Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by jakobnissen » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:21 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #148

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 no…

Juniors are not as capable of delegating to AI as seniors are. Delegation to AI requires code review, catching the AI when it doesn’t follow good engineering practices, and catching the AI in semantic mistakes due to the AIs lack of broader context. Those things are all hard for juniors.

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

#192

Post by apsurd » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:24 AM UTC

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…

AI dramatically increases velocity. But is velocity productivity? Productivity relative to which scope: you, the team, the department, the company?

The question is really, velocity _of what_?

I got this from a HN comment. It really hit for me because the default mentality for engineers is to build. The more you build the better. That's not "wrong" but in a business setting it is very much necessary but not sufficient. And so whenever we think about productivity, impact, velocity, whatever measure of output, the real question is _of what_? More code? More product surface area? That was never really the problem. In fact it makes life worse majority of the time.

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

#193

Post by eucyclos » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:25 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #144

hombre_fatal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's an example: https://eudaimonia-project.netlify.app/

I'm happy to sell it to you, though it is also free. I guided Claude to write this in three weeks, after never having written a line of JavaScript or set up a server before. I'm sure a better JavaScript programmer than I could do this in three weeks, but there's no way I could. I just had a cool idea for making advertising a force for good, and now I have a working version in beta.

I'd say it is better software, but better is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Claude's execution is average and always will be, that's a function of being a prediction engine. But I genuinely think the idea is better than how advertising works today, and this product would not exist at all if I had to write it myself. And I'm someone who has written code before, enough that I was probably a somewhat early adopter to this whole thing. Multiply that by all the people whose ideas get to live now, and I'm sure some ideas will prove to be better even with average execution. Like an llm, that's a function of statistics.

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

#194

Post by wasmainiac » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:29 AM UTC

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…

Because its failure rate is too high. Beyond boilerplate code and CRUD apps, if I let AI run freely on the projects I maintain, I spend more time fixing its changes than if I just did it myself. It hallucinates functionally, it designs itself into corners, it does not follow my instructions, it writes too much code for simple features.

It’s fine at replacing what stack overflow did nearly a decade ago, but that isn’t really an improvement from my baseline.

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

#195

Post by ehnto » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:34 AM UTC

yoyohello13 wrote: post #179

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 l…

That was my insight also. As a manager, you already have the headcount approved, and your people just allegedly got some significant percentage more productive. The first thought shouldn't be, great let's cut costs, it should be great now we finally have the bandwidth to deliver faster.

On a macro level, if you were in a rising economic tide, you would still be hiring, and turning those productivity gains into more business.

I wonder what the parallels are to past automations. When part producing companies moved from manual mills to CNC mills, did they fire a bunch of people or did they make more parts?

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

#196

Post by bandrami » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:34 AM UTC

eucyclos wrote: post #193

bandrami wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's an example: https://eudaimonia-project.netlify.app/ I'm happy to sell it to you, though it is also free. I guided Claude to write this in three weeks, after never having written a line of JavaScript or set up a server before. I'm sure a better JavaScript programmer than I could do this in three weeks, but there's no way I could. I just had a cool idea for making advertising a force for good, and now I have a w…

In glad you made something with it you wanted to make, and as a fan of Aristotle I'm always happy to see the word eudaimonia out there. Best of luck. That said I don't understand what this does or why I would want the tokens it mentions.

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

#197

Post by salawat » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:36 AM UTC

jaxn wrote: post #132

sdf2df wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Not a throaway, can't remember what my old account is called 2) Feel free to screen shot. Stick it on your desktop and set a reminder and check the state of the world in 12 months time. Job done fella.

For some of us, the world has already changed drastically. I am shipping more code, better code, less buggy code WAY faster than ever before. Big systemic changes for the better to our infra as well. There are days where I easily do 2 weeks worth of my best work ever. I totally understand that not everyone is having that experience. And yet until people live it, it seems they just discount the experience others are h…

Cool, and you're doing it on top of the single largest IP hijacking in the history of the world, a massive uptick in infra spend and energy burn to "just throw more compute" at it instead of figuring out how to throw "the right compute at it", cannibalization of the onboarding graduates, and losing having enough friction to keep you from running off after what's probably a bad idea on further analysis, because you can crank this out in a weekend. Last time somewhat did that, we got fucking JS. We still haven't rid ourselves of it.

Let us not lose sight of how we got here.

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

#198

Post by baq » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:36 AM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #182

salawat wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can do a lot with just $20 Codex CLI subscription. Tokens are cheap compared to the $20k we're paying for a dev each month.

Exactly, the $20 codex is so good value it’s irresponsible to not give it to everyone. Claude code $20 is otoh pointless, the limits are good enough for 10 mins of work twice per business day.

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

#199

Post by kiba » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:37 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #141

thewebguyd wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People younger than me are not even adults. I grew up during the dial up era and then the transition to broadband. I don't think software is indeterminate.

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

#200

Post by eucyclos » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:40 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #196

eucyclos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example: https://eudaimonia-project.netlify.app/ I'm happy to sell it to you, though it is also free. I guided Claude to write this in three weeks, after never having written a line of JavaScript or set up a server before. I'm sure a better JavaScript programmer than I could do this in three weeks, but there's no way I could. I just had a cool idea for making advertising a force for good, and now I have a w…

In glad you made something with it you wanted to make, and as a fan of Aristotle I'm always happy to see the word eudaimonia out there. Best of luck. That said I don't understand what this does or why I would want the tokens it mentions.

Yeah, I gotta make a video walkthrough. Its basically a goal tracker combined with an ad filter - write what you want out of life and block ads, it replaces them with ads that actually align with your long term goals instead of distracting from them. The tokens let you add ads to the network, though you also get some for using the goal tracker.