Fable Took My Job
cendyne.dev
cendyne.dev
There was a time that I really cared about my work and about my colleagues livelihoods.
Then I realised, it’s just a job. I’ve lost jobs before. I’ve taken shitty, low paid jobs before. It’s just a job. You turn up, they pay you, then you go home to your actual life, the one that matters.
People take their jobs too seriously.
Unfortunately not everyone has that luxury, and as AI continues to devalue intellectual labor, fewer will.
I still feel the same way.
Even the article itself: they care about "having a job", not having that specific job. And they care about it in order to "make a living".
Perspective... there are people crossing the entire world to come and be trashmen or food delivery slaves in our western countries, there are other jobs, you just don't want to do most of them
Don't live like your cushy $$$ desk job is a god given right and you'll be fine
EDIT typo
Sure, you can go work in a warehouse, coffee shop, bakery, etc.
I know a dude who's part time picking veggies in a bio farm part time surgeon. Another who's part time baker part time financial advisor. If you have four limbs and half a brain you certainly can find a job outside of tech. It might not pay as well or be as convenient but let's not pretend we're in a "$500k at FAANG or homelessness" situation.
I really wish I could ascend to your level and never be upset about anything bad that happens, no matter how pointless and obviously unjust.
To be fair, parent and grandparent are never being upset about anything bag that happens to other people. I've met plenty of this type and you can be assured they'll be outraged when it happens to them....though often they're the type born into wealth so all problems are other people's problems.
Being a software engineer professionally in call it 1990 thru 2020 is an incredibly privileged position. We were only able to enjoy such an easy position in life because of supply and demand and the math has changed. We had these positions not because we were special but because investors could make money off of it and needed us.
Suddenly they don't. Or believe they don't. Should we be pissed. Probably. But it doesn't change the fact that we got cozy with things that were revokable.
Yes, I agree, programmers got lucky, and that luck is coming to an end. This has happened to many professions in the past. It's not new.
What is new is two things:
* that it's not just programmers that will be displaced, although we are among the first. Many people, possibly all of them, will have their labor value diminished by AI. This is a systemic issue that requires a systemic solution, not just a pep talk and "Get tough, buttercup,"
* that the success of AI is built on illegitimate grounds, as the training data is built by the people it's displacing; and is serving to enrich a fantastically small number of capital holders, at the expensive of literally everyone else.
So in view of that, I think it's silly and beside the point to say "Hey, tough luck" or to accuse programmers of being entitled, which is certainly the subtext in your comment. Programmers should be upset, but so should everyone else.
We are being entitled. We shouldn't have been sucking at the investors class teet thinking we are special. We along with most white collar workers on the west were being entitled and complacent. My point of view is very far from tough luck.
Who is "we"? Every labor-providing human on the planet? When that many people are economically disenfranchised and you call them "entitled", the problem is you.
> thinking we are special.
Again, it's not clear who you are talking about. Who thought they are special? Human beings who exchange their labor for money, i.e. have a job? I think I've made clear that programmers are not the end of this trend so to the extent your comment focuses on programmers, it is misguided.
> My point of view is very far from tough luck.
In that case, I don't understand your view at all, because it sure sounds like you are blaming the victim here.
I'm speaking specifically about white collar workers in western countries. I don't believe they are economically disenfranchised at least not yet. We were behaving entitled-ly by not acting in unison with the other laborers who are economically disenfranchised. If you are some sort of exception forgive me but I doubt you were spending your money to build shared parks and teach programming to the children of Amazon drivers. Most white collar workers here are buying pickup trucks and living it up. Myself included. And now we are in the finding out phase of why that was bad.
Well you don't, the person I'm replying to say they won't find ANY job.
If you lose your job and truly need money to feed yourself of pay your bills you will find a job, any job, that's how the bottom 80% of the population live, welcome to the club lmao
Rather than encouraging people to accept the misery inflicted on them by a handful of billionaires, why don't you acknowledge the injustice that AI magnifies the gap between capital and labor, and encourage people to fight (through democratic means) for a more just society, i.e. one that distributes the benefits of labor-saving devices among everyone, not just to a tiny fraction at the top.
Technology and "progress" haven't been improving the workers life in a long long time, again: welcome to the club.
That's ridiculous and myopic. Technology have improved many people's lives for a long time. Or would you prefer to stop wearing industrially-manufactured clothes, stop taking scientifically-developed vaccines, and of course stop using the device that you are reading this on now?
The difference is that in the past, technological development victimized only subsets of the work force. Mechanical looms were bad for textile workers, but good for everyone else. Personal computers were bad for "human calculators," but good for everyone else. The people who lost their jobs to technology could, theoretically, retrain and get another job.
But now we're facing technology that is theoretically capable of doing any job, at a price that's cheaper than any human. If you lose your job as a programmer due to AI, you can't just retrain as a lawyer, because those jobs are gone too (or will be soon). You can't just become a barista or a cab driver, those jobs are gone too.
Sniping at fellow working-class members is counterproductive. Ultimately, this is a test of democracy: can our government be forced to serve the people who it represents, or only corporate interests? If the latter, then we're entering a period of neo-feudelism.
>>the owners of AI infrastructure will continue to get rich while literally everyone else gets poorer
This didn't happen with previous technological revolutions, isn't happening now and won't happen as long as we don't mess it up with preventing competition and access to technology.
At the risk of repeating myself: who is going to buy it, when wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capital-owning elite? If human labor can't compete with AI, what value can a person exchange in the free market for goods?
> This didn't happen with previous technological revolutions,
Yes, it did [1]. Maybe you should study some history before leaping to conclusions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
Post AI they will not need to spend so much resources for your job. They will have more for themselves. It's good for vast majority of people.
Where will they get those resources for themselves? From the job that they don't have anymore, because of AI?
There is no reason to assume that the AI employment catastrophe will end with coders.
Even if they have resources, what makes you think they get to hoard them? Instead of paying programmers, they'll pay the owners of data centers.
From goods and services they provide to others - now at lower cost.
>>There is no reason to assume that the AI employment catastrophe will end with coders.
It will not. It will also create a lot of new jobs. Stuff will get cheaper which means you will need to work less on average to sustain the same standards of living.
>> Instead of paying programmers, they'll pay the owners of data centers.
Yes but less. Paying less means more is left.
> From goods and services they provide to others - now at lower cost.
So why don't they do that today? Why don't today's poor people have access to a wide selection of good and services that they exchange with other poor people?
> It will also create a lot of new jobs.
Specifically, what new jobs will be created? That is, what jobs will be needed that an AI can't do cheaper than a human?
I live in Finland, the country with highest unemployment rate in OECD. Over here hundreds of applications for one cashier, warehouse, coffee shop, bakery job is perfectly normal. It's not realistic for some random unemployed IT guy with no field specific experience to find a job in them right now. In case of AI job apocalypse, I would imagine the situation would look similar elsewhere as well.
Supply and demand will be very different from today, for the worse.
"Yeah, I've never had a job or an education before the year 2026."
The longer it has been since you've turned 18, the less believable this is. And even if they believe you, it's probably not in your favour that they think you've been sitting at home for 10 years.
It's not "some people", it's the bottom 80%. You're an anomaly, the anomaly is going away, it sucks (for you) but that's what it is.
Techies have been automating people out of their jobs for decades and we're supposed to feel sorry for them now that it's their turn, cry me a river...
You might finally understand that these problems aren't technical but political, in the meantime get in line and suck it up
They "techies" didn't do this. Spare me your self-hating performative guilt trip.
Technology advances (beasts of burden replacing human labor, windmills replacing human labor, firearms replacing melee weapons, automatic looms replacing manual textile workers, electric light replacing manual illumination), and at each step, society as a whole benefits, but some benefit more than others: in particular the capital-owning class reap the immediate benefits, to the detriment of the labor class whose skill is devalued and whose livelihood is ruined.
This isn't new. Blaming "techies" is wrong. Point your finger at the owners who are enriching themselves at the expense of the many. In a just society, the benefits of technological advance should be shared (more) equally. A functioning democratic government would protect those whose livelihoods are at risk, because the instability of mass unemployment is more damaging to society than possibly demotivating a handful of billionaires.
Not at that rate, or anything close.
>>A functioning democratic government would protect those whose livelihoods are at risk, because the instability of mass unemployment is more damaging to society than possibly demotivating a handful of billionaires.
Unemployment is still very low and there are tons of jobs we are not doing right now because of lack of people and capital. Those just won't be cushy high paying desk jobs.
It will be very hard to pay for $200/mo Claude accounts when everyone's job is gone.
> It will be a better world overall for most.
I strongly disagree. AI is coming for programmers' jobs first, but programmers won't be the last victim. Ultimately, any job is in danger. The only way to be safe is to be willing to do the job cheaper than a machine that never sleeps. That's basically an impossible bar to maintain, especially as AI and robotics get better.
Seeing the technorati "elite" as the enemy is a mistake, because ultimately programmers, rubbish collectors, and waitresses are all just "labor." Tech bros were momentarily lucky and enjoyed a level of privilege, but the real enemy is the ownership class: the people who aren't at risk of losing their job because they own the data centers. If you want a fair society and equal distribution of benefits, stop the capitalist class from poisoning democracy.
- It is reasonable to expect a nice comfy desk job with little stress where they get paid well to explore an interest they have. We are all moderns Thomas Edisons no?
- It is unexpected, undesirable and perhaps objectively bad to not live a life without struggle. I bet most westerners would not sit home in poverty and then fly after years to be with their loved one who has struggled to become a cook or delivery person.
For context I say this all as a westerner who tries to shake this mentality. We don't need all of this supposed comfort we only are addicted to it.
This conversation is schizophrenic because we are conflating two different topics:
* from a perspective of mindfulness and gratitude, yes, it is psychologically better to not attach your identity to your career, living space. Eastern philosophy (e.g. Tao te Ching) teaches us about non-materialism; Greek philosophy teaches us about stoicism. All of these perspectives can be useful coping mechanisms when faced with a materially uncertain future.
* from a perspective of economics, law, and politics we can simultaneously acknowledge that when a business built on intellectual property theft (i.e. AI), focused on enriching a small cadre of capital owners, indirectly devalues labor causing material hardship for much of the population of the world, an injustice as occurred. It seems unfair to us, because the skill that we have worked a lifetime to hone has been cheapened by a selfish business that couldn't exist without the work publicly and freely contributed. That is worth being upset about.
I'll point out that Sam Altman also enjoys a very high level of comfort, which he does not need; and that his comfort seems to be predicated on other people losing their livelihood. So why are (intellectual labor class) HNers suffering while (capital owning class) CEOs are not?
So none of his unneeded comforts are predicated on other people losing their livelihood.
This is the key. Many people find out too late that they shouldn't have splurged on nonsense. Some never realize it.
Hot take, but I don't think it actually does, tbh.
Setting aside the temporary delusions of management, the tech itself doesn't devalue anything. It just optimizes away redundant stuff. That was always kinda redundant, but it wasn't "intellectual labor" just because it was done by white-collar workers.
We only have to go back to pre-AI days and look at what kind of mindless nonsense tasks said workers back then complained to see what I mean.
No people ever wanted to do this kind of work anyway, so it is fantastic that they in the future will not have to. The only thing we need to ensure is that the benefits of that will not be harvested by the same rich few. But that was also the mantra before AI, so nothing changed there either.
We can do so, because anything made out of carbon can also be reduced to carbon. Nothing and no one is untouchable, but, ideally, words are the tool. Anything else has unforeseen side-effects.
No one ever wants to do most of the work they do. That is the literal definition of work, as opposed to a hobby. You do it because otherwise you and your children starve. Job satisfaction is optional (and may cut into your salary).
A lot of work happens (or happened) because everyone is in agreement that it kinda should be done.
Like for example, you do need food so someone will probably have to do the things that lead to there being food.
These things of course aren't always fun. Who wants to collect cow manure after all. But they pay into something where everyone agrees that it should be happening and it should do so as the result of a collective effort.
The stuff I was talking about either has no such meta layer or has so many layers of meta, that it is incomprehensible for normal human minds, which, evidently, makes people miserable.
Lots of things "kinda should be done" but people enjoy enough that payment is not required. You said that food production needs to be done, but food production is useless unless someone eats that food. But although eating is necessary for civilization, eating is considered work. Why not? Because people are willing to eat without being paid for it.
Yes. "Optimizing away redundant stuff" is another way of saying "making workers more efficient," which means that employers need fewer workers to accomplish the same tasks. That is exactly what devaluing labor means: the work that you do is worth less because more of it can be done by a cheaper competitor, i.e. an LLM.
Weather or not anyone enjoys that work is irrelevant. English textile workers in the 1810s may not have enjoyed spending long hours sewing clothes by hand, but they needed to in order to support their families, so they were understandably upset when their labor was devalued by automated means of production. I am pretty sure exactly none of those unemployed textile workers breathed a sigh of relief and said "Well, thank god, now I can finally stop sewing and pursue my dream to work as a landscape painter."
Experience has taught me that investing the OP’s amount of emotional capital into your job leads to unhappiness.
Either you're a helpless waif buffered by the storms of this world, or you're in charge of at least something - picking the first results in reddit-tier apathy and despair.
The second may not cause much immediate change, but at least you'll feel better about it.
Loss of a job/career shouldn’t define a person. Loss of a human being does. For too long we ask people we meet “what do you do for work?” Perhaps the question that lets us better know a person is “who is your family?”
Now this is a situation you can't easily get out of, then sure, I think that kind of mindset helps you, at least for a period of time.
Now with AI threatening my job, I've decided to never take a mortgage, and generally live as frugally as possible, preparing for the worst. If I get laid off, I can at least always move back to my parents without being stuck with a house that I can't afford.
I predict AI might be the factor that finally causes a big a drop in real estate market. No need for offices when you replace workers with AI, no demand for housing when young people continue living with their parents and don't have children.
This is an easy thing to say when you've got money in the bank and some kind of health insurance that isn't tied to your employer.
All of this is to say that we have a case of “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” on steroids; Capital is going to fight like its life depends on it to stay irrationally convinced in their belief that AI can replace Labor.
AI might be the best thing to happen for labour n fact; because they're going to gain a lot more intelligence for the same amount of work.
Knowing which buttons to press: $999
To paraphrase an old meme.
If an LLM now knows which buttons to press... the $1 part of my job is not going to pay my bills
The useless layers of labour hasn’t changed with AI because it was and continues to be a failure of management that they exist in the first place.
I welcome the idea of working smarter, not harder, but I don’t think it can be applied to every company.
Humans are just the temporary hosts.
This should be the case now for anything that is not a prototype. The job has changed from "writing code" to "shipping software". A technical lead.
As AI gets more intelligent and the tooling around it develops and organizations figure out how to get it access to the data, the level of involvement needed for software engineers will decrease. Since the cost of developing software is plummeting, the amount of software being used is going to expand greatly- that will keep the technical lead positions available longer and also create more opportunities for consultant engagements.
Although someone can use AI to rewrite every software dependency and every paid piece of software, its still not worthwhile for them for most software, especially if the price of the software is low compared to the complexity it hides.
Users of a paid software product still need a human to be responsible for it.
As you develop your skills with AI, you now have the ability to develop your own software products. So there's an opportunity to become a small business owner. You didn't want to do these non-technical roles, but now you can continue to direct AI to automate all the aspects of the business.
This makes the technical skills required but not sufficient part of the whole business and there are many businesses (like restaurants) that are bad businesses, because many people are willing to open a restaurant as a life-style choice even though most of them are not a good business. This influx of new competitors, make the current restaurant owners profit to go down, because of the increased competition that isn't purely market driven.
In the software world that means "a small product" won't have any moat & pricing power, and your competitors might be wiling to subsidise it for years as a side project, making the whole market suffer from profit erosion (an economic term) leading to zero profit long-term equilibrium.
For example try charging per message (as previously charged by SMS/MMS) in the era of subsidised messenger apps with free calls and messages.
This makes the unique position of SAAS software with 9$/month subscription highly doubtful in the future.
Most people stop after having gotten their dopamine hit. It was the case before, it's still the case now with AI.
Try any newly released software, and you'll notice a trove of issues, whether it's UX, UI, features not working properly. Errors, etc. All of the unsexy work that is needed to go from "it works" to "thousands / millions of people can rely on it daily".
Playing the long game has always worked, and will always work.
There are two ways forward for any company (whether big or small):
- Expand the pie: push AI to its limits while keeping your employees, new markets, new offerings
- Keep the same pie, and increase the size of the slices among the shareholders (employees or not)
For now, until the frontier models decide to stop losing money and pass the real costs onto the consumers.
Even if true (which I'm leaning towards that it is), when will companies realize this?
We could be in for a decade long software career recession until the effects of poorly managed and written software trickles down to lost customers and company bankruptcies. Bad decisions in large companies take a very long time to produce clearly visible effects.
> As you develop your skills with AI, you now have the ability to develop your own software products.
I think this is a dead end. We're quickly approaching a state where software is no longer a product that can be sold, but rather a tool used by someone selling a service.
this does not mean software jobs would come back, you'd just end up in the amazon situation where today you use word made by JOXHSWW, then there are too many bugs and you buy another word made by ANSJJGG and so on.
Some B2B software will continue, but B2C can just become a single person fly by night with some models, or you can end up doing it yourself. A couple of years ago a model one-shotting a game of pacman was sci-fi, now it's just another benchmark, maybe the next model benchmarks will be one-shot photoshop or word or whatever. Either way today's C is more interested in doomscrolling tiktok on their phone than to booting up a computer to do some photo editing anyways.
As the article says, "taste" is still important in steering a model, but for how long? and how many people with taste do you really need compared to a few years ago where you needed people with taste AND a lot of people to execute.
It feels AI is just the next step of outsourcing, writing specs in the evening then magically the next morning software appears which might or might not work the way you expected, and the cycle repeated, only today the cycle is in your terminal and takes minutes vs hours/days
Sure, in the same way a skilled photographer can take better photographs on an iPhone than I can. Nevertheless, because any twit can take good enough photos on an iPhone, the need for the specialized skills of an expert photographer are much less than in, say, the 1930s.
That's why AI is dangerous. It's not because it makes human skill useless, it's because it makes non-human skill good enough. When was the last time you hired an expert photographer, or skilled dressmaker, or a master cabinetmaker? Maybe once or twice in your life, because the iPhone camera, fast fashion, and Ikea are good enough.
When no human knows what the machine is doing exactly, how do you know your intent is being followed? The seeming sufficiency of superficiality the public "enjoys" is an illusion needing upkeep.
Machines cannot make meaning, nor can they originate intent. They can't keep themselves suspended mid-air, detached from human understanding. You need engineers who understand human and machine, identifying the reasonable among the un-reflected wishes and making it explicit and precise.
No one is saying that no one will know what the computer is doing, but fewer people will have to. We are moving up the abstraction hierarchy, just as we have done since the stone age. In my grandparents' generation, knowing how to fix an internal combustion engine was a common skill among young men; today, it's been abstracted away. In the same way, I don't know how my clothes are manufactured, where my electricity is generated, or whether my CPU's "management engine" is spying on me. I don't need to know the details, because everything "just works." The same thing is happening with AI.
2. A photo is just what it appears to be. A program's code can't be gleaned from its output. Without checking the code you can't know if it's good enough or not.
3. For a lot of use cases, good enough isn't good enough. A good enough robot in a factory produces unacceptable defect rates, a good enough space rocket explodes way too often.
A highly dubious assertion. If demand for software is infinite, why don't we have infinite software, since we now have the ability to create infinite software?
> Without checking the code you can't know if it's good enough or not.
And even after checking the code, you still won't know if it's good enough, as evidenced by the large number of bugs that get shipped. I think it's clear that AI can do at least a good job checking code as humans can, so my argument stands.
> good enough isn't good enough
It seems like you are playing word games instead of addressing my argument. Can you please explain the point you were trying to make with this argument?
Without even looking it up, I expect that this is patently untrue. I bet way more people make a living as photographers today than in the 1930s.
EDIT: yep, about 4x as many today, and slightly more per capita even.
Not saying your overall point is off, but the fact that you picked a bad example is illustrative of a broader point: it’s very difficult to tell in advance how technology will impact employment.
EDIT: can’t reply so I’ll just add this here:
As I understood it, your entire point was that people don’t have as much need for photographers, dressmakers, and cabinetmakers today, because technology has given us low-skill or no-skill options that are good enough. Is that a fair characterization of your argument?
This is definitely true for some categories (agriculture, or elevator operators), but again, there are more professional photographers working today than in the 1930s. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are more seamstresses / tailors / etc too, more professional carpenters, etc.
Some of this is basic Jevon’s paradox in action, and some of it is just that median American is much wealthier (in real terms) than a century ago, so even though we can buy lots of “good enough”, there’s still a larger market for high-end skilled artisan labor than a century ago.
Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).
See this over and over on hn and Reddit - CEOs are stupid and don’t understand how much pain offshore/AI causes. No…they’re taking a calculated risk on the organisations resilience and know the people whining about CEOs being stupid will be the ones patching over the cracks
The rug pull is every software engineer losing their job.
That's the point gp was making. If the big labs all increase prices 10x, the cost of running your own open models stays the same
I rather expect them to go up. I bought a bunch three years ago and a lot more recently. All of them I could sell for 2x what I paid.
Who are these investors subsidizing random inference providers on https://openrouter.ai/ ?
Self hosting is a complex investment. Competitors need an stupidly expensive amount of hardware to enter the scene if they're going to serve SaaS. Chinese backed models can be regulated out of competition. Openai and Anthropic will soon be semi exclusive sources of training data as development happens on private conversations.
Success is not guaranteed, but it is crystal clear that the goal is replacing us and then pricing the replacement as the largest possible percentage of our salaries possible.
It's the oldest trick in the book. Place a heavily discounted supermarket in town, wait for all local businesses to close, raise prices.
Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.
Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.
Every step introduces misunderstanding and miscommunication, and minds change, and when you go down the wrong path it is hard to alter course or start over while avoiding blame and ill feeling.
Offshoring quality was not as good as the original, because the original was being produced by developers who were close to the clients and steeped in the same assumptions.
With offshoring, all of the weight was borne by the specification - if something was not captured, it did not exist. It doesn't matter how much it was just a basic assumption that something would work that way - if you didn't say precisely what you wanted, you didn't get anything even close.
So someone close to a product could implement something in a week for x money. Management would see that "week" as a fixed unit of work that could be given to someone who would work for less - but that other person would require an order of magnitude more "prompting" in order to produce what you really wanted, because they didn't have the same knowledge and assumptions.
So their calculus was, well, it might actually take 5 weeks to get the same output, but it was still cheaper. But that completely overlooks the local overhead of 5 failed iterations, and the cost to client relations, or the cost to internal staff burning out in frustration at what was once simple becoming multiple needless failures, or the additional cost of documenting the spec to such a degree nothing gets left out. And the latter, you can't do until you've failed enough to know both sides different assumptions and knowledge gaps.
(Edit: also my point wasn't don't do it or that this can never work - it was that in this case management simply didn't care about the demonstrable quality problem because the cost of reiterating was so low they could afford to write off the first couple of failed attempts, and this is exactly the attitude we'll get with AI. If you can get something that's superficially most of the way there in an hour with a prompt all by yourself, there's no cost to just changing your mind, retrying, trying other things, all with no pesky engineers slowing things down)
The "it saves money" mindset is bad for everyone, distorts everything away from valuable work and investments that generate the most revenue.
I wonder when this comes from other white class jobs— process engineering, autocad drafter, electronics design.
Now that the unbelievable damage is done to families, towns, and cultures of entire regions of the US, they can swoop in and fix it for white collar workers.
Amazing.
You are right though, the damage is unbelievable and it is heartbreaking.
Good advice regarding psychological investment.
Not so useful advice when the job provides your actual livelihood, and the changes (e.g. outsourcing or AI or some industry change) mean you might soon hold a "will work for food" sign in some street corner.
I mean these days, it's not usually that people made some particular job their whole personality and "center of their life", the reason that they worry about losing it.
It's that their job is what puts food on the table, and the job pools are drying up.
Also a lot of tech workers earn a higher salary compared to most of other professions, so I'd expect people to put away some buffer for a rainy day.
Until the government forbids writing programs by hand, writing programs by hand will remain a satisfying hobby. The only thing that's changing is how much other people appreciate the skill and effort you put into a given program.
That was in regards of not trying to fly when conditions were marginal, but it applies to much more.
We're gettin' old, xxs. Waves cane and yells "Get off my LLM!"
To quote the wise Lord Farquaad: "some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
Unless you're thinking of something else, but I can't find anything that comes close to the sentiment other than the above.
As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.
What do you expect them to understand?
It amazes me how little people IN software engineering understand what's happening. Go ahead, listen to your bosses and write all your knowledge in AGENTS.md files, you're definitely special and won't be laid off.
Ask anyone in manufacturing how writing things down for your cheaper replacements works out for you.
I do.
You don't need any sort of fancy harness as claimed.
All you need to do is type vague ideas into a text box. Then you need some UX taste to pick good concepts.
The building of the software happens trivially now. You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.
What you need next is someone with time and patience to QA test the software and provide feedback for the AI.
I guess ideally the same person, with the UX taste.
Give it a few weeks and the product is done, without the need for a team of 5-10. All it takes is one competent human.
I know that many here vehemently disagree and raise concerns about the viability and maintainability of the software.
I believe not a single one of them has made that experience, these concerns are based on their imagination of what they think would happen. Usually they tell you that they essentially review every line of code in their projects.
The actual reality is, that it is too early to actually say where this is going to end. Either AI is going to fix what it is causing right now or not.
We are screwed either way. So is the person or prompter behind the message above.
If Ai is universal there is no need for UX, because a real personal assistant, that takes personal care of you is the only UX necessary in the end.
After >500 hours of work over six months.
I don't think we are screwed. There's risks, but it is also highly likely that living standard will go up for everyone and working time down dramatically.
Yes. If AI doesn't slow down soon, there will no longer be need to build most software. This is not the case yet, and in my opinion we are now at at great time for building new products.
The question for me is whether only software engineering or white-collar work is affected, forcing us into different labor.
If instead most labor is affected, I am confident we will figure out a new social contract. Contrary to what some pessimists seem to believe, I very much doubt the evil elites are working towards a largely unemployed and poor population.
I could imagine that the norm will be two days of work per week, with five days off.
Before the industrial revolution, 80-90% of society worked in the fields, in agriculture. It would have been a quite obvious prediction to say that once machines can do most of that work, people would just have a lot of free time and hardly work anymore. Look how that turned out.
I'd therefore be skeptical of predictions saying we'll all work less. 40 hours a week were a thing 100 years ago when productivity was much lower, and it has not changed since.
Often, the agent will fix a problem without assessing if the fix is worth it, optimal or defective. It's fine to merge fixes like this in codebases occasionally - humans have been managing to do this and to work around this for ages. I'd like to see a software project that is purely LLM driven and doesn't devolve into chaos because of this.
I understand that many doubt this and would like to see evidence. The recent Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft, that gathered 200 contributors in a few days seems like a good example to watch. I understand it's currently around 500k LOC in Rust.
Let's see if their app is going to beat eg. GIMP.
I agree - let's wait and see. I think the outcome of prompting a model will vary wildly depending on who is doing the prompting. Natural language can only get you so far. And if I'm wrong - oh well, I guess I'll need to uproot my life.
This part is quite "load-bearing".
I heard from someone who worked at Lovable that what most customers produce with that magical textbox is software that shouldn't go anywhere near production. Apparently the problem of thinking like an engineer is not solved by these AI tools. Most people who are not software engineers by trade are not capable of verifying what they produced, nor would they even consider needing to.
No offence, I think you might be a classic case of "senior who forgot how it feels to be junior", where after a lot work experience deva start taking their software engineering instincts for granted and forget that they are a skill that takes years to master. You can prompt an AI for a solution, you can even prompt it for ideas, but you cannot prompt it to think for you.
Is it really so hard to select Opus 5.5 in Claude Code and type into the box that you'd like an audit for production readiness?
I think you need a competent person, perhaps a product owner, in front of it to make sense of the output and direct it.
Maybe you are right and for a non-technical person this is harder than I imagine. But it is getting easier every month now, isn't it?
If all you give the machine is a vague idea, then it is unlikely that you will get what you want or need. Pure information theory. Garbage in, garbage out. You could get lucky, but luck based strategies are just frustatingly bad in the long run.
> The building of the software happens trivially now.
The building of bad software does, no doubt. I'd like to use good software and my sincere hope is that AI tech will be used to raise software quality substantially since most of what I see around me and have to use every day is just really bad, compared to what it could be if people cared.
> You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.
For quality you do.
It's not about luck, but your persistence in engaging in a test and feedback loop.
You do not need to be a software engineer to do that.
When the generated code is not performant enough, or has bugs or unintended behavior, who is going to correct it? The same AI that made the mistake in the first place? Another AI? A human?
When a bug introduced by the AI creates real damage to you, or your org, or third parties, who is responsible? You or the AI? If it's you, how can you be held responsible for shipping code you never understood in the first place?
Yes. When things don't work, the obvious first step is providing feedback to the AI to fix it. Have you not tried this?
About liability, you're going to have to think about what went wrong and whether developers or QA testers could have done things differently. In traditional software development, despite supposed understanding of the code, we also had bugs and incidents.
When a bug creates damage, the user is responsible. But like at most companies pre-AI, it is not prudent to focus too much on the individual. There should be a post-mortem that determines which processes were weak, and these days that can be fed directly into a harness for the LLM to improve your tooling or testing to avoid that class of problem.
If I weren’t doing this, another IT consulting firm would. It’s now just a matter of time before most people realize the current state of AI and what can be accomplished with it
If that’s “all it takes” then half the proprietary software on my machine would be swapped with far better vibe-coded versions by now. (Just a few weeks to get up and running, right?)
If anything, vibe-coding is an anti-signal for me now since I expect that the software will be abandoned as soon as the vibe-coder gets mildly bored or tokens go up in price. I’d never knowingly pay for something like that.
(For B2B slopware, sure, maybe this makes sense. But it was never particularly good or novel in the first place.)
This sentence, whenever I see it, makes me chuckle now.
Surely the leopards won't eat my face. I have taste and you can't get that from a machine.
If the higher-ups don't care about the quality of your code when they compel you to tokenmaxx, what on earth gives you the impression they have a clue about your taste? It's not the AI that is going to fire you, it's that arsehole Brad who you made the grave mistake of beating too comprehensively at Catan.
Higher-ups do not need to concur with that. They just get.. how does on say today.. "left behind".
The operative word being "visible", in the most literal sense? 9 times out of 10 the market seems to select for cost first, appearance second, functionality third.
I think prime example of this is the prevalence of ad-supported business models. People would rather be interrupted with tasteless ads and pay twice (attention, everything costs more to pay for ads which they watched) than pay a tiny sum of money that they can afford.
In other words, would those people have kept their jobs at current interest rates if there was no AI?
I think most wouldn't and leadership would be saying something else.
This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".
Why do we have middle managers still, while we're replacing programmers? Really says a lot about how decisions are made, we're hierarchical monkeys at the core.
How could you ever think otherwise?
If you have only bad middle management around you then it might be time to either step up and do it better or find a different place to work, since there are places with excellent middle management.
At FAANG, good middle managers are the exception, the promotion process incentivizes different behaviors. A manager taking care of their team or, worse, pushing back on their boss isn't playing the right game.
ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.
I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.
I used to repair cars. I guess if nothing else works, I can do that until EVs take over that.
By the way, my local bike shop has a one month long (!!!) queue for repairs. Just saying.
Where I live many, many older people are now on e-bikes. They are good paying customers, and most don't want to work on their bikes themselves (unlike hobbyists with the pushbikes).
And today they are taken aback by any reasonable hourly rate because a new bike from China costs less than a few hours of your work. Good luck! Oh, and if you really follow through on this make sure you copy Sheldon's pages just in case they ever go down, you'll have an edge over the rest.
I'll believe this the day an AI model can golf with an executive, or wine and dine and call hookers in an overnight business meeting. Sure, that's not every exec, but that's common enough that AI isn't going to work there.
Ever since LLMs took over everything I'm working or have worked on, I no longer have fun, no longer feel joy, or challenged to solve issues.
My question is, what now? What's the backup skill or job to develop next and still feel joy with it?
Not sure what to recommend for you though.
Is it you though?
Last week "I" have chased down a really sneaky performance bug in a shutdown routine of one of our applications, if it went to prod it would cost us a lot of grief. How did I do it? Well, I didn't, I gave Claude access to kubectl, described the behavior and how to trigger it, and went for a coffee. After 10 minutes of didly-dalling I took a sip of coffe, then copy-pasted 100% spot-on response to a JIRA ticket and sent it to developers for a fix.
I did maybe 2% of work there.
I get these and the fix ai suggests is often wrong or hallucinated!
I created here something similar to how intranets work, where I can easily define a service as public or internal in k8s through the ingress class
If it's internal, it's accessible only through tailscale, if it's public, it's accessible by anyone, now for some reason internal services have insane delays or very very bad bandwidth, never understood why and couldn't figure out how to even debug this
Ran codex, gave access to the whole node, ah yeah just lower the MTU to this value, lo and behold it fixed everything
The other day I got a cheap thermal printer with the only way to use it is through an app, I thought ok I'll try to reverse engineer it, try to understand the protocol, then write a script to print, few days later and progress was very slow, I thought let's try to let an LLM so it
It reversed the entire protocol, wrote me a web app where I can print whatever I want, I got what I needed, but feel zero accomplishment
Just a personal view, but I feel great when I get that result. I had an effing problem that was a pain but is now fixed after a short conversation. I get to check and confirm that results are good for me. And it gets done without spending hours with random tech support ("did you try reinstalling your OS"?). My 2c.
I didn't 100% think through every decision in the implementation but I am 100% responsible for ensuring the problem was solved. What tool I used to solve the problem doesn't diminish my work.
Thing is I don't know on which one to focus on as a backup, I wanted to hear some ideas from the HN community
For some you may be even able to leverage your software skills.
If you have time, start developing your public speaking skills. This will give you the edge over other engineers within your company, especially if you know how to use it. Additionally, you'd be able to survive if you are layed off by either moving to an adjacent field (pre-sales, sales, CTO...etc) or just start attending and presenting at conferences. Hope this helps
The answer you're looking for is not on Hacker News.
This sums it up well and will ring true no matter which side of the argument you're on.
But I think it is important we all emphasise that this LLM-age giddiness sits squarely in those businesses where influence and product have always been their thing. It is unfortunate but, here we are. I don't believe a VP or MD or CXO is ever going to admit they were played by their peers on this one (agentic development).
The positive perhaps is the hardening of personal development, by need or necessity. LLM and agents are terrible at domain expertise still, and only until memory availability becomes abundent again (in end-user equipment), that is not going to change.
My big concern for the industry is when that happens, and anyone can build anything, but with the ability to tune to domain expertise via their own terms; this is the collapse, where no 'moat' exists at all, we are already seeing the collapse of the subscription model, and I believe pay-on-demand / purchase _is_ authentication is a tracking metric to that collapse. I forsee regulation being pushed to ensure the model however and foresee regulation on user equipment.
Larger institutions are perhaps 1-2 years lagging (for regulatory reasons) on uptake and perhaps that is the point in all this giddiness.
We're heading towards the end of the year and I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans. What they have done is convince those with money to spend differently on their fellow humans.
It is also a political question, on which many techies have been maneuvered into abdicating. Stripped of agency, agents they are bamboozled to depend on.
This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.
And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".
Is it politically correct to say this? Is it fair? Is it true? I know Indian programmers who are as passionate and experienced as anyone, and yet they're cheaper (though not by that much nowadays). Because India is what people generally mean when they say this.
Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.
What will break first? The people or the system.
Most were just let go. No severance, or comp packages. Just a good luck with your job search, it was nice while it lasted.
For his next gig, he worked in fisheries. His 10 years of experience at the factory didn't mater, and he started with entry level pay. This lasted some years, until some bigger company bought his employer, and merged. Lots of people had to go, him included.
Then he landed work delivering mail. Worked there for 15 years, until the postal service started downsizing due to ever decreasing volume in mail being delivered.
So his last attempt was to just go to trade school, and try some trade. 50+ years old working on a apprentice salary, once again starting at the bottom rung of the ladder.
My point is, there are many people out there that have lived this life. For every software developer that have made bank for the past 20 years, and are now faced with the reality of being made obsolete, there are probably 10 people who've gone through this multiple times, but gone from one minimum wage job to another. Going back to start every time.
It sucks for everyone. But you just have to adapt. I guess one silver lining is that when the "white collar professional jobs"-apocalypse arrives, that's when we'll finally look at things like UBI.
Time and time again, we've seen that when working class jobs disappear, it is met with some sort of aw-shucks / but-they'll-find-something-else-to-do reaction. Whereas when the middle/professional class is affected, it is seemingly a end of times sign.
Yes, but this time around there may be nothing left to adapt to.
But that's true for anybody that need to start as a beginner in a new industry.
But, I think the cold hard truth is that if you're a professional worker, with a six figure salary, the idea of going back to school, and working with something completely unrelated to your interest - all while taking a steep pay cut...it is unthinkable for many.
The alternative is of course unemployment.
It is hard to know if it is just bot traffic to sow discord, or if plenty of people are genuinely delighted that office workers are finding themselves unemployed.
But contrast this to the visa thread such as the recent one on Microsoft and in there it’s all about who can bring the most bodies into their country wins. Talent is pure human not machine.
I’m not taking a side here but it’s clear that in most of these discussions fear is the driving factor. People are very worried about out what is going to happen to their jobs.
These threads seem more like therapy for a lot of folks to vent which is good but shows there isn’t space to be heard in real life.
Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.
Interesting times ahead?
Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
Everything looks to be a lot different. Once AI is better than humans at knowledge work, why would you even keep human in the loop? (That's assuming AI reaches the level of being better than humans - I'm not arguing for that assumption, but about it's consequences and that in this scenario we won't get much new jobs).
You can give a workman a power tool and he shouldn't instantly assume that his housebuilding job is under threat, because corporations will build a house-building power tool.
Why won't he think that? Two reasons: 1) any tool that becomes more powerful tends to become more specialised and expensive to operate, so an electric drill doesn't scale to a house-building drill without incredible tradeoffs, and 2) he isn't reading a million breathless class warfare-igniting articles whose writers are paid through attention.
Isn't that exactly what is different about AI automation? AI is more generalized and cheaper to operate.
And as I've noted above that's jus assumption (to show that AI is different than previous displacements), I'm not making actual claim that LLMs will be better at knowledge work than humans.
In a word, bleak.
They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.
Mega corp will advance technology exponentially, but for the rest of us we will live in a mix of medieval life style assisted by robotic and low tech. People will exode city and go back to the countryside.
For what concern my self, I'm buying arable land, maybe in couple of years home food production will be fully automated.
Awfully optimistic. Why would they let you do that?
Capital is that fraction of produce set aside for future production. OpenAI is capital but not all wealth is capital. And capital isn't going anywhere - the machines will have gigafactories etc. The value of labor will plumet but present-day capital that is usable by the machines or can be scrapped and repurposed will retain value.
The value of square meter of land + mineral/sunlight rights (not capital) is likely to rise - the amount of wealth that somebody would give you for that asset would probably increase, as more wealth can be generated from it.
Individuals without wealth now will likely end up with a much lower allocation of those things which retain value (land, materials, etc) while having a much higher quantity (relative to now) of those things whose value will drop - AI tokens, electronics, entertainment, etc.
Essentially our current trajectory taken to the limit. Land expensive, food expensive, interest low, smartphone cheap.
> who will be the buyers
Imagine an impoverished and technologically backward country which has been colonized/occupied, and where the most valuable assets are exported well below market price or stolen. The people still trade their own labor for subsistence. They still produce some goods which have value in outside countries, they receive some charity, there is still tourism, their labor has some value (servitude, trafficking). AI would be the same (assuming laws hold up) - e.g. you could rent out your solar panels to OpenAI in exchange for a loaned domestic robot and a token subscription.
1. There are plenty of things being outsourced, They can be done locally.
2. There are plenty of things currently not being done by locals - like elderly care.
3. We can find new things to do.
4. We can work less.
And even if those things raise living standard somewhat, the efficiencies from AI/robots should be more than enough to compensate.
But, in a capitalistic globalized economy this isn't how things work. So we'll see some shift from that. And it will work better in countries with a more democratic socialistic leaning rather than capitalistic.
We're already starting to see that, with the recent EU trade deal with china, limiting the amount of cars china can send to Europe.
This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.
I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.
Big Tech? Startup? Selling a service? Selling software tools? Something else?
Because (business) success usually involves a big recipe of good ideas, good execution, good networking/marketing/sales.
Proprietary code was once rare and valuable. But code is cheap to create, and plentiful. It might as well be flour, sugar, butter. Can anyone that ever worked at a bakery trivially create a successful rival bakery because of a few recipes and an EZBake Oven? Can a vibe-coded Adobe Creative Suite take down Adobe overnight? I'll believe it when I see it.
That's not to say that if you're an engineer, but you have a passion and confidence in your ideas and salesmanship that you shouldn't give it a try, if you're in a position to do so, or otherwise don't have better options. But thinking that software engineering is more of a factor in rapid business success than it used to be seems like an odd assumption.
I guess I'm not using this tech enough :-)
There are interesting parallels between LLMs and biological structures as well, for instance spontaneous oscillation in nervous systems lacking inputs but with a feedback loop in the topology.
Any kind of feedback system is riding a fine line between amplification/generation and runaway behavior resulting in an oscillating loop. Electronics, mechanical control systems, biological systems and LLMs all share the same property: some fraction of the output is coupled back to the input. With LLMs the fraction is 100%. It's a small miracle they don't loop more than they do!
It makes me think about how many people just stop reading because it's not comfortable, and they don't bother turning on reading mode.
Seems like we're now crossing into bargaining and depression.
I have empathy for those who were open minded enough not to mock those of us who were warning against this or swiftly dismissed our opinions. I hope you can now be open minded to the fact this will continue, and will extend to ALL jobs, that our society WILL dramatically change to the point of becoming unrecognizable in the not so distant future. We tend to be consistent in making the same errors when predicting the future. You just need to look into past predictions about our present time. Most people still make those errors. But once you see them you can try to avoid them, though unfortunately not making those mistakes usually leads you to seem crazy to others, which is also part of the reason those mistakes are so common.
Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.
We will lay you off in 3 months - and having for a 3 months dead man walking in the company is probably worse for everyone. Since said employee probably won't break records for productivity during this period - it is easier for everyone just to give the one let go some lump sum.
Anyway I think that in this post the context is that they will be let go during good times - without the informal - we know the company is in trouble and layoffs as coming common knowledge that big companies have.
[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/fixing-a-vibe-coded-app
I was part of it in online poker world. You needed 2 functioning braincells to make 6 figures while playing a few hours a day back in 2005/2006. It got more and more difficult from there. First it got guys "living their life" while hustling on the side who thought it's an easy mode forever and didn't even bother to learn new tools. Then it turned previously good players into marginal grinders and then only a small group of winners remained. Many went to different/easier pastures - private games, heavy game selection at (super) high stakes. Most though lost their income and with it years of life that now seemed wasted in front of the computer.
Among my friends I've seen suicides (two), lost families (more than two), despair and poverty (too many to count). There are also positive stories - people who started doing something else, adjusted their expectation and are now living happy life even though their income will never be close to what their experienced in their early twenties.
In online poker - instead of Fable - we had ever developing tools. Databases, HUDs, HUDs connected to databases, auto-seating scripts (where a script looks for "donks" and auto seats you at the table when they seat) and then bots and solvers. I was on the frontier lab side I guess as the author of the most popular solver when they first came out. Now Fable is coming after my edge.
I am still a tech optimist. I think it will be a better and more abundant world at the end of it. There is still a lot of jobs we are not doing now because we don't have enough people. The transition is going to hurt though, especially those who don't have energy to start from scratch.
Gambling for living taught me no income stream is forever. Especially lucrative ones are going to be competed for and will dry out. Live below your means, try to save money, don't compete for status. It was always a good advice but it never hits until it's you who it applies to.
More so was agile having developers replace the heavy old product and project management organizations a lot of enterprises had. And then came devops were developers replaced sys admins? Remember those folks?
The billionaire class tell us the utopia is coming. Why should we believe them? Given that they’ve failed to share the benefits of the massive productivity gains of the last 50 years (stagnant pay, 30 hour work weeks, health care and social safety net?) why should we trust them to share this? They didn’t when we automated away other people’s jobs why would they now that ours are being automated? We shouldn’t believe them imo.
but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.
We will expand the job market and create new jobs that weren't possible before.
1. jobs being automated implies companies can do way more with fewer workers
2. this means they have extra profit that they can push somewhere
3. they will push it again to capital by finding new ventures to scale out
4. for achieving (3) they need labour pool, which is where we come in
Few open questions
- What kind of new ventures? Colonising Mars is an example, but ambition is unlimited
- Will companies choose to scale out or just eat profits? I think they will scale out due to ideology and market dynamics
- Biggest question: can humans still provide value in some dimension where AI can't? I don't know..
"Can humans do any single thing better than AI"
If its true then companies will scale out just enough that it requires 40 hours per week of our labour.
> I agree that companies will scale out, but all signs point to them scaling out their token spend rather than hiring
I disagree. My question back to you is, if you were a company, why would you not scale out to have as many humans as possible? You'd do it because if you don't, your competitors have an advantage over you
The average engineer is... average. I have watched the frontier models raise the bar for hiring quite high over the last year, to the point where it becomes a real question whether most companies will need more than one strong employee per job function in the next few years.
The way processes are shifting, the companies with the most staff are the most likely to be outcompeted by smaller teams leveraging agentic development. I suspect we haven't seen anything close to the worst of layoffs at large corporations yet. The limiting factor is that it takes a while for a massive ship to turn, but inertia will only go so far.
As for what humans can do better than AI, there's one thing: assume liability. Lately, however, it seems that no one with the power to do so is particularly concerned about holding anyone accountable for AI-driven mistakes.
I wish I could justify your optimism, as I expect life to deteriorate materially for the typical member of the working class in countries without strong safety nets. But I just don't see it leading to more hiring when even the current frontier models are more capable across most dimensions than the average white-collar worker.
Yeah they are.
Two pizza team = 2 person team + Opus 5.5
Or for the really enterprising, solopreneur scaling to > $2.5 ARR (more than Goog's revenue per employee).
This is a fundamentally different game now.
I don't know why anyone assumes it just stops here.
Almost all 24/7 on call is support theater anyway.
>Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc.
Not if a newcomer can be assisted by the other person or even just by AI in understanding the codebase.
You can probably even promise 99% uptime (sounds good enough to most buyers probably?) even if people sleep 8 hours a day as long as the failures comes no earlier than than 15 minutes into their sleep and only happens at most once a month (1% of 30 days is 7,8 hours).
The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits
That requires having enough good new ideas for everyone to work on, and sadly a lot of companies don't have those
I think startups have an easier time for 2 reasons: They are innovating on the product side already, and probably were already capacity constrained for work on the top ideas. They also have a high proportion of tech debt which never bubbled to the top of effort vs reward (competing against product work) before but would still be valuable to fix. E.g. https://posthog.com/blog/sql-parser was on the HN frontpage a few months ago, and this work would never have happened in the before times
If it's easier for startups, it's for the same reason doing a "pivot" is easier: they usually don't have much of a product or revenue or customer base to begin with, they throw things out there and see what sticks.
Because they don't need 10x the existing value, nor is the extra value they can actually use and benefit from that expandable.
And despite being quick to call this "dumb", you missed the most obvious reason: by not keeping the whole team they save money. Which makes their expenses lower and their VCs/shareholders happy. Keeping the team and "delivering 10x the existing value" doesn't leverage AI for reducing costs, and is hardly guaranteed to bring in much in the way of returns either.
Usable new value goes through a "pipe" so to speak, which constrains how much you can use or need. And that's the business and market and regulation realities.
If you're making Instagram for example you aren't going to change everything "just because you can", nor is there any reason to make 10x intrusive changes to the backend "to make it faster" or something with the danger of disrupting something, if it goes predictably well enough already.
Your marketing team, your engineering team (what's left of it), your business team, also need to understand and pace any changes, and have a specific vision, not just "anything possible, even 10x the things".
10 people don't 10x. They barely 3x.
That's likes rocket science, av, automata and things like that.
Less than 1% engineers work on that and even they are using ai.
For other 99%, one person knowing what to build is enough.
What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change
"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"
Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.
This seems a bit arbitrary to me. Why 1969, exactly? Personally I'd go for the "democratization of Internet" as the start of the slope. So perhaps 1989 ("1989: Quantum Computer Services and Apple end their partnership. Quantum Computer Services renames itself America Online. Two years later, America Online for DOS is released, and a year after that, America Online for Windows.")? Or arguably even a bit later...
Which (IMHO) is a bit more on topic than being able to fly in a Concorde.
Marylin Monroe? Mickey Mouse? Michael Myers?