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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The reasonable concern people have about AI eliminating coder jobs is that they will make existing coders drastically more productive. "Productivity" is literally defined as the number X of people required to do Y amount of stuff.

I'm not sure how seriously people take the threat of non-coding vibe-coders. Maybe they should! The most important and popular programming environment in the world is the spreadsheet. Before spreadsheets, everything that is today a spreadsheet was a program some programmer had to write.

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I'm still optimistic that the net effect of making existing programmers drastically more productive is that our value goes up, because we can produce more value for other people.

The economy has taught us that when there is an excess of worker productivity, it leads to layoffs. It certainly does not lead to raises.

Do you have a citation for that?

What a strange thing to ask for a citation on when CEO pay, stock buy backs and corporate dividends are at all time highs while worker pay and honestly just affording to live continue to crater.

I mean, I hate a lazy "citation needed" FUD attack as much as (really likely way more than) anyone, but with a bit more context I do think a citation is needed, as the correct citation in the other direction is (as someone else noted) Jevon's paradox: when you make it easier to X, you make it so people can use X in ever more contexts, and you make it so that the things which previously needed something way harder than X are suddenly possible, and the result -- as much in software development as any other field: it seems like every year it becomes MUCH easier to do things, due to better tools -- always seems to result in MORE demand, not less... we even see the slow raising of "table stakes" for software, such that a website or app is off-putting and lame to a lot of users if it isn't doing the things that require at least some effort: instead of animated transitions and giant images maybe the next phase of this is that the website has to be an interactive assistant white-glove AI experience--or some crazy AR-capable thing--requiring tons of engineering effort to pull off, but now possible for your average website due to AI coding. Meanwhile, the other effects you are talking about all started before AI coding even sort of worked well, and so have very little to do with AI: they are more related to monetary policy shifts, temporary pandemic demand spikes, and that R&D tax law change.

Productivity is up and labor wages are up. That’s why I asked. It wasn’t an attempt at a rebuttal it was a request for reading material as it’s a heterodox view.

The normal conversation is that productivity growth has slowed and the divide has increased, not that more productivity creates lower outcomes in real terms.

https://www.bls.gov/productivity/images/labor-compensation-l...

What is 'real hourly compensation'?

It's economic jargon for what people are paid per hour for working (which can include non-direct payments such as healthcare and pensions), adjusted for inflation (for economists, "real" just means divided by CPI, as opposed to "nominal" which are the actual dollar amounts in the past).

Data is collected through the National Compensation Survey: https://www.bls.gov/respondents/ncs/

No software company I have ever worked at had an excess of worker productivity. There were always at least 3-5X as much work needing to be done, bugs needing to be fixed, features that needed to be implemented than engineers to do it. Backlogs just grew and grew until you just gave up and mass-closed issues because they were 10 years old.

If AI coding improves productivity, it might move us closer to having 2X as much work as we can possibly do instead of 3X.

I don't think you can judge "work needing to be done" by looking at backlog. Tickets are easy to enter. If they were really important, they'd get done or people would be hired to do them (employed or contracted). 10 year old issues that never got attention were just never that important to begin with.

That sounds like the famous lump of labour fallacy. When something's cheaper people often spend more on it (Jevons paradox).

This "fallacy" is from 1891 and assumes jobs that require virtually no retraining. A farm worker could ion theory clean the factory floor or do one small step in an assembly line within a week.

Nowadays we already have bullshit jobs that keep academics employed. Retraining takes several years.

With "AI" the danger is theoretically limited because it creates more bureaucracy and reduces productivity. The problem is that it is used as an excuse for layoffs.

I rather think that LLMs help to write code faster, and also enables folks that would not program to do so in some capacity. In the end, you end up with more code in the world, and you end up needing more programmers to maintain/keep it running at scale.

LLMs don't care you have to maintain the code, they don't get any benefit or loss from their work and are unaccountable when they fuck up. They have no skin in the game.

They don't know the office politics, or go on coffee breaks with the team - humans still have more context and access. We still need people to manage the goals and risks, to constrain the AI in order to make it useful, and to navigate the physical and social world in their place.

But when everyone started to produce SEO slop, the web died. It’s harder than ever to find truly passionate, single subject blogs from professionals for example.

The AI slop will make it harder for the small guys without marketing budget (some lucky few will still make it though). It will slowly kill the app ecosystem, untill all we reluctantly trust is FANG. The app pricing reflects it.

> everything that is today a spreadsheet was a program some programmer had to write

That is incorrect, sir.

First, because many problems were designed to fit into spreadsheets (human systems designed around a convenient tool). It is much more likely that several spreadsheets were _paper_ before, not custom written programs. For a lot of cases, that paper work was adapted directly to spreadsheets, no one did a custom program intermediate.

Second, because many problems we have today could be solved by simple spreadsheets, but they often aren't. Instead, people choose to hire developers instead, for a variety of reasons.

I'm not sure we're really disagreeing about anything here. If you think spreadsheets didn't displace any programmers at all, that's contrary to my intuition, but not necessarily wrong --- especially because of the explosion of extrinsic demand for computer programming.

You say spreadsheet software replace programmer.

I say spreadsheet software replace paper.

That's the disagreement. You have intuition, I have sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#Paper_spreadsheets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#Electronic_spreads...

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