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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

> Let's say that happens. What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee.

If this is true, turning off the brain... is completely rational. Why burn out the brain for something happening either way? It's not like being fully engaged is going to result in anything that much better for the employee. In a world where code is this disposable, memorizing a codebase that won't recognizably exist in 3 years is also stupid.

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I’m not allowed to enter legit chess tournaments where if I’m going be using my phone’s chess engine app to tell me the best move in every single position. Because that’s considered cheating by the chess players and tournament organizers and rightly so. But, there doesn’t seem to be an incentive to not do something similar in the world of work unless your LLM output is so bad or obviously inaccurate.

The challenge here is that the business world doesn't really recognize the concept of cheating.

In particular, tech is very open to people cheating and if billions of dollars could be had by somehow communicating the chess engine's work to a human at chess, the world of business would cheat at it.

Tech has a number of large startups that basically started with the assumption of "what if we assumed the law had no teeth?"

In the world of business and money, you lose if you don't cheat because everyone else is cheating.

And if it's that's true... What reason is there for the company's clients to keep sending money?

Clients will cut the middle man and run the LLM themselves.

I’ve pondered this too. I was in a group meeting with a consultant who is upfront with clients that he has started to use Claude heavily to speed up his output. There are probably a lot of clients who would still pay for his services because maybe they still appreciate his input or the relationship and don’t want to go through the pain of figuring out how to replace him with an LLM. It has been my experience that some teams would rather just subscribe to some software or platform even if there’s a free alternative.

Why do you assume that the fully engaged employee would be laid off at all?

You're telling me none of the 730,000 people laid off over the last four years were fully engaged employees?

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