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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended.

He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work.

I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my own field (marketing/tech writing.)

Yes, theoretically AI can replace every writer and marketer. The functionality is there.

No, this isn’t actually happening, because what’s mattered all along isn’t a generic marketing skill set; but the mental effort to actually provide value. No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring, and the writers that actually have something of value in their writing are doing just fine.

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That still seems super naive, at least if its extended to software engineering. Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded. I don't see how AI will improve that.

I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.

If you are but still get canned, then you’re just dealing with irrational management, and that predates AI.

Business can remain irrational longer than you can remain financially solvent.

>irrational management, and that predates AI

actually, it's AI that will be doing the predating

the goalposts for providing value are changing faster than ever

The problem isn’t whether or not companies need us— it’s about how many of us they need (demand), and how many of us there are (supply), because that determines our value. Companies pay people what they’ll work for, not based on how much they contribute to the bottom line; in economics, paying more than you have to for anything, including labor, is the irrational path. A steady, high demand for software developers has kept salaries high because that’s the only way they could get capable people to work for them.

The higher-end of markets aren’t immune to this. As the demand for lower-level workers drops, people will upskill trying to move up rather than get lopped off. Since there are fewer positions the further up the hierarchy you get, you don’t need a huge increase in supply to affect demand. That’s when you start seeing the most experienced, highest-earning people getting shit-canned because someone is willing to do a good-enough version of their role for 2/3 their sizable salary.

This can all happen without a single entire role being completely automated out of existence.

Software is already fantastically profitable. Productive SaaS companies right now collect ~500k in revenue per employee.

If what you describe happens (33% cut to salaries) then the bar for your own startup to be worth it is suddenly lower.

If large companies don’t pay us good salaries then why would we not go and build better competitors without the legacy and dead weight?

Go for it. I got out of that ridiculous ouroboro of an industry years ago. That might be great for you, but surely you can’t imagine VC funding enough startups to save the software labor market? The tech workforce is giant. Do you think there are tens or hundreds of thousands of ways to make unique new software products where even a single digit percentage are commercially viable? Software isn’t fungible: it needs to solve specific problems that people have, and do it well enough to deal with the hassle of switching software.

This isn’t an individual problem— it’s an industry-wide problem.

(I pulled the 2/3 number out of a hat to illustrate the point. I put exactly zero analysis into that.)

> If what you describe happens (33% cut to salaries) then the bar for your own startup to be worth it is suddenly lower.

That sounds like a material reduction in quality of life. Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money. IMHO, that's not a good trade off.

> Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money.

It is also ignoring scalability issues in the sense that if a large number of people now working regular jobs in tech are forced down this path, the amount of competition among these startups would be astronomical which would result is downward pressure on both the ability to fundraise and the ability to generate revenue for your particular startup.

Impossible for me to believe each individual startup founder would find some profitable niche to fit into.

> I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.

Businesses want worker fungibility and to reduce bus favor from having single point of failures. That usually, but not always, flies in the face of irreplaceability.

In a perfect world, yes. In most companies, finding good talent is a much harder problem than having too much of it.

The value-cost ratio is all that matters to a company. Yes, that implies that they are assuming all variations of value are achievable by AI which isn’t true and probably won’t ever be. But they do think that, nearly all of them. Because they don’t understand value. This has been true since the very first corporation. And that’s the problem. They will see a totally cheesed and squeezed metric telling them AI can reach 40% of the value of a “ ___ engineer “ at 10% of the cost and lay off engineers until shit starts exploding. And the stock market will strongly reward that decision.

I was and I did. Now there's nobody on the team who can fulfil something we promised to our biggest customer a few months ago. Shrug not my problem because I don't work there.

Only quibble that in some areas like the games industry, being disposable (qua susceptibility to layoffs) was closer to the status quo well before AI came around.

> I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.

Employees in knowledge work don’t generate constant value at all times. And companies want value at all times (that needs to be ever increasing). You’re not disposable at all point in time if you’re providing value at that point in time.

Companies shutdown profitable divisions/products because they aren't profitable enough. 'Providing value' is determined at a whim and by metrics out of your control.

AI isn't an adequate replacement for experienced software engineers, that is true.

But employers think it is, and are falling for the hype and are affecting engineers left and right regardless.

Whether I'm wrong or they're wrong is immaterial.

They're still replacing SWEs with AI.

>Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded.

I'm sorry but this is simply false. Nothing has really changed on the ground for SWEs. Nothing at all. Compensation is still sky high. Interviews are still the same. Career progression is the same. Everything takes the same amount of time. It's all business as usual for software engineering as a profession. AI is just one more tool in the toolkit; some devs use it, some don't. No engineering org has fallen for any hype in a meaningful way. Ultimately SWE teams on the frontline are busy doing what they always do, mostly in the way that they've always been doing.

The only thing that's changed in a remarkable way is how disconnected the rhetoric on social media is from ground reality. Anyone telling you AI is even replacing 5% of SWEs in the industry is a jobless hack.

> I'm sorry but this is simply false. Nothing has really changed on the ground for SWEs. Nothing at all. Compensation is still sky high. Interviews are still the same. Career progression is the same. Everything takes the same amount of time.

That's not remotely what I'm hearing or seeing from those who are on the job market.

The tech job market hasn't been "easy" for many years (basically since 2015 except for a ~2 year boom from mid 2020 to mid 2022). People always find different things to attribute the difficulty to. I remember way back in the day when bootcamps were the boogeyman.

Try being a translator today. You can provide as much value as you want, you won't get a job anymore.

That's just factually untrue though. And there are high profile examples I would expect any well read person to know.

And we're at the point where you have to essentially choose the factually wrong point of view so there's no worth in even listing the counter examples.

The demand for authorised translators (approved in country X to correctly translate into country X’s native language from a particular language) has been steadily growing with globalisation and international trade. Contracts, court documents, financial records, medical records, birth and death certificates, technical reports: all of these must be translated and stamped by someone with the authority to do so, someone the government has confirmed to be competent.

The professional guilds are sounding the alarms, because there aren’t enough translators qualifying.

Something similar happened with web search.

There used to be many site aggregators curated by people for different categories - kind of like sub-reddits. At the same time, there were purely algorithmic search engines (yahoo, google, etc.).

The algorithmic approach won, but aggregators still exist.

I think that the friction lies somewhere in between what you’re observing and what ~safety1st addresses below.

The author has a specific issue in mind. Today the author chooses joy and refuses to evoke the woe and worries of the audience thus omitting their concerns; the audience fails to inherit the author’s optimism, likely due to some kind of asymmetry in sociopolitical outlook and status between the two parties.

HN is succumbing to the discordant trends in common discourse found elsewhere online. Demographic changes may have something to do with this.

I don’t think it’s demographic changes as much as it is fear of displacement.

Until 2 years ago, software engineering appeared to be an ideal career: strong demand for talent combined with high salaries. But with the productivity gains promised (and often achieved) with coding agents, people are understandably afraid. And people who are afraid take defensive measures: denial, anger, excessive criticism, etc. AI becomes, in some sense, “the enemy.”

I think that better explains the shift in overall tone.

I mean it's a title. Titles are under no obligation to condense the entire content of the article into one sentence. People who want to comment on the article should read it first, and then write in good faith.

The problem lies in the HN comments which have taken that title and interpreted it through the lens of unrelated political arguments: class warfare, anti-offshoring, etc. etc. I don't think any title would be immune from these people. They're just angry because the Internet has its hooks in their brain, and they're going to post about it.

His points are good and people would be wise to read the article and take them to heart. His key points are:

1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.

2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.

None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.

HN has better moderation than a lot of places but from my vantage point the entire Internet is sinking into this garbage - we're more aware of the problem these days, at least, but everything and everywhere is more consumed by political hot takes than ever before.

If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!

> 1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.

> 2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.

> None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.

They’re both tautologies. No new or useful info to glean. I didn’t need some highly intelligent security researcher to explain these things that are explained by intuition by anyone with an above room temp IQ.

There must surely be more to this, and given how many of his other recent blogs are a mix of political rant and a screed against da haterz. I suspect it’s a lot more political on his side than you think.

> If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!

lol, gotta love people who whine about HN quality and then just write pointless crybaby paragraphs like this. If you can’t beat em, join em I guess.

I _do_ believe the author implied universality on purpose.

That’s also close to the YC motto: “make something people want”.

Or as Paul Graham puts it: be good. https://paulgraham.com/good.html

> No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring

Nah. Humans can be boring too. No one wants to consume AI art in any form because art isn't just about what it is, but also how it came to be. We care about art and history because those things involved humans. And we like understanding the takes of our fellow humans. We don't care about the take of a statistical model on the topics of art and creativity.

The problem is that with generative AI, I have no means of protecting my work from being stolen.

It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs.

Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.

Now that wouldn't be so bad. One could argue copyright has long held back progress in certain areas. The problem is, the rules only apply one way. The rent seeking oligarchs of the tech industry can steal everything but I can't.

They can just eat the cost of a lawsuit, I can't. They can just decide to make a special deal with Disney to use their copyrighted material, I can't.

Sure the days of free markets capitalism are long gone. A few monopolists controlling the market has long been the norm. But AI makes it even worse. So much worse.

> a private repo on Github

Delete your github repos and operate your own gitolite instance. Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.

That's only a half measure if AI companies ruthlessly consume anything they can get. Microsoft might ignore repo visibility, they can still consume it. OpenAI may have a backdoor by nature of its apps/harnesses running on dev machines that do have copies of your project.

I guess you're safe with a privately self hosted project that you only share with people who don't have any AI and won't reshare it.

Then again, if you even distribute only binaries then in theory the AI could copy those and reverse engineer them, or just mutate the binaries.

> Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.

Someone needs to build an easy to run AI agent that does that automatically, maybe with strategically bad choices (like complex no-op tests, bad algorithms, introduction of security vulnerabilities described as fixing them). I'd run it. Maybe it could even star/interact with other slop repos, so low activity couldn't be used as a filter.

AI will be the straw that breaks the camel's back on copyright Imo. We've known since 90s Napster music piracy that copyright is broken in the information age, and its just a flimsy set of unprincipled edicts meant to protect those with power and money.

Nowadays AI companies have more money and lawyers than most movie studios, so

I predict that there will be a billion dollar company/ies (probably exist even now in stealth mode), whose business model will be to slopfork existing software - after all AI has proven to be very capable at that.

With trillions of dollars both supporting and opposing this business model, something will probably change in some way wrt copyright, and hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.

> hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.

Given the current political and economic environment, I wish I had the sort of optimism to believe any changes in the law would benefit the average person.

> Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.

Good. "You" made the world a better place at the expense of "me", the rent-seeking GPL author. I can go suck it if nobody wants my equivalent product with a worse license anymore. How do people not get this? If AI enables somebody to reproduce somebody else's hard labor much more cheaply, then it should do so instead of holding everyone else to ransom just because some self-entitled programmer wants to prevent competition when he's falling behind the market.

If you're a programmer, you have no moral right to complain about that because it's also the whole point of computer software. To do things more cheaply - ie to make somebody else's work worthless.

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