Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by bubblegumcrisis » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

sghiassy wrote: post #418

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.

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

How did you decide to work at Meta?

I'll be honest, just the idea of working there makes me feel like vomiting. For me, they are bizarrely evil. They're not evil like, "we're going to destroy our competition through anti competitive practices," (which they do), but "let's destroy a whole generation of minds."

And now with the glasses. I mean, jeeze. Can there be a stronger signal of not caring for others?

It's as if Meta sees people as cattle. Though I think a lot of techies see humans as cattle, truthfully.

What was your rationale?

I guess this question is out-of-the-blue, and I don't mean for you to justify your existence, but I've never understood why people choose to work for Meta.

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

#422

Post by KellyCriterion » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #362

eucyclos wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

++1

I didnt get it either on first glance when scrolling down the whole page

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

#423

Post by KellyCriterion » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

kranner wrote: post #130

httpz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a classic case of Productivity Paradox when personal computers were first introduced into workplaces in the 80s. A famous economist once said, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

> There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come. Predictions without a deadline are unfalsifiable.

Well the thing with predictions is that they are in genral difficult - esp. when it comes to those in future :-D

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

#424

Post by YesBox » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

gilbetron wrote: post #417

YesBox wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

How can we verify if you dont post the code?

I appreciate you testing, even though it's not a great comparison:

- My feedback cycle of LLM prompting forced me to be more explicit with each call, which benefited your prompt since I gave you exactly what to look for with fewer nuances.

- Maybe GPT 5.1 is old or kneecapped for newer versions of GPT

- Maybe Opus/Claud is just a way better model :P

Please post the code!

Edit: Regarding "exactly what to look for", when solving a new problem, rarely is all the nuance available for the first iteration.

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

#425

Post by mettamage » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:40 PM UTC

sigseg1v wrote: post #415

Madmallard wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

super cool, don't have the time to read it right now but to think in terms of ASTs is pretty handy!

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

#426

Post by tayo42 » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #233

tayo42 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To deal with the problems where there is ambiguity in the problem and the approach to solving it. Not everything is a basic decision tree. Humans aren't deterministic either, the way we woukd approach a problem is probably different. Is one of us right or wrong? We're generally just focused on end results. Maybe 2 years ago Ai was doing random stuff and we got all those funny screenshots of dumb gemini answers. The i…

Two weeks ago I asked a frontier model to list five mammals without "e" in their name and number four was "otter"

Is identifying mammals without the letter E part of your ops work flow?

Opus 4.6 didn't have an issue with this question though.

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

#427

Post by qweiopqweiop » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

bubblegumcrisis wrote: post #421

sghiassy wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How did you decide to work at Meta? I'll be honest, just the idea of working there makes me feel like vomiting. For me, they are bizarrely evil. They're not evil like, "we're going to destroy our competition through anti competitive practices," (which they do), but "let's destroy a whole generation of minds." And now with the glasses. I mean, jeeze. Can there be a stronger signal of not caring for others? It's as if…

I feel the same - would I like a meta paycheck, sure, but I couldn't look at myself in the mirror knowing what the company I'm giving my work to does to people's brains (not just the young, though that is the most reprehensible).

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

#428

Post by thewebguyd » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

weatherlite wrote: post #342

afro88 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right IMO. I have never worked for a company where the bottleneck was "we've run out of things to do". That said, plenty of companies run out of actual software engineering work when their product isn't competitive. But it usually isn't competitive because they haven't been able to move fast enough

I think it depends on: A) how old the product is: Twitter during its first 5 years probaby had more work to do compared to Twitter after 15 years. I suspect that is why they were able to get rid of so many developers. B) The industry: many b2c / ecommerce businesses are straightforward and don't have an endless need for new features. This is different than more deep tech companies

There’s a third one, and it’s non-tech companies or companies for whom software is not a core product. They only make in-house tooling, ERP extensions, etc. Similar to your Twitter example, once the ERP or whatever is “done” there’s not much more work to do outside of updating for tax & legal changes, or if the business launches new products, opens a new location, etc.

I’ve built several of such tools where I work. We don’t even have a dev team, it’s just IT Ops, and all of what I’ve built is effectively “done” software unless the business changes.

I suspect there’s a lot of that out there in the world.

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

#429

Post by baxtr » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

ffsm8 wrote: post #419

baxtr wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe I’m naive but I’m not terrified about the future at all.

Every efficiency wave made life better for humans. Why should this one be different?

Assume many people lose their jobs. This in turn means companies will have higher margins. Higher margins attract more competition. More competition means lower margins since some will use the lower costs to offer lower prices.

Lower prices increase quality of life for everyone.

People who lost their job might be able to pick up doing something they actually enjoy…

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

#430

Post by Izkata » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #392

vividfrier wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I often wonder what I am missing. Recently I wanted to wrap a low level vendor API with a callback API (make a request struct and request id, submit, provide a callback fn, which gets called with request IDs and messages received from vendor) to async Python (await make_request(...)). Kinda straightforward - lots of careful code of registering and unregistering callbacks, some careful thread synchronisation (callback…

Based on what I've seen and heard, you have the happy path working and that's what the pro-AI people are describing with huge speedups. Figuring out and fixing the edge cases and failure modes is getting pushed into the review stage or even users, so it doesn't count towards the development time. It can even count as more speed if it generates more cases that get handled quickly.