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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

#241

Post by leptons »

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…

>I am shipping more code, better code, less buggy code WAY faster than ever before.

It's clearly relative. For all we know you're a crap coder and AI is now your crutch. We have no evidence that with AI you are as good as an average developer with a fair amount of experience. And even if you do have a fair amount of experience, that doesn't mean you're a good coder.

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

#242

Post by citrin_ru »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #117
behnamoh wrote: post #5

I don't think there's been much of an impact, really. Those who know how to use AI just got tangentially more productive (because why would you reveal your fake 10x productivity boost so your boss hands you 10x more tasks to finish?), and those w/o AI knowledge stayed the way they were. The real impact is for indie-devs or freelancers but that usually doesn't account for much of the GDP.

If everyone was 10x productive then we would have had native Claude Code app for each platform. Instead they are using Electron and calling it a day. Very ironic isn't it? If AI is so good then why don't we get native software from Anthropic?

Shift from quality to velocity started not yesterday but AI only accelerated this shift. Majority of comments here tell how fast Claude can generate code, not how good the result is. Electron is the prefect fit for move fast mindset. It is likely that Claude developers don’t see electron as problem at all.

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

#243

Post by throw3847r7 »

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…

You need certain company culture, to be able to scale up, and to capture this value. Most companies can not just add new developers.

AI needs documentation, automation, integration tests... It works very well for remote first company, but not for in-face informal grinding approach.

Just year ago, client told me to delete integration tests, because "they ran too long"!

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

#244

Post by jpollock »

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 last time I tried AI, I tested it with a stopwatch.

The group used feature flags...

    if (a) {
       // new code
    } else {
       // old code
    }

    void testOff() {
       disableFlag(a);
       // test it still works
    }
    
    void testOn() {
        enableFlag(a);
        // test it still works
    }
However, as with any cleanup, it doesn't happen. We have thousands of these things lying around taking up space. I thought "I can give this to the AI, it won't get bored or complain."

I can do one flag in ~3minutes. Code edit, pr prepped and sent.

The AI can do one in 10mins, but I couldn't look away. It kept trying to use find/grep to search through a huge repo to find symbols (instead of the MCP service).

Then it ignored instructions and didn't clean up one or the other test, left unused fields or parameters and generally made a mess.

Finally, I needed to review and fix the results, taking another 3-5 minutes, with no guarantee that it compiled.

At that point, a task that takes me 3 minutes has taken me 15.

Sure, it made code changes, and felt "cool", but it cost the company 5x the cost of not using the AI (before considering the token cost).

Even worse, the CI/CD system couldn't keep up the my individual velocity of cleaning these up, using an automated tool? Yeah, not going to be pleasant.

However, I need to try again, everyone's saying there was a step change in December.

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

#245

Post by superfrank »

ehnto wrote: post #195
yoyohello13 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I'm an EM as well and I've been telling my teams for a while now that I think they really only need to start worrying once our backlog starts going down instead of up. Generally, I still agree with that (and your) sentiment when you look at the long term, but in the short term, I think all of the following arguments can be made in favor of layoffs:

- AI tools are expensive so until the increased productivity translates to increased revenue we need to make room in the budget

- We expect the bottlenecks in our org to move from writing code to something else (PM or design or something) so we're cutting SWEs in anticipation of needing to move that budget elsewhere.

- We anticipate the skillsets needed by developers in the AI world to be fundamentally different from what they are now that it's cheaper to just lay people off, run as lean as possible, and rehire people with the skills we want in a year or two than it is to try and retrain.

I don't necessarily agree with those arguments (especially the last one), but I think they're somewhat valid arguments

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

#246

Post by ako »

throwaw12 wrote: post #185
yoyohello13 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Just do more work, get more done That's one of the reasons why I am terrified, because it can lead to burn out, and I personally don't like to babysit bunch of agents, because the output doesn't feel "mine", when its not "mine" I don't feel ownership. And I am deliberately hitting the brake from time to time not to increase expectations, because I feel like driving someone else's car while not understanding fully h…

I'm currently a product manager (was a software engineer and technical architect before), so i already lost the feeling of ownership of code. But just like when you're doing product management with a team of software engineers, testers, and UXers, with AI you can still feel ownership of the feature or capability you're shipping. So from my perspective, nothing changes regarding ownership.

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

#247

Post by 20k »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #140
20k wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it odd the universal assumption that AI is going to be good for productivity The loss of skills, complete loss of visibility and experience with the codebase, and the complete lack of software architecture design, seems like a massive killer in the long term I have a feeling that we're going to see productivity with AI drop through the floor

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…

And now you have no idea how any of the code works

AI writes bad software by virtue of it being written by the AI, not you. No actual team member understands what's going on with the code. You can't interrogate the AI for its decision making. It doesn't understand the architecture its built. There's nobody you can ask about why anything is built the way it is - it just exists

Its interesting watching people forget that the #1 most important thing is developers who understand a codebase thoroughly. Institutional knowledge is absolutely key to maintaining a codebase, and making good decisions in the long term

Its always been possible to trade long term productivity for short term gains like this. But now you simply have no idea what's going on in your code, which is an absolute nightmare for long term productivity

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

#248

Post by staticassertion »

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…

When it comes to novel work, LLMs become "fast typers" for me and little more. They accelerate testing phases but that's it. The bar for novelty isn't very high either - "make this specific system scale in a way that others won't" isn't a thing an LLM can ever do on its own, though it can be an aid.

LLMs also are quite bad for security. They can find simple bugs, but they don't find the really interesting ones that leverage "gap between mental model and implementation" or "combination of features and bugs" etc, which is where most of the interesting security work is imo.

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

#249

Post by asadm »

staticassertion wrote: post #248
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…

When it comes to novel work, LLMs become "fast typers" for me and little more. They accelerate testing phases but that's it. The bar for novelty isn't very high either - "make this specific system scale in a way that others won't" isn't a thing an LLM can ever do on its own, though it can be an aid. LLMs also are quite bad for security. They can find simple bugs, but they don't find the really interesting ones that l…

I think your analysis is a bit outdated these days or you may be holding it wrong.

I am doing novel work with codex but it does need some prompting ie. exploring possibilities from current codebase, adding papers to prompt etc.

For security, I think I generally start a new thread before committing to review from security pov.

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

#250

Post by staticassertion »

asadm wrote: post #249
staticassertion wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to novel work, LLMs become "fast typers" for me and little more. They accelerate testing phases but that's it. The bar for novelty isn't very high either - "make this specific system scale in a way that others won't" isn't a thing an LLM can ever do on its own, though it can be an aid. LLMs also are quite bad for security. They can find simple bugs, but they don't find the really interesting ones that l…

I think your analysis is a bit outdated these days or you may be holding it wrong. I am doing novel work with codex but it does need some prompting ie. exploring possibilities from current codebase, adding papers to prompt etc. For security, I think I generally start a new thread before committing to review from security pov.

You can do novel work with an LLM. You can. The LLM can't. It can be an aid - exploring papers, gathering information, helping to validate, etc. It can't do the actual novel part, fundamentally it is limited to what it is trained on.

If you are relying on the LLM and context, then unless your context is a secret your competitor is only ever one prompt behind you. If you're willing to pursue true novelty, you need a human and you can leap beyond your competition.

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