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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

#21

Post by ares623 »

simonw wrote: post #2

A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people meant early January due to the December break. General agents (OpenClaw, Anthropic Copilot, ChatGPT "Work") started working even later than that. This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using…

And this is why the labs cannot just "stop training and become profitable". I can't imagine they would like it if studies like this will actually become credible.

"Move fast like a blur so people can't see that you have no clothes"

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

#22

Post by bluecheese452 »

nicce wrote: post #16
usef- wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the amount of software increases tremendously

Seems like all companies think that their products are good enough and can’t offer more, as they always want to remove people instead of offering better and bigger products.

At some point your issue tracker or text editor is done. No need for it to automatically schedule your haircut as well.

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

#23

Post by ballsac »

raincole wrote: post #6
simonw wrote: post #2

A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people meant early January due to the December break. General agents (OpenClaw, Anthropic Copilot, ChatGPT "Work") started working even later than that. This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using…

Any research on the impact of AI would have been lagging indicators. It's not the researchers' fault[0], but the nature of a field moving at neck breaking speed. Remember there was a paper saying programmers were 20% slower with AI? [0]: well...

Well… what

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

#24

Post by nicce »

bluecheese452 wrote: post #22
nicce wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like all companies think that their products are good enough and can’t offer more, as they always want to remove people instead of offering better and bigger products.

At some point your issue tracker or text editor is done. No need for it to automatically schedule your haircut as well.

But the company that has a text editor that can read your mind is going to bankrupt you, as it is faster than typing

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

#25

Post by ballsac »

bloaf wrote: post #7

Organizational inertia is a real thing. There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI. A lot of the answer to "how much impact has AI had" comes down to "how much have we even attempted?" In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet.

> we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions

Yeah, sure you are. Report back when it happens.

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

#26

Post by bloaf »

nicce wrote: post #13
bloaf wrote: post #7

Organizational inertia is a real thing. There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI. A lot of the answer to "how much impact has AI had" comes down to "how much have we even attempted?" In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet.

> In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet. Interesting to see the impact in the long term when battle tested software gets replaced with vibecoded variants by non-programmers. Does it increase data breaches or quality actually goes up?

I think Sturgeon's law would tell us that everything will stay about the same.

But in reality, a lot of corporate software exists just because there are plenty of companies who are afraid of owning code. They don't want to maintain any in-house coding skills, and therefore are willing to buy literally any vaguely-relevant CRUD app that the manager heard about at the conference. I don't think replacing that class of software with vibe coded alternatives will be any worse, because the bar is starting on the floor.

There are entire software categories that consist entirely of code that is only one or two evolutionary steps away from some engineer's spreadsheet originally written in 1995. One fine example I work with has changed its backend database 3 times in the past 4 years. Their most recent decision to use mongodb came with the questionable decision to store json as a raw string literals complete with bizarre escaping inside a database literally designed to store json-shaped-objects.

I don't think Opus could store data that poorly, even if the end user prompting it didn't know what they were doing.

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

#27

Post by ballsac »

simonw wrote: post #2

A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people meant early January due to the December break. General agents (OpenClaw, Anthropic Copilot, ChatGPT "Work") started working even later than that. This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using…

> 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.

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

#28

Post by singpolyma3 »

01100011 wrote: post #8

I don't feel like reading an article that will probably be out of date in 6 months, but from what I've seen, if agents keep improving at this rate, 80% of SWEs are going to be looking for new careers in 5 years.

Or their career will just involve different tools and skills than they previously assumed

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

#29

Post by bloaf »

ballsac wrote: post #25
bloaf wrote: post #7

Organizational inertia is a real thing. There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI. A lot of the answer to "how much impact has AI had" comes down to "how much have we even attempted?" In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet.

> we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions Yeah, sure you are. Report back when it happens.

We got the thumbs up from management last week.

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

#30

Post by singpolyma3 »

ValentineC wrote: post #20
usef- wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the amount of software increases tremendously

I'm surprised the layoffs worldwide hasn't produced more entrepreneurs building their own software product.

Most people simply do not want to be entrepreneurs
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