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> Codex will support me and others in performing our work effectively away from our desks. This feels so hopelessly optimistic to me, because "effectively away

> Codex will support me and others in performing our work effectively away from our desks. This feels so hopelessly optimistic to me, because "effectively away from our desks" for most people will mean "in the unemployment line"

zackproser 1y ago
Maybe, maybe that's FUD...I can't predict the future.
- righthand 1y ago
  You can’t predict the future or are choosing to ignore the future? Are you pretending that automation doesn’t take away human jobs?
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    When automation took away millions of farming jobs, I think that was good for society and virtually every individual in it.
    - jampekka 1y ago
      In aggregate it was good for society, but it was a disaster for a lot of people and a lot of areas. This is the theme of e.g. The Grapes of Wrath. We should welcome automation and efficiency, but also address the situation of the "losers" of the development and not just expect the invisible hand will sort everything out.
    - micromacrofoot 1y ago
      when offshoring took millions of factory jobs it was a lot less clear automation was good for farming, but the consolidation into corporate megafarms probably not so much I would argue that automating labor isn't bad, but it's being used to take labor away without a solution
    - righthand 1y ago
      Can you elaborate why having a less diverse farming economy is good for every individual? Automation didn’t invent commodities so it’s unrelated to the advent of a food surplus. It might make obtaining surplus easier but it didn’t give more purpose to people by forcing them to sell their land to a bigger corporation. Even if 50% of farmers don’t want to be farmers anymore doesn’t mean they’d gladly give up their job for a recliner and ubi.
      - sokoloff 1y ago
        When 80% of Americans were in farming, it's fair to say that it took around 80% of labor to feed America. If I try to approximate the same today, the median US family can be fed for something around 1/10th of their labor. That seems like a fantastic improvement, unless you really, really like farming.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  Yeah but if you look to the present... there aren't really any jobs where someone is blissfully wandering the earth delegating tasks. Most of the time I can't even take a walk on calls because someone wants to screen share something with me... I'd like you to be right, but I live in society where joy at work is often considered antithetical to productivity. No matter how much more productive I get, that space is used to fill in more productivity. We'll need more than tooling to stop this.
ninininino 1y ago
I guess maybe the analogy is we as software devs are all horses. With Codex and Claude Code, these model agents are cars. Some of horses will become drivers of cars and some of us will no longer be needed to pull wagons and will be out of a job. Is that the proper framing?
- allturtles 1y ago
  > Some of horses will become drivers of cars An amusing image, but your analogy lost me here.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    Guessing that's sarcasm.
  - ninininino 1y ago
    It's pretty intentional. I think CEOs or PMs or Founders are like horse jockeys. Devs are like horses. (Some of them are both the jockey and the horse). AI is a car. CEO or PM or Founder might smoothly swap out the horse for a car and continue on with little change. For the horse to become a driver of a car is a more difficult challenge, but not impossible. It needs to evolve.
chw9e 1y ago
Think we've got a long time yet for that. We're going to be writing code a lot faster but getting these things to 90-95% on such a wide variety of tasks is going to be a monumental effort, the first 60-70% on anything is always much easier than the last 5-10%. Also there's a matter of taste, as commented above, the best way to use these is going to be running multiple runs at once (that's going to be super expensive right now so we'll need inference improvements on today's SOTA models to make this something we can reasonably do on every task). Then somebody needs to pick which run made the best code, and even then you're going to want code review probably from a human if it's written by machine. Trusting the machine and just vibe coding stuff is fine for small projects or maybe even smaller features, but for a codebase that's going to be around for a while I expect we're going to want a lot of human involvement in the architecture. AI can help us explore different paths faster, but humans need to be driving it still for quite some time - whether that's by encoding their taste into other models or by manually reviewing stuff, either way it's going to take maintenance work. In the near-term, I expect engineering teams to start looking for how to leverage background agents more. New engineering flows need to be built around these and I am bearish on the current status quo of just outsource everything to the beefiest models and hope they can one-shot it. Reviewing a bunch of AI code is also terrible and we have to find a better way of doing that. I expect since we're going to be stuck on figuring out background agents for a while that teams will start to get in the weeds and view these agents as critical infra that needs to be designed and maintained in-house. For most companies, foundation labs will just be an API call, not hosting the agents themselves. There's a lot that can be done with agents that hasn't been explored much at all yet, we're still super early here and that's going to be where a lot of new engineering infra work comes from in the next 3-5 years.
fhd2 1y ago
Well, the optimistic take is that if something gets cheaper to produce (e.g. code), demand for it actually increases. Now you could argue that any non technical person could just oversee the agents instead. Possibly. Though in my experience, humans like to have other humans they trust oversee and understand important stuff for them.
darth_avocado 1y ago
It is most definitely going to be the unemployment line. When in the history of productivity gains, has it translated to more time for people to do other things that are not work? It always translates to more profits for shareholders and bigger pay for executive class, followed by more work for half the workers to fill up the time opened up by the said productivity gains, and unemployment for the other half.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  200 years ago, 80% of Americans worked in farming. 150 years ago, that was still over half. It’s now under 2%. If you’ve seen the work hours and work ethic of farmers, it’s safe to say that most of those people got other jobs that take far less work than farmers did/do. Closer to our field, I think we’d have far worse work lives (fewer of us employed and much lower pay) if we had to code everything in assembler still. The creation of more powerful abstractions and languages allowed more of us to become software devs and make a living this way than if all we had were the less productive tools of the early days of computing.
  - jampekka 1y ago
    From 200 years ago sure, but the link between productivity growth and income growth got more or less broken in the 1970's. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
  - throw234234234 1y ago
    Many people lost their livelihoods though in each transition. I find each life valuable but that's just me - yes we are better in aggregate long term but in some ways it is paved with their sacrifice. If we can find a way to support those displaced even that would be a much better start. e.g. re-education funds, training schools/government run apprenticeships on projects, etc. Especially if the scale of the displacement is large. We all only have the one life IMV - its about giving those lives the opportunities to pivot. Ageism, and gatekeeping will stop many from changing careers.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
AstroBen 1y ago
It's mind blowing to me how many developers are happy about the developments here.. as if they're going to eventually be paid to just sit there while agents do everything. Ah, work is now so easy!
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  I mean, I get what everyone's saying. But, just Devil's Advocate, what would be so terrible about software developers having to find some other line of work? We've used our software development skills to automate other people out of work for what can be argued to be literally decades. Each time we did it, we certainly expected that the people affected would find other work. New jobs were created. The world didn't end. I honestly don't think it would be that much worse this time.
  - AstroBen 1y ago
    > what would be so terrible about software developers having to find some other line of work Uh.. I'm having trouble considering this as a serious question. It's objectively going to lead to them being in a worse situation. Mostly irrelevant resume and needing to re-skill into something and start from the bottom.. out of a well paid career that many enjoy and find fulfilling My question wasn't an ethical one. It's why are the people that are the target of this automation happy about the progress, to the point of trying to push it forward faster, cheering it on
    - jampekka 1y ago
      I agree that with the current economic structures a lot of us will end up worse off. Just like e.g. manufacturing workers did. But the automation is not the problem, it's the economic structure in which increased efficiency makes a lot of people worse off.
      - AstroBen 1y ago
        Yeah you're right. Improving productivity for society should be a really exciting time for everyone.. instead we just leave the affected with nothing

zackproser 1y ago

Maybe, maybe that's FUD...I can't predict the future.

righthand 1y ago
You can’t predict the future or are choosing to ignore the future? Are you pretending that automation doesn’t take away human jobs?
- sokoloff 1y ago
  When automation took away millions of farming jobs, I think that was good for society and virtually every individual in it.
  - jampekka 1y ago
    In aggregate it was good for society, but it was a disaster for a lot of people and a lot of areas. This is the theme of e.g. The Grapes of Wrath. We should welcome automation and efficiency, but also address the situation of the "losers" of the development and not just expect the invisible hand will sort everything out.
  - micromacrofoot 1y ago
    when offshoring took millions of factory jobs it was a lot less clear automation was good for farming, but the consolidation into corporate megafarms probably not so much I would argue that automating labor isn't bad, but it's being used to take labor away without a solution
  - righthand 1y ago
    Can you elaborate why having a less diverse farming economy is good for every individual? Automation didn’t invent commodities so it’s unrelated to the advent of a food surplus. It might make obtaining surplus easier but it didn’t give more purpose to people by forcing them to sell their land to a bigger corporation. Even if 50% of farmers don’t want to be farmers anymore doesn’t mean they’d gladly give up their job for a recliner and ubi.
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      When 80% of Americans were in farming, it's fair to say that it took around 80% of labor to feed America. If I try to approximate the same today, the median US family can be fed for something around 1/10th of their labor. That seems like a fantastic improvement, unless you really, really like farming.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
Yeah but if you look to the present... there aren't really any jobs where someone is blissfully wandering the earth delegating tasks. Most of the time I can't even take a walk on calls because someone wants to screen share something with me... I'd like you to be right, but I live in society where joy at work is often considered antithetical to productivity. No matter how much more productive I get, that space is used to fill in more productivity. We'll need more than tooling to stop this.

ninininino 1y ago

I guess maybe the analogy is we as software devs are all horses. With Codex and Claude Code, these model agents are cars. Some of horses will become drivers of cars and some of us will no longer be needed to pull wagons and will be out of a job. Is that the proper framing?

allturtles 1y ago
> Some of horses will become drivers of cars An amusing image, but your analogy lost me here.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  Guessing that's sarcasm.
- ninininino 1y ago
  It's pretty intentional. I think CEOs or PMs or Founders are like horse jockeys. Devs are like horses. (Some of them are both the jockey and the horse). AI is a car. CEO or PM or Founder might smoothly swap out the horse for a car and continue on with little change. For the horse to become a driver of a car is a more difficult challenge, but not impossible. It needs to evolve.

chw9e 1y ago

Think we've got a long time yet for that. We're going to be writing code a lot faster but getting these things to 90-95% on such a wide variety of tasks is going to be a monumental effort, the first 60-70% on anything is always much easier than the last 5-10%. Also there's a matter of taste, as commented above, the best way to use these is going to be running multiple runs at once (that's going to be super expensive right now so we'll need inference improvements on today's SOTA models to make this something we can reasonably do on every task). Then somebody needs to pick which run made the best code, and even then you're going to want code review probably from a human if it's written by machine. Trusting the machine and just vibe coding stuff is fine for small projects or maybe even smaller features, but for a codebase that's going to be around for a while I expect we're going to want a lot of human involvement in the architecture. AI can help us explore different paths faster, but humans need to be driving it still for quite some time - whether that's by encoding their taste into other models or by manually reviewing stuff, either way it's going to take maintenance work. In the near-term, I expect engineering teams to start looking for how to leverage background agents more. New engineering flows need to be built around these and I am bearish on the current status quo of just outsource everything to the beefiest models and hope they can one-shot it. Reviewing a bunch of AI code is also terrible and we have to find a better way of doing that. I expect since we're going to be stuck on figuring out background agents for a while that teams will start to get in the weeds and view these agents as critical infra that needs to be designed and maintained in-house. For most companies, foundation labs will just be an API call, not hosting the agents themselves. There's a lot that can be done with agents that hasn't been explored much at all yet, we're still super early here and that's going to be where a lot of new engineering infra work comes from in the next 3-5 years.

fhd2 1y ago

Well, the optimistic take is that if something gets cheaper to produce (e.g. code), demand for it actually increases. Now you could argue that any non technical person could just oversee the agents instead. Possibly. Though in my experience, humans like to have other humans they trust oversee and understand important stuff for them.

darth_avocado 1y ago

It is most definitely going to be the unemployment line. When in the history of productivity gains, has it translated to more time for people to do other things that are not work? It always translates to more profits for shareholders and bigger pay for executive class, followed by more work for half the workers to fill up the time opened up by the said productivity gains, and unemployment for the other half.

sokoloff 1y ago
200 years ago, 80% of Americans worked in farming. 150 years ago, that was still over half. It’s now under 2%. If you’ve seen the work hours and work ethic of farmers, it’s safe to say that most of those people got other jobs that take far less work than farmers did/do. Closer to our field, I think we’d have far worse work lives (fewer of us employed and much lower pay) if we had to code everything in assembler still. The creation of more powerful abstractions and languages allowed more of us to become software devs and make a living this way than if all we had were the less productive tools of the early days of computing.
- jampekka 1y ago
  From 200 years ago sure, but the link between productivity growth and income growth got more or less broken in the 1970's. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
- throw234234234 1y ago
  Many people lost their livelihoods though in each transition. I find each life valuable but that's just me - yes we are better in aggregate long term but in some ways it is paved with their sacrifice. If we can find a way to support those displaced even that would be a much better start. e.g. re-education funds, training schools/government run apprenticeships on projects, etc. Especially if the scale of the displacement is large. We all only have the one life IMV - its about giving those lives the opportunities to pivot. Ageism, and gatekeeping will stop many from changing careers.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

AstroBen 1y ago

It's mind blowing to me how many developers are happy about the developments here.. as if they're going to eventually be paid to just sit there while agents do everything. Ah, work is now so easy!

bilbo0s 1y ago
I mean, I get what everyone's saying. But, just Devil's Advocate, what would be so terrible about software developers having to find some other line of work? We've used our software development skills to automate other people out of work for what can be argued to be literally decades. Each time we did it, we certainly expected that the people affected would find other work. New jobs were created. The world didn't end. I honestly don't think it would be that much worse this time.
- AstroBen 1y ago
  > what would be so terrible about software developers having to find some other line of work Uh.. I'm having trouble considering this as a serious question. It's objectively going to lead to them being in a worse situation. Mostly irrelevant resume and needing to re-skill into something and start from the bottom.. out of a well paid career that many enjoy and find fulfilling My question wasn't an ethical one. It's why are the people that are the target of this automation happy about the progress, to the point of trying to push it forward faster, cheering it on
  - jampekka 1y ago
    I agree that with the current economic structures a lot of us will end up worse off. Just like e.g. manufacturing workers did. But the automation is not the problem, it's the economic structure in which increased efficiency makes a lot of people worse off.
    - AstroBen 1y ago
      Yeah you're right. Improving productivity for society should be a really exciting time for everyone.. instead we just leave the affected with nothing