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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

#461

Post by rich_sasha »

Bewelge wrote: post #434
rich_sasha wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just a guess, but to me it sounds like you're trying to do too much at once. When trying something like this: > lots of careful code of registering and unregistering callbacks, some careful thread synchronisation (callbacks get called in another thread), thinking about sane exception handling in async code. Fiddly but not rocket science. I'd expect CC to fail this when just given requirements. The way I use it is to…

> The way I use it is to explicitly tell it things like: "Make sure to do Y when callback X gets fired" and not "you have to be careful about thread synchronisation". "Do X, so that Exceptions are always thrown when Y happens" instead of "Make sure to implement sane Exception handling".

At this point I'm basically programming in English, no? Trying to squeeze exact instructions into an inherently ambiguous representation. I might as well write code at this point, if this is the level of detail required. For this to work, I need to be able to say "make this thread-safe", maybe "by using a queue". Not explaining which synchronisation primitive to use in every last piece of the code.

This is my point actually. If I describe the task to accuracy level X, it still doesn't seem to work. To make it work, perhaps I need to describe it to level Y>X, but that for now takes me more time than to do it myself.

There's lots of variables here, how fast I am at writing code or planning structure, how close to spec the things needs to be, etc. My first "vibe code" was a personal productivity app in Claude Code, in Flutter (task timing). I have 0 idea about Dash or Flutter or any web stuff, and yet it made a complete app that did some stuff, worked on my phone, with a nice GUI, all from just a spec. From scratch, it would take me weeks.

...though in the end, even after 3 attempts, the final thing still didn't actually work well enough to be useful. The timer would sometimes get stuck or crash back down to 0, and froze when the app was minimised.

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

#462

Post by rootusrootus »

gurghet wrote: post #332
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…

Basically it tricks you into making the code less maintainable, so while it seems to boost productivity, it's just delaying huge failures.

Exactly this, IMO. We are in a race to see whether the mountain of technical debt that AI is creating grows faster than AI's ability to whittle it down later.

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

#463

Post by random3 »

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…

Interesting.

Are you generating revenue or, otherwise, what productivity are you measuring?

Without generating revenue (which to be clear is a very good proxy to measure impact) everyone can be indeed very prolific in their hobbies. But labor market is about making money for a living and unless you can directly impact your day-to-day needs from your work, it can't be called productive.

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

#464

Post by maxwells-daemon »

mikkupikku wrote: post #323
gentleman11 wrote: post #281

I know kids avoiding many high paying careers because of ai right now, and artists just giving up everywhere i look. Thanks, ai

Art should be done foremost because it's a passion for the artist. If you give up art just because you can no longer sell it, because you're being out competed by computer generated furry porn, then the world hasn't really lost anything of value.

That isn't how it works. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and most other innovators were regular working artists long before they were influential. If you take away the means for artists to sell work that isn't boundary-pushing, they won't get enough practice and exposure to make influential work later.

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

#465

Post by ragebol »

ixsploit wrote: post #340
ragebol wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the point, to be able to learn that. The craft changes with all these AI helpers, so the juniors have to also catch up/change with it. Or there won't b any seniors in due time.

It's really not an easy problem to solve. You would hire someone with the expactation that they learn, but you also need to pay them. New hires always slow the team down. And currently you wouldn't even get much out of them, as you can delegate those tasks to AI. Additionally you can not even be sure that the junior will learn or just throw stuff at AI. The amount of vibecoded Code I have to review at the moment from…

That has always been the case. The market price for seniors will go up significantly if the supply drops.

It's just shortsighted to not train any/enough juniors as an industry. Shortsightedness, what else is new

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

#466

Post by BurningFrog »

dirkc wrote: post #413
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 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.

My experience of pair programming is the opposite. In a pair I get maybe 4x as much done as when working alone.

Mostly it's because when we hit a point where one person would get stuck, the other usually knows what to do, and we sail through almost anything with little friction.

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

#467

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

Can mostly second this.

Working on a side project, and it's truly incredible how good AI has been for MOST of it.

Also, bewildering how truly awful it was at some seemingly random things - like writing not terribly difficult Assembly that mostly exists already to do Go-style hot splitting (to even get it to understand what older versions of Go did).

I suspect it'll still be 3 years before AI is as good at the FAANGs as it is outside, just due to the ungodly huge context and the amount of proprietary stuff it would need to learn to use effectively, plus getting all the access to it, etc.

But, even when it does all that, that's maybe 33% of the job.

I just don't see mass layoffs at the really big tech companies, unless it's more focused on just cutting and cutting than actually because people have been made redundant.

Even at the management level, I'm not sure we're going to see managers managing teams of 30 instead of teams of 10.

At the end of the day, a manager needs to know what you're doing and if you're any good at it, and there's only so many people a person can do that effectively with.

Maybe low-level managers go away, and it's just TLMs, but someone still needs to do your 1-on-1s and babysit those that need babysat.

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

#468

Post by thewebguyd »

tayo42 wrote: post #426
bandrami wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

No, but it can show unreliability for adjacent tasks. Identifying a CIDR block in traffic logs is a normal part of an ops work flow. It means it's more likely to fail if you need to generate a complex Regex to filter PII from a terabyte of logs. If the model has a blind spot for specific characters because it tokenizes words instead of seeing individual characters, then it can miss a critical path of failure because the service name didn't fit its probabilistic training.

Maybe you need to boilerplate Terraform. If the model can't reliably (reliably, as in, 100% deterministic, does this without fail) parse constraints, it's not just a funny mistake it's a potential 5 figure billing error.

Ops can't run on "mostly accurate." That's just simply not good enough. We need deterministic precision.

For AI to be useful in this world to the extent others have claimed it is for software eng, we'll likely need more advanced world models, not just something that can predict the next most likely token.

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

#469

Post by jlarocco »

baxtr wrote: post #429
ffsm8 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

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

That's so out of touch.

First, you're conveniently ignoring the possibility that people actually like the job they are about to lose.

And believe it or not most people aren't toiling away at jobs they hate because it never occurred to them to do something they like more. They work jobs they dislike because it's the only choice they have because they have to pay their bills so they can survive and so that their dependents can have an acceptable life.

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

#470

Post by mikkupikku »

maxwells-daemon wrote: post #464
mikkupikku wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art should be done foremost because it's a passion for the artist. If you give up art just because you can no longer sell it, because you're being out competed by computer generated furry porn, then the world hasn't really lost anything of value.

That isn't how it works. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and most other innovators were regular working artists long before they were influential. If you take away the means for artists to sell work that isn't boundary-pushing, they won't get enough practice and exposure to make influential work later.

Music existed before any of the record companies did. People used to sing and play music just to entertain themselves and their friends. I am quite certain they will continue to do so, AI never phasing them.
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