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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

#491

Post by ijk »

salawat wrote: post #178
aurareturn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Believe it or not, I still know many devs who do not use any agents. They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste. I'm going to guess that many people on HN are also on the "free ChatGPT isn't that good at programming" train.

Not everyone has the capability to rent out data center tier hardware to just do their job. These things require so much damn compute you need some serious heft to actually daisy chain enough stages either in parallel or deep to get enough tokens/sec for the experience to go ham. If you're making bags o' coke money, and deciding to fund Altman's, Zuckernut's or Amazon/Google's/Microsoft's datacenter build out, that's…

This is my current problem: I can get work to pay for a Claude Max subscription, but for personal use or to learn how to use it that's a big price tag.

I worry that we're returning to an era of renting core development tools. After the huge benefits from free and open source tools, that's a bitter pill to swallow.

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

#492

Post by sgc »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #459
sgc wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they are not perfect, but no translation is even close to perfect. The floor is actually incredibly low. All I can say is that many doctoral-level scholars, including myself and some academic publishers, find them to be somewhere between serviceable and better than average.

Knowing the quality of LLM translations between the two languages I speak, hearing it used like this by supposed academics invokes a deep despair in me. "Serviceable" is a flimsy excuse for mass-producing and publishing slop. Particularly given that slop will displace efforts to produce human translations, putting a ceiling on humanity's future output - no one will ever aspire to do better than slop, so instead of a…

I wouldn't have put it online if I didn't think it was a major improvement over nothing. Realistically, if we haven't translated it in the last 500 years, there is no point for the next several hundred years of history to stick with nothing as well. It takes a bit more than pasting sentences in chatGPT to get a serviceable translation of course, but significantly better results than that are possible. I have not tried translating into other languages, but I am sure having English as the target language is a help.

It's all right there on my website in parallel text, everybody can check and come to their own conclusion rather than driving by with unhelpful generalizations. And really, that is the primary scope of these translations: as aids in reading an original text.

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

#493

Post by sdf2df »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #133
sdf2df wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You prove my point. Guys like you dont get it. You think OAI, Amazon etc can freely put large amounts of money into this for 5-10 years? Lmao - delusional. Investors are impatient. Show huge jumps in revenue this year or you no longer have permission to put monumental amounts of money into this anymore. Short of that they'll just destroy the stock price by selling off; leaving employees who get paid via SBC very unha…

> You think OAI, Amazon etc can freely put large amounts of money into this for 5-10 years? Won't matter. The Chinese models will be running on potatoes by then and be better than ever.

By the time that's obvious investors in the market would've priced that in. Again repeating myself here.

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

#494

Post by johsole »

mirsadm wrote: post #310
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 have an app which is fairly popular. This release cycle I used Claude Code and codex to implement all the changes / features. It definitely let me move much quicker than before. However now that it's in the beta stage the amount of issues and bugs is insane. I reviewed a lot of the code that went in as well. I suspect the bug fixing stage is going to take longer than the initial implementation. There are so many is…

I make mistakes when writing code, but I know what types of mistakes I make. With AI it's like a coworker who makes mistakes, sometimes they're obvious to me and sometimes they're not, because I make different mistakes.

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

#495

Post by m0llusk »

Most of my recent interviews have been mostly people telling me that I am an idiot because I can't leetcode proficiently enough, so those jobs going away doesn't really effect me and at the same time makes sense. LLMs should be good with the leetcode classics that are the basis for rating software development productivity.

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

#496

Post by Bewelge »

rich_sasha wrote: post #461
Bewelge wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 representa…

> At this point I'm basically programming in English, no?

Yea, except they can handle some degree of complexity. Its usefulness obviously really depends on that degree. And I'm sure there are still a lot of domains and types of software where that tradeoff between doing it yourself or spelling it out isn't worth it.

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

#497

Post by quinndupont »

fourside wrote: post #441
quinndupont wrote: post #439

AI is coming for jobs—but the real risk isn’t where most people are looking. The leading AI exposure indices (Anthropic, Eloundou et al.) focus on which jobs get automated. They treat low exposure as “safe.” But the least exposed workers—cooks, roofers, dishwashers, construction laborers—are often in the worst jobs: low pay, high physical toll, short career spans, and little upward mobility. Safe from AI, but not fro…

What’s your reasoning for labeling lawyers as low-exposure?

That's largely based on the original analysis and their methodology. "Responsibility" (only attributable to humans) is one reason, another is that judges probably don't want to speak with robots in court.

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

#498

Post by 20k »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #472
20k wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can ask the AI why, but its answer doesn't come from any kind of genuine reasoning. It doesn't know why it did anything, because it doesn't exist as a sentient being. It just makes something up that sounds good

If you choose to take AI reasoning at face value, you're choosing to accept pretty strong technical debt

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

#499

Post by quinndupont »

thewebguyd wrote: post #458
quinndupont wrote: post #439

AI is coming for jobs—but the real risk isn’t where most people are looking. The leading AI exposure indices (Anthropic, Eloundou et al.) focus on which jobs get automated. They treat low exposure as “safe.” But the least exposed workers—cooks, roofers, dishwashers, construction laborers—are often in the worst jobs: low pay, high physical toll, short career spans, and little upward mobility. Safe from AI, but not fro…

I mean, if that's true, then the governments around the world better damn well be prepared. There's a ton of millennials (myself included) turning 40, that have been in this field since 2005 or earlier. It's all we know, and at this point we're getting too old to just "go do physical labor for minimum wage so AI can write code instead." I'm certainly too old to go back to school and try to pass the bar example to be…

Agreed. My point for spinning up this alternative metric is that the policy implications of the original suggest people should go out and get tough, dirty, dangerous jobs if they don't want to be displaced. But, there's a reason you don't see many 60 year old people in the trades.

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

#500

Post by tayo42 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #468
tayo42 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Your terraform written by a person already doesn't have deterministic precision. Ai isn't messing these things up either.

If your Ai work flow is still dumping logs into a chat and saying search it for some pattern, then you should see what something like Claude code approaches problems. These agents aren't building scripts to solve problems. Which is your deterministic solution.

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