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Comment by pbw | Hacker News Reader

Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead.

The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer. But "work for yourself" probably means direct competition with others who are just as expert as you with AI, so that's no panacea.

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This can only go three ways.

The first is that the entire global codebase starts to become an unstable shitpile, and eventually critical infrastructure starts collapsing in a kind of self-inflicted Y2k event. Experienced developers will be rehired at astronomical rates to put everything back together, and then everyone will proceed more cautiously. (Perhaps.)

The second is that AI is just about good enough and things muddle along in a not-great-not-terrible way. Dev status and salaries drop slowly, profits increase, reliability and quality are both down, but not enough to cause serious problems.

The third is that the shitpile singularity is avoided because AI gets much better at coding much more quickly, and rapidly becomes smarter than human devs. It gets good enough to create smart specs with a better-than-human understanding of edge cases, strategy, etc, and also good enough to implement clean code from those specs.

If this happens development as we know it would end, because the concept of a codebase would become obsolete. The entire Internet would become dynamic and adaptive, with code being generated in real time as requirements and condition evolve.

I'm sure this will happen eventually, but current LLMs are hilariously short of it.

So for now there's a gap between what CEOs believe is happening - option 3. And what is really happening - option 1.

I think a shitpile singularity is quite likely within a couple of years. But if there's any sane management left it may just about be possible to steer into option 2.

I agree with you three scenarios. But I would assign different probabilities. I think the second option is the most likely. Things will get shittier and cheaper. Third option might not ever come to pass.

Just like clothing and textile work. They are getting cheaper and cheaper, true, but even with centuries of automation, they are still getting shittier in the process.

There are many more scenarios, though. One of them is that AI slop is impressive looking to outsiders, but can't produce anything great on itself, and, after the first wave of increased use based on faith, it just gets tossed in the pile of tools somewhere above UML and Web Services. Something that many people use because "it's the standard" but generally despise because it's crap.

The whole thing with gen AI is so depressing to me.

For the first time now I can feel the joy of what I do slipping away from me. I don't even mind my employer capturing more productivity, but I do mind if all the things I love about the job are done by robots instead.

Maybe I'm in the minority but I love writing code! I love writing tests! If I wanted to ask for this stuff to be done for me, I would be a manager!

Now, I'll need to use gen AI to replace the fun part of the job, or I'll be put out to pasture.

It's not a future I look forward to, even if I'm able to keep up and continue working in the industry.

The fun part for me was coming up with ideas for new things, then architecting those things, creating the high level systems to implement them, and iterating on them to make them better. Figuring out why some test harness wasn't mocking some random thing correctly, remembering which api call had which syntax, or just writing a bajillion almost-boilerplate endpoints was always drudgery and I'm glad to be rid of it.

Another game is to distribute the gains from increased productivity more equally. E.g. in Europe as late as early 2000s working hours were reduced in response to technological development. But since then the response even from workers seems to be to demand increasingly shittier bullshit jobs to keep people busy.

The game is live within your means and max out your retirement fund with index funds. Then you own a slither of that production.

This will work until the capitalists realize the stock market let's plebs do well and they'll unlist the best companies.

Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.

“I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.” Nothing? Ever? Brainwashed?

> Nothing? Ever? Brainwashed?

Interesting to see A imagine what B meant, then assert that A believes some metric will always go up because they always saw it go up? It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.

> It's not clear what they meant

I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to. But even if it weren't (admittedly you have to have actually read Marx for it to jump out at you) by the time you responded there was another comment that very clearly spells it out, complete with citations.

> I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to.

This kind of statement does not make a point, nor is it appealing to engage with. Good luck with whatever.

I love when people in glass houses throw stones;

> It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.

Does this kind of statement make a point? Is it appealing to engage with?

I saw this on Reddit and it captured this phenomenon beautifully: you're not a victim here, you're just starting a fight and then losing that fight.

> you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was)

Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are not affected negatively by technological progress over the span of their entire careers, you're just lazily talking shit.

If it's the solution, so much easier than keeping ahead of the technology treadmill, and it's so obvious to you, it's strange that you haven't set up the One Big Union yet and fixed all the problems.

> "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual.

Right, but the observation here is that many, maybe most, individuals in a particular field are having this same problem of labor autonomy and exploitation. So... unions are pretty good for that.

SWE is somewhat unique in that, despite us being the lowest level assembly-line type worker in our field, we get paid somewhat well. Yes, we're code monkeys, but well-paid code monkeys. With a hint of delusions of grandeur.

I'm talking about labor theory of value vis-a-vis this comment

> Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique

Ie "capitalists" are not rewarded for deploying capital and mitigating risk but for extracting as much from the labor as possible. And yes Marx is absolutely the "originator" of these ideas and yes absolutely you ask any orthodox economist (and many random armchair economists on here) they will deny it till they're blue in the face. In fact you're doing it now :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

Edit: it's the same thing that plagues the rest of American civil society: "voting against your [communal] interests because someone convinced you that your exceptional". Ie who needs unions when I'm a 10x innovator/developer. Well I guess enjoy your LLM overlords then Mr 10x <shrug>.

Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power. Whether that’s the employee or the employer is going to depend on the exact circumstances (realistically it will be some mix). Hence why factory workers today get paid more than in the 1800s (and factory owners as well!)

> Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power.

That's true. And employers have been consistently the one with more bargaining power, and that's why our wages haven't kept up with the productivity gains. This is also known as productivity-pay-gap.

We, the working class, are supposed to be paid roughly 50% more than we are paid now, if the gains from productivity were properly distributed. But they are not, concentrated to a large extent in the owning class, which is what's unfair and why we, the workers, should unite to get what's rightfully ours.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

right; the "ancap" mentality in computing could only last for so long. Eventually, and especially with the refusal of incorporating any ethics or humanity into it, it's now an established industry affecting all walks of life just like every other that has preceded it, and the belief that its technological superiority/uniqueness was a good reason to essentially exempt it from regulation (TV broadcasts for children are required to have "bumper" sections that would clearly define the show vs the advertisement; Why was computing/the internet treated differently? A high-horse mentality that stemmed from "complexity olympics"? no child could ever use or comprehend a sophisticated machine like this!!) has really fucked us. The labor is decentralized at such a scale that I also have a hard time believing anything could be rectified; open source software is mostly just corporate welfare, putting anything at all on the internet has become corporate welfare, and there is no real purpose or goal for building all of this. The computer was supposed to allow us to do less work, right?

> But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer

Or, you know, being a member of society, you can find other members of society who feel like you, and organize together to place demands on employers that...you know...stops them from exploiting you.

- That's how you got the weekend: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-modern-phe...

- And that's how you got the 8-hour working week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement

- And that's how you got children off the factories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour

But, you know, you can always hustle against your fellow SEs, and try to appease your masters. Where others work the bare minimum of 8 hours, why not work 12, and also on the weekend? It's also fine.

Generating shareholder value is very important for the well-being of society! /s

By all means “organize together to place demands on your employers”. I didn’t say don’t do that. But there are 24 hours in a day — maybe strive to be good at your job AND organize instead of doing just one or the other?

I'd argue we'll be better at our jobs if we took pride in our craft and were treated with dignity and respect rather than like replaceable cogs in a machine that have to compete with one another to stay "competitive".

Not everything is about society.

Who claimed that?

> Generating shareholder value is very important for the well-being of society!

Should I be worried about the shareholders? While we are it, how about also removing the few environmental regulations and worker protection laws we still have, just so the poor poor shareholders can buy another yacht? /s

"Stonks go up" is not a proxy for success. Success is when pharma executives don't tremble like the villains they are from hearing the name of Mario's little brother. Success is when normal people get from the social contract at least as much as they put in. If we, the people, get less than from the social contract that we put in, as we nowadays observe, I can guarantee you we will break down the social contract, and the ones having most to lose from that are your precious stakeholders.

As a member of society, a lot of things in your life should be about society. And none of those things is shareholder value.

In fact, most people would have a version of this pyramid in order of importance:

1. Personal mental and physical well-being and the same for your loved ones

2. Healthy and functioning society and robust social safety nets, e.g retirement, paid leave, social housing, public transport etc

...

1337. The composition of sand on Mars

...

4206919111337. Shareholder value

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