mismatch, ohh gcc not installed, ohh libffmpeg is required,...
    * somehow copy paste and integrate first basic API
    * prepare for production, ohhh production requires different type of Auth flow
    * deploy, redeploy, fix, deploy, redeploy
    * 3 days later -> finally hello world is working
Now:

    * Hey my LLM buddy, I want to integrate Google API, where do I start, come up with a plan
    * Enable things which requires manual intervention
    * In the meantime LLM integrates the code, install lib, asks me to approve installation of libpg, libffmpeg,....
    * test, if fails, feed the error back to LLM + prompt to fix it
    * deploy

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

#147

Post by applfanboysbgon »

keeda wrote: post #125
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 studie…

> they are typically dismissed because they look so weird to us.

I dismiss them because Yegge's work (if it can even be called his work, given that he doesn't look at the code) is steaming garbage with zero real-world utility, not "because they look weird". You suggest the apparent utility is undeniable, while saying "based purely on popularity" -- but popularity is in no way a measure of utility. Yegge is a conman who profited hundreds of thousands of dollars shilling a memecoin rugpull tied to these projects. The actual thousands of users are people joining the hypetrain, looking to get in on the promised pyramid scheme of free money where AI will build the next million dollar software for you, if only you have the right combination of .md files to make it work. None of these software are actually materialising, so all the people in this bubble can do is make more AI wrappers that promise to make other AI wrappers that will totally make them money.

I am completely open to being proven wrong by a vibe-coded open source application that is actually useful, but I haven't seen a single one. Literally not even one. I would count literally anything where the end-product is not an AI wrapper itself, which has tens to hundreds of thousands of users, and which was written entirely by agents. One example of that would be great. Just one. There have been a couple of attempts at a web browser, and Claude's C compiler, but neither are actually useful or have any real users; they are just proofs of concept and I have seen nothing that convinces me they are a solid foundation from which you could actually build useful software from, or that models will ever be on a trajectory to make them actually useful.

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

#148

Post by chii »

zmmmmm wrote: post #143

the numbers they show are barely distinguishable from noise as far as I can interpret them. For me, the impact is absolutely in hiring juniors. We basically just stopped considering it. There's almost no work a junior can do that now I would look at and think it isn't easier to hand off in some form (possibly different to what the junior would do) to an AI. It's a bit illusory though. It was always the case that hand…

Doesn't make sense to stop hiring juniors.

If AI increases productivity, and juniors are cheaper to hire, but is just as able to hand off tasks to ai as a senior, then it makes more sense to hire more juniors to get them working with an AI as soon as possible. This produces output faster, for which more revenue could be derived.

So the only limiting factor is the possibility of not deriving more revenue - which is not related to the AI issue, but broader, macroeconomic issue(s).

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

#149

Post by p1esk »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #126
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…

I’m observing very similar trends at a startup I’m at. Unfortunately I’m not ready to retire yet.

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

#150

Post by booleandilemma »

silentkat wrote: post #84
righthand wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience it is now twice the amount of merge requests as a follow-up appears to correct any bugs no one reviewed in the first merge request.

I’m at a big tech company. They proudly stated more productivity measures in commits (already nonsense). 47% more commits, 17% less time per commit. Meaning 128% more time spent coding. Burning us out and acting like the AI slop is “unlocking” productivity. There’s some neat stuff, don’t get me wrong. But every additional tool so far has started strong but then always falls over. Always. Right now there’s this “orche…

Management is just stupid sometimes. We had a similar metric at my last company and my manager's response was "well how else are we supposed to measure productivity?", and that was supposed to be a legitimate answer.
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