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Comment by xpe | Hacker News Reader

How many people are just assuming the study is true or false based on what you already think is the case?

Better instead to use our collective brain power for something more productive. Such as digging into the various possible causal factors and understanding if the paper properly addresses and disentangles them.

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Maybe, just maybe, the reason is that the economy is moving towards the dumps and nobody is hiring or firing, because they know the future is gloomy.

But it makes it much nicer to say its AI that's stealing jobs to create even more hype.

This is the obvious answer to anyone paying attention

Perhaps you have it backwards, and the future is gloomy because AI is wrecking young american's job prospects.

Is it possible to stay better than AI? Maybe for some people. Not for the average person. The results of that are one of the largest contributors to the gloomy future (among other things).

The future is gloomy because the American economy has largely been in a state of "jobless recovery" since thr great recession. Stock prices are up thanks to corporate tax cuts, ZIRP, AI hype etc, but discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure.

> discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure

This is false.

Real disposable personal income is higher today than any time before March 2020 [1]. Covid stimulus first dramatically raised (March '20 to '21) and then lowered (March '21 to June '22) that figure. But we hit a local maximum in April '25, after which real DPI started falling, though nevertheless only to the level we saw in spring '21 and early '25, and no point before.

(Real median household figures are more laggy. But they show the same trend [2]. On a national level, these figures are up.)

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Disposable income is income after taxes. Discretionary income, which is what I specified, is income that remains after the necessities of life have been paid for.

Discretionary income spiked during Covid giveaways, and declined during the inflation of 2021/2, but the trend line is up from 2015.

https://i.imgur.com/Dbf8yyU.png

> Discretionary income, which is what I specified, is income that remains after the necessities of life have been paid for

You’re correct. See the personal savings rate [1]. If we observe the distribution, the lower quartile to third of households have no material savings [2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

If you see how real disposable personal income is defined, it basically just says how much personal income in total there is - if 90% of it was in the hands of 1% of the people, it does not tell you that. It does not tell you a median either - it's just how big the pool is. Household incomes are up, but is that inflation adjusted, and how does that compare to cost of living? The conclusion you are coming to is not supported by the data you provided alone.

> Household incomes are up, but is that inflation adjusted

Yes. That’s what the “real” part communicates in economics data.

> how does that compare to cost of living? The conclusion you are coming to is not supported by the data you provided alone

If aggregate real personal disposable incomes are up, and real median household incomes are up, for real median household disposable incomes to be down requires an extreme increase in lower income households’ costs of living compared with higher incomes households’. (No, rising wealth wouldn’t fix that disparity because we’re measuring income and consumption, the former which exempts capital gains.)

Inflation effects are unevenly spread across households [1]. But the slope of the effect, at least as of ‘21, was insufficient to shift the median negative. What it probably was sufficient to do, especially by 2024, is shift somewhere between the lower decile to maybe quartile’s real disposable household income negative since ~2025 to 2018, when we last moderated interest rates. But not since the GFC.

TL; DR While OP’s statement is true of some households, and probably most households in the lower decile to quarter, it’s not true in general. (Caveat: it may be true if we include recent Medicaid and poverty-related cuts.)

[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

Speaking to your point about a jobless recovery… that’s not accurate.

The US had recovered to full pre-recession employment levels by 2017[1].

Unemployment is around 4% right now.

I can’t speak to discretionary income or why the market is high, and maybe there is some sort of structural “underemployment” going on, but people are working.

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/chart-book-the-legacy-of-the-g...

Uber and Doordash count as "jobs" in the employment rolls. That's fine for people like you and me who probably have full time jobs with benefits and look at employment numbers from the angle of "how does this affect the value of my index fund?" But for the people who have these jobs as their sole source of income and rely on forms of public assistance to make ends, the reality feels far more precarious.

> Is it possible to stay better than AI? Maybe for some people. Not for the average person.

I know we're talking broadly across all industries but I can only speak to what I know and am able to observe directly.

My opinion of the average software developer with a few years experience is not very high. Yet now that we have non-coders shipping features written with LLMs, and we're starting to observe the fallout from that, I'm getting closer to saying than an entry level coder is far better than an LLM (depending on how we evaluate "better").

There are also a lot of hidden costs associated with LLMs. For example, I'm spending a lot more time reviewing PRs than I used to. And we're taking a lot more time doing rework than we were before.

We can't yet say that LLMs have caused an increase in regressions, since we've been racing towards a major new version release, and so people are rushing in general and that skews the numbers. Over time, however, we'll have data on rate of bugs introduced before the widespread company adoption of LLMs vs after, controlled for crunch times as well.

If the average software developer only spends an average of 20% of their time actually writing code, then even if an LLM can offer an optimistic 50% productivity increase, then we're only optimizing for 10% best case scenario.

I think there is a lot of marketing-hype-driven ideology around "AI" right now that is leading a lot of people to buy into some of the overstated claims. This ideology may have companies genuinely slowing down their hiring of entry-levels at the moment, since some people are saying that an LLM is like having an incompetent intern. The business thinks "If you need to babysit a junior and you need to babysit an LLM, then why pay for the junior?" And we still need better data to determine if, on average, what a company pays for a junior is truly more expensive than delegating the work to an LLM + taking on the maintenance and review overhead. We don't have the answers yet. My personal bias has me thinking that on average a junior will provide higher returns although not necessarily immediately. The benefit of a junior is that they learn from mistakes and can adapt more readily to specific business requirements.

This is not to say that LLMs aren't valuable. I think the trade-off for entry-levels is that I would have killed to have something like Cursor when I was a a pre-teen teaching myself to code in the 90s. When you want to build something complicated and don't even know where to start, and LLM can get you some scaffolding and show you a basic strategy that you can build on. Then you go fix bugs and poke around and break stuff.. it's a great learning tool. So I expect that, over time, the talent of entry-levels will probably increase. In the short term, we need to get through this AI bubble and stabilize. Companies will learn where LLMs save costs and where they can still benefit from less-experienced coders. It will just take a bit of time.

Wait but the job was to churn as many lines of code as possible, wasn’t it?

Especially given how the gov stats for unemployment rate and CPI have been changed over the years.

Example, if you dig into who we technically consider unemployed in that number, you’ll laugh.

Let’s say after 6 months of emails and ghost listings you take a break, you’re now considered “not in the labor force” which is the same category as retirees and full-time students. So that “improves” the unemployment rate

Not a hot take, but I think we’ve been in a recession/massive slowdown for much longer than the gov data shows

Willing to bet hedge funds have their own calculations of these metrics they keep secret as a market edge

> that number

Anyone referring to unemployment data in the singular has not dug into the numbers.

Odd Lots has done a lot of interviews with Fed members these past few days as they were in Jackson Hole and they all said that "now the data looks right" as they were talking to businesses everyone was saying they weren't hiring but the job numbers had remained high. One even said he'd expect to see even worse revisions in the coming months given the anecdotal data he's seeing in the wild.

So yeah, i'd say most of this AI stuff is bullshit, if it was really this good Sam Altman wouldn't be talking about building social networks.

The data in the study shows a strong trend going back to 2022. Whether the more recent data gets revised or not, you can see a strong negative effect on young workers.

Why do you think the future is gloomy from a business perspective?

The paper tries to directly address this by showing that job market for young software devs is much worse than other occupations that aren't as affected by AI. If it was broad economic decline or fear, you'd expect to it affect job types more broadly.

IRC section 174 was recently reversed. Its original removal was one of the big reasons for the layoffs in tech along with ZIRP ending.

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145

That would be worth considering as a factor, but you wouldn't expect it to so disproportionately affect young workers. Also, they are showing the same trend with receptionists, translators and customer service representatives which wouldn't have had the tax effect.

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