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Comment by JeremyNT | Hacker News Reader

This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang).

I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there.

If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.

For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).

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> know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor

But now you too can access AI labor. You can use it for yourself directly.

Kind of. But the outcomes likely do not benefit the masses. People "accessing AI labor" is just a race to the bottom. Maybe some new tools get made or small businesses get off the ground, but ultimately this "AI labor" is a machine that is owned by capitalists. They dictate its use, and they will give or deny people access to the machine as it benefits them. Maybe they get the masses dependent on AI tools that are currently either free or underpriced, as alternatives to AI wither away unable to compete on cost, then the prices are raised or the product enshittified. Or maybe AI will be massively useful to the surveillance state and data brokers. Maybe AI will simply replace a large percentage of human labor in large corporations, leading to mass unemployment.

I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own it, not us.

As someone who has leaned fully into AI tooling this resonates. The current environment is an oligopoly so I'm learning how to leverage someone else's tool. However, in this way, I don't think LLMs are a radical departure from any proprietary other tool (e.g. Photoshop).

Indeed. Do you know how many small consultancies are out there which are "Microsoft shops"? An individual could become a millionaire by founding their own and delivering value for a few high-roller clients.

what makes you think that's actually possible? maybe if you really had the connections and sales experience etc...

but also, if that were possible, then why wouldn't prices go down? why would the value of such labor stay so high if the same thing can be done by other individuals?

I saw it happen more back in the day compared to now. Point being, nobody batted an eyelash at being entirely dependent on some company's proprietary tech. It was how money was made in the business.

Nobody says there's no money to make anymore. But the space for that is limited, no matter how many millions hustle, there's only 100 spots in the top 100.

I think the key here is having the network with the high-roller clients. The ability to execute is down funnel of that.

Software development was a race to the bottom for the majority of developers aside from the major tech companies for a decade. I’m seeing companies on the enterprise/corp dev side - where most developers work - stagnate for a decade and not keep up with inflation in tier 2 cities - again where most developers work.

That is a fiction. None of us can waste tens of thousands of dollars whipping out a C compiler or web browser on a whim to test things.

If these tools improve to the point of being able to write real code, the financial move for the agent runners is to charge far more than they are now but far less than the developers being replaced.

> it’s obviously not going to stop there.

I don’t think it is obvious actually that you won’t have to have some expert experience/knowledge/skills to get the most out of these tools.

Today. Ask again in 6 months. A year.

People have been saying this for multiple years in a row now.

And it has been getting more true for years in a row.

Disagree entirely.

If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point.

In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be false as it has been historically so far.

> If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point

I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it.

The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there."

"full effect" is a pretty squishy term.

My more concrete claim (and similar to "Ask again in 6 months. A year.") is the following.

With every new frontier model released [0]:

1. the level of technical expertise required to achieve a given task decreases, or

2. the difficulty/complexity/size of a task that a inexperienced user can accomplish increases.

I think either of these two versions is objectively true looking back and will continue being true going forward. And, the amount that it increases by is not trivial.

[0] or every X months to account for tweaks, new tooling (Claude Code is not even a year old yet!), and new approaches.

Using a LLM to program is simply another abstraction level. Just how C was to assembly.

I feel like the nondeterminism makes LLM-assisted programming a different sort of concept than using a compiler. Your prompt isn't your source code.

Fortran to Assembly.

The transition from assembly to C, as I remember it, didn't involve using automated IP theft of scraped licensed source code to generate slop that no human has understood up until it's thrown at a code reviewer, though.

Six months ago, we _literally did not have Claude Code_. We had MCP, A2A and IDE integrations, but we didn't have an app where you could say "build me an ios app that does $thing" and have it build the damn thing start to finish.

Three months ago, we didn't have Opus 4.5, which almost everyone is saying is leaps and bounds better than previous models. MCP and A2A are mostly antiquated. We also didn't have Claude Desktop, which is trying to automate work in general.

Three _weeks_ ago, we didn't have Clawdbot/Openclaw, which people are using to try and automate as much of their lives as possible...and succeeding.

Things are changing outrageously fast in this space.

> Six months ago, we _literally did not have Claude Code_.

Claude Code came out a year ago.

I think the keyword here is "some".

It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place.

Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.

Originally spinners and weavers were quite happy. One spun, the other weaved, and the cloth was made.

Then along game the flying shuttle and the weavers were even happier - producing twice as much cloth and needing half as many spinners.

The the spinning jenny came along and spinners (typically the wife of the weaver) were basically unemployed, so much so that the workers took to breaking into the factories to destroy the jennys.

But the weavers were on the same track. They no longer owned their own equipment in their own home, they were centralised in factories using equipment owned by the industrialists.

Over the entire period first spinners, then weavers, lost their jobs, even with the massive explosion in output.

Meanwhile lower skilled jobs (typically with barely paid children) abounded (with no safety requirements)

Fortunately in the 1800s English industrialists had some amount of virtue, and the workers organised into unions, so economic damage wasn't as widespread as it could have been.

This power imbalance between the owners and workers was only really arrested after the world wars - first with ww1 where many owner's sent their children to battle and lost their heirs, then later with strong government reacting to the public post ww2.

If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so

Would travel agents have been justified in destroying the Internet so that people couldn't use Expedia?

Society was been better without the internet. We have lost all our privacy, our third spaces, the concept of doing hobbies for fun instead of as content, and much more.

> Society was been better without the internet

I don't even follow the reasoning of arguing this counterpoint, you are literally only able to make this argument because the internet even exists.

That's a "yet you participate in society" argument. It's not at all contradictory to use this communication medium to describe my perception of its negative impacts.

> capital is devaluing labor

I guess the right word here is "disenfranchising".

Valuation is a relative thing based mostly of availability. Adding capital makes labor more valuable, not less. This is not the process happening here, and it's not clear what direction the valuation is going.

... even if we take for granted that any of this is really happening.

> If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.

Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.

If the human race is wiped out by global warming I'm not so sure I would agree with this statement. Technology rarely fails to have downsides that are only discovered in hindsight IMO.

Or perhaps they would have advanced the cause of labor and prevented some of the exploitation from the ownership class. Depends on which side of the story you want to tell. The slur Luddite is a form of historical propaganda.

Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.

Reaganomics has never worked

> Reaganomics has never worked

Depends how you look at it.

Trickle down economics has never worked in the way it was advertised to the masses, but it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.

Sure, because it all trickles into their pockets.

> it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.

That would be "trickle up economics", though.

problem today is that there is no "sink" for money to go to when it flows upwards. we have resorted to raising interest rates to curb inflation, but that doesn't fix the problem, it just gives them an alternative income source (bonds/fixed income)

I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.

so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.

Yeah it's called wealth transfer and the vast majority is on the wrong end.

All of this crap has already been figured out by Silvio Gesell and his free economics ("Freiwirtschaft") movement before world war two. In fact, it has been figured out before Lenin got to power. Communists could have just stolen his ideas, pretended that they were their own and be done with capitalism.

Instead, we live in this absurd timeline where our communist "saviors" preferred losing against capitalists over achieving their stated goals. This tells us that in communism, the means are the goal and the proclaimed end goal is just an excuse to perform the means.

If communists genuinely wanted to help their people and they accept that they might not know how to get there, they would at least run hundreds to thousands of economic experiments, something that wouldn't be possible under capitalism, to find the methods that work. Instead, the self proclaimed saviors are inherently anti-reformist and against incremental change to improve society. They demand that all economic activity be under the control of the state and thereby destroy all possibility of performing economic experiments.

Sure, but would it have been better or worse for the Luddites?

For those who survived sure. For those at the time, I'm sure they would disagree

If you knew a little bit about history then you would know that the "Anti-Luddite" position is literally "shoot the unemployed if they strike".

Equivocating Luddites with backwards thinking is a way to cover up government violence. You're literally trying to misrepresent the Luddite position by implying that they had some sort of global plot to force the world to be worse and that they were rightfully stopped by the government when in reality they had some personal grievances about how they were treated and they took revenge against the owners of capital by vandalizing their capital.

You're trying to twist this into Luddites hating capital and machinery itself, which is factually wrong.

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