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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

#411

Post by dpacmittal »

bearjaws wrote: post #410

We are rewriting our entire frontend from Webpack + Gatsby to Vite + React, we converted all static pages in one day using Claude Code. We basically have ~40 components and 6 pages to go until complete rewrite, I am sure we will run into bumps in the road, but it's been crazy to watch. We also added i18n (English + Spanish), ThemeProvider for white labeling solution, and WCAG 2A compliance, all in one shot. If I went…

I think this is the happiest path for any coding agent. React + vite is in their blood quite literally.

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

#412

Post by gilbetron »

staticassertion wrote: post #248
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…

When it comes to novel work, LLMs become "fast typers" for me and little more. They accelerate testing phases but that's it. The bar for novelty isn't very high either - "make this specific system scale in a way that others won't" isn't a thing an LLM can ever do on its own, though it can be an aid. LLMs also are quite bad for security. They can find simple bugs, but they don't find the really interesting ones that l…

What was your take on this?

https://aisle.com/blog/what-ai-security-research-looks-like-...

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

#413

Post by dirkc »

m_ke wrote: post #377
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…

having been an early employee and founder of a few startups and then working at a few larger companies, most people who only ever worked at FAANG have no idea how much more productive tiny teams with ownership are.

I have a theory that when you have 2 developers working in synergy, you're at something like 1.8x what 1 person can do. As you add more people you approach 2x until some point after which you start to decrease productive. I don't think that point is far beyond 5.

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

#414

Post by taurusnoises »

tl2do wrote: post #20

From my experience as a software engineer, doubling my productivity hasn’t reduced my workload. My output per hour has gone up, but expectations and requirements have gone up just as fast. Software development is effectively endless work, and AI has mostly compressed timelines rather than reduced total demand.

At the risk of being the person who says, "it's capitalism," (I know I know).... When making profit is the dominant intent of a company, a worker doing something faster doesn't lead to the worker doing less. It leads to the worker producing more in the same time. If doing more yields too much of the thing produced for the market to handle, the company either A. creates more need for the more produced (fabricate necessity), or B. creates a new need for a new thing, and a new thing for you to produce. There's no getting off the wheel for the worker in capitalism.

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

#415

Post by sigseg1v »

Madmallard wrote: post #381
sheeshkebab wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In those situations you basically need to guide llm to do it properly. It rarely one shots complex problems like this, especially in non web dev, but could make it faster than doing it manually.

Oh believe me I broke it down super finely, down to single files and even single functions in some places It still is completely and utterly hopeless

I've done this multiple times in various codebases, both medium sized personal ones (approx 50k lines for one project, and a smaller 20k line one earlier) and am currently in the process of doing a similar migration at work (~1.4 million lines, but we didn't migrate the whole thing, more like 300k of it).

I found success with it pretty easily for those smaller projects. They were gamedev projects, and the process was basically to generate a source of truth AST and diff it vs a target language AST, and then do some more verifier steps of comparing log output, screenshot output, and getting it to write integration tests. I wrote up a bit of a blog on it. I'm not sure if this will be of any use to you, maybe your case is more difficult, but anyway here you go: https://sigsegv.land/blog/migrating-typescript-to-csharp-acc...

For me it worked great, and I would (and am) using a similar method for more projects.

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

#416

Post by jb_hn »

KronisLV wrote: post #351
Madmallard wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tr…

Agreed -- coding agents / LLMs are definitely imperfect, but it's always hard to contextualize "it failed at X" without knowing exactly what X was (or how the agent was instructed to perform X)

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

#417

Post by gilbetron »

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 just tested this with Claude Code and Opus 4.6, with the following prompt:

"I have an arbitrary width rectangle that needs to be broken into smaller random width rectangles (maintaining depth) within a given min/max range. The solution needs to be highly performant from an algorithmic standpoint, well-tested using TDD and Red/Green testing, written in python, and not have any subtle errors."

It got the answer you ended up with (if I'm understanding you correctly) the first time in just over 2 minutes of working, and included a solid test suite examining edge cases and with input validation.

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

#418

Post by sghiassy »

m_ke wrote: post #377
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…

having been an early employee and founder of a few startups and then working at a few larger companies, most people who only ever worked at FAANG have no idea how much more productive tiny teams with ownership are.

Been a startup founder - work at Meta currently.

AI is making everyone faster that I’ve seen. I’d say 30% of the tickets I’ve seen in the last month have been solved by just clicking the delegate to AI button

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

#419

Post by ffsm8 »

baxtr wrote: post #403
m_ke wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having been an early employee and founder of a few startups and then working at a few larger companies, most people who only ever worked at FAANG have no idea how much more productive tiny teams with ownership are.

I love tiny teams. I hate big corp. Big corporations are full with people who love to entertain 20+ people in video calls. 1-2 people speak, the other nod their heads while browsing Amazon. I wouldn’t be sad if those jobs vanished.

Well, you should be terrified of those jobs vanishing I think.

All of these people will consequently be on the job market competing for your opportunities.

Yes you may feel superior to their capabilities - and may even be justified in your opinion (I know nothing about you beyond this comment)... But it'll still significantly impact your professional future if this actually happens. It would massively impact wages at the very least

Your viewpoint is incredibly short-sighted and not actually realizing the broad effect on the industry as a whole such a change would bring.

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