Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by kranke155 » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

uxcolumbo wrote: post #258

kranke155 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My exit is storytelling. I think that’s the only thing that will remain. I suspect humans will still want to hear stories about and from other humans.

There’s something about AIs that feels wrong for storytelling. I just don’t think people will want AIs to tell them stories. And if they do… Well, I believe in human storytelling.

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

#272

Post by adelie » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:11 AM UTC

tkgally wrote: post #235

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…

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.…

I'm not in translation, but a number of close friends are in the industry. Two trends I've noticed in the industry, which I think we're seeing mirrored in tech:

1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutting your contract than it loses in sales.

2. Translation jobs have been replaced with jobs proofreading machine translations, which pays peanuts (since AI is 'doing most of the work') but in fact takes almost as much effort as translating from scratch (since AI is often wrong in very subtle ways). The comparison to PR reviews makes itself.

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

#273

Post by kranner » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:15 AM UTC

freddref wrote: post #210

kranner wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is the same. There are modest gains compensating for lack of good documentation and the like, but the human bottlenecks in the process aren't useless bureaucracy. Whether or not a feature or a particular UX implementation of it makes sense, these things can't be skipped, sped up or handed off to any AI.

What are these bottlenecks specifically that you feel are essential? Am trying to compare this to reports that people are not reviewing code any more.

When features and their exact UI implementations are being developed, feedback and discussions around those things.

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

#274

Post by oytis » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:19 AM UTC

hobofan wrote: post #261

oytis wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> you would learn how things work and then write the code In a legacy codebase this may require learning a lot of things about how things work just to make small changes, which may be much less efficient.

I might still be naive about the industry, but if you don't know how the legacy codebase works, you might either delegate the change to someone else in the company who does, or, if there is no one left, use this opportunity to become the person who knows at least something about it.

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

#275

Post by Karrot_Kream » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:21 AM UTC

blackcatsec wrote: post #159

fnordpiglet wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer is pretty advanced in its use of these tools for development and it’s absolutely accelerated everything we do to the point we are exhausting roadmaps for six months in a few weeks. However I think very few companies are operating like this yet. It takes time for tools and techniques to make it out and Claude code alone isn’t enough. They are basically planning to let go of most of the product managers and…

Why are you excited for this? They’re not going to give YOU those peoples’ salaries. You will get none of it. In fact, it will drag your salary through the floor because of all the available talent.

I'm very confused about this. Salary is only one portion of your total compensation. The vast majority of tech companies offer equity in a company. The two ways to increase the FMV of your equity is: increase your equity stake or increase the value of the total equity available. Hitting the same goals with fewer people means your run rate is lower, which increases the value of your equity (the FMV prices in lower COGS for the same revenue.) Also, keeping on staff often means you want to offer them increased equity stakes as an employment package. Letting staff go means more of that available equity pool is available to distribute to remaining employees.

We aren't fungible workers in a low skill industry. And if you find yourself working in a tech company without equity: just don't, leave. Either find a new tech company or do something else altogether.

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

#276

Post by throwaw12 » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:22 AM UTC

oytis wrote: post #257

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…

> Isn't it a very inefficient way to learn things?

It is. But there are 2 things:

1. Do I want to learn that? (if I am coming back to this topic again in 5 months, knowledge accumulates, but there is a temptation to finish the thing quickly, because it is so boring to swim in huge legacy codebase)

2. How long it takes to grasp it and implement the solution? If I can complete it with AI in 2 days vs on my own in 2 weeks, I probably do not want to spend too much time on this thing

as I mentioned in other comments, this is exactly makes me worried about future of the work I will be doing, because there is no attachment to the product in my brain, no mental models being built, no muscles trained, it feels someone else's "work", because it explores the code, it writes the code. I just judge it when I get a task

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

#277

Post by tripledry » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:22 AM UTC

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…

Something I've been thinking about lately is if there is value in understanding the systems we produce and if we expected to?

If I can just vibe and shrug when someone asks why production is down globally then I'm sure the amount of features I can push out increases, but if I am still expected to understand and fix the systems I generate, I'm not convinced it's actually faster to vibe and then try to understand what's going on rather than thinking and writing.

In my experience the more I delegate to AI, the less I understand the results. The "slowness and thinking" might just be a feature not a bug, at times I feel that AI was simply the final straw that finally gave the nudge to lower standards.

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

#278

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:26 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #231

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #82

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?

I’m probably gonna do that (I use SwiftLint[0] -Note: I no longer use CocoaPods anything, these days. I wrote that, years ago.), but I tend to be quite strict, and didn’t want to be constantly interrupting myself, polishing turds. It was really kind of a joke.

I haven’t turned it on, yet, because of the velocity of the work, but I think I’ve found my stride.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/swiftlint/

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

#279

Post by joe_mamba » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:27 AM UTC

tripledry wrote: post #277

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…

Something I've been thinking about lately is if there is value in understanding the systems we produce and if we expected to? If I can just vibe and shrug when someone asks why production is down globally then I'm sure the amount of features I can push out increases, but if I am still expected to understand and fix the systems I generate, I'm not convinced it's actually faster to vibe and then try to understand what'…

>if I can just vibe and shrug when someone asks why production is down globally

You're pretty high up in the development, decision and value-addition chain, if YOU are the responsible go-to person for these questions. AI has no impact on your position.

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

#280

Post by joe_mamba » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

throw3847r7 wrote: post #243

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…

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"!

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

Why are you surprised customers don't like spending money on the items that don't add business value. Add to that QA, documentation, security audits, etc.

They want to ship stuff that brings in customers and revenue day one, everything else is a cost.