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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

I don't feel like reading an article that will probably be out of date in 6 months, but from what I've seen, if agents keep improving at this rate, 80% of SWEs are going to be looking for new careers in 5 years.

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If my baby keeps growing at this rate, in 5 years she'll be as tall as the empire state building.

This is a deepity.

The problem is not necessarily job losses as such. When artisans were replaced by factory work, it took a long time for automation to actually reduce the number of workers. What happened quickly was that the asset of the artisans -their skill and experience - was replaced by an asset owned by the factory owner -the capital equipment. That converted workers from having guaranteed work, and a degree of autonomy, to being a replaceable commodity dominated by the factory system.

This is the real threat today. The growth of the middle class was essentially the growth of jobs in which the workers have human capital in their skill and experience again. That experience is being slurped up by LLMs and other models.

The question is whether "LLM operator" is really going to be a profession which requires scarce skills and experience, or whether many companies will be operable with less well-rewarded workers. I think that those who think there's an obvious correct prediction here are overconfident.

Or their career will just involve different tools and skills than they previously assumed

Probably both. We were already hitting limits in terms of finding software that could generate returns; without public funding or enormous regulation the possibility of finding new jobs with a degree is lower than it's been in a while.

Or the amount of software increases tremendously

No one will use it.

Seems like all companies think that their products are good enough and can’t offer more, as they always want to remove people instead of offering better and bigger products.

At some point your issue tracker or text editor is done. No need for it to automatically schedule your haircut as well.

But the company that has a text editor that can read your mind is going to bankrupt you, as it is faster than typing

Emacs is far from done. Scheduling things from it are already a feature, in the org-mode.

I don't think most of the layoffs that have happened so far are about present-day AI. It's often an easy excuse though.

I'm surprised the layoffs worldwide hasn't produced more entrepreneurs building their own software product.

Most people simply do not want to be entrepreneurs

It is almost as if the technology is not as good as everyone claims. If they were, the game would already be over.

I wouldn’t build my product with an LLM owned by a company at the core of it. That feels way too risky, it’s almost like building on a platform you don’t own. I expect we will see way more entrepreneurial growth once local models become good enough and the hardware to run them becomes more affordable than it is now.

(Though I’m biased, I personally feel it’s an anti-human technology, the world would be better without it)

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