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> I went to the coffeeshop and drank very good coffee listening to music. Then at night I sat and had a beer thinking about T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland', the effect of industrialization in England at that time and his views of how ennui affected the aristocracy.

Well, for those among us that are not aristocracy already, except for the vanishingly small number of people required to oversee such processes, we’re probably the closest we’re going to get to it. If they don’t need people to do the tech labor, we’ve got way more people than we need, so that’s a huge oversupply of tech skills, which means tech skills are rapidly becoming worthless. Glad to see how fast we’re moving in our very own race to the bottom!

I kind of feel like software engineers working on improving AI are traitors working against other SE’s trying to make a living.

However…

I have to acknowledge my craft of SE has been putting people out of work for decades. I myself came up with business process improvement that directly let the company release about 20 people. I did this twice.

So… fair play.

Aren't the true traitors still the ones paying the SE to do that work? The managerial slave-master class?

You always have a choice to make. You make it everyday. Get up. Go to a legitimate job. Work.

You probably choose not to steal, rob, impersonate someone else, or generally make money illegally.

It can be traitors all the way down.

In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

>It frees up people to do more interesting things

Like beg on the corners and starve in the street? Trying to figure out how the basics of capitalism where labor is exchanged for money is not going to work well when the only jobs left are side gigs. Something will have to change and a lot of People will fight said change.

I’ve thought about this myself. Couple of points:

1) It’s not my job to fix all the problems of Capitalism. It’s painful to try to fight the system without collective action. My family and I have to eat too.

2) We have had a solution all along for the particular problem of AI putting devs out of work. It’s called professional licensure, and you can see it in action in engineering and medical fields. Professional Software Engineers would assume a certain amount of liability and responsibility for the software they develop. That’s regardless of whether they develop it with LLM tools or something else.

For example, you let your tools write slop that you ship without even looking? And it goes on to wreak havoc? That’s professional malpractice. Bad engineer.

If we do this then Software Engineers become the responsible humans in the loop of so-called “AI” systems.

It’s not your job to fix capitalism. But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.

Say you found a job shooting people in the head for money. Like if you work for ICE or something…

You need to feed your family. Is this job ok? You may decide yes. I decided no. I will find another way to feed my family.

You don’t get to escape consequences because you are a small cog in a large system.

In the bigger picture, automation should free people from labor. But that requires some very greedy people to relax their grip ever so slightly. I imagine they see automation as a way to reduce reliance on labor, and if they don’t need labor, they don’t need people. So let them starve and stop having kids.

> But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.

It’s not even the money-making skill: it’s the application of it. People that are good at shooting people can be beneficial to society as protectors or they can be the the business end of systemic oppression. People with software development skills don’t have to help optimize the motor in the brand-new shiny capitalism juicer.

We will come up with new jobs, like we have for all of human history. I think even in an abundance utopia people will still work - we need purpose to sustain our existence.

The work will become even more fulfilling however.

Throughout human history that didn’t happen fast enough to avoid an astonishing amount of human misery. Nobody’s worried about the future of work. They’re worried about the people that rely on tech jobs for food, mortgage/rent, cancer treatments, elder care, retirement, et al. Look at what happened to the rust belt, coal country, etc. etc. etc.

I agree with you, IMO largely this is an affordability crisis though, which is fuelled by inflation. I don't really offer many solutions besides eliminating inflation. I apologise if that is insufficient (it is).

Don’t apologize — stop minimizing the job market concerns by saying “there will be new jobs” as if that’s imminent.

> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

Yeah, but why does it need to take the fun jobs first, like painting, writing poems, coding, making music, ...

I want the AI to cook, do the dishes, take out the trash, etc.

Well, because consuming art, reading poems, having code written for you that solves a problem, and listening to music is also fun. Recently I wanted a grand elegy to Britain written as the Empire started failing and set to music in a specific style. I had it playing in the background while fixing some issues with some software.

It truly was joyful to have this available to me. It didn’t have to have mass appeal or need me to pay the right artists the right amounts. I had it in moments.

It’s a wonderful world.

To me the image of a world where everyone does menial work while entertaining themselves with AI-generated "art" doesn't seem fun, it seems extremely depressing and dystopian. I guess we just have different values.

And if you consider art something to be consumed for light entertainment, that viewpoint makes sense. For people that consider art a way to express, and conversely experience, otherwise inexpressible things about our humanity, your wonderful world is a cheap, superficial, and sad way for tech companies to amalgamate and sell other people’s ideas and labor.

> like painting, writing poems, coding, making music

Citation needed. Do you have an example of someone in the arts losing their job because of AI?

Yes. The entire job markets for game concept art, stock photography, and storyboarding have been decimated and those were the lowest-hanging fruit for diffusion model applications.

I'm not sure cooking is a good example as it is fun, and also automated in many ways

Depends on the person. When I worked as a chef I’d gladly have had a robot cook for me at home if it was affordable.

> In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

To a point. Then it just frees up people to do nothing.

> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

That is in fact the goal. The less labor capital needs, the more money (and power) the capitalists get to keep for themselves.

The problem is that most people consider doing art, writing, making music, and heck, even coding, “more interesting” than orchestrating a pile of knowledgeable but idiotic robot interns because that’s what’s profitable.

Sure, but that’s fine. I don’t have any allegiance to other software engineers.

Do you think other people’s sense of ethics should be so transactional towards you? Companies that might sell your data to shitty date brokers have no allegiance to you. Muggers have no allegiance to the people they mug. They’re both executing their professional tasks that benefit the people they have allegience to. They’re contributing to the velocity of money in our society. The data might even be used to market beneficial goods and service. So… thumbs up? Or would you feel differently if it was someone else profiting at your expense.

Yes, none of these guys have any allegiance to me. Trying to form a union of muggers with a guy trying to mug me won’t work. You’re welcome to try it if you think it will work for you but I’m not going to.

Copout.

Lol,a race to the bottom where too many tech savvy people are left unemployed while a few "privileged" get a decreasing buying power to maintain security of the digital tools that keep the whole digital dependent civilizations afloat?

Sounds like a great starting plot for an interesting story.

> Edit: This is going to have huge ramifications for the tech security industry as these systems will be able to break security systems as easily it solved the proof. The sooner the good guys, if there are any left, understand this the better it will be for everybody.

What can the good guys do? Fire up Claude to improve their systems? Unless you have it working fully autonomously to counter-act abuse, I don't see how you can beat the "bad guys". There may be some industries where this is a solved problem (e.g. you can do all the validation server-sided, religiously follow best practices to prevent and mitigate abuse), but a lot of stuff like multiplayer video games will be doomed unless they move to a "you must use a locked down system we control" model. I honestly don't consider it liberating as someone that has various hobby projects, that now in addition to plain old DDoS I'll also have people spin up layer 7 attacks with just their credit card. It almost makes me want to give up instead of pushing forward in a world where the worst of the worst has access to the best of the best.

Nothing as heavy as the above but here's my small anecdote:

I was putting off security updates on my npm dependencies in my personal project because it's a pain to migrate if the upgrade isn't trivial. It's not a critical website, but I run npm scripts locally, and dependabot is telling me things.

I told Claude Code to make a migration plan to upgrade my deps. It updated code for breaking changes (there were API changes, not all fixes are minor version upgrades) and replaced abandoned unmaintained packages with newer ones or built-in Node APIs. It was all done in an hour. I even got unit tests out of it to test for regressions.

In this case, I was able to skip the boring task of maintaining code and applying routine updates and focus on the fun feature stuff.

> I would go for a 2 or 3 hour walk with my phone using the remote control feature looking every 5 - 10 minutes

2-3 hours "walking" while having to check in every 5-10 minutes?

If I have to check in every 5-10 minutes, I won't taste coffee or hear that there's good music playing.

Just Claude code a push notification feature then

How is this better?

> I would go for a 2 or 3 hour walk with my phone using the remote control feature looking every 5 - 10 minutes to make sure it doesn't need human help.

That is a nightmarish scenario tbh

Nightmarish?! In comparison to the average person's actual job? I'm pretty sure that many people out there would sign up for a battle royale for a chance at such a job.

Would they? I'd love to get in touch

My clients have been burned before. Once you set up the battle royale with a trusted third party validating that there'll be an assured good job at the end, I promise I'll have enough candidates for you to fill up the first 10 competitions.

I you think you’ll be paid 3 hours of salary for every 5 minutes of work, I have bad news for you.

Most likely your 3 hours will be filled with managing 36 different AI sessions at a time and it will slowly break your brain.

At least if we keep doing capitalism the way we are.

Tech industry folks have been so coddled for decades that many think their astonishing intellect has earned them a cushy life rather than being in a field with high labor demand. It’s one reason tech workers are often considered arrogant and out of touch… and that’s why people think they can get paid to lightly orchestrate agents to do their jobs. Oof.

If efficiency gains create an oversupply of tech labor, even the bestie BFF bosses will notice the hoards of more qualified people who will kill for any job that pays more than CVS or Uber— so a lot less than most developers make now. The tech world regularly, shamelessly cuts higher-earning higher-skill workers for cheaper “good enough” replacements. Best of luck.

Even many of the folks that see the writing on the wall have fanciful visions of using their astonishingly capable genius developer brain to maintain or quickly re-achieve some of their high status in the trades. As a union tradesman, I’d find that misconception hilarious if I didn’t feel so bad for them. A lot of folks are going to have a lot of bitter medicine to swallow.

So sitting at a desk is nicer than a walk outside for you? Why would relaxation be a nightmare?

Checking one’s phone every 5 to 10 minutes is nothing but relaxation. One needs to have the mind at ease to relax.

That nightmarish scenario is what T.S. Eliot was describing in "The Wasteland" which "portrays deep, existential ennui and boredom as defining symptoms of modern life following World War I."

Later this boredom was described by the Stones, "And though she’s not really ill / There’s a little yellow pill / She goes running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper".

It is a nightmare. Mostly what I'm thinking about while the agents are running is how bored I'm going to be. That is the joke, my deep thought on T.S. Eliot are about the wasteland this thing is going to create.

I have similar amounts of success (pretty good!) standing in line at a coffee shop talking to people who work for me through some action that needs to be taken and doing the same with AI.

However I do not trust AI anywhere near as much as I trust the humans. The AI is super capable but also occasionally a psychopath toddler. I sat in amused astonishment when faced with job 2 not running because job 1 was failing Claude went in to the database, changed the failure record to success, triggered job 2 which produced harmful garbage, and then claimed victory. Only the most troubled person would even think of doing that, but Claude thought it was the best solution.

My work has required us all to be "AI Native". I am AI skeptical but am the type of person to try to do what is asked to the best of my ability. I can be wrong, after all.

There is some real power in AI, for sure. But as I have been working with it, one thing is very clear. Either AI is not even close to a real intelligence (my take), or it is an alien intelligence. As I develop a system where it iterates on its own contexts, it definitely becomes probabilistically more likely to do the right thing, but the mistakes it makes become even more logic-defying. It's the coding equivalent of a hand with extra fingers.

I'm only a few weeks into really diving in. Work has given me infinite tokens to play with. Building my own orchestrator system that's purely programmatic, which will spawn agents to do work. Treat them as functions. Defined inputs and defined outputs. Don't give an agent more than one goal, I find that giving it a goal of building a system often leads it to assert that it works when it does not, so the verifier is a different agent. I know this is not new thinking, as I said I am new.

For me the most useful way to think about it has been considering LLMs to be a probabilistic programming language. It won't really error out, it'll just try to make it work. This attitude has made it fun for me again. Love learning new languages and also love making dirty scripts that make various tasks easier.

This type of slop comment is somehow worse than spam.

>After a week, scores of iterations, it can reverse engineer any website

Cool, let’s see the proof.

I posted a link but don't want to spam HN more than I have.

It is proof-of-concept. Seriously burns some tokens (~80k - ~200k) but doesn't require AI after to scrape and automate a website so if all the people at Browser Use, Browser Base, and every one pounding every website used it, I think, the net benefit would be in the billions. I would recommend using it in isolation. Nonetheless, it works very very well on my machine.

> This type of slop comment is somehow worse than spam.

Please don't be mean.

It sounds like this is along the lines of Firecrawl is trying to do? Or what Plaid has done for banking?

> I think, the net benefit would be in the billions.

I think, you must forgive people if they are somewhat hostile, if not sick and tired of these claims. It’s quite frustrating seeing individuals constantly saying things like this. Meanwhile I don’t think a lot of people are seeing the structural shifts that these claims imply. This is not an original idea. The disruption claim has been made for the past several years in various fields and the goalposts keep getting moved. AI will absolutely change and render some jobs moot even in its current state if Claude/GPT are able to make a profitable business model. If it turns out that Claude is really being subsidized by investors and it turns out that $200/month subscription is really a $5,000/month when Claude has to stand on its on, I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

It’s clear you’ve gotten some good, if expensive use out of AI, but I’m not sure that experience scales or if it will exist in 5 years.

There is no proof, just a self-congratulatory word salad with dubious authenticity.

It’s insane how insufferable this place is now.

Here is a description of the iteration loop. [0] I'm working on another draft that will be much more polished and have better explanations of the iteration loop.

> There is no proof, just a self-congratulatory word salad with dubious authenticity.

I worked 8 days straight on that and have been working non-stop on the second draft that is much cleaner and safer. I'm a human being. Please don't be mean. If humanity does come to end, it won't be because of AI, it will be because we can't stop being assholes to each other.

[0] https://github.com/adam-s/intercept/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-...

That's fucking insane. Thank you for sharing.

I had a bad feeling we were basically already there.