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Comment by fallinditch | Hacker News Reader

It feels like there's a kind of tectonic shift happening due to various economic and technical factors ... maybe driven somewhat by the advent of practical AI. For me I think it's going to be better to build stuff as a solo entrepreneur than try to swim against the current.

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I might be uninformed here, I have yet to hear of anyone actually being replaced or reqs being reduced because of LLM scripting. I understand the threat, and it seems like a competent programmer could maybe squeeze out 1.5-2x their work with such a program, but is anyone actually doing that? Are any hiring managers or CTOs authorizing that instead of hiring a human?

I’m not saying it won’t happen, but so far it feels like the only reality is that we’re all a bit uncomfortable that it will happen eventually.

At big tech companies we are embedding ai into all layers of our workflow. And it’s accelerating.

Can you give an example where AI has potentially displaced human software engineers? I know of an example where creatives were probably laid off in favor of AI, but not clear examples for software engineering itself.

(I'm not in favor of creatives losing their jobs either! It's just off-topic.)

I haven’t seen anyone get laid off due to ai but maybe we don’t hire as many contractors to deal with some work that is now much easier due to the intelligent automation. Perhaps leadership is factoring this into their headcount decisions now.

I think interest rates are a much bigger factor than AI at this point!

I think there’s one more factor which is that, by and large, hyperscaling has been proven ineffective for most companies. Sure, Uber got away with it, but nearly every company who goes public and triples their headcount in a year finds themselves less productive than they were before.

And I think section 174 is a much bigger factor than interest rates (though I think AI could take the lead in the next few years, depending on how fast the tech keeps evolving)

Depends how you look at it I think. AI isn't directly replacing jobs, but it did suck most of the available investment capital from workers in 2023.

AI companies were really the only tech startups getting funded in 2023, but unlike traditional startups where most of that funding would go to building out a team of engineers to build the product, AI startups tend to have smaller teams and most of the funding goes to compute.

Agree. I also think enterprises suspect a prolonged environment of elevated interest rates.

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