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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

#521

Post by tayo42 »

bandrami wrote: post #519
tayo42 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If i give you a task to write terraform or any code, you won't write what I write, you probably won't even write the same thing twice. You can introduce a bug too, we're not perfect. The output of the task "write some terraform" already isn't deterministic when dealing with people.

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

#522

Post by tayo42 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #511
tayo42 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Not sure why the implementation is important or not. The point is the system will be triggered by some text input and complete the task asynchronously on its own.

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

#523

Post by Zarathruster »

rybosworld wrote: post #482
heavyset_go wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout history, what were once middle class and artisan professions were increasingly automated and tons of people and their families ended up in poverty until they died. We just gloss over them and villify the ones who tried to do anything about it (the ones that weren't executed also died in poverty).

Yeah this always get's completely glossed over in these conversations. People always say: "Things ended up working out in the end" Things only worked out in the sense that society carried on without all the people who lost their jobs. The U.S. has recent examples of large scale job destruction. Michigan: From 2000-2009. Massive job destruction. 330,000 auto workers in 2000. Down to 109,000 in 2009. Estimates are that…

> Since this was mostly contained within one city (Detroit)

It's concentrated in Detroit but also distributed throughout the state, as you can observe in the census.gov slides.

The devastation is regional. It's been a wild experience, watching it all fall apart over the last 40+ years. The decay is immense and impossible to convey to someone from a rich state. Someone from the Eastern Bloc might get it, but I've never been able to communicate it to a Californian. Hop in a car and drive from town to town. Once-prosperous communities are boarded up and gradually reclaimed by nature. Department stores are converted into soup kitchens or marijuana dispensaries.

"Things will work themselves out" is not a law of nature, unless we broaden our definition of "things working out" to include outcomes like "everyone young enough flees, everyone else clutches their savings until they eventually die impoverished."

But with AI, even outcomes like that might be overly optimistic. Where will young people flee to? Where can they go, what trade can they learn, to be safe enough to eventually die in comfort?

When I look at Michigan I see both the past and the future, and I am planning accordingly.

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

#524

Post by sigseg1v »

Madmallard wrote: post #486
sigseg1v wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done this multiple times in various codebases, both medium sized personal ones (approx 50k lines for one project, and a smaller 20k line one earlier) and am currently in the process of doing a similar migration at work (~1.4 million lines, but we didn't migrate the whole thing, more like 300k of it). I found success with it pretty easily for those smaller projects. They were gamedev projects, and the process was…

"I also wanted to build a LOT of unit tests, integration tests, and static validation. From a bit of prior experience I found that this is where AI tooling really shines, and it can write tests with far more patience that I ever could. This lets it build up a large hoard of regression and correctness tests that help when I want to implement more things later and the codebase grows." The tests it writes in my experien…

Ya I could see where framework patterns and stuff will need a lot of corrections in post after that type of migration. For mine it was the other direction and only the server portion (Express server written in typescript for a Phaser game, and porting to Kestrel on C#, which was able to use pretty much identical code and at the end after it was done I just switch and refactor ba few things to make it more idiomatic C#).

For the tests, I'm not sure why we have such different results but essentially it took a codebase I had no tests in, and in the port it one shot a ton of tests that have already helped me in adding new features. My game server for it runs in kubernetes and has a "auto-distribute" system that matches players to servers and redistributes them if one server is taken offline. The integration tests it wrote for testing that auto-distribute system found a legit race condition that was there in both the old and new code (it migrated it accurately enough that it had the same bugs) and as part of implementing that test it fixed the bug.

Of course I wouldn't use it if it wasn't a good tool but for me the difference between doing this port via this method versus doing it manually in prior massive projects was such an insane time save that I would have been crazy to do it any other way. I'm super happy with the new code and after also getting the test infra and stuff like that up it's honestly a huge upgrade from my original code that I thought I had so painstakingly crafted.

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

#525

Post by izacus »

baxtr wrote: post #481
heavyset_go wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout history, what were once middle class and artisan professions were increasingly automated and tons of people and their families ended up in poverty until they died. We just gloss over them and villify the ones who tried to do anything about it (the ones that weren't executed also died in poverty).

You need to be careful with these things. Such exaggerated narratives are the reason people are afraid. during the Industrial Revolution many artisan and skilled trades lost their livelihoods. And yet, while many people did suffer serious short-term hardship and wage collapse, most did not simply remain in lifelong poverty, because over time industrialization created new types of employment and average wages eventual…

[flagged]

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

#526

Post by izacus »

adelie wrote: post #272
tkgally wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it depends partly on how locked each individual is into a particular type of work, both skill-wise and temperamentally. To give an example from a field where LLMs started causing employment worries earlier than software development: translation. Some translators made their living doing the equivalent of routine, repetitive coding tasks: translating patents, manuals, text strings for localized software, etc.…

I'm not in translation, but a number of close friends are in the industry. Two trends I've noticed in the industry, which I think we're seeing mirrored in tech: 1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutti…

In other words, AI was used to massively depress wages and lower quality of life of employees while outputting worse results. Which is what is now happening in software.

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

#527

Post by sdf2df »

toteroni wrote: post #517
sdf2df wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

[flagged]

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

#528

Post by sdf2df »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #179
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…

The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make l…

Stop talking sense bro, you'll get downvoted.

If you look at my post history I'm essentially saying the same stuff lol.

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

#529

Post by sdf2df »

afro88 wrote: post #189
yoyohello13 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make l…

This is exactly right IMO. I have never worked for a company where the bottleneck was "we've run out of things to do". That said, plenty of companies run out of actual software engineering work when their product isn't competitive. But it usually isn't competitive because they haven't been able to move fast enough

Not moving fast enough.. sure. But to what direction? The direction and clarity of it is the hardest part.

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

#530

Post by sdf2df »

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…

Congrats. Now post this more often so the bozo's who downvote posts that push-against pro-LLM stuff f-off.

I came to the same conclusion when producing a video with Grok. Did the job but utterly painful and it was definitely very costly - I used 50 free-trial accounts and maxed them out each day for a month.

Im pretty sure these conclusions hold across all models and therefore the technology by extension.

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