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

#501

Post by redhed » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:46 PM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #169

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.

Which one would you recommend as the best right now? Claude Code?

I have been having a lot of success with Cursor. I like being able to switch between Anthropic and OpenAI models. Claude Code does gives way more tokens/$ than Cursor right now though.

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

#502

Post by sdf2df » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

neya wrote: post #485

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…

I think a lot of people will not like to hear this but we use AI almost for everything internally. The noob way to go about this is just give it a couple of tasks and just give it complete root access to your life. That's always going to end up in disappointment. Instead, I realised, AI always needs an architect. Opinionated. Strategic. Authoritative. It is quite good at following most orders. Hence why you must ALWA…

"I think a lot of people will not like to hear this..."

Lol why? You've been suckered in and will eventually crash and burn. But carry on.

Just remember when things go wrong - it's your ass on the line.

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

#503

Post by sdf2df » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #466

dirkc wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's that but youre missing a lot of variables. E.g. if one of you had perfect sleep and the other didn't the individual with perfect sleep will perform better for longer.

I don't get why people try to simplify - you're removing important details that determine performance and therefore output. This leads to false conclusions.

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

#504

Post by StableAlkyne » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

wnmurphy wrote: post #435

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…

I agree with your categories. The majority of the usage for me is (1) and (3). (1) LLMs are basically Stack Overflow on steroids. No need to go look up examples or read the documentation in most cases, spit out a mostly working starting point. (3) Learning. Ramping up on an unfamiliar project by asking Antigravity questions is really useful. I do think it makes devs faster, in that it takes less time to do these two…

> LLMs are basically Stack Overflow on steroids

That, and I've never had to beg an LLM for an answer, or waste 5 minutes of my life typing up a paragraph to pre-empt the XY Problem Problem. Also never had it close my question as a duplicate of an unrelated question.

The accuracy tends to be somewhat lower than SO, but IMO this is a fair tradeoff to avoid having to potentially fight for an answer.

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

#505

Post by bobbane » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:54 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 told my son I would disown him if he worked for Facebook, for the reasons stated above.

Then he took a contracting gig for Meta. His rationalization was that the project was an ill-specified prototype that would never see the light of day - if they wanted to throw money at him for stuff like that, he would accept it.

That gig is finished, and he's now thoroughly disillusioned with working for big tech.

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

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Post by redhed » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

kdheiwns wrote: post #97

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.

Yep. All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago, where I could search for something and find actually relevant and helpful info quickly. I've seen lots of people say AI can basically code a project for them. Maybe it can, but that seems to heavily depend on the field. Other than boilerplate code or very generic projects, it's a step above useless imo when it comes to gam…

What language/engine did you try it with for gamedev? Just curious if it was weak in a popular engine.

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

#507

Post by stevenhuang » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

sdf2df wrote: post #116

stevenhuang wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 months I won't be surprised if there's not much change. But in 5 years? 10? Anything can happen. It is presumptuous to think you can project the future capabilities of this technology and confidently state that labour markets will never be affected.

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…

Whether investors will see returns soon enough to service their debt loads is entirely another matter. I do agree the likely course of action is we get a crash of sorts, since the only way their investments pan out is if labour is replaced entirely which of course sounds unlikely in near term.

My point is the cat is out of the bag. It doesn't take massive investments to achieve iterative improvements on SOTA. As long as the technology does not plateau, smaller labs have shown it's possible to advance the frontiers independent of large companies/investments. And as these frontiers advance, more and more of economical knowledge work will be subsumed by AI. I don't see a way out of this, which is why I am a strong proponent of wealth distribution eg UBI.

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

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Post by eudamoniac » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

mikkupikku wrote: post #408

ausbah wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that seems a bit harsh. if you’re livelihood has been from making some sort of visual art for however many years and work has even drying up bc of AI, just doing a sudden career pivot is pretty difficult.

True, it's harsh. But the way I see it, artists producing real art from their soul are going to keep at it even while corporate graphic designers and furry porn fanart illustrators are getting decimated. Society at large won't be culturally impoverished by this, so I'm viewing corporate graphic artists with the same mindset as buggy whip manufacturers. Technology coming for the careers of artists isn't even new, the…

> artists producing real art from their soul are going to keep at it

With what time and money? The statue of David and the Sistine Chapel ceiling would not have come to be from hobbyists. There are precious few culturally relevant works of art that lacked both a patron and a sales motive.

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

#509

Post by eudamoniac » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

mikkupikku wrote: post #321

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or worse. I’ve heard stories from friends where leadership expects huge boosts in productivity due to LLMs, and perceive anything but an order of magnitude boost as incompetence or a refusal to adapt.

To be fair, some of it might genuinely be refusal to adapt? If we go by HN comments, there definitely do seem to be at least some people who are letting their hangups prevent them from learning this tech. > It can't think, it just predicts likely tokens > I can't believe this industry I once cherished for rational professionalism has fallen for nondeterministism > Sorry, I'm just not going to participate in destroyin…

I just don't want to use it. It may or may not be a big deal, I lean toward it not being, but even if it is I would prefer not to use it, so I'm going to resist it as far as possible. I don't pretend it's about any higher principle than me not liking it. I'll wait to get put on a PIP and then I'll do exactly what they ask.

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

#510

Post by matthest » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 7:02 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…

From this angle, what's the difference between Meta and a junk food company?

Both sell things that are bad for you, but that the consumer has complete control over whether or not to consume.

And not all of what Meta is selling is bad. There's a lot of information exchanged on Facebook, Instagram, etc. that are good for society. Like health/nutrition advice, etc.