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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

our labor market is cyclic, relatively short busts and long initially-slow-and-faster-and-faster booms. We had busts of 2000-2003, 2008-2010(11?), 2022- i guess 2026. I wasn't in US in 199x, yet i guess beginning of the 199x also was a bit tough.

Unavoidable AI-based productivity growth, in software and in all the other industries, will lead to the software, specifically AI in this case, not just eating the wold, it would be devouring it. Such AI revolution will mean even more need for software engineers, just like the Personal Computer revolution and the Internet revolution did in their times. Of course the software engineering will get changed like it did in those previous revolutions.

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> Unavoidable AI-based productivity growth

There is no productivity growth attributed to AI. In fact, serious attempts to measure AI performance show that even if AI makes some code entry tasks faster, total product delivery times are, in fact, increased.

(This should be obvious once you realize coding AIs are technical debt generation machines.)

There's no "productivity growth attributed to AI" -- yet.

I think we've gone beyond anecdotal evidence of experience engineers finding true value in this new tech. It may not have registered yet, but skilled people are unequivocally finding value in these tools.

I agree that we have yet to settle down on the true costs involved (which will probably end up at "slightly less than a junior engineer" or something like that) - but we are months beyond the idea that it's all smoke and mirrors and no one is getting value out of it.

> but skilled people are unequivocally finding value in these tools.

Sure, whatever. That would be anecdotal evidence.

I get you, but as the months progress, we keep finding that more and more experienced engineers are finding a lot of time-saving value in this new tech.

I think we are past the point where we can just dismiss their input - these new tools do legitimately add value, it appears.

> experienced engineers are finding a lot of time-saving value in this new tech

Experienced engineers are always finding "time-saving value in new tech". This is a tale as old as the craft of programming itself, and all the hundreds and thousands of ways to hack the development experience engineers obsess over has never resulted in tangible gains for delivering quality software on time.

> but this time the LLM technology is magic and it will be different!

How many more SOTA models? How many more weeks? Will you "trust the plan" forever?

I think part of the problem is that it is such a generic catch all term:

- AI will replace all workers (unlikely today) - AI speeds up programming (yes today)

There’s a difference between the engineer getting value and the firm.

It can be true that the engineer is more productive but the end result is the firm is in a net negative state.

that is today. The first cars - with steam engine, the very first in 1769! - and even the ones from the first half of 19th century also didn't look like an improvement. The AI today is more like the internal combustion engine toward the end of the 19th century - on the brink of becoming the dominating tech while using a horse was still a viable option for a time.

METR had found this result in the past but in a recent reexamination, rather than a 20% loss, there was now a 20% gain (per recent Roge Karma article in the Atlantic). I'm not aware of all of the studies though and what the consensus is, just an example that seems to suggest this is not necessarily true.

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