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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

#361

Post by exfalso »

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…

It's failing when there is no data in the training set, and there are no patterns to replicate in the existing code base.

I can give you many, many examples of where it failed for me:

1. Efficient implementation of Union-Find: complete garbage result 2. Spark pipelines: mostly garbage 3. Fuzzer for testing something: half success, non-replicateable ("creative") part was garbage. 4. Confidential Computing (niche): complete garbage if starting from scratch, good at extracting existing abstractions and replicating existing code.

Where it succeeds: 1. SQL queries 2. Following more precise descriptions of what to do 3. Replicating existing code patterns

The pattern is very clear. Novel things, things that require deeper domain knowledge, coming up with the to-be-replicated patterns themselves, problems with little data don't work. Everything else works.

I believe the reason why there is a big split in the reception is because senior engineers work on problems that don't have existing solutions - LLMs are terrible at those. What they are missing is that the software and the methodology must be modified in order to make the LLM work. There are methodical ways to do this, but this shift in the industry is still in baby shoes, and we don't yet have a shared understanding of what this methodology is.

Personally I have very strong opinions on how this should be done. But I'm urging everyone to start thinking about it, perhaps even going as far as quitting if this isn't something people can pursue at their current job. The carnage is coming:/

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

#362

Post by tasuki »

eucyclos wrote: post #200
bandrami wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In glad you made something with it you wanted to make, and as a fan of Aristotle I'm always happy to see the word eudaimonia out there. Best of luck. That said I don't understand what this does or why I would want the tokens it mentions.

Yeah, I gotta make a video walkthrough. Its basically a goal tracker combined with an ad filter - write what you want out of life and block ads, it replaces them with ads that actually align with your long term goals instead of distracting from them. The tokens let you add ads to the network, though you also get some for using the goal tracker.

No, you don't need a video walkthrough. You need that damn web page to explain – in plain language – what this is and what it's good for.

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

#363

Post by demorro »

sgc wrote: post #108
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…

> Imagine if your grandma had wheels! She'd be a bicycle. I always took this to be a sharp jab saying the entire village is riding your grandma, giving it a very aggressive undertone. It's pretty funny nonetheless. Too early to say what AI brings to the efficiency table I think. In some major things I do it's a 1000x speed up. In others it is more a different way of approaching a problem than a speed up. In yet other…

1000x is ridiculous. What are you doing where that level of improvement is measurable. That means you are doing things that would have taken you a year of full-time work in less than half a day now.

EDIT: Retracted, I think the example given below is reasonably valid.

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

#364

Post by wvlia5 »

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…

This is a bot comment.

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

#365

Post by Esophagus4 »

raphaelj wrote: post #297
RA_Fisher wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that extra work bring in more revenue? I think that’s the key question.

Companies that do not reduce their workforce might outcompete you. It might not be about bringing more revenues but retaining market share.

If your barrier to being competitive is a slow, bureaucratic org, restructuring and laying off might actually help long term.

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

#366

Post by ambicapter »

mikkupikku wrote: post #309
kranke155 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my understanding - from a friend at WPP who told me the same and from a freakonomics episode - is that advertising was wildly oversold before digital. When the metrics arrived with digital, they saw that advertising, in some ways, was just not as effective as they’d hoped. In some ways the ROI wasn’t there. Seth Godin agrees. He says that advertising in the digital era could be as simple as just having a good prod…

Advertising's foremost job is to sell the premise of advertising to business management. Selling the business's product is always secondary to that.

Always felt suspicious to me that so much of company dynamics are basically about selling yourself to management...and there's one team in the company who's full-time job is selling? Wonder how that will turn out.

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

#367

Post by demorro »

laserlight wrote: post #336
keeda wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

That update blog is funny. The only data they can get at reports slowdowns, but they struggle to believe it because developers self-report amazing speedups.

You'd get the same sort of results if you were studying the benefits of substance abuse.

"It is difficult to study the downsides of opiates because none of our participants were willing to go a day without opiates. For this reason, opiates must be really good and we're just missing something."

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

#368

Post by aurareturn »

mirsadm wrote: post #310
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 an app which is fairly popular. This release cycle I used Claude Code and codex to implement all the changes / features. It definitely let me move much quicker than before. However now that it's in the beta stage the amount of issues and bugs is insane. I reviewed a lot of the code that went in as well. I suspect the bug fixing stage is going to take longer than the initial implementation. There are so many is…

The last 10% takes up 90% of the time. Usually, the time is spent finding issues you didn't even know about. This was true before LLMs.

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

#369

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

joe_mamba wrote: post #280
throw3847r7 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> integration tests, QA etc ... the items that don't add business value

They absolutely do add value / prevent loss, but you need some understanding in order to see that. Not seeing it is a marker of not understanding.

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

#370

Post by joenot443 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #348
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 find LLMs are good at essentially boilerplate code. It's clear what to do and it needs to be typed in. Or areas where I really have no idea where to start, because I'm not familiar with the codebase. I find anything else, I spend more time coaxing them into doing 85% of what I need that I'm better off doing it myself. So they're not useless but there's only so many times in a week that I need a function to pretty-p…

> I spend more time coaxing them into doing 85% of what I need that I'm better off doing it myself

What was the last thing you built in which you felt this was the case?

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