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Comment by Squarex | Hacker News Reader

Has your job not be completely changed? Have you not noticed a worse job market?

I'm not sure I'd call that "meaningful" in the sense of "trillions of dollars and datacenters built all over the place" meaningful. Yes, I can now tell Claude to build a feature and it often does an okay job. I can ship faster. I can't tell you that it's worth spending the true cost of AI for that however. What'll be nice is 5 years of data showing that companies are raking in more money because they shipped more features. We haven't seen that yet.

Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.

there's a popular misconception that AI is so extremely costly that when the world finally comes to terms with it, we will stop using AI and things will die down. i'm sorry to burst your bubble: this won't happen.

the inference cost of AI has been dropping ~5x over every 6 months. AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.

That doesn't cause the amount that's already been spent to simply disappear. To recoup, they're going to need to sell a LOT of subscriptions. In about 3 years, we'll need to upgrade the GPUs that we use - if we're still chasing frontier models. That cost remains to be seen. There's a ton of unknowns here.

I don't have a bubble to burst.

> AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.

2 y.o model is probably 100x cheaper, but model size and requirements are also growing proportionally.

2 years ago, thinking was an optional, nowadays people use Opus with high effort almost by default.

My job hasn’t completely changed. It’s changed, but fundamentally I solve problems. Sometimes LLMs help me do that now.

The job market sucks, but there are so many confounding factors: pandemic over hiring, the loss of ZIRP, an economy that would be recession if it weren’t for data center investment, and may be in recession soon even with it.

This industry has been in down cycles before. It’s just been a while. So far it feels like a down cycle, not the sky falling.

It’s not clear what the future will hold, but I’m 100% sure it won’t evolve the way Anthropic predicts. Both because they have strong biases and because there's just no way to predict how this technology will play out. Humans are, if anything, remarkably adaptable.

I started my professional career in tech in the early 1990s. At that time, I sat in a chair with a keyboard and a screen to do my work. In 2026, I still work that way. So fundamentally how I work has not changed. Well, now I have two screens.

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