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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

#511

Post by thewebguyd »

tayo42 wrote: post #500
thewebguyd wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That still only just makes it a force multiplier for engineers, like any other tech, not a replacement as it's being hyped and sold as.

Claude resorting to writing code for everything, because that's all the model can do without too many hallucinations and context poisoning, is just a higher speed REPL. Great, that's useful.

But that's not what is being hyped and sold. What's being hyped and sold is "You don't need an Ops guy anymore, just talk to the computer." Well, what happens when the AI decides the "fix" is to just open up 0.0.0.0/0 to the world to make the errors go away? The non technical minimum wage person now just talking to the computer has no idea they just pwned the company.

If AI's answer is "Just write a script to solve the prompt" then you still need technical people, and it's vasly over hyped.

I'll be interested when you actually can just dump logs in a chat and analyze it without the model having to resort to writing code to solve the problem. That will be revolutionary. Imagine all the time I'd save by not having to make business reports, I can just tell the business people to point AI at terabytes of CSV exports and just ask it questions. That is when it will stop just being labor compression for existing engineers, and start being a world changing paradigm shift.

For now, it's just yet another tool in my toolbelt.

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

#512

Post by dirkc »

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.

Maybe the multiplier is 4x and by the time you have a team of ten you're back down to 2x? My theory is a bit of a hyperbole and I don't know what the multipliers would be? But I know that many times you can move quick when you're small.

And to your point, a single person can easily get stuck, I know that applies to me many times.

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

#513

Post by eucyclos »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #422
tasuki wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow, that us useful feedback, thanks! I'll update that this weekend.

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

#514

Post by Izkata »

bee_rider wrote: post #112
kdheiwns wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thinking of it, I haven’t seen as many “copy paste from StackOverflow” memes lately. Maybe LLMs have given people the ability to 1) Do that inside their IDEs, which is less funny 2) Generate blog post about it instead of memes

Python one-upped that a long time ago:

  from stackoverflow import quick_sort
https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import

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

#515

Post by maxwells-daemon »

mikkupikku wrote: post #470
maxwells-daemon wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's true, but most of the cultural innovation I'm aware of, from Bach to Coltrane to Hendrix, came from people who could make art their life, largely by paying the bills with it. I don't think we'll lose art entirely, but we might lose the greatest artists.

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

#516

Post by thewebguyd »

keeda wrote: post #476
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I tend to mean "heavily AI-assisted coding" whereas you likely mean "never look at the code YOLO coding."

The original point that sparked this sub-thread though is that AI is being overhyped. If actual vibe coding (YOLO it, never look at or understand the code, thus truly enabling non-technical folk to have revolutionary power and ability) doesn't work, then AI is yet just another tool in the toolbelt like any other developer life enhancing tech we've had so far, it's just a new form of IDE.

Being a new form of IDE, while very useful, isn't exactly entire economy transforming revolutionary tech. If it can't be used by someone with zero computer/eng experience to build something useful and revenue generating, the amount of investment we've seen into it is way overblown and is well overdue for a pretty severe correction.

I buy AI as a "developer enhancing tool" just like any other devtools that we've seen over my career. I don't currently buy it as a "total labor economy transformation force."

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

#517

Post by toteroni »

sdf2df wrote: post #502
neya wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how so?

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

#518

Post by tasuki »

eucyclos wrote: post #387
tasuki wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would the above explanation be better? The website is there because stripe needs a landing page and the text is there because I'm trying to communicate the aspiration the instantiation I can always explain in detail if someone wants to hear how that would work.

> Would the above explanation be better?

No idea. I certainly didn't get it. Goal tracker is one thing, ad blocker is another thing. Why would I want to combine them? And why would I want to see any ads at all? Perhaps I'm just not the target audience...

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

#519

Post by bandrami »

tayo42 wrote: post #500
thewebguyd wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Your terraform written by a person already doesn't have deterministic precision

Can you expand on that? Because it sure seems to me like it is in fact deterministic unless the person deliberately made it otherwise

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

#520

Post by littlexsparkee »

bandrami wrote: post #161
hombre_fatal wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you know if all software written in the last six months shipped X% faster and was Y% better? Why would you think you have your finger on the pulse of general software trends like that when you use the same, what, dozen apps every week? Just looking at my own productivity, as mere sideprojects this month , I've shipped my own terminal app (replaced iTerm2), btrfs+luks NAS system manager, overhauled my macOS…

Right, I'm sympathetic to the idea that LLMs facilitate the creation of software that people previously weren't willing to pay for, but then kind of by definition that's not going to have a big topline economic impact.

Well, we don't know - that's capturing 2 scenarios: software that whose impact is low as reflected by lack of investment and legitimately useful improvements that just weren't valued (fix slow code, reduce errors and increase uptime, address security concerns) because the cost was not appreciated / papered over by patches / company hasn't been bitten yet
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