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Comment by chopete3 | Hacker News Reader

>> Yes, the tools are powerful, but a CEO who thinks they replace the work of employees is simply a bad CEO.

This is a broad generalization of employees. There will be some "routine tasks" that can be done by AI, now that is a lot more powerful.

There won't be as many employees needed for routine work - for example L1 and L2 support work. For example, many companies had ML engineers building models for various models. Companies can get that off the shelf from AI companies. They don't need a big team of model builders now.

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If L2 support work is the example then I doubt we’re near replacement.

L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix.

I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models would effectively replace good L2 staff.

They might magnify good L2 staff so fewer are needed (and maybe even help L1 staff become L2).

My agent is currently doing the work of ~6 senior engineers, based on ticket closures. These are not trivial tasks: all of them involve a mix of code, judgement, executing remote commands in a production environment, etc.

This is at a well-known tech company operating at massive scale (and resulting complexity).

L1/L2 tech support is completely dead within a couple years. The delay is only around how long it takes people to realize.

I've got 12 agents. They're doing the work of 120 engineers, and three CEOs. Lately, one of the agents has been laid off due to AI, and another went to see the Burning Man so another 10 work overtime. The CEO agent became an evangelical Christian, and wrote how cool Peter Thiel is on X, so we no longer need people, the future is here.

I often use AI chatbot to generate step-by-step instruction for setting or repairing up some bit of tech. It's incredibly empowering, and saved me a a lot of money that would have been spent on buying replacement tech.

You know who can't do that? People who call L1 support.

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