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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

#231

I'm working on a project right now, that is heavily informed by AI. I wouldn't even try it, if I didn't have the help. It's a big job. However, I can't imagine vibe-coders actually shipping anything. I really have to ride herd on the output from the LLM. Sometimes, the error is PEBCAK, because I erred, when I prompted, and that can lead to very subtle issues. I no longer review every line, but I also have not yet got…

Is there a reason you don’t use a hook to make all code pass your linters before you look at it?

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

#232

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…

You would need to expand your capacity to find and define the work. I imagine that would be a major challenge.

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

#233
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To deal with the problems where there is ambiguity in the problem and the approach to solving it. Not everything is a basic decision tree. Humans aren't deterministic either, the way we woukd approach a problem is probably different. Is one of us right or wrong? We're generally just focused on end results. Maybe 2 years ago Ai was doing random stuff and we got all those funny screenshots of dumb gemini answers. The i…

Two weeks ago I asked a frontier model to list five mammals without "e" in their name and number four was "otter"

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

#234
I'm not really concerned about the availability of SW dev jobs, but I am concerned about the quality of them. For many companies the velocity (and quality, much to my chagrin) of the code you can produce doesn't really matter. What matters more is whether or not you're building the right thing, and too often you're not. These companies also tend to keep more headcount than seems justified, I think because they are gambling that a few employees are going to do something awesome but they don't know which ones. As AI gets better what will these companies do? I don't think they will fire a bunch of SW devs. I think instead they will embrace the slop and just take more shots, and crazier shots. It doesn't just give us something to do, it also gives a bunch of PHBs something to do.

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

#235

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…

I suspect it depends partly on how locked each individual is into a particular type of work, both skill-wise and temperamentally.

To give an example from a field where LLMs started causing employment worries earlier than software development: translation. Some translators made their living doing the equivalent of routine, repetitive coding tasks: translating patents, manuals, text strings for localized software, etc. Some of that work was already threatened by pre-LLM machine translation, despite its poor quality; context-aware LLMs have pretty much taken over the rest. Translators who were specialized in that type of work and too old or inflexible to move into other areas were hurt badly.

The potential demand for translation between languages has always been immense, and until the past few years only a tiny portion of that demand was being met. Now that translation is practically free, much more of that demand is being met, though not always well. Few people using an app or browser extension to translate between languages have much sense of what makes a good translation or of how translation can go bad. Professional translators who are able to apply their higher-level knowledge and language skills to facilitate intercultural communication in various ways can still make good money. But it requires a mindset change that can be difficult.

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

#236

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…

Because hiring less while getting more done increases margins. Your company is not for profit so doesnt care about margins. Others do.

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

#237

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…

That's my experience too. It's okay at a few things that save me some typing, but it isn't really going to do the hard work for me. I also still need to spend significant amounts of time figuring out what it did wrong and correcting it. And that's frustrating. I don't make those mistakes, and I really dislike being led down bad paths. If "code smells" are bad, then "AI" is a rotting corpse.

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

#238

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’m currently working across like 5 projects (was 4 last week but you know how it is). I now do more in days than others might in a week. Yesterday a colleague didn’t quite manage to implement a loading container with a Vue directive instead of DOM hacks, it was easier for me to just throw AI at the problem and produced a working and tested solution and developer docs than to have a similarly long meeting and have th…

>I now do more in days than others might in a week.

I've always done more in days than others might in a week. YMMV.

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

#239
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep requirement gathering takes forever Then validation takes forever Writing code is lesser problem than figuring out what we want when we want, and to get stakeholders at one place.

Finally, a fella who gets it. Apple has already shown this decades ago - they got the iPhone and iPod developed and out the door in relatively short-time scales given the impact of the products on the world. Once you know what you want, exactly what you want, things moves fast - really fast.

I've seen biz team taking 3 4 months to do UAT

But sure let's buy 200$ per month claude to ship things faster lol

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

#240
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Are you hiring?

My friend used to say that, and he got quietly fired and outsourced because now someone in India can use ChatGPT to produce similar code, lol. IMO AI will make 70-80% job obsolete for sure.

>now someone in India can use ChatGPT to produce similar code,

lol, that sounds like a disaster for the codebase.

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