I'm worried it might get bad • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#201

Post by righthand » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 8:59 PM UTC

Sebb767 wrote: post #157

righthand wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am senior developer and have easily and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. Nothing has changed for me and my team mates who do use it are slower than me and often don’t know what the Pr actually does. You chose to invest in the downward career slope. That’s why your opinion has changed. If you continued to resist it you wouldn’t be looking to remove yourself from the auditing/coding po…

> and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. I'm not sure that's much of an achievement, to be honest. If you tried it and it turned out to be not useful for you, fine, I'm on your side. But refusing to try for the sake of it seems backwards. I mean, then why use CI, version control and those fancy IDEs anyway? Notepad is a perfectly cromulent text editor (and what is code, if not text, anyw…

I never said I didn’t try it. You said that.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#202

Post by readthenotes1 » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

adonese wrote: post #55

I can see the author's point but im failing to link it to ai. The ai im using now is a good as a productivity booster for otherwise already well defined problem-- and decently good engineers. I dont think the layoffs are due to that. It is affecting entry jobs rather badly, but that (anecdotely) constitutes minority.

ADP's June employment report was pretty dismal, much worse than the blowout BLS report that came out the next day. It was more in line with the revision that came out 2 months later.

The ADP Chief economist said that the problem wasn't that companies are laying off, is that they aren't replacing attrition - - that they can get the same work done without doing so and hinted at AI productivity boost as a reason.

I know it's a raging battle here, but just simply having a search engine that works again is a huge productivity gain...

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#203

Post by readthenotes1 » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #67

CalRobert wrote: post #36

Surprised he didn’t also mention US national debt and servicing it as interest rates rise.

Why would he? I’ve been hearing concerns about national debt my whole life (including the 80s when interest rates were a hell of a lot higher than now), and I’m retirement age. I’m not saying those chickens won’t eventually come home to roost, but probably not anytime soon. The U. S. has become quite skilled at giving that tin can a swift kick down the road.

Because paying the interest on the debt is now the fourth leading cost of the federal government, and since we are running an ever-increasing deficit, it will only grow.

The chickens are flocking around the roost now.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#204

Post by yencabulator » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

evklein wrote: post #122

fusslo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this lately. While we engineers understand how to judge and evaluate AI solutions, I am not sure Business Owners (BO) care. BO's are ok with a certain percentage of bugs/rework/inefficiency/instability. And the tradeoff of eliminating (or marginalizing) Engineering may be worth the increased percentage of unfavorable outcomes.

Probably depends on BO/stakeholder as well. B2B solution that has a low risk of killing anyone? Maybe fuck it, let the model have its way. Technology that controls software that keeps people alive, controls infrastructure, etc., uhhhh I don't think so. I guess we're just waiting for the first news story of someone's pacemaker going haywire and shocking them to death because the monitoring code was vibed through to pr…

Think more business risk than risk to humans.

B2B AI LLM vibe-SaaS that has a 10% chance to become profitable and a 10% chance to gift away all money invested into the business ever while leaving founders on the receiving end of 100 lawsuits.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#205

Post by AstroBen » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 9:28 PM UTC

righthand wrote: post #198

AstroBen wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is investing in something that improves my productivity and output quality a downward career slope? Continuing to use a hand saw when there are power tools available seems like the downward slope.. If AI gets to a point where I'm fully able to be removed from auditing/coding positions.. well there won't be any coding positions left for anyone > often don’t know what the Pr actually does this is on them for being…

> How is investing in something that improves my productivity and output quality a downward career slope? > I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code You don’t think relying on a system you yourself are predicting will replace you isn’t investing in a downward slope. Wait until you find out Llms are helping suppress your wages. > this is on them for being lazy. Just like you g…

Not using LLMs doesn't make them go away. Whether they suppress wages or replace anyone is completely out of my control. Avoiding them just means I'd be producing below my potential

> you became lazy about writing code

I haven't, though. I still do the same amount of work except now I get more done. Now more of my energy goes into architecture, testing, specs, making sure it's built well instead of the lower level wiring things together

I use them for their perfect memory and as a creativity buddy, not for them to think for me

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#206

Post by ivape » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

Okay, so you don't make anymore money and die homeless. Whatever. To have to constantly worry about this for eternity is such a waste of life.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#207

Post by lossolo » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 10:03 PM UTC

otikik wrote: post #46

> We start to see unrest and/or riots against "the rich" because there are no jobs, and people are being evicted I am surprised this has not already happened. The combination of rampant inequality and lax gun laws (in some states) is very explosive.

It’s a cycle that is always interrupted by war or revolution. The wealthy in the US do not understand what a revolution is, they believe that laws written on paper are as unbreakable as the laws of physics. Laws only function when the vast majority of society agrees to abide by them. Once people have nothing left to lose, it will be too late.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#208

Post by alexsmirnov » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 10:15 PM UTC

thisisit wrote: post #139

There has been convergence of many events: 1. The tax deduction change where costs couldn't be classified as an expense. 2. The saturation in people joining coding. At one point in time everyone wanted to be part of a bootcamp to earn that sweet coding salary. 3. Rising interest rates means the era of borrowing at low costs is over. etc. AI is last on my list for the reasons that people are being laid off. And its no…

AI is on the top of rumors, but it's not a real cause of layoffs, just a nuance. And a great excuse. "Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work" is highly exaggerated. Only AI tools approved for employee are Gemini, NotebookLM, Cursor, Warp 2, plus a few other. AI generated github PR review is a joke most of the times, and Slack AI is like a slot machine: sometimes got right, mostly not.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#209

Post by fusslo » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 10:27 PM UTC

readthenotes1 wrote: post #199

fusslo wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the ‘works fine on my machine’ is usually said by jr/inept devs I havent heard that around serious engineers

Isn't that the no true Scotsman fallacy? I'm overjoyed that you only encountered serious "engineers". My professional experience is that at least 3/4 of the people riding software should not be because they write horrible code horribly. But since I live in a place where you have to pass licensing exams to call yourself an "engineer", Maybe my experience is different than yours

Hi, you did not understand what I wrote.

> I'm overjoyed that you only encountered serious "engineers".

Nowhere did I say this. At all. I said I havent heard 'works on my machine' said by serious engineers. That does not mean that I have ONLY met serious engineers.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#210

Post by yencabulator » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 10:31 PM UTC

Nevermark wrote: post #116

xlbuttplug2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate at which AI is capable of producing code is intractable for humans to deal with. Right now the bottleneck is human reviewers. If AI ever becomes effective at generating provably correct code, it's joever.

But will humans understand the proofs? Oh…

The proof either passes the SAT solver in a reasonable amount of time, or it doesn't.