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AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

theguardian.com

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Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#71

Post by ahachete »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #51
ahachete wrote: post #31

There's a fundamental disconnect: OP refers to senior engineers being replaced with AI, whereas the evidence and logical reasoning points much more to junior engineers being replaced by AI. And that premise seems like a quite plausible one...

I think the junior thing started ~24, early ~25. Because back then the level of the current models was at or above that level, with somewhat flaky reliability. In the past year that's changed. We are now at "mostly reliable" in any junior-level stuff, and "surprisingly capable, maybe still needs some hand-holding" at advanced / senior-level stuff. And somewhat super-human if the problem is easily verifiable in a feed…

Not my experience.

It's junior level coding and maybe senior level advising, but even then only when clearly directed with the right questions and guardrails.

As an autonomous thing? Junior at best.

That's why I think it's extremely helpful for seniors: with proper guidance, it really boosts your productivity, writing notable parts of the code.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#72

Post by sodapopcan »

whimsicalism wrote: post #27
fzeroracer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. This is what every person who's been laid off by AI says. Every single time. People really like to assume that the work they do is important, except companies don't care about important they car…

My job is essentially delivering faster with no guard rails. I know it is a common HN sentiment that nobody can do my job better than me because I am the most thoughtful person to ever do it. This is explicitly not what I am saying given that I am leading with AI getting close to being able to do much of what is currently my job. I find it hard to imagine a world where we stagnate right where we are and it takes a de…

What will not be shittier about it? What do you envision these jobs are that are going to replace the current ones?

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#73

Post by sodapopcan »

ninkendo wrote: post #10
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

> It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Agreed. > Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be. Eh… some people maybe. But history shows nearly every time a tool makes people more efficient, we get more jobs, not less. Jevon’s paradox and all that: https://en.wikiped…

> But history shows nearly every time a tool makes people more efficient, we get more jobs, not less.

I hope so, but you have any ideas what they could be? This time feels different, especially because all the ultra-pro-AI people keep saying that "this time it's different" from a technological revolution. This is aiming to replaces people across many industries whereas historically it has been in smaller increments as new inventions are (more slowly) rolled out.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#74

Post by [deleted] »

ahachete wrote: post #71
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the junior thing started ~24, early ~25. Because back then the level of the current models was at or above that level, with somewhat flaky reliability. In the past year that's changed. We are now at "mostly reliable" in any junior-level stuff, and "surprisingly capable, maybe still needs some hand-holding" at advanced / senior-level stuff. And somewhat super-human if the problem is easily verifiable in a feed…

Not my experience. It's junior level coding and maybe senior level advising, but even then only when clearly directed with the right questions and guardrails. As an autonomous thing? Junior at best. That's why I think it's extremely helpful for seniors: with proper guidance, it really boosts your productivity, writing notable parts of the code.

[deleted]

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#75

Post by TiredOfLife »

meroes wrote: post #9
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

What masterful framing AI leaders developed that people say, “AI is doing my work”. Did other technologies get phrased this way? The accounting software is doing my work? The locomotive is doing my work?

> The accounting software is doing my work?

That is literally what accounting software did. It made the work of 10 people into work of 3 people with software

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#76

Post by jsnell »

hamdingers wrote: post #48
whimsicalism wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am commenting on something in the background space of assumptions of the essay. Just because it is not the main thrust doesn’t mean I didnt read the article or used an LLM to summarize it for me. Take care

[flagged]

Faking quotes like you're doing there is about as bad faith as it gets.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#77

Post by lostmsu »

happy_dog1 wrote: post #57
whimsicalism wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read my reply to another comment making a similar point. In short, I think you are giving Doctorow far too much credit - the assumption that these tools are fundamentally incapable is woven throughout the essay, the risk always comes from the fact that managers might think these tools (which are obviously inferior) can do your job. The notion that they can actually do your job is treated as invariable absurd,…

I think we have to be careful when assuming that model capabilities will continue to grow at the same rate they have grown in recent years. It is very well-documented their growth in recent years has been accompanied by an exponential increase in the cost of building these models, see for example (of many examples) [1]. These costs include not just the cost of GPUs but also the cost for reinforcement learning from hu…

No, models significantly improved at the same cost. Last year's Claude 3.7 has since been beaten by GPT-OSS 120B that you can run locally and is much cheaper to train.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#78

Post by pixl97 »

fzeroracer wrote: post #21
whimsicalism wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt cam…

> My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. This is what every person who's been laid off by AI says. Every single time. People really like to assume that the work they do is important, except companies don't care about important they car…

I mean this is what technology has been doing for a long time... Luddites and all.

HN just has a strong streak with programmers saying they'll never be replaced by the auto-loom.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#79

Post by pixl97 »

ninkendo wrote: post #10
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

> It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Agreed. > Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be. Eh… some people maybe. But history shows nearly every time a tool makes people more efficient, we get more jobs, not less. Jevon’s paradox and all that: https://en.wikiped…

Right, cars lead to more horses... except it didn't.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#80

Post by eudamoniac »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

I mostly do normal React crap, ostensibly the easiest thing for these tools to do, and these tools cannot do a considerable portion of my work. Yes I've used the latest model. Yes I've used the latest agentic IDE. Yes I've tweaked my prompts and added repository rule files. Yes I've done this approximately every three months for the last two years. This shit does not work. Nobody ever posts proof of it working well in any .

I am at the point where if I read something from a software developer like, "these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work", I have to just assume that person's day to day work was garbage. And this is not terribly surprising, because a lot of software developers I have personally worked with did produce mostly garbage. Some amount of those people are surely using AI and posting about it, and that explains what we continually see online. Sorry to any offended.

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