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

anthropic.com

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

#471

Post by camdenreslink »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #275
blackcatsec wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you excited for this? They’re not going to give YOU those peoples’ salaries. You will get none of it. In fact, it will drag your salary through the floor because of all the available talent.

I'm very confused about this. Salary is only one portion of your total compensation. The vast majority of tech companies offer equity in a company. The two ways to increase the FMV of your equity is: increase your equity stake or increase the value of the total equity available. Hitting the same goals with fewer people means your run rate is lower, which increases the value of your equity (the FMV prices in lower COG…

Equity is negotiable just like salary, and if supply of developer labor increases with the same or less demand, you'll get less equity just like you will get less salary.

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

#472

Post by hombre_fatal »

20k wrote: post #247
hombre_fatal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd claim the opposite. Better models design better software, and quickly better software than what most software developers were writing. Just yesterday I asked Opus 4.6 what I could do to make an old macOS AppKit project more testable, too lazy to even encumber the question with my own preferences like I usually do, and it pitched a refactor into Elm architecture. And then it did the refactor while I took a piss. T…

And now you have no idea how any of the code works AI writes bad software by virtue of it being written by the AI, not you. No actual team member understands what's going on with the code. You can't interrogate the AI for its decision making. It doesn't understand the architecture its built. There's nobody you can ask about why anything is built the way it is - it just exists Its interesting watching people forget th…

You can read as much or as little of the code as you want.

The status quo was that I have no better understanding of code I haven't touched in a year, or code built by other people. Now I have the option to query the code with AI to bootstrap my understanding to exactly the level necessary.

But you're wrong on every claim about LLM capabilities. You can ask the AI exactly why it decided on a given design. You can ask it what the best options were and why it chose that option. You can ask it for the trade-offs.

In fact, this should be part of your Plan feedback loop before you move to Implementation.

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

#473

Post by steve_adams_86 »

bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

In my org I get far more done than ever, but I also find it more exhausting.

Because I can get so much done, I've lost my sense for what's enough. And if I can squeeze out a bit more relatively easily, why wouldn't I? When do I hit the brakes?

There are some tasks where LLMs are not all that helpful, and I find myself kind of savoring those tasks.

I'm surprised you don't notice a difference. Where I work it has been transformative. Perhaps it's because we're relatively small and scrappy, so the change in pace is easier with less organizational inertia. We've dramatically changed processes and increased outputs without a loss in quality. For less experienced programmers who are more interested in simple scripts for processing data, their outputs are actually far better, and they're learning faster because the Claude Code UI exposes them to so many techniques in the shell. I now see people using bash pipes for basic operations who wouldn't have known a thing about bash a couple years ago. The other day a couple less-technical people came to me to learn about what tests are. They never would have been motivated to learn this before. It's really cool.

It doesn't reduce work at all, though. We're an under-funded NGO with high ambition. These changes allow us to do more with the same funding. Hopefully it allows us to get more funding, too. I can't see it leading to anyone being let go; we need every brain we can get.

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

#474

Post by randusername »

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 see an individual productivity boost, but not necessarily a collective one.

I don't think features per hour is really what is holding back most established businesses.

My experiences suggest that we still have some time before the people that understand the plumbing of the business _and_ AI bubble up to positions of authority through wielding it practically and successfully at increasingly greater scale.

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

#475

Post by causal »

ipaddr wrote: post #54
causal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This - I can't think of any place I've ever worked where development ever outpaced backlog and tech debt.

When you work long enough you'll find it. Places where changing software is risky you can end up waiting for approvals. Places where another company purchased yours or you are getting shutdown soon and there is no new work. Sometimes you end up on a system that they want to replace but they never get around to it. Being overworked is sometimes better than being underworked. Sometimes the reserve is better. They both…

None of these are development conquering all goals.

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

#476

Post by keeda »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #147
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…

> they are typically dismissed because they look so weird to us. I dismiss them because Yegge's work (if it can even be called his work, given that he doesn't look at the code) is steaming garbage with zero real-world utility, not "because they look weird". You suggest the apparent utility is undeniable, while saying "based purely on popularity" -- but popularity is in no way a measure of utility. Yegge is a conman w…

The memecoin thing was stupid, totally. Yegge should never have touched it, because well, crypto, but also because that's a distraction from the actual project.

> popularity is in no way a measure of utility

Why would it be popular if it's not useful? Yegge is not like some superstar whose products are popular just because he made them. And while some people may be chasing dollars, most of them are building software that scratches an itch. (Search for Beads on GitHub, you'll find thousands of public repos, and lord knows how many private repos.)

Beads has certainly made my agents much more effective, even the older models. To understand its utility you have to do agentic coding for a while, see the stupid mistakes agents make because they forget everything, and then introduce Beads and see almost all those issues melt away.

> None of these software are actually materialising

They are if you look for them. There are many indications (often discussed here) showing spikes in apps on app stores, number of GitHub projects, and Show HN entries. Now, you may dismiss these as "not actually useful", and at this volume that's undoubtedly true for a lot of them.

But there is already early data showing growth not only in mobile app downloads, but also time spent per user and revenue -- which are pretty clear indications of utility: https://sensortower.com/blog/state-of-mobile-2026

Edit: it occurs to me that by "vibe-coding" we may be talking about two different things -- I tend to mean "heavily AI-assisted coding" whereas you likely mean "never look at the code YOLO coding." I'll totally agree that YOLO vibe-coded apps by non-experts will be crap. Other than Beads and Gastown I don't know of any such app that is non-trivial. But then those were steered by a highly experienced engineer, and my original point was, vibe-coding correctly could look very weird by today's best practices.

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

#477

Post by pinkmuffinere »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #251
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the suggestions! I didn't want to do the math myself, but I did take your suggestion and found some articles discussing ways to make it work even with a non-normal distribution: - https://cxl.com/blog/outliers/ - https://www.blastx.com/insights/the-best-revenue-significanc... - (online tool to calculate significance) https://www.blastx.com/rpv-calculator I'm not checking their math, but the articles make s…

One heuristic I like to use when thinking about this question (and I honestly wish the answer space here were less emotionally charged, so we could all learn from each other) is that: LLMs need a human to understand the shape of the solution to check the LLM's work. In fields that I have confirmed expertise in, I can easily nudge and steer the LLM and only skim its output quickly to know if it's right or wrong. In fi…

I think this is a _really_ insightful answer about effectively working with LLMs. And you’re winning me over on statistics too :)

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

#478

Post by camdenreslink »

keeda wrote: post #456
oytis wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please regulate our competition! Challenging our monopoly is a national security risk!

Could you point me to a comment where anyone said regulation should only apply to their competition? Any talk has been for the entire AI industry. If you claim regulation favors the incumbents, well take it up with parent commenter whose comment seems to imply that regulation is needed!

Incumbents love regulation, because they are much better positioned to comply with it than any upstarts or new challengers. So, when a company like Anthropic gets a decent marketshare, their priority shifts to lobbying for regulation to limit competition.

It is a form of regulatory capture.

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

#479

Post by oxag3n »

Wait a second, did they measure exposure from Claude logs and just assumed impact?

Let's say I sell snake oil and I survey every buyer, trying to convince everyone doctors won't be needed in the future.

First conclusion is that retired population seeks medical services the most (reality check - according to CDC most doctor visits are for infants).

Second conclusion is that because it's a snake oil, it heals all the problems and those people will never return to outdated healthcare system.

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

#480

Post by keeda »

camdenreslink wrote: post #478
keeda wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you point me to a comment where anyone said regulation should only apply to their competition? Any talk has been for the entire AI industry. If you claim regulation favors the incumbents, well take it up with parent commenter whose comment seems to imply that regulation is needed!

Incumbents love regulation, because they are much better positioned to comply with it than any upstarts or new challengers. So, when a company like Anthropic gets a decent marketshare, their priority shifts to lobbying for regulation to limit competition. It is a form of regulatory capture.

That's what I meant, but as the root comment implied, regulation is needed, so the solution is not laissez-faire.

These companies are not going to regulate themselves. Capitalism is going to drive them to relentlessly compete for growth at all costs, a lot of which would be imposed on society. At least they are honest that regulation is needed, unlike Big Tobacco.

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