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Comment by synthc | Hacker News Reader

My first job (around 2010) was to extract events from financial news and police reports.

We built this huge system with tons of regexes, custom parsers, word lists, ontologies etc. It was a huge effort to get somewhat acceptable accuracy.

It is humbling to see that these days a 100 line Python script can do the same thing but better: AI has basically taken over my first job.

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I can see this being true to a lot of old jobs, like my brother's first job that basically was to transcribe audio tapes. whisper can do it in no time, that's crazy.

I’ve had a similar experience extracting transactions from my PDF bank statements [1]. GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini perform as well the janky regex parser I wrote a few years ago. The fact that they can zero shot the problem makes me think there’s a lot of bank statements in the training data.

[1] https://dandavis.dev/pnc-virtual-wallet-statement-parser.htm...

Well, your first job today would be writing that 100 line Python script then doing something 100x more interesting with the events than writing truck loads of regexs?

No, his first job would be a more senior developer writing 100 line Python script instead of hiring an intern to write a truck load of RegExs. After that dev saved time just writing the script over mentoring/explaining/hiring the intern, that dev would then do the more interesting things with the events.

That is, his first job is now gone.

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