Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 584 posts

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

#351

Post by KronisLV »

Madmallard wrote: post #349
vb7132 wrote: post #347

I was at a big tech for last 10 years, quit my job last month - I feel 50x more productive outside than inside. Here is my take on AI's impact on productivity: First let's review what are LLMs objectively good at: 1. Writing boiler plate code 2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration) 3. Learning new things: Summarizing knowledge, explaining concepts 4. Documentation, menial tasks At a big tech…

2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration) I have a game written in XNA 100% of the code is there, including all the physics that I hand-wrote. All the assets are there. I tried to get Gemini and Claude to do it numerous times, always with utter failure of epic proportions with anything that's actually detailed. 1 - my transition from the lobby screen into gameplay? 0% replicated on all attempt…

I crave to see people saying "Here's the repo btw: ..." and others trying out porting it over, just so we see all of the ways how AI fails (and how each model does) and maybe in the middle there a few ways to improve its odds. Until it eventually gets included in training data, a bit like how LLMs are oddly good at making SVGs of pelicans on bicycles nowadays.

And then, maybe someone slightly crazy comes along and tries seeing how much they can do with regular codegen approaches, without any LLMs in the mix, but also not manual porting.

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

#352

Post by bandrami »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #338
kdheiwns wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Until two weeks from now, at which point you'll be hopelessly obsolete. I've seen this treadmill before and am happy to let it settle down first.

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

#353

Post by ygouzerh »

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 feel that it differs a lot between companies. It seems like corporate are having less an impact for now, as external innovation needs tailoring to adapt to its needs (e.g a security solution that needs 3 month projects to be tailored to the company tech stack), whereas startups and smaller firms see the most of the impact so far.

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

#354

Post by motbus3 »

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 think you can more stuff done earlier but the quality is not good or it doesn't work as expected if you tinker with it enough. Fixing the issues from the generated code usually doesn't work at all

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

#355

Post by tasuki »

redhale wrote: post #334
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 g…

> It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility.

I prefer walking or cycling and often walk about 8km a day around town, for both mobility and exercise. (Other people's) automobiles make my experience worse, not better.

I'm sure there's an analogy somewhere.

(Sure, automobiles improve the speed of mobility, if that's the only thing you care about...)

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

#356

Post by staticassertion »

bdangubic wrote: post #315
staticassertion wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

of course you need a human but do not need nearly as many humans as there are currently in the labor force

Maybe, but I'm not really convinced. LLMs make some aspects of the job faster, mainly I don't have to type anymore. But... that was always a relatively small portion of the job. Design, understanding constraints, maintaining and operating code, deciding what to do, what not to do, when to do it, gaining consensus across product, eng, support, and customers, etc. I do all of those things as an engineer. Coding faster is really awesome, it's so nice, and I can whip up POCs for the frontend etc now, and that's accelerating development... but that's it.

The reality is that a huge portion of my time is spent doing similar work and what LLMs largely do is pick up the smaller tasks or features that I may not have prioritized otherwise. Revolutionary in one sense, completely banal and a really minor part of my job in many others.

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

#357

Post by demorro »

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…

It makes me wonder if the majority of all-in on AI folks are quite young and never experienced pre-enshittification search.

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

#358

Post by aurareturn »

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

Makes no sense because LLMs makes it far less worth it to outsource developers.

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

#359

Post by svara »

vb7132 wrote: post #347

I was at a big tech for last 10 years, quit my job last month - I feel 50x more productive outside than inside. Here is my take on AI's impact on productivity: First let's review what are LLMs objectively good at: 1. Writing boiler plate code 2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration) 3. Learning new things: Summarizing knowledge, explaining concepts 4. Documentation, menial tasks At a big tech…

Yes, throughput is determined by the bottleneck and above a certain organization size, the bottleneck often is coordination costs.
Post reply on HN