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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

#331

Post by zozbot234 »

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 am terrified about what's coming

Why? This is great. AI fixing up huge legacy codebases is just taking the jobs humans would never want to do.

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

#332

Post by gurghet »

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…

Basically it tricks you into making the code less maintainable, so while it seems to boost productivity, it's just delaying huge failures.

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

#333

Post by apercu »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #229
aurareturn wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do a lot with just $20 Codex CLI subscription. Tokens are cheap compared to the $20k we're paying for a dev each month.

Amazes me that people pay 20k a month for a dev rather than paying 2k a month for one in Poland or 1k a month for one from India There’s obviously a benefit of paying higher rates for US programmers, but does that benefit change when llms are thrown into the mix

My experience with outsourcing over 20+ years (Russia, Romania, India, South America) is that you just move money around when you do it.

It takes more planning, more specification, more coordination, more QA. The quality is almost always worse, and remediation takes forever. So your BA, QA and PM time goes way up and absorbs any cost savings.

YMMV.

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

#334

Post by redhale »

bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

I don't doubt your sincerity. But this represents an absolutely bonkers disparity compared to the reality I'm experiencing.

I'm not sure what to say. It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility. There are a lot of logical reasons to be against the mass adoption of automobiles, but "lack of effectiveness as a form of personal mobility" is not one of them.

Hearing things like this does give me a little hope though, as I think it means the total collapse of the software engineering industry is probably still a few years away, if so many companies are still so far behind the curve.

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

#335

Post by layer8 »

throwaw12 wrote: post #211
QuercusMax wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels very much like leading a team of junior engineers or even interns who are very fast but have no idea about why we're doing anything. You have to understand the problems you're trying to solve and describe the solutions in a way they can be implemented. It's not going to be written exactly like you would do it, but that's ok - because you care about the results of the solution and not its precise implementati…

> It feels very much like leading a team of junior engineers or even interns who are very fast but have no idea about why we're doing anything Yes, yes! And this is problem for me, because of the pace, my brain muscles are not developing enough compared to when I was doing those things myself. before, I was changing my mind while implementing the code, because I see more things while typing, and digging deeper, but n…

There’s some hope that the industry will realize that managing clueless LLMs at high pace isn’t sustainable and leads to worse results, and some middle ground has to be found. Or we will reach AGI, so AI won’t be clueless anymore and really take your engineering job.

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

#336

Post by laserlight »

keeda wrote: post #125
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine instead of > Now imagine > Imagine what that would do Imagine if your grandma had wheels! She'd be a bicycle. Now imagine she had an engine. She could be a motorcycle! Unfortunately for grandma, she lives in reality and is not actually a motorcycle, which would be cool as hell. Our imagination can only take us so far. To more substantively reply to your longer linked comment: your hypothesis is that people…

> No productivity studies of individual developers tackling tasks show a 10x speedup; results tend to be anywhere from +20% to minus 20%. The only study showing a -20% came back and said, "we now think it's +9% - +38%, but we can't prove rigorously because developers don't want to work without AI anymore": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142078 Even at the time of the original study, most other rigorous studie…

> we now think it's +9% - +38%

If you are referring to the following quote [0], you are off by a sign:

> we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%.

[0] https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/

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

#337

Post by rhubarbtree »

bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

This is not a good thing. If you’re not being exposed and skilling up already, you’re likely to be in the camp that is washed away.

If you can’t be exposed to it in your day job, start using Claude opus in the evening so you know what’s coming.

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

#338

Post by rhubarbtree »

kdheiwns wrote: post #97
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

Yep. All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago, where I could search for something and find actually relevant and helpful info quickly. I've seen lots of people say AI can basically code a project for them. Maybe it can, but that seems to heavily depend on the field. Other than boilerplate code or very generic projects, it's a step above useless imo when it comes to gam…

Are you using Claude Opus 4.5/6?

If not, then you’re not close to the cutting edge.

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

#339

Post by mchaver »

kdheiwns wrote: post #97
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

Yep. All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago, where I could search for something and find actually relevant and helpful info quickly. I've seen lots of people say AI can basically code a project for them. Maybe it can, but that seems to heavily depend on the field. Other than boilerplate code or very generic projects, it's a step above useless imo when it comes to gam…

> All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago

So the good old days before search engines were drowning with ads and dark patterns. My assumption is big LLMs will go in the same direction after market capture is complete and they need to start turning a profit. If we are lucky the open source models can keep up.

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

#340

Post by ixsploit »

ragebol wrote: post #295
jakobnissen wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Juniors are not as capable of delegating to AI as seniors are. Delegation to AI requires code review, catching the AI when it doesn’t follow good engineering practices, and catching the AI in semantic mistakes due to the AIs lack of broader context. Those things are all hard for juniors.

Isn't that the point, to be able to learn that. The craft changes with all these AI helpers, so the juniors have to also catch up/change with it. Or there won't b any seniors in due time.

It's really not an easy problem to solve.

You would hire someone with the expactation that they learn, but you also need to pay them. New hires always slow the team down. And currently you wouldn't even get much out of them, as you can delegate those tasks to AI.

Additionally you can not even be sure that the junior will learn or just throw stuff at AI. The amount of vibecoded Code I have to review at the moment from Seniors is stunning.

So yeah, the market needs Seniors, but there is basically no incentive for a company to hire a Junior at the moment. It's just easier and cheaper to pay a bit better than the market and hire Seniors then to train a Junior for years.

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