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Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

They aim to undercut labor.

For now, businesses are getting addicted to cheap tokens. As the screws get turned, business will debate whether they should spend budget on humans or tokens. What's further devastating is that humans are also becoming addicted to cheap tokens. Much human output is nowadays a token slopfest. People are becoming dumber too. So the real business question will be spending budget on token monkeys or tokens.

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> They aim to undercut labor.

Which doesn't work the same way at all. With taxis, making them unprofitable leads to a long-lasting lack of taxis. When lots of jobs are lost, it actually becomes easier to hire someone with the right experience.

Supply-wise yes.

But when lots of jobs are lost, consumer spending is lost, and it becomes harder to sustain a business (whether B2C or B2B) and afford to hire someone...

It depends on how long you can keep those people un- or underemployed. I think engineers are rapidly bleeding experience even while being employed if all they do is prompting.

It might work very much the same. Discourage a cohort of CS grads into following another career path. Give businesses enough time to fully commit to “agentic workflows” such that they don’t have the expertise for in-house engineering anymore. Completely spaghettify every code base such that only AI would be willing and able to implement new features in it. Let customers lower their expectations of quality to meet what AI can product. By the time they crank up the token price, it may be hard or impossible for businesses just to switch back to human engineers.

If you knew about how much man power it takes to maintain, evaluate and improve agentic workflows, I don’t think you would write such a thing. In this context, AI is a jobs program for permanent employment.

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