> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.
And when the required complexity of software to do the task gets high enough, you assign an agent to do the task instead.
Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
41–50 of 272 posts
Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
#42> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.
Entropy makes sure that you can't scale systems into infinite completely.
Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
#43I agree, his takes should not be dismissed lightly. I'm not sure about "demand is fixed" though. I feel like software demand has been declared saturated at least a few times.
I have been making software professionally for 25 years and in all that time i have never run into the problem that we have run out of things to do .
Exactly, if we look at what projects are on-going now, look at Startups, they are practically solving all the same thing and most of them will be dead soon, we need to finally reach the era where tools to "zeroshot" anything becomes widespread to create new problems, but even by then, we will have an oversupply of tech workers, many will have to convert to a different field, many will not want to be paid based on callcenter type of work which is prompt-as-much-as-you-can, understandably.
It's quite hard to predict what will happen, but in a few years, I bet the unemployment rate of tech workers will be really high, we can just look at how many jobs are currently already replaceable but the owner of it is just lagging in the implementation of automation, it's probably already the large majority of tech jobs.
Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't seem at all related to the above comment - or anything, for that matter. Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.
> Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs. I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying? Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?
You could replace every software engineer on the planet with a perfect LLM tomorrow and it would not lead to mass unemployment-triggered riots. If you're talking about software engineering specifically, you're not correct. If you're talking about all labor, you're talking about something unrelated to the article.
Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
#45[flagged]
The AI boosters imagine they'll be annointed and rewarded by their new overlords.
That's why they're obsessed (to the point of psychosis) with "mastering" the new technique.
That's why they're all building a "harness".
What they don't realize is that the ironworker still ends up in chains.
Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs. I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying? Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?
You could replace every software engineer on the planet with a perfect LLM tomorrow and it would not lead to mass unemployment-triggered riots. If you're talking about software engineering specifically, you're not correct. If you're talking about all labor, you're talking about something unrelated to the article.
To quote the article:
> Take copywriting. It was a profession that took years to master and paid well. This changed slowly as more professionals joined the market, even after the demand spike driven by ecommerce and adtech. Now, LLMs have destroyed the job for the vast majority of professionals.
Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
#47[flagged]
IMHO that is the most likely of the many dystopian robots-replace-humans scenario:
The AI-enhanced become more and more AI-integrated and internally AI-fused and they don't even realize they eventually are not humans at all.
The non-AI underclass just hasn't got enough access to resources to survive long term and dies out with a whimper.
Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
#48> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.
Exactly and this is true of many things. Much of the world is not zero sum, otherwise we'd have fallen into the "malthusian trap" several productivity booms ago.
Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
#49> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.
This is a particularly ignorant thing to say.
Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
#50> > This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless"
> > So blog with single post hyping LLMs. Oh and the domain name "human-in-the-loop". Call me suspicious.
> If after reading what I just said in the reply above you still think I'm an "AI shill" or "lab shill", there's nothing I can do for you.
Yes there isn’t. Because they look indistinguishable.
Replacement Inevitability with a human face, along with all the human concern; “I am part of it and it scares me.”
> Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm one of the engineers who's constantly committing to improve our agentic tooling, I use different models to do adversarial code reviews, I keep a toolbelt of skills and prompts, etc. I have effectively become the so-called "AI-native engineer" (gosh, I hate that term).
Some CEO gloating about replacing all-knowledge-work gets skepticism, eye-rolls and resentment. Someone in the trenches having human feelings about it generates both sympathetic and ecocentric fear.
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And maybe autor intent does not matter? The original submission was massively “popular”. It served its purpose.