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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

#321

Post by mikkupikku »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #21
sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #13

My speed shipping software increased but so did the demands of features by my company.

Or worse. I’ve heard stories from friends where leadership expects huge boosts in productivity due to LLMs, and perceive anything but an order of magnitude boost as incompetence or a refusal to adapt.

To be fair, some of it might genuinely be refusal to adapt? If we go by HN comments, there definitely do seem to be at least some people who are letting their hangups prevent them from learning this tech.

> It can't think, it just predicts likely tokens

> I can't believe this industry I once cherished for rational professionalism has fallen for nondeterministism

> Sorry, I'm just not going to participate in destroying the planet with these power hunger DCs

> All this stuff actually costs 10x what a human developer costs but they're dumping the service at a low price to make us dependent.

> It's a bubble, or a scam, in a year or two everything will go back to normal.

Tell me sentiments like these don't get bandied about by devs who want to keep doing things the way they know and like.

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

#323

Post by mikkupikku »

gentleman11 wrote: post #281

I know kids avoiding many high paying careers because of ai right now, and artists just giving up everywhere i look. Thanks, ai

Art should be done foremost because it's a passion for the artist. If you give up art just because you can no longer sell it, because you're being out competed by computer generated furry porn, then the world hasn't really lost anything of value.

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

#324

Post by thewhitetulip »

citrin_ru wrote: post #242
thewhitetulip wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand why they used Electron. But since AI is so amazing they should be using Claude to generate super optimized native software! They do claim that Claude is better than humans and AI is replacing programmers any day now.

So why aren't they using their own software to generate a linux optimized package for linux, a Swift software for MacOS and whatever windows uses.

That would be the best ad for AI. See, we use our own product!

But it doesn't happen.

So essentially by not generating custom binaries for every platform and using Electron they're doing one thing but saying something else. So maybe generating code isn't the #1 problem in the world!

Also I remember them saying that their engg write less code and they use Claude to write Claude. If Claude can be used to write Claude then why not use Claude to write OS specific binaries?!

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

#325

Post by ausbah »

mikkupikku wrote: post #323
gentleman11 wrote: post #281

I know kids avoiding many high paying careers because of ai right now, and artists just giving up everywhere i look. Thanks, ai

Art should be done foremost because it's a passion for the artist. If you give up art just because you can no longer sell it, because you're being out competed by computer generated furry porn, then the world hasn't really lost anything of value.

that seems a bit harsh. if you’re livelihood has been from making some sort of visual art for however many years and work has even drying up bc of AI, just doing a sudden career pivot is pretty difficult.

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

#326

Post by squirrellous »

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.

C++ dev here. It’s helping me just fine. Not as much as frontend folks but not far behind either.

It’s not quite at the place where LLMs can take over 100% coding, but give it a few more months.

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

#327

Post by thbb123 »

adelie wrote: post #272
tkgally wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cutti…

It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.

After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.

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

#328

Post by redhale »

YesBox wrote: post #137
willmadden wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build a new feature. If you aren't bogged down in bureaucracy it will happen much faster.

I dont use LLMs much. When I do, the experience always feels like search 2.0. Information at your fingertips. But you need to know exactly what you're looking for to get exactly what you need. The more complicated the problem, the more fractal / divergent outcomes there are. (Im forming the opinion that this is going to be the real limitations of LLMs). I recently used copilot.com to help solve a tricky problem for m…

> I don't use LLMs much

Sorry to be so blunt, but it's not surprising that you aren't able to get much value from these tools, considering you don't use them much.

Getting value from LLMs / agents is a skill like any other. If you don't practice it deliberately, you will likely be bad at it. It would be a mistake to confuse lack of personal skill for lack of tool capability. But I see people make this mistake all the time.

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

#329

Post by NathanielK »

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…

CNC machines drove down operator wages. Its similar to the translator example where the machine code is written by someone else, but the person running the machine still needs to understand. Simple pushing the go button is dangerous, being able to adapt is critical.

Jobs where a machinist is in charge of large chunks of the process are rarer. Large shop will have one person setting up many machines to maximize throughput.

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

#330

Post by apercu »

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…

I think a lot of companies have ineffective ways to measure productivity, poor management (e.g., people who were IC's then promoted to management but have no management training or experience), incentives aren't necessarily aligned between orgs and staff, so people end up with a perverse "more headcount" means I'm better than Sandy over there. Leadership and vision have been rare in my professional life (though the corporate-owned media celebrates mediocrity in leadership all the time with puff pieces).

Once you get to a certain size company, this means a lot of bloat. Heck, I've seen small(ish) companies that had as many managers and administrators as ICs.

But You're not wrong, I'm just pointing out how an org that has 4k people can lay off a few hundred with modest impact of the financials (though extensive impact on morale).

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