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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI.

Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.

The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.

The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)

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You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries.

There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.

It would be one thing if those increases in productivity were improving my QOL as a consumer of produced goods, through cost reductions or increases in quality, but I'm not seeing any of that.

All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.

What's the point of all that, to me?

It's easier to enter the owner class. It's easier for you to do a startup where you're not the expert in everything. It's easier for you to rely less on buying things when you can make them yourself.

The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.

> It's easier to enter the owner class.

Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.

This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.

If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.

>Based on what?

Based on the far lower bar to get a product out the door.

Which is only relevant if one of the following two things happens:

1. Consumption goes up. (It's not going up. 40 hours at your job buys you less shit today than it did 3 years ago.)

2. Mega-corps start losing marketshare and revenue to this avalanche of new one-to-two-person businesses. (They aren't. Their revenues are climbing, which implies that consolidation is what's happening, not diversification.)

Your theory does not match reality.

New markets are created all the time, as new products and services become viable. So one-to-two-person businesses don't necessarily compete with larger businesses for the same customers. And that's why both can have rising revenue.

None of that matters, if the populace lacks the purchasing power to sustain these “new markets”. It also assumes, that incumbents won’t enter the new markets, and acquire/squeeze/kill the new players.

A new market is made when a product or service which previously was too expensive becomes affordable to more people due to innovation. There's thousands of example, many of them in your own life.

But you are decided. Being negative is what you have chosen and there's plenty of people who will back you up because they are also afraid.

Could you give any examples of how these new markets have positively changed my life as a consumer? Did any of the stuff I buy become cheaper or better, or get replaced with something else entirely (that is cheaper or better)?

Where is the horse buggy -> automobile transition of this AI age? Where is the industrialization that made clothes 10x cheaper to make? Show me examples.

There's two many examples to mention, but you will shoot down any example I give. So what's the use? Also are you asking specifically for AI or for invention in general?

Where are these new markets, and how much of my spend as a consumer is going towards them?

This isn't the invention of the internal combustion engine, or the textile loom, or the internet. The way people are doing work has changed a bit, but from the consumer end, all I see is shit like 'your health insurance will be 30% more expensive next year' and $11 for a gallon of milk and another rent increase and when I ask Google a question the results are sometimes a bit better and sometimes a bit worse.

No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people.

Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.

People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.

It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.

It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.

Strongly agree. Reduce the work week today to 4 days 32 hours, the US already generates $5T in profits per year. That is time taken from workers from the one life they get. If corporations want to be more productive, take your best shot with LLMs. If it works, great, we keep reducing the work week. If it doesn't work, well, take it up with who sold you the magic beans.

We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=4+day+week

(we get there eventually with structural demographics, it’ll just take longer)

It is not.

Eventually a new startup will replace your large inefficient employer with people working 10% of their time.

So tax them as much as needed, or require state ownership of some amount. Startups, and company entities in general, exist because a jurisdiction allows them to, or allows them to accept payments, control accounts with financial resources, pay vendors and workers, and operate within a commercial framework. That is a privilege, not a right. The rules are a shared agreement and delusion, the rules can change at any time.

Actually participating in commerce is considered a pillar in defining a liberal democracy, in the words of John Locke, so I would say that is a right.

It’s certainly an opinion, but not law, and laws can always change.

Yes, in theory but if working more confers an advantage then work expectations will stay the same and will show up as higher productivity. So the real question is how will that productivity be distributed. Right now it's being concentrated into shareholders value rather than wages.

I could “retire” to a senior level role and run at 10% capacity with zero AI use at a bigco and nobody would know the difference.

Yup. Everything after the first decade of a career is either jockeying for a promotion, jumping ship-to-ship as needed, or sitting around in meetings.

It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.

> I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.

They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.

This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.

Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.

Key factors for me:

  - Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs.  Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
  - Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them.  Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
  - Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.

That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target.

Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.

This a chamber of weights and measurements comment "I got mine, fuck everyone else".

Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things.

Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.

I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.

Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those.

Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.

AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.

"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.

> Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work

That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.

How long does it take to learn all that then? Can't imagine it would take that long.. At least compared to, eg, becoming an experienced Rust or C programmer.

And if it does take that long, why is it so great anyway?

Making labor hyper-interchangeable is kinda like the whole pitch here. It's two steps away from b2b SaaS labor if the PR is to be believed.

Maybe you can say you're an elite prompter or whatever, but it always kinda sounds to me like "I know the secret menu at taco bell." Like the whole point of the product here is precisely to not need such pretense or complexity. You are paying hundreds (at least) a month to use something, but also you are using it in a special way? I really don't get it.

Judging by the students I have seen, it will take longer. You could become a mediocre programmer in months, and still be useful by doing grunt work. I don’t see how people will become master architects steering fleets of agents without a deep understanding of the fundamentals, which takes longer to master.

Yes, you can vibe up a demo in no time. But LLMs still need guidance to produce an architecture that will hold up to real world scenarios.

You are kind of ranting here and your point seem to mostly be "but we should not do harness engineering at all" which I agree with btw.

I am describing the reality we are currently in. If I don't do some harness engineering then my bots crap on the floor and I start questioning whether I should delegate to them at all and if me doing it manually wouldn't still take less time.

And you are describing a desired reality. I sympathize, mind you, it's just not the one we are currently living in.

I'm not being prescriptive here, just agreeing with the gp about greater labor interchangability!

Like maybe step outside yourself for a second. We are arguing both that agential blah blah makes everything fast and easy and you don't need to be as knowledgeable about any X anymore, but also at the same time we want to argue that its not easy, and you better know XYZ about it, and actually its not a magic bullet.

How can it be both? Where else do you allow this kind of dissonance in something you think?

And also, not all of us have sold our soul to it, and we're still putting food on the table! I am happy I am not in your reality I guess.

> We are arguing both that agential blah blah makes everything fast and easy and you don't need to be as knowledgeable about any X anymore

I do not know who "we" is but I sure as hell am not arguing this -- that's demonstrably false for like 95% of all tasks I threw even at frontier/SOTA models.

I am on the side of "not as easy as many easily-hyped-up people make it out to be". Some things Opus one-shots in 10 minutes much better than I could in a full day. Most of them though, I have to keep pointing out mistakes and it missing the forest for the trees... constantly.

> And also, not all of us have sold our soul to it

I can only roll my eyes here. How dramatic.

Why are even engaging if you don't even agree with the contention this thread started with?? Do you like actually disagree with gp's original point or not? Is the implication you agree there is maybe a bit of bluster and hype when we talk about this? Such that maybe your "new reality" here is maybe not as radical or comprehensive as those words would imply?

Like its nice to be in agreement if we are but surely you got something better to be doing if you don't actually have some counter argument to my framing here? this forum is getting quite odd I must say.

And yes was being cheeky at the end there but I guess you're a little too used to being on the defense with this stuff? Or not? Still not sure. But I think your agent just finished another task, better go check!

I am unsure where your confusion comes from, the very first of my comments which you replied to was already expressing disagreement with my then-parent poster.

No idea why you are escalating and are trying to mock either, so I'll bow out.

Ok, right, well.. Uh thank you for the thoughtful convo here?

> I can do more than I could before as the result of AI

Are you getting paid more or are you just doing more for fun.

Somebody will eventually know the difference.

And then you’re fired.

"The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours."

This will never happen in the USA. Together with UBI.

The delusion of engineers is that finally we have the means to stop compromising on quality to deliver, and fix all the garbage we’ve had to put out rationalizing about “cost-benefit”.

Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.

Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.

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