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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

If AI can do the easiest 50% of our tasks, then it means we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks. This has a lot of implications, but it does generally result in the job being more interesting overall.

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Or, alternatively, the difficult 50% are difficult because they're uninteresting, like trying to find an obscure workaround for an unfixed bug in excel, or re-authing for the n-th time today, or updating a Jira ticket, or getting the only person with access to a database to send you a dataset when they never as much as reply to your emails...

> we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks

Either that, or replacing the time with slacking off and not even getting whatever benefits doing the easiest tasks might have had (learning, the feeling of accomplishing something), like what some teachers see with writing essays in schools and homework.

The tech has the potential to let us do less busywork (which is great, even regular codegen for boilerplate and ORM mappings etc. can save time), it's just that it might take conscious effort not to be lazy with this freed up time.

The industry has already gone through many, many examples of software reducing developer effort. It always results in developers becoming more productive.

In my experience, the 50% most difficult part of a problem is often the most boring. E.g. writing tests, tracking down obscure bugs, trying to understand API or library documentation, etc. It's often stuff that is very difficult but doesn't take all that much creativity.

I disagree with all of those. Tracking down obscure bugs is interesting, and all the other examples are easy.

You'll potentially be building on flimsy foundations if it gets the foundational stuff wrong (see anecdote in sibling post). I fear for those who aren't so diligent, especially if there are consequences involved.

The strategy is to have it write tests, and spend your time making sure the tests are really comprehensive and correct, then mostly just trust the code. If stuff breaks down the line, add regression tests, fix the problem and continue with your day.

>This has a lot of implications, but it does generally result in the job being more interesting overall.

One implication is that when AI providers claim that "AI can make a person TWICE as productive!"

... business owners seem to be hearing that as "Those users should cost me HALF as much!"

> If AI can do the easiest 50% of our tasks

...But it can't, which means your inference has no implications, because it evaluates to False.

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