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What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

siepr.stanford.edu

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

#161

Post by CuriouslyC »

dgellow wrote: post #138
simonw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody was saying coding agents started working in 2023 or 2024, because the category was defined by Claude Code which was first released in February 2025.

I would say that Aider is what defined coding agents. That was at least multiple months before Claude code. I remember seeing a coworker use aider for a hackathon project Adeline November-December 2024 , and it was already decent and pretty close to the DX we consider coding agents to have

Devin and Cline were the original true "agents" IIRC. Aider was the original terminal "agent" but it was't a true agent, it was sort of a hybrid agentic chat, since it had limited recursion ability (3 turns by default) and you had to configure it carefully to make it consistently take multiple turns in a row.

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

#162

Post by ACS_Solver »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #105
cowanon77 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be true this time though; I have observed it myself and heard it from several experienced developers I personally know and respect. It feels like some threshold was crossed with Opus 4.5 and Gpt 5.3, where the models are now able to reliably solve certain classes of problems that were previously unreliable. Time will tell of course, and it’s early, but inflection points do exist with progress.

Thing is. You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt. And simultaneously, many people expressing their frustration and the shortcomings of “But it’s different this time” - several people, several times over the last couple of years. This is not at all a dig at you, I’m very sorry if it reads that way. My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The way…

I don't buy into the huge LLM hype but I certainly think late 2025 was the inflection point. Up until then, I thought LLMs universally sucked at code. GPT-3.5, GPT-4, o1, o3, Claude 3.5, Sonnet 4, the whole bunch. Each iteration got marginally better, hallucinated APIs less and so on, but my overall evaluation of them all was that they wrote crap code and were unsuitable for anything other than one-off scripts.

Then the incremental improvements did, in my experience, cross some kind of threshold in late 2025 where the things became useful. It is of course anecdotal and personal judgment. But I asked LLMs to implement a small feature in my codebase (my usual test) and finally it produced code I was happy with. They've also been able to locate and diagnose a problem based on logs. In my view it's now a markedly different level of capability than we had a year ago, though I would call the previous two years equally useless.

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

#163

Post by FrustratedMonky »

fathermarz wrote: post #4

Recently poked around the job market to see what I qualify for in this day and age. Working as a solo builder in my org I would say that I have done enough in the last 18 months to consider myself “with it”. What I found was pretty brutal. Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon? Then it hit me. Oh they are all making shit up now and have no bar that anyone can hit because they are believing in…

HR always adds a lot of years of experience.

Even when Java 1.0 came out, HR was asking for 4-5 years of experience.

Seems like a decades long problem with people writing the job descriptions don't actually know what the job is.

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

#164

Post by CuriouslyC »

the_gastropod wrote: post #134
ballsac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in 2026? 5? 4? 3? Heard this one way too many times.

I’ve been feeling gaslit about this too. Getting major “we’re still early!” crypto bro vibes from this constant goalpost moving.

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 things, but I suspect that the AI we have now is capable of helping us find those workarounds and keep things moving.

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

#165

Post by prymitive »

zkmon wrote: post #158

> Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has predicted that AI could wipe out half of white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 20 percent. And then he also says that a certain model is too dangerous to release.

I'm sure Anthropic would love for everyone to believe that soon they will be the sole provider of "skills" for the entire planet and every single business transaction is done as a part of the subscription they offer - people sell AI generated content and other people's agents buy that - they're the entire world economy. I'm sure such narrative would help them reach infinity market valuation for the upcoming IPO.

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

#166

Post by CuriouslyC »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #37
ballsac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in 2026? 5? 4? 3? Heard this one way too many times.

Yep, the goalposts just keep shifting. In reality: they still don't work well, unless you're content with producing low quality work.

Here's the rub. They produce low quality work according to your rubric. If that was the universal rubric, they would already have RL'd against it, and you'd like the work they produce.

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

#167

Post by CuriouslyC »

close04 wrote: post #126
throwaway7783 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"unless you're content with producing low quality work." - With the right guiding hand, it is a productivity multiplier without compromising quality. As a fully autonomous developer, it is a disaster.

How are junior devs becoming qualified “guiding hands” these days? If the expert with LLM assistance is multiplied, what’s a company’s incentive to pay for a junior, and how would they train to get good in these conditions?

Juniors are still useful, but not as pure "coders". The juniors you want to hire now can wear product, engineering and QA hats, and are self starters with good attention to detail and AI skills. These types of people are actually a bargain.

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

#168

Post by StilesCrisis »

ModernMech wrote: post #137
cowanon77 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be true this time though; I have observed it myself and heard it from several experienced developers I personally know and respect. It feels like some threshold was crossed with Opus 4.5 and Gpt 5.3, where the models are now able to reliably solve certain classes of problems that were previously unreliable. Time will tell of course, and it’s early, but inflection points do exist with progress.

If it's so evident, why can't someone prove it with something more than "it seems better and everyone agrees"?

You think the world is lacking in LLM benchmarks?

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

#170

Post by Forgeties79 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #131
Forgeties79 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the right guiding hand, it is a productivity multiplier without compromising quality This just reads like another variation of “it’s the user not the tool,” which is just endless runway for always blaming people and never acknowledging the limitations of LLM’s. I’d be curious to hear how the recipients of your work enabled by the “productivity multiplier” feel about the quality.

You can't play an entire orchestra's sheet music on a single guitar either, but your playing ability still matters a lot. I would say that as of July 2026, with the right scaffolding, you can get reasonably good output out of a LLM, or better a combination of LLMs. For example, it pays off to prepare an implementation plan with one LLM and then let another LLM check it for flaws, then again. After several iterations…

> I would say that as of July 2026, with the right scaffolding, you can get reasonably good output out of a LLM, or better a combination of LLMs.

Totally agree, I don’t think I said or implied otherwise.

And yes can it can be the user and often even is, but when it comes to any LLM conversation I’ve been a part of it seems people think the only answer is “you’re using it wrong.” Evangelists swear it’s a 100x multiplier and anything counter to that means you’re either a Luddite who is blinded by politics or are too dumb to use the tool.

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