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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

It's so good that I think it kills off a bunch of businesses.

Anybody selling templates - dead.

Anybody selling design services to pre-seed startups and small businesses - dead.

Squarespace - probably dead soon too.

Any startup not taking advantage of these tools is stuck in the past. This is the new "going fast". You can test your ideas so quickly with these tools.

As a full stack engineer, I can build and design myself to a pretty reasonable degree. I'm not going to do that anymore. These tools are faster than me.

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> It's so good that I think it kills off a bunch of businesses.

I disagree with the premise that somehow now all startups and small business would like to do their own webdesign simply because LLMs can help with some of the process, same goes for the rest of your points.

Those business won't disappear, but instead they'll be able to make more with less, just like in the past when automation been improved. People don't suddenly get fired, but instead pick up new skills and can suddenly do much more.

The dream was always that we could automate humanity enough so we can all have more free-time, but turns out that just have the same amount of free-time as before but now we're pushed to do even more in less time.

> People don't suddenly get fired, but instead pick up new skills and can suddenly do much more.

What idyllic utopia are you living in?

It cannot be the same world I'm living in, we're just seeing mass layoffs here

> The dream was always that we could automate humanity enough so we can all have more free-time,

The dream of the workforce maybe.

I think the dream of the wealthy and owner class is that they no longer need a workforce at all and can safely grind us workers into fertilizer without losing any quality of life for themselves

> It cannot be the same world I'm living in, we're just seeing mass layoffs here

I'm seeing mass layoffs all around too, I believe it's because they added too many people in the past though, not because LLMs will suddenly replace a bunch of roles that suddenly won't need humans. Of course the companies won't admit to hiring too much before, but instead find the most convenient scapegoat.

Having a different perspective is not living in a different world, it's just a different perspective.

> I think the dream of the wealthy and owner class is that they no longer need a workforce at all and can safely grind us workers into fertilizer without losing any quality of life for themselves

Certainly true in some countries like the US where the working and middle class basically has given up, but absolutely not true in other places. I'd love to see them try though, long time ago we rebalanced the scales so about time.

Why do you think your upper classes have a different dream just because your working classes are better at pushing back? They want the same thing as American ones so, and it's dangerous to forget that.

> we're just seeing mass layoffs here

zero of those jobs have been replaced by AI though. We're seeing layoffs because of a one-two punch of insane overhiring during/after covid followed immediately by an economic pullback and return to "lean" operating strategies.

Those are a few of the reasons. There are more. End of ZIRP, monopolies realizing they don't have to employ all the talented engineers to prevent competition anymore, etc. But you can't exclude AI.

Chegg and StackOverflow certainly beg to differ with your hypothesis. And they're only the first to fall.

There’s a difference between your job being replaced by AI and your employer being disrupted by AI. Stack Overflow might have fewer employees, while the AI companies expand. That’s not a good explanation for a job market bust.

> There’s a difference between your job being replaced by AI and your employer being disrupted by AI

Technically yes

But the difference is not really meaningful to the people who are out of work, is it?

It’s relevant to a discussion about whether AI is causing unemployment in the tech industry. Basically anything can cause unemployment if the bar is that some company somewhere is affected in a way that leads them to have to lay someone off.

> zero of those jobs have been replaced by AI though.

Hard disagree on "zero", and I've read articles about businesses laying off people specifically to replace them with AI (Washington Post had an article about people getting let go shortly after ChatGPT first came out, e.g. copywriters), so this is just demonstrably false.

That said, I agree the larger reason for the current layoffs are (a) massive Covid overhiring, (b) end of the ~decade long ZIRP era, (c) at least in the US, much more outsourcing now that video conf tech is good and everyone is used to remote work. Long term, though, I think we've reached a state where, for a ton of jobs, technology is destroying jobs a lot faster than it's creating new ones. Lots has been written about how many startups can now execute quickly with a team half the size or less than what was required just a couple years ago. Many forms of labor have just become devalued in an incredibly short time span.

> I've read articles about businesses laying off people specifically to replace them with AI

Out of curiosity, were these announcements by AI companies or companies with an interest in AI companies?

At lot of articles you read are effectively advertising, especially if it’s a CEO talking about their company.

It was an article from the point of view of people who actually lost their jobs due to AI. People are simply in denial if they think this isn't happening. And this article is from nearly 2 years ago.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki...

https://archive.vn/C5syl

Well OC was referring to mass layoffs.

That article seems to be about contracted copywriters.

If your whole job is writing “150-word descriptions” (the article’s words) for $60 an hour and the like, yeah LLMs got you beat.

But that’s a far cry from mass layoff territory.

Also, in that same article, he was rehired by a (granted, a single) client who didn’t like chatgpt. What is the rate of clients that dropped chatgpt?

as long as there's labor competition and legal monopolies the monopolies will always squeeze labor.

I think you severely underestimate how poorly the average small business experience is with the small website production market.

It's not just the price. Most I know feel scammed and would jump at the bit of getting rid of those "service providers"

As a designer myself (and writer of this post) I'm not really worried about AI taking my job. If you notice, all designs look extremely similar between each other and I believe uniqueness will be something very valuable in the future. I do believe AI makes processes much faster (I dont code, so I could skip asking a developer to create these webs and just have the AI create them) but customization, branding and brand's tone & voice are not really at risk as for now. We'll have to see how this evolves in the future.

I definitely agree we all need to learn these tools and use them in our favor, but I'm not sure they'll directly take our jobs as for now.

I remember having the same kind of fear of loosing my job around 10yrs ago when templates and came up, but we just learnt how to include them in our workflows and continued working from there.

I build and sell templates for a living. Like shadcnblocks.com or zerostatic.io. How long do you think I’ve got? It’s seriously an existential threat for me, but my sales don’t seem affected yet.

You'll be fine for awhile. We're in the "somewhat usable but extremely annoying/complex UX" phase of all this AI stuff right now.

Go play with Lovable and see what you think. You shouldn't ignore your fears. The more you learn, the better prepared you'll be.

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