Live data from Hacker News

AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

61–70 of 608 posts

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amplified means more work done by fewer people. It doesn’t need to replace a single entire functional human being to do things like kill the demand for labor in dev, which in turn, will kill salaries.

I would disagree. Amplified meens me and you get more s** done. Unless there a limited amount of software we need to produce per year globally to keep everyone happy, then nobody wants more -- and we happen to be at that point right NOW this second. I think not. We can make more (in less time) and people will get more. This is the mental "glass half full" approach I think. Why not take this mental route instead? We d…

Jevon's paradox means this is untrue because it means more work not less.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#63
post #54
post #24

Humans don’t have an internal notion of “fact” or “truth.” They generate statistically plausible text. Reliability comes from scaffolding: retrieval, tools, validation layers. Without that, fluency can masquerade as authority. The interesting question isn’t whether they’re coworkers or exoskeletons. It’s whether we’re mistaking rhetoric for epistemology.

> LLMs aren’t built around truth as a first-class primitive. neither are humans > They optimize for next-token probability and human approval, not factual verification. while there are outliers, most humans also tend to tell people what they want to hear and to fit in. > factuality is emergent and contingent, not enforced by architecture. like humans; as far as we know, there is no "factuality" gene, and we lie to ou…

[deleted]

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#64
post #4

It's the new underpaid employee that you're training to replace you. People need to understand that we have the technology to train models to do anything that you can do on a computer, only thing that's missing is the data. If you can record a human doing anything on a computer, we'll soon have a way to automate it

It's a strange economical morbid dependency. AI companies promises incredible things but AI agents cannot produce it themselves, they need to eat you slowly first.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#65
In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product..., Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to the point that most of what we do is linear combination of well established patterns?

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#66

> Autonomous agents fail because they don't have the context that humans carry around implicitly. Yet. This is mostly a matter of data capture and organization. It sounds like Kasava is already doing a lot of this. They just need more sources.

Self-conscious efforts to formalize and concentrate information in systems controlled by firm management, known as "scientific management" by its proponents and "Taylorism" by many of its detractors, are a century old[1]. It has proven to be a constantly receding horizon.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#67

I like this. This is an accurate state of AI at this very moment for me. The LLM is (just) a tool which is making me "amplified" for coding and certain tasks. I will worry about developers being completely replaced when I see something resembling it. Enough people worry about that (or say it to amp stock prices) -- and they like to tell everyone about this future too. I just don't see it.

The more likely outcome is that fewer devs will be hired as fewer devs will be needed to accomplish the same amount of output.

The old shrinking markets aka lump of labour fallacy. It's a bit like dreaming of that mythical day, when all of the work will be done.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#68

I like this. This is an accurate state of AI at this very moment for me. The LLM is (just) a tool which is making me "amplified" for coding and certain tasks. I will worry about developers being completely replaced when I see something resembling it. Enough people worry about that (or say it to amp stock prices) -- and they like to tell everyone about this future too. I just don't see it.

Amplified means more work done by fewer people. It doesn’t need to replace a single entire functional human being to do things like kill the demand for labor in dev, which in turn, will kill salaries.

This is incorrect. It’s basic economics - technology that boosts productivity results in higher salaries and more jobs.
Post reply on HN