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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?

My backlog is less empty than ever - it just happens to be overflowing with whispy Claude-written tickets for functionality that somebody else's Claude suggested after summarizing some other Claude-infused Slack chat.

ofcourse not, but they can pay someone 80k a year to work on the backlog, whereas maybe they used to pay 175k. its not about work going down, its the skill set needed to complete the work is lower than ever, and they need less people than ever

they won't even need that as agents talk to their own lanes in some Linear project management workflow that your sales team agents are connected. The entire system is going to end up agentic and even the CEO will be out of work unless they are founders and owners of the company. We'll all have our own business this way. Or it all collapses. Time will tell.

i think this is farther off, much sooner is just the subjugation of technical workers to be low skill drivers of LLMs

color me skeptical that the CEO or anyone non-technical is ever going to prompt their way out of a major incident when all the AI chickens come home to roost.

Maintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.

I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.

> laws should be structured as data rather than code

There was a submission a while back that might be relevant here: "Why Law Is Law-Shaped" (lawvm.org) [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945861

People just need to add/subtract an input box and update the tax rates. They don't need an ontology of taxes and goods.

> laws should be

You are comparing what it is with what should be.

I bet tax law is Turing-complete.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is in some places, but nevertheless I wonder - is there a good reason for that? I don't think any lawmaker actually wants tax calculations to have the potential of not halting, right? ... right?

I'm hopeful that software will be applied in new areas where it was too costly before, with AI help it will be possible. Software will be cheaper, even more prevalent, lower quality in since respects, but SW engineering will still be a viable career.

There are really a ton of fields where people have done an absolutely terrible job of properly using the advantages of software, even pre AI. Like, even today there are people manually drawing footprints in PCB design software, manually determining what pins carry differential signals, manually forgetting to swap RX and TX lines.. except for the functions they absolutely had to have a computer do, they forgot to move out all the drudgery and footguns and continue operating in "PDF space". It's embarrassing for a profession that is supposedly made of engineers.

PDF space is still more advanced than the people typing into "word processors" however. Making software to emulate letters was such a massive mistake for the trajectory of computing, it let people effortlessly "adopt computers" by making a digital facsimile of their terrible analog processes. Only with AI we now have the ability to digest all this unstructured mess.

No one said there won't be work to be done, just that fewer people will be doing it.

If the work to be done is infinite, why would there necessarily be fewer people doing it?

Because most companies aren't software driven, they sell physical products and software is a cost center.

There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.

it could mean they are not completely out of automation opportunities, and will lose to more innovative players if won't invest into software. The end state of these companies is grid of cheap robots controlled by software.

Exactly, because the amount of people on bench due to robots doesn't scale with the amount of customer opportunities.

There are only so much customers to chose from and all of them have finite budgets.

The exponential growth curve only exists in MBA books.

In case of productivity surplus, exponential demand can be easily created by government: e.g. they print N trillions dollars, and say we spend it on some (hopefully useful) mega project(s): fusion, carbon capture, give nice home to everyone, fully verifiable, glitch free, hyper optimized software, etc. It will immediately create lots of demand, supply chains, customers, etc.

You can see current AI hype as example, and its government didn't step in and printed N trillions yet.

Sure, and I have a bridge to sell, to the same government.

In a few years, it just might.

If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.

> In a few years, it just might.

If you're in a product company and your development backlog is empty, run. That company is about to go out of business.

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro

I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

Because of the current state of AI.

But the current state of AI is a very good indicator were it is going. Even if we don't achieve AGI, do you think AI in its current form will not be better in 5 or 10 years and we will have this solved a lot more/better than today?

Even with AI, you still need to design the software, test it, try it out, deploy it and scale it. An proper agentic platform still needs time to be build.

And the models need to be a little bit better and for that you want human feedback/reinforcement learning

>Even if we don't achieve AGI, do you think AI in its current form will not be better in 5 or 10 years and we will have this solved a lot more/better than today?

In my sector? No, not really. Because the core problem isn't tech, but labor rights. Those will only worsen.

Yes, I don't think this will be a lot better. Newest Claude is barely better, same with the rest of the model. In the same time cost of training new models and running them is increasing so taking this in the account I don't think this'll even last 5y

Tokens get cheaper and smarter every day.

This alone will lead to being able to run a fable class claude model 24/7 and potentially running something like this in parallel multiply times over.

Really? From what I see everyone are raising prices and even if tokens price is dropping price of running LLM is raising. LLM is highly subsidized and will never be cheaper than human

Because selling shovels is more profitable than digging holes themselves.

Really? Where do you live because in my country the opposite is true

In Germany, in this case selling shovels if you want to take the example literally is selling construction machines, or renting them, versus having guest workers digging the holes.

Naturally we can't use figures of speech.

Are you aware AI companies are subsidizing usage and have negative revenue?

And now your comparison is inaccurate. I said whole application. So the correct one would be selling/renting construction vehicles vs building entire building and here selling/renting is maybe 10% of developer income.

Digging a hole is like making small code change and if you wish to continue using this analogy then tokens are digging a hole and selling entire applications (thing Software house do) is construction company building entire building

Second obviously deliver more cash and here AI premise starts to crack. AI can't deliver anything good, costs much more than developing team (Uber proved it) and even if you use it as hard as possible and it does what it suppose to deliver max 5% increase across the board

Wait.

I'm 40yo. Do you know how long I'm waiting? Only taking for an account this newest hype I heard like 4x next year and the current progress is slowing significantly over last year. Even foundings are starting to back off

Yes, when the project budget runs out and contractor team has to leave.

My backlog is overflowing. My wallet, however, is depleting.

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