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

#541

Post by bandrami » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

rhubarbtree wrote: post #337

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.

This is not a good thing. If you’re not being exposed and skilling up already, you’re likely to be in the camp that is washed away. If you can’t be exposed to it in your day job, start using Claude opus in the evening so you know what’s coming.

Eh, people have been warning me "you'll be left behind!" about the flavor of the week for decades now and it hasn't happened yet. If it happens it happens.

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

#542

Post by monksy » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:59 AM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #256

aurareturn wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they really want to cut cost, fire the worst dev on the team and use that money to give everyone a Codex subscription.

Or better yet, fire the managers or bean counters that think decreasing everyone’s productivity is good for long term savings. I’m reminded of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

Oh they laid people off so they could outsource more to India. Despite the managers reminding them, the cost is 1/3 the cost but 3x slower. American devs were 5x more productive overall.

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

#543

Post by nickcoffee » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC

The productivity-to-workload compression point is real, but I think the more interesting dynamic is what happens to team shape over time. Running a small sales team with agents, the bottleneck shifted from execution to judgment almost overnight. The work didn't disappear, but who's doing which part of it changed pretty fast.

The junior hiring slowdown makes sense in that context. Junior roles were often the execution layer. That layer is getting absorbed. Whether that's bad long-term depends on whether there's still a path to build judgment without first doing the execution work for years. But what can be seen on entry level teams is you typically have 20% of these people that are outstanding, and 80% average. I assume this 20% will simply be able to cover more ground.

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

#544

Post by gilbetron » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:50 AM UTC

YesBox wrote: post #424

gilbetron wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tested this with Claude Code and Opus 4.6, with the following prompt: "I have an arbitrary width rectangle that needs to be broken into smaller random width rectangles (maintaining depth) within a given min/max range. The solution needs to be highly performant from an algorithmic standpoint, well-tested using TDD and Red/Green testing, written in python, and not have any subtle errors." It got the answer you e…

How can we verify if you dont post the code? I appreciate you testing, even though it's not a great comparison: - My feedback cycle of LLM prompting forced me to be more explicit with each call, which benefited your prompt since I gave you exactly what to look for with fewer nuances. - Maybe GPT 5.1 is old or kneecapped for newer versions of GPT - Maybe Opus/Claud is just a way better model :P Please post the code! E…

I didn't prompt anything odd, just standard prompt "etiquette", actually I significantly prompted less than I would usually do, trying to do a simple prompt like you did.

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

#545

Post by neya » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:02 AM UTC

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.

Look, whether you like it or not AI is here and it is decent at some tasks and the world is using it to automate stuff. You saw how Clawdbot exploded, right? Despite users getting hacked left and right didn't stop the adoption. Yesterday there was again a hack incident. It's a burning pain that AI solves to the point where people don't care even if they get hacked.

Will I crash and burn? Maybe, you're right. But, that's why I'm taking things at a very slow pace. Only automating internal tasks. Only things I trust AI to do. Very very limited scope. What's really my alternative here?

Just sit back and watch the world move on? My alternative is not changing with the times and being stagnant. That's not really a solution. Even if I'm doing that, I want to have data points that AI is really a dead end instead of just assumptions. My alternative reality isn't a bed or roses - a lot of people at the top do believe they can replace me and my work (CTO) with AI, thanks to the hype. I'm just trying to evolve so I don't become a meme down the line. Can they actually replace me or my job with AI? Absolutely not from what I'm seeing. But hypes of cutting cost is always attractive to people at the top. Just trying to stay alive man, lol.

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

#546

Post by bandrami » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:29 AM UTC

tayo42 wrote: post #522

thewebguyd wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right but our company takes on interns not to help the company but to help the intern

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

#547

Post by bandrami » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:30 AM UTC

willmadden wrote: post #432

bandrami wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would that help us with?

The LLM needs to understand your existing codebase if it's going to be useful building features that integrate with said codebase seamlessly without breaking things or assuming things that don't exist. That's not something you want to give away to a private AI company, so self-host an open source model.

I understood how that would help the LLM, I asked how that would help us. What decision would that inform for us that we're currently having trouble with?

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

#548

Post by bandrami » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:36 AM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #155

thewebguyd wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's useful for scripting, but it's still only marginally faster. It certainly hasn't been "groundbreaking productivity" like it's being sold. The problem with analyzing logs is determinism. If I ask Claude to look for evidence of compromise, I can't trust the output without also going and verifying myself. It's now an extra step, for what? I still have to go into Elastic and run the actual queries to verify wh…

>still only marginally faster. Is it? A couple days ago I had it build tooling for a one-off task I need to run, it wrote ~800 lines of Python to accomplish this, in <30m. I found it was too slow, so I got it to convert it to run multiple tasks in parallel in another prompt. Would have taken a couple days for me to build from hand, given the number of interruptions I have in the average day. This isn't a one-off, it'…

Did that need to be 800 lines of Python, though, is the question

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

#549

Post by qudat » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:57 AM UTC

anthonypasq wrote: post #450

qudat wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that it just makes mistakes but it also implements things in ways I don’t like or are not relevant to the business requirements or scope of the feature / project. I end up replacing any saved time with QA and code review and I really don’t see how that’s going to change. In my mind I see Claude as a better search engine that understands code well enough to find answers and gain understanding faster. That’s a…

can you imagine two years in the future and still believe this will be true? You are just dragging your feet. You will give in sooner or later, and i would suggest sooner.

Nah I’m using it extensively, I know the limits. I do not think scaling is going to magically fix the fundamental limits of attention LLMs

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

#550

Post by cherrycherry98 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:24 AM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #172

throwaw12 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste Probably that's the reason why some people are sure their job is still safe. Nature of job is changing rapidly

I totally get tech CEOs who threaten to fire their devs who do not embrace AI tools. I'm not a tech CEO but people who are anti-LLM for programming have no place on my team.

Anecdotally, the person on my team who is producing the most output and the highest quality happens to explicitly shun LLMs and is also relatively young. Other team members embracing AI spend their day being misled by chat bots, trying to get their agents to work properly by toying with contexts (just needs a little more knowledge!), and producing verbose code that's hard to review and with obvious bugs when you actually think about what it's doing. My favorite is how everything is excessively commented but more than once I've caught the code not matching what the comment said it would do!

FWIW I find it useful if I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to prompt it than type it myself. Also for research and building understanding it's generally good. I still catch it being wrong on details of you're really paying attention or literally contradicting itself between prompts. That gives me a lot of pause about trusting things it told me that I just accepted as fact without having enough knowledge myself to question it.