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

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

#251

Post by Karrot_Kream »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #227
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend reading Wikipedia and talking to LLMs to get this one. Order values do follow power-law distributions (you're probably looking for an exponential or a Zipf distribution.) You want to ask how to perform a statistical test using these distributions. I'm a fan of Bayesian techniques here, but it's up to you if you want to use a frequentist approach. If you can follow some basic calculus you can follow the ma…

Thanks for the suggestions! I didn't want to do the math myself, but I did take your suggestion and found some articles discussing ways to make it work even with a non-normal distribution: - https://cxl.com/blog/outliers/ - https://www.blastx.com/insights/the-best-revenue-significanc... - (online tool to calculate significance) https://www.blastx.com/rpv-calculator I'm not checking their math, but the articles make s…

One heuristic I like to use when thinking about this question (and I honestly wish the answer space here were less emotionally charged, so we could all learn from each other) is that: LLMs need a human to understand the shape of the solution to check the LLM's work. In fields that I have confirmed expertise in, I can easily nudge and steer the LLM and only skim its output quickly to know if it's right or wrong. In fields I don't, I first ask the LLM for resources (papers, textbooks, articles, etc) and familiarize myself with some initial literature first. I then work with the LLMs slowly to make a solution. I've found that to work well so far.

(I also just love statistics and think it's some of the most applicable math to everyday life in everything from bus arrival times to road traffic to order values to financial markets.)

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

#252

Post by dm270 »

boxedemp wrote: post #103

I think it really depends what you're working on. I do some consulting and found it's not helping the C++ devs as much it's helping the html/js devs.

Finally someone that says it. I think it’s a multi-variable problem as it handles languages differently. Also working in legacy code can be worse more often than not.

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

#253

Post by siva7 »

truetraveller wrote: post #163
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…

You were probably deficient in RESEARCH skills before. No offense to you, since I was also like this once. LLMs research and put the results on the plate. Yes, for people who were deficient in research skills, I can see 2-3x improvements. Note1: I have "expert" level research skills. But LLMs still help me in research, but the boost is probably 1.2x max. But Note2: By research, I mean googling, github search, forum s…

Ok Mr. Expert Level Researcher, go back and read the comment of parent again to find out that it has nothing to do with deficiency in research skills.

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

#254

Post by kranke155 »

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…

I work in commercials.

We can now make 1$ million dollar commercials with 100,000$ or less. So a 90% reduction in costs - if we use AI.

The issue is they don’t look great. AI isn’t that great at some key details.

But the agencies are really trying to push for it.

They think this is the way back to the big flashy commercials of old. Budgets are lower than ever, and shrinking.

Big issue here is really the misunderstanding of cause - budgets are lower, because advertising has changed in general (TV is less and less important ) and a lot of studies showed that advertising is actually not all that effective.

So they are grabbing onto a lifeboat. But I’m worried there’s no land.

I’ve planned my exit.

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

#255

Post by nl »

falkensmaize wrote: post #122
jiggawatts wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle. Gemini 3 and Opus 4.6 were the "woah, they're actually useful now!" moment for me. I keep saying to colleagues that it's like a rising tide. Initially the AIs were lapping around our ankles, now…

I don’t see definitive evidence that there is some kind of Moore’s law for model improvement though. Just because this year’s model performs better than last year’s model doesn’t mean next year’s model will be another leap. Most of the big improvements this year seem to be around tooling - I still see Opus 4.6 (which is my daily driver at work) making lots of mistakes.

Things like the METR benchmark aren't sufficient?

I mean Moore's law is just a rule of thumb but the curve fits METR just as well..

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

#256

Post by KronisLV »

aurareturn wrote: post #225
monksy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to the company that I was just at that cut Intelij licenses as cost cutting measures.

If they really want to cut cost, fire the worst dev on the team and use that money to give everyone a Codex subscription.

Or better yet, fire the managers or bean counters that think decreasing everyone’s productivity is good for long term savings.

I’m reminded of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

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

#257

Post by oytis »

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…

> I have stopped writing code, occasionally I jump into the changes proposed by LLM and make manual edits if it is feasible, otherwise I revert changes and ask it to generate again but based on my learnings from the past rejected output

Isn't it a very inefficient way to learn things? Like, normally, you would learn how things work and then write the code, refining your knowledge while you are writing. Now you don't learn anything in advance, and only do so reluctantly when things break? In the end there is a codebase that no one knows how it works.

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

#258

Post by uxcolumbo »

kranke155 wrote: post #254
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…

I work in commercials. We can now make 1$ million dollar commercials with 100,000$ or less. So a 90% reduction in costs - if we use AI. The issue is they don’t look great. AI isn’t that great at some key details. But the agencies are really trying to push for it. They think this is the way back to the big flashy commercials of old. Budgets are lower than ever, and shrinking. Big issue here is really the misunderstand…

Advertisement is not that effective in general or just for certain channels, i.e. TV?

Also what are you existing to?

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

#259

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

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…

I don't want to generalize from my specific situation too much, but I want to offer an anecdote from my neck of the woods. On my personal sub, I agree it is kinda crazy the kind of projects I can get into now with little to no prior knowledge.

On the other hand, our corporate AI is.. not great atm. It was briefly kinda decent and then suddenly it kinda degraded. Worst case is, no one is communicating with us so we don't know what was changed. It is possible companies are already trying to 'optimize'.

I know it is not exactly what you are asking. You are saying capability is there, but I am personally starting to see a crack in corporate willingness to spend.

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

#260

Post by throwaw12 »

superfrank wrote: post #245
ehnto wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 translat…

I see similar arguments and I don't agree as well, here is why:

> rehire people with the skills we want in a year or two than it is to try and retrain.

before that future comes your company might become obsolete already, because you have lost your market share to new entrants

> We expect the bottlenecks in our org to move from writing code to something else

I would love to tell them, hey lets leverage current momentum and build, when those times come, we offer existing people with accumulated knowledge to retrain to a new type of work, if they think they're not good fit, they can leave, if they're willing, give them a chance, invest in people, make them feel safe and earn trust and loyalty from them

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

1. Its not that expensive: 150$/seat/month -> 5 lunches? or maybe squeeze it from Sales personnel traveling with Business class?

2. By the time increased productivity is realized by others, company who resisted could be so far behind, that they won't be able to afford hiring engineers with those skillsets, if they think 150$ is expensive now, I am sure they will say "What??? 350k$ for this engineer?, no way, I will instead hire contractors"

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