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

anthropic.com

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

#171

Post by kodablah »

throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…

> People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing?

At review time.

There are simply too many software industries that can't delegate both authorship _and_ review to non-humans because the maintenance/use of such software, especially in libraries and backwards-compat-concerning environments, cannot justify an "ends justifies the means" approach (yet).

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

#172

Post by aurareturn »

throwaw12 wrote: post #170
aurareturn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Believe it or not, I still know many devs who do not use any agents. They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste. I'm going to guess that many people on HN are also on the "free ChatGPT isn't that good at programming" train.

> They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste Probably that's the reason why some people are sure their job is still safe. Nature of job is changing rapidly

I totally get tech CEOs who threaten to fire their devs who do not embrace AI tools.

I'm not a tech CEO but people who are anti-LLM for programming have no place on my team.

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

#173

Post by fulafel »

throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…

A terminology tangent because it's an econ publication: Notice that the article doesn't talk about productivity.

Productivity is a term of art in economics and means you generate more units of output (for example per person, per input, per wages paid) but doesn't take quality or otherwise desireability into account. It's best suited for commodities and industrial outputs (and maybe slop?).

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

#175

Post by dataflow »

throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…

I feel like this might be heavily dependent on both your task and the AI you're using? What language do you code in and what AI do you use? And are your tasks pretty typical/boilerplate-y with prior art to go off of, or novel/at-the-edge-of-tech?

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

#176

Post by bandrami »

Tanjreeve wrote: post #165
bandrami wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that it's likely but it's certainly a plausible outcome. If tooling keeps getting built for this and the financial music stops it's going to take a while for everybody to get back up to speed Remember this famously happened before, in the 1970s

There's an actual working product now, albeit one which is currently loss leading. In software world at least there is definitely enough value for it to be used even if it's just better search engine. I'm not sure why it would disappear if the financial music stops as opposed to being commoditised.

Because there's cheaper ways to get an equally good search engine? But yes I imagine some amount of inference will continue even in an AI Winter 3.0 scenario.

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

#177

Post by bandrami »

tayo42 wrote: post #162
thewebguyd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Ops hasn't been in the crosshairs of Ai yet. Imo it's only a matter of time as companies start to figure out how to use ai. Companies don't seem to have real plans yet and everyone is figuring out ai in general out. Soon though I will think agents start popping up, things like first line response to pages, executing automation

We've had deterministic automation of tier one response for over a decade now. What value would indeterminacy add to that?

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

#178

Post by salawat »

aurareturn wrote: post #166
throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Believe it or not, I still know many devs who do not use any agents. They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste. I'm going to guess that many people on HN are also on the "free ChatGPT isn't that good at programming" train.

Not everyone has the capability to rent out data center tier hardware to just do their job. These things require so much damn compute you need some serious heft to actually daisy chain enough stages either in parallel or deep to get enough tokens/sec for the experience to go ham. If you're making bags o' coke money, and deciding to fund Altman's, Zuckernut's or Amazon/Google's/Microsoft's datacenter build out, that's on you. Rest of us are just trying to get by on bits and bobs we've kept limping over the years. If opencode is anything to judge the vibecoded scene by, I'm fairly sure at some point the vibe crowd will learn the lesson of isolating the most expensive computation ever from the hot loop, then maybe find one day all they needed was maybe something to let the model build a context, and a text editor.

Til then wtf_are_these_abstractions.jpg

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

#179

Post by yoyohello13 »

throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…

The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make life better for people. What a crazy fucking concept right?

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

#180

Post by salawat »

aurareturn wrote: post #172
throwaw12 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste Probably that's the reason why some people are sure their job is still safe. Nature of job is changing rapidly

I totally get tech CEOs who threaten to fire their devs who do not embrace AI tools. I'm not a tech CEO but people who are anti-LLM for programming have no place on my team.

And you are paying for their tokens on top of their salary, right? Right?
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