Cannibalism | Hacker News Reader

Cannibalism

b-ark.ca

71 pointssrijan486 comments

"Fourth, we will not find ourselves working less. Rather, there will be a bimodal outcome: those unable to find a place in the new AI-powered industry will fall out of it entirely, while those that remain are worked harder and harder as they drive automated development systems. Five PRs a week? Hah! Try fifty. Or five hundred."

My experience with AI/LLMs summed up. The baseline expectation got higher. I didn't get any time back. My life didn't become easier.

As it was the case with all productivity catalysts in the past. The Industrial Revolution promised machines would work and we’d get to have leisure time. Instead, it brought 16 hour factory shifts. This will be no different

The industrial revolution hasn’t led to people working less, but it has led to more output: created more luxuries, made previous-luxuries available to lower classes, and reduced extreme poverty.

I am not refuting that. But the one thing it didn’t achieve was its main selling point - a reduction of labor in exchange for more leisure time.

Likewise, AI will not lead to a future where the machines are working for us while we can enjoy our free time; it’s just increasing the required output from AI-augmented workers. That will probably increase economic output, but like before not leisure time.

> Instead, it brought 16 hour factory shifts.

To paraphrase Marx, "And so, the equivalent amount of labour required to produce the goods needed to sustain a worker for a day is, say, 4 hours. But that doesn't mean the selfsame worker can work for no longer that 4 hours! He can be forced to work six, or eight, or twelve hours a day, and whatever additional goods he produces — that's the surplus product, which in this case goes straight to line up the factory owner's pockets".

It only goes into the factory owner's pocket to the degree that the factory has no competitors (has pricing power) and the factory owners don't work for the factory (i.e. RSUs and the like).

Marx is great at building a narrative that generates resentment if you buy his frame. But you don't need to buy his frame, and if you don't, you suffer a lot less resentment. It's no way to live.

That applies to an awful lot of cases though? Especially during Marx' time.

The trouble is thinking in terms of class.

It encourages one to generalize from instances to the group, and from the group to individuals.

Cherry-pick your examples and you smear the group. Invoke the smeared group, and you target the individual.

It's structurally isomorphic to racism and any other -ism.

The poor capitalists with all the money and power, making the decisions at the highest levels, guiding society's direction... can you imagine they might be responsible for the shittier and shittier turns our world is taking?

Class is the shape of power and exploitation under capitalism. Some own, others work to enrich those that own. That's all class is. Being frank about the real power differences in our society and our world isn't an ism.

There is a spectrum between an employer’s monopoly/oligopoly over labor that Marx’s narrative presupposes and a perfectly competitive labor market your narrative presupposes.

Reality varies between these two extremes in different labor markets. In some labor markets, the employer has so much leverage they’re essentially a local monopolist; in other markets, employees have enough leverage that the respective labor market is close to perfectly efficient.

Thusly, both yours and Marx’s narratives about the labor markets are typically wrong, but serve good extremes on a spectrum. These extremes help you calibrate the respective spectrum and as you turn the dial between the amount of power the employee vs employer has in a respective market, you can induce how well employees get treated.

Moreover, if there exists a mismatch between employee treatment and their respective leverage, there essentially exists an arbitrage opportunity to exploit. For example, in 2022 Musk (especially when he bought Twitter and laid of 80% of the workforce) and other tech oligarchs conjectured that tech workers were being overcompensated and that employers had enough leverage to start treating them worse. Largely this bet paid off whether or not it was justified during the time. On the other hand, RenTech saw that highly skilled people were being under compensated and was able to get top tier talent without having to compete with others firms that much since they were undervaluing this labor.

I think right now tech labor is being undervalued by the market and that there is an arbitrage opportunity to get highly skilled people since the cut-throat competition for these workers is much less than it was in 2021. That is my conjecture. Regardless if my conjecture is true, I hope I sufficiently illustrated why this spectrum mental model is more useful than presupposing a monopoly labor market or a perfectly efficient labor market: both of these are unlikely to be true and are just meant to be oversimplified mental models with strong assumptions that can be loosened later. From these strong assumptions, we can loosen them to build more robust mental models as I describe above.

> a perfectly efficient labor market

But in a perfectly efficient market, the good would be traded at its marginal price. And the marginal price of labour is the sustenance wage, not the marginal product of labor as neoclassical economists seem to believe.

A perfectly efficient market doesn’t necessarily mean that a good is traded at its marginal price. You’re instead describing a perfectly competitive market. An economy is Pareto efficient (aka perfectly efficient) when resources are allocated such that no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Even if I give into your premise — which I don’t — marginal price would differ for different careers, such as doctors who had to take on more education costs and opportunity cost and thus have a higher marginal price above bare sustenance.

> It only goes into the factory owner's pocket to the degree that the factory has no competitors

Nope! Marx explicitly presupposes fully free market, where everything (including labour) is bought and sold at the marginal cost. But the marginal cost of labour is less than what that labour produces — workers produce more than they get to consume, you know, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to feed the children, the elderly, the politicians, the priests, etc.

So long as we have a scarcity of necessities (housing comes to mind) peer competition will ensure that all increases in productivity accrue to the owners of capital, because you need to outcompete your peers for said necessity.

Years ago I outbid some other people for a house in rural Ireland. (This is a longer way of saying "I bought a house"). It was a very cheap house. Those other people have their career choices* (like making pottery for a living vs being a remote software developer) constrained because they were outbid, in the same way that my own choices (like working 4 days a week vs 5) are constrained by e.g. people who are willing to work 5+ days a week 12 hours a day.

* To be clear, I know very well that most people don't even have such a choice in the first place.

One of the big reasons why I hated AI since day one.

Why would it? Who, with a half brain, thought that you’d ever work less?

Many economists, already from the 19th century, claimed that technological progress would reduce the workweek. Some imagined we'd work 3 days per week, others only 1. Some imagined we'd work a few hours everyday.

I remember many people even on this very site claiming AI would help humanity. I think the most ridiculous the most ridiculous claim was helping fight climate change, but helping produce more leisure time by automating work was definitely what some people thought, or at least what they wanted us to think while pushing their crap.

Those economists probably didn't think we'd make building a home default-illegal.

That's true, but they also probably didn't think individual residence would become a norm (despite all the problems it generates), and probably didn't think secondary housing would become a normal for middle classes (vacations were a high bourgeoisie thing entirely until fairly recently).

Literally no one, no one even claimed we would work less due to AI. It is one of many absurd claims about AI here. There was no period in which we would get think pieces predicting more leisure time.

We had plenty of think pieces about making people obsolete, about destruction, generally in celebratory tone. I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment".

> Literally no one, no one even claimed we would work less due to AI. It is one of many absurd claims about AI here. There was no period in which we would get think pieces predicting more leisure time.

https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/ari-emanuels-3b-v...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/11/ignore-the-d...

https://time.com/6268804/artificial-intelligence-pissarides-...

> I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment".

Higher unemployment means people work less.

> Higher unemployment means people work less.

Higher unemployment typically mean that people who are employed work more and under worst conditions - because their negotiation positions is much worst. Just about the last thing high unemployment means is that "the average employed person has more leisure time" or "average person in general have easier life".

Conflating high unemployment with "worker has more free time" is beyond absurd.

But OK, I dont read telegraph nor seen what that hedge fund guy was saying.

That is true, but people work less overall.

In many places it is more likely to reduce pay rather than hours or conditions because of legal limits.

> Literally no one, no one even claimed we would work less due to AI.

Yeah? What is this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADUlC-fWKsY

I think this is largely right. Software engineering as a stable, high-earning and in demand career is a thing of the past.

Those who make it work from here are those who've changed their work completely to resemble something more like a hands-off tech lead. There will of course be the lucky few who've made it work as artisans without direct commercial pressures to conform to the new "right way to do it". But the careers many of us have had is not a path available for others to follow anymore.

The irony of automating away "inefficiencies", "drudgery" and the "labour intensive" parts of other professions stings all the more when the sharp end of that shtick is pointed back in our direction.

> Third, once destroyed those industries will not meaningfully return. This is not a process that will result in a natural ebb and flow. Once the software development profession is disrupted, it will stay that way as talent pipelines dry up and expertise ages out

I can echo that. If/when I am replaced with an LLM, I plan on switching to a hands-on profession - welder, electrician, machinist. I am also not planning on ever going back to software... errr... prompt "engineering". Maybe for twice my pre-LLM salary at a place with a no-LLM policy? More at a prompt-engineering place.

Fantastic article. However author never considered that I'm looking forward to my job being automated. That's like a whole point of programming.

To what end? Can't you just quit and get the same result?

Of course, on the other hand does it make sense to keep an obsolete field artificially alive because "jobs"? There are many new oportunities opening for us. One will be increasing demand for cybersecurity auditors, someone will need to wire those servers and someone else will need to expand the AI into more fields.

We humans don't like change much, but that doesn't mean we should pump money to blockbuster.

Quitting is an individual action with potential adverse consequences (misery).

The political question is why despite productivity in economic terms (which i know is flawed) growing many times over, do we still have to work as much, get paid so little, and have so many unemployed people looking for a job?

Looks like without a parasitic capitalist class, we could share resources and work and have people live better lives and work less.

Your job being automated to the point where you no longer proform it has the same adverse consequences. Whether this could work is some economic and societal setup is irrelevant, because that's not the world we live in.

> that's not the world we live in

That's not a definitive conclusion. The world is constantly evolving, we just have to push it in the right direction.

What are you talking about? The only reason we could work less is because we always gave way to innovation. We don't haul large blocks of ice because "evil capitalists" started making fridges. Or do you want to reinstate ice trade, just because it generated more jobs? Or ban tractors because farming by hand was made by way more people?

"Sharing resources" doesn't work. We share way too much just to keep pensioners alive and can't have kids because of that. Confiscating all the billionaire's wealth wouldn't make a dent and would destroy much more.

Not sorry for the rant

I'm not advocating for going back to the stone age. But if work was sufficiently shared, we could all work less. A lot of "work" is actually useless in terms of production and social use (see Graeber, Bullshit Jobs).

Have you ever been in any kind of group project at school? That's not how any of this works.

An automated job is not a job at all.

> These tools are here. They’re not going away.

They might very well go away. There is definitely an AI bubble, and it remains to be seen whether it deflates gradually or pops spectacularly. Geoeconomics might destroy them by constraining their access to hardware. The capabilities are real, but whether those capabilities are realised is a different matter.

Deepseek is realistic about this and is offering great prices.

I think that once companies are more realistic about token demand they can start making a profit

Yup, and the marginal value of the boutique models is much lower than the marginal cost. Most workflows have no need for american models.

What is China subsidises its inference providers to provide like utility level "intelligence" at or below cost globally until all the knowledge jobs in the west go the way of the manufacturing ones..

Even if that were true, the smaller quants that can be run on a MacBook aren't going anywhere

Providing services below cost is how SV and American tech operated last 25 years. It was the same pattern again and again - sell bellow cost, competition cant compete, create quasi monopoly, enshittify and start earning.

OpenAI and Anthropic still sells tokens under cost.

Great piece, well written and succinctly sums up my thoughts.

The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated shit. I pushed back, it apologised, and then generated more crap that had nothing to do with reality, I pushed back, we looped again, still just total fiction: “the drums don’t come in until bar 16” on a song that opens with a drum loop, that kind of crap.

We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.

I’m guessing it’s that humans don’t have capacity to deal with this kind of scenario - it’s like having a junior staff member who is utterly incredible 90% of the time - completely convincing in their certainty and skill level, and then 10% of the time you catch them doing a shit in their desk drawer because they couldn’t be arsed to walk to the toilet. AI’s are basically sociopaths.

> We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.

I think one more thing this whole LLM charade in the last few years has revealed is that no-one really cares. As long as it "looks" like it works, turns out, its all fine.

Convenience trumps quality.

Bic pens. Disposable razors. Whipped cream in a can.

Add LLM code to the list.

Seems correct. Weird thing is, every single piece of software that I use feels like it got shittier in the last couple of years.

But I am not using more software. I mean their source codes might have gotten larger, but the count of tools/services I use is basically the same.

So this feels more like giving up nice handcrafted fountain pens for bic pens. But I am still using a couple pens overall. So no added convenience, just shittier quality.

“Looks like code. Feels like code. Works (mostly) like code. It’s code”

Doesn’t the article make the argument that since you can write tests this is not as much of a problem for code gen ?

Its arguable whether it is a foolproof solution (I don’t think so) but it definitely makes it look like you can build a harness around the stochastic machine that will validate the correctness of the generated randomness.

Monkeys and typewriters when you can quickly validate whether it’s Shakespeare or not is a costly but theoretically feasible scenario. No?

Yeh I think you’re probably right. But in the wider use of these tools - less so. Yet the uptake for report writing and email sending and …whatever else - massive.

Meh just another anti AI rant - this time with the cloak of legitimacy taken from a market downturn.

Whether you agree with it or not, the author makes some good points and it goes way beyond just a "rant".

I was with the article - especially the bit about the 10% an LLM loses and how that loss can be de-amplified across eventual meaning, but then...

"My first instinct is to laugh and shake my head. One need not look very far to find indignant software developers absolutely certain that their jobs cannot possibly be automated away by the very tools their industry contemporaries are creating to replace them. I suspect you’d also not have to look far into their posting histories to find those same people comparing cabbies to buggy whip makers."

What a rude and callous comment. I'm one of those developers, I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails. Laugh at me as I defend my lifelong career, why don't you? I'm also one who decries such things as the removal of local services, taxi and otherwise, for those in the cloud. Screw you, man.

Not the OP but this line really got my attention

> I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails

If you don't mind could you please elaborate on what tasks or knowledge your job requires that you feel an LLM isn't even _fractionally_ capable of? I understand if you said that out of emotion and frustration, but if you're serious I'm intensely and genuinely curious because nowadays it seems like the frontier models are capable of more programming tasks than not with the proper harness and engineer. When was the last time you tried?

I just want to emphasize that this is not a further provocation, just potentially in awe of what you do at your job and would like to know more.

If we're truthful, yes the LLM ("agent") can't do much by itself, but thanks to all the theft which no one was compensated for, they can do something based on what was done.

Not GP but honestly I don't even spend 10% of my time writing code - even if these tools were perfect code generators that could read my mind (instead of having to prompt) it wouldn't significantly impact my work.

If you want to be in awe of basic support tasks then sure! I frequently need to assist with support tickets, communicate between departments to solve customer queries and sometimes manually fix slop that AI has put in there. No LLM rig can do that for me, nor does anyone want it to.

classic example of the goomba fallacy - "all software engineers are one single person-caricature I have in my head and are therefore a stupid walking contradiction whenever two of them express different opinions".

Do these hypothetical laid off software engineers with no empathy for buggy drivers exist outside the imagination of people who hate software engineers? I know in my education we had a bunch of mandatory courses about automation and the effects on workers, how to consult with workers on how to lift them up rather than be antagonistic, and consider different stakeholders (where "the business" or "product" was but one of many) etc.

Is this sarcastic or do you just not see the irony?

It's not easy being a developer right now. We went from being dorky and unpopular in school to being superstars (at work) and now the writing's on the wall. I can sympathize, but I'll concede that our recently developed attention for the state of nature and the fair distribution of capital is .. interesting.

I don't disagree, but the absolute hubris to think that our job is particularly difficult is also ridiculous. One by one our responsibilities will be able to be shifted into highly leveragable software, whether it's years or decades away.

There’s no irony. Author made a straw man of some bad, bad developer laughing at poor cabbies and it all clicked once VCs came for the fellow professionals.

I think you wanted to be offended and didn't even understand the point. Maybe I'm also being rude.

Tech bro lamenting and berating developers how immoral and hypocritical they’re for “laughing” (has this ever happened?) at other professions, while doing the same. Story as old as time.

Article literally says their first instinct was to laugh. I'm not a tech bro, just a guy with a job (for now) and I made it clear from my comment that I have never laughed at tech taking the jobs of others, or made it happen myself. Try reading again.

I was talking about the article, though. I'm agreeing with your comment, in case it's not clear.

The point of this sentence is to show that there are Software Developers who are looking at this in a short-sighted way. There doesn't seem anything rude about it.

Are people seriously getting use out of LLMs? Everything they produce is extermely sloppy in my experience, like actually mostly useless. I really dont understand the hype. Its very confusing.

I work 40 hours a week at a company I care very little for. Despite that, I still have to make 40 hours. I also have a side-project that I do in my free time. I do not have the energy to sit behind my desk for >40 hrs a week

So I walk, program, sit, get coffee, read a bit, come back and review the code. Most of the time it's fine, sometimes I had forgotten to mention something, and have to correct it, but this step doesn't take more than ~15 mins.

I then have a feature that would've taken me multiple days. Not because I need multiple days, but because I do not have the 8 hours of continuous time to work on it.

People have forgotten that when you start your programming day, you have to get up to speed which takes me longer than others. Let's say this takes ~15 mins. That means that if you spend 2 hours programming, ~12% of that was just getting back into the groove. LLMs do this instantly, it reads context, you can ask it questions, and you're up to speed again in less than a minute.

The point here is not that LLMs provide high quality code, but they do save you a bit of time and energy, which is worth a lot in my opinion.

A lot of inventions haven't been that ground-breaking; only there to save time. You can wash the dishes by hand, but you can also have a machine do it while you go watch TV.

I am convinced the people who swear by them either have very different work tasks from me, or they have very different ideas about what a job well done looks like.

I feel like everything I apply these things to sends me up a much messier and long winded route to a useable result, when compared to just doing it myself from the jump. Even the things they're ostensibly good at like sorting data comes out so messy it's practically net zero by the time you're done with quality control.

I tend to do the main structural parts myself and tell it to fill in the gaps and add tests, which sort of works 70% of the time. It may not be worth what my company is being charged.

That's my approach as well. When I try to mentally compare the cost of the subscription to the performance, I think it's extremely dubious at best.

Yes. Most of the people I see are on the extremes of either hating LLMs or fanatically loving it, but I am somewhere in the middle ground, I think, where I see it as a tool that sometimes helps to some extent. I don't depend on it, it almost never gives me new ideas or ways to do things, but for trivial tasks it helps me relax supervising it - usually writing the first draft for documentation or suggesting initial updates, even filling in some semi-repetitive code patterns in web apps ("create empty functions and link the buttons to it"). It is just a tool, not too bad to ignore, not too good to get more productivity, sometimes useful. Using it is like using an IDE 30 years ago or Intellisense 15-20 years ago.

LE. I see current versions of LLM like an intern that helps me doing work. We work together, I give directions and supervision and I am responsible for the results. I cannot give complex tasks and I cannot skip checking everything, but it usually helps.

Every time I have actually engaged in conversations with people making the same claim you do, it turned out they did not really invest time into learning how to work with coding agents: They assumed, given that they’re developers, the know how to code, and thus would knew how to steer a coding agent.

That is a wrong assumption, however. An agent is an entirely new tool in your toolbox, with no similarity to any of those you already have. You will need to learn how to wield it, like a new programming language or technology you’re unfamiliar with. You will need to do some small side projects to learn. You will need to develop a feeling for how it reacts to your inputs, when to reset the session, pass it links to documentation, or interrupt it.

None of this comes intuitively. It takes time and effort, and if you’re not ready to consciously invest that, coding agents are not going to work efficiently for you. That doesn’t take away from their utility though.

No, the more appropriate analogy would be that LLMs (reasoning agents would be better term, as they are no longer just an LLMs) are new beings rather than new tools.

A new tool can be ultimately understood, and has a well-defined behaviour you can rely on. Then you can indeed become an expert in using a new tool.

But AI agent is more a new being (or person). It's not possible to understand them, as they are not meant to. Each of them has individuality, and can change tomorrow. There is no guarantee of a common behaviour.

So you could replace "tool" in your comment with "person" and you will see the flaw of your argument. No matter how many people you saw before, it's difficult to generalize the skillset (at least for humans there are some biological and cultural arguments why they can be generalized over). You can always meet someone different, who's, for whatever reason, not being helpful to you.

Most of the interaction surface with a coding agent is the harness anyway, so I'd definitely classify them as tools. Moreover, I don't like the anthropomorphism of calling them beings—and even if I were to follow that narrative, you can absolutely become better at interacting with people by practicing it.

Regardless, it sure seems like developers experienced with using coding agents achieve better results than those without, which pretty much refuses your entire point.

Yes you can learn the harness, that's a tool. But it's not the important part.

I am not anthroporphizing them. I am just saying people are a better analogy.

> seems like developers experienced with using coding agents achieve better results than those without

That doesn't mean there is a skill involved. The same goes with people - you might just be naturally charismatic and get stuff done better with people. Doesn't mean it's a learnable skill that applies to everyone and every use case.

It's absolutely a skill. That you're putting this up as "charisma" simply shows you have not explored agentic engineering.

If you are indeed interested, this is a good beginner: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

Sorry, it's not engineering, it's cargo-culting as engineering. Engineering is based on improved formal understanding of the process, not magical incantantions. And yes I do use these things. It's like saying copy-pasting code is a skill.

Until you think using agents is a magical incantation, you will not be able to actually engage with it and develop the skill.

As evidence that it is a skill beyond copy paste, you should look around (online and offline) at the really smart people who are able to derive so much from it.

I don't know, it is pretty simple to type /init in claude and see if its understanding of a project matches reality. And if it can make changes to it.

The difference working with agents, is that a solo dev suddenly becomes a dev manager, who has to deal with a unreliable team of developers far out on the spectrum.

I have unlimited access to every agent, every tool. Ive tried them all, I've built a dozen MCPs and even my own small "harness" Ive done it all, its all very underwhelming.

I hate the "You're holding it wrong" argument.. Because Ive held it every which way possible and its not very impressive.

That is not the argument I'm making though, and I'm a bit sad that's the only thing you've got out of my comment. From your username and past conversations, I can tell you're not up for an open debate on the usefulness of this technology, so let's leave it here. I can only reiterate to try and give it some more time, just like you would for every other new skill.

Without you telling what your job entails and how the pristine artifacts of your crystalline mind fit into the larger picture it's very hard to have a conversation about this.

But yes, many developers I know haven't coded manually in months and that includes me. That doesn't mean I drink coffee and take walks while the agent codes however. I'm now in the driving seat instead of wrangling syntax and waiting for my hands to type something.

I manage the rules, the intent, the structure. If I don't like what it does, I update the coding standard, the docs, the specs, you name it. If I want a different architecture I can actually get it done in 10min instead of a week - if at all. It's more effort than coding for me, because coding is slow and methodical and incentivizes pedantry, but for me it's a massive improvement. I have been bored out of my mind for a decade now, but I'm relatively good at what I do so I just stuck with it. I'm one of those "middle management types stuck in developer role"-type of guys so I guess my personality and proclivities have something to do with it. I also know quite a few grumpy old-school types that don't get anything done with LLMs. They can't communicate, they don't understand psychology, they don't understand architecture and have a debilitating case of missing the forest for the trees. The spread, in my experience, is massive.

Just out of curiosity, did you actually use claude?

Otherwise have a look here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174

is a sometimes useful agent, and a sometimes useful slightly smarter search engine.

it can be useful for some automation... but its also dangerously dumb for that.

I am getting serious use out of LLMs, and everyone else who does knows that those claiming otherwise are only getting slop because they’re not giving it enough guard rails, likely because they’re uninitiated, likely because they hate AI in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com