AI isn't killing jobs, it's 'unbundling' them into lower-paid chunks | Hacker News Reader

AI isn't killing jobs, it's 'unbundling' them into lower-paid chunks

theregister.com

56 pointsgnabgib33 comments

> In strong-bundle occupations… AI improves performance inside the job, but does not remove the human from the bundle," the authors argue.

At least in software engineering, AI can't replace the accountability that only humans can provide, but it multiplies the surface area that a human is accountable for, driving up the work demands on worker in one dimension while it lowers the demand for actual coding. On balance, it's more work down with far fewer people.

> It also squares with what we're seeing so far. AI is reshaping jobs, not wiping them out. Tasks move around, productivity may go up, yet employment and hours haven't shifted much – at least yet. In many cases, the bundle is still holding.

AI will supercharge the decades-old trend of productivity growth dramatically outpacing both employment and compensation, as the returns go primarily to the owners of capital.

The result: a lack of job growth while productivity still rises, and also stagnant wages as workers lose the labor market leverage.

Boy howdy does the future look bleak in this lens.

i guess tech workers should have unionized when they had the chance; too bad everyone thought they were too special.

Many of us screamed we were overpaid plumbers. May we now reap our just desserts.

Actually where I live in the EU plumbers make more than most software devs because there's so few of them. It takes months for a scheduled job and emergency work is obviously top dollar.

I don't understand how this isn't just an argument for confiscation by the masses.

My employer pays for the tokens, does the brown bags to disseminate learnings, encourages 20% time and hackathons. Of course they don't also hand me a bag of cash for no reason.

Why would anyone deploy capital not seeking a return?

> The human is left doing whatever the machine can't, often a narrower slice of the original role

I haven't seen anyone talk about AI and its impact on flow yet. It's pretty easy for me to achieve a flow state while coding without AI, but with AI, I'm not so sure. I spend my time managing multiple Claude instances as they work on different tasks, and there's no time to go really deep into anything.

Flow was such a productivity boost for me. Even though Claude definitely helps me finish tasks quicker, I've started wondering how much quicker it actually is, vs getting into flow.

I’ve seen people share the same experience here on HN. Im also in the same boat while I find LLMs uncomfortably useful but quite tiring to work with. To maintain flow I spend more time on crafting a complete and clear promot, akin to programming in natural language and avoid the back and forth when possible.

I’ve tried having one “big” task that I’m focusing on with active back and forth while letting other Claude instances handle easier back-burner type tasks that it can effectively one-shot. But I’ve noticed that often turns into me spending more time/focus than I’d want on tasks that aren’t actually that impactful. I still think I get more done than I would otherwise, but I still haven’t found the best management strategy.

Some people think that flow is a negative. You do what you feel like doing, not what you should be doing.

This is a piece I liked a lot about how to make coding agents better for flow state: https://haskellforall.com/2026/02/beyond-agentic-coding

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930565 - February 2026 (90 comments)

Sounds like you’ve become a manager.

Very soon all software engineers will be managers. And no, not sarcasm.

IMO: That's just due to the speed of responses.

Hardware will continue to improve, and eventually you'll have the choice of reaching a flow state with 2026 models, or using frontier models at our current level of performance.

In a sense, that is almost exactly the vision of the future shown in accellerando. User can and does send tons of specialized agents into the world. I am still not certain if I buy the premise of the article, but then my company is too cheap to let me play with Claude.

MBAs don't want to rely on people's flow. Let alone their skills. The fungible cog is their ideal.

I feel like you can get into a different sort of flow - a low-key flow where you're managing a bunch of different streams as interrupts come in. Different kind of focus, much more big-picture, kinda like playing an RTS.

At this point if I see "Made with {whatever_service_you_outsourced_thinking_to}" on a PR description and you didn't even feel like putting the effort to remove it, I'm going in with the assumption that you didn't bother to do or check a lot of things.

I get into the same flow state as any fast paced strategy game like StarCraft.

been in enterprise tech for 20 years and what I see is what I will call unbundling. its more like seniors are now doing work of 5 juniors because AI does the grunt work. so companies just dont hire juniors anymore. but the senior guy doesnt get paid 5x, maybe 1.2x if lucky and expected to output 5x.

I myself have gone back to hands on coding in last 6 months along with managing the team. so now I am doing both developer and manager role. company loves it obviously but I am not getting paid more to do both and juniors in my team are under severe pressure to show thier worth. thats not unbundling thats just squeezing people. And companies will continue to do it.

It's cute you think seniors are getting paid more.

I've been on the receiving end of development. You waited months for a POC. You ripped your hair out as the developer responsible for adding a backend to batch move stock wanted to chat to you about his wife's bird pictures during lunch while weeks into "the big feature" (literally an upsert).

I'm just glad that the tea party of corporate programming is over. Whatever comes next, it cannot possibly be worse.

If you’re wondering what is left when you have a swarm of generally intelligent agents working on your behalf and can do every task as well as a human, we already have the answer. That is the life of a CEO.

Humans are left deciding the direction, choosing what matters and what to spend attention on, and making judgement calls on the edge cases.

In the future, everyone is a CEO. How many CEOs are there though in that future? Probably not 8 billion

Just further proof that context is the real moat, not intelligence. All the models are already converging to be equally intelligent and that will only continue. GPT 5.4 / Opus 4.6 are the first two models I’ve used where I’m like, yeah, with the right spec/context they can pretty much do anything.

The “bundle” or “context” is the value.

Unbundling is killing, full stop.

OP is clearly living in a paralell world.

We have managers using chatbot to write code instead of engineers themselves.

Company after company using AI for everything over humans.

If you say that AI is not killing job in 2026, you are delusional.

Is this sarcasm? I can no longer tell the difference between sarcarsm, shilling, or good faith aithentic takes in absentia of real data points

>Is this sarcasm?

Is this sarcasm?

If you believe otherwise, you either don't know what is going on or you are not being affected by AI.

There are plenty of high skilled blue-collar folks who can no longer find job because AI is doing "the same" for cheap.

Oh, you're that type of forum participant.

The kind that knows better and can make categorical assertions about other people with no deduction or reasoning and can make baseless claims without any kind of evidence.

Thank you for the reveal.

The reality about the nature of programming does not matter. It is simply the perception among managers that AI could help them save money that causes job loss.

It happened to me, personally.

How is this different from previous layers of abstraction? React/JS dev don't have to think about memory management or a million other things that C++ application devs did. Instead that cognitive load is unbundled onto the framework maintainers, and frontend devs can be much more productive.

Obviously react/js didn't cause job apocalypse... Quite the opposite. It's just another abstraction layer making it possible to build a full application with less text. Prompts are the same pattern again IMO

It is different because writing a spec to tell AI what it wants is much easier than writing React/JS. The market reflects that.

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