5 ms·

> The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

• furyofantares 1y ago
  > That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along. The hypothetical that we're 8x as productive but the work isn't as fun isn't "society becoming shittier".
  • Steven420 1y ago
    How is everyone working shitty jobs not "society becoming shittier"? Seems pretty awful
    • furyofantares 1y ago
      "Society" is more than just software developers. We are very well paid for very cushy work. It's not good for anyone's work to get worse, but it's not a huge hit to society if a well-paid cushy job gets less cushy. And presumably people buy our work because it's valuable to them. Multiplying that by 8 would be a pretty big benefit to society. I don't want my job to get less fun, but I would press that button without hesitation. It would be an incredible trade for society at large.
      • codr7 1y ago
        If you think software development is cushy, I wonder what kind of software you're writing. Because there are different levels; getting something to work is not the same thing as writing maintainable, high quality software. I've seen plenty enough people try, really try, to get into software development; but they just can't do it.
      • bluefirebrand 1y ago
        My cushy software job has burned me out so badly that I am on medical leave with massive memory problems and a bit of concern about my heart So I mean... Yeah Is software more comfortable generally than many other lines of work? Yes probably Is it always soft and cushy? No, not at all. It is often high pressure and high stress
        • griffiths 1y ago
          What kind of massive memory problems? I might have this but didn't think to attribute it to burnout.
          • mrbombastic 1y ago
            Also asking for a friend…
            • bluefirebrand 1y ago
              Really sorry to hear that All I can suggest is see a doctor as soon as possible and talk to them about it
          • ModernMech 1y ago
            When I burned out I experienced skill regression and short term memory loss. Like, an inability to remember specific events of the day before, inability to perform skills I had done for decades like play an instrument. Took over a year to stabilize and return to normal.
  • anothernewdude 1y ago
    Okay, but the reality of society becoming shittier is society becoming shittier.
• popcorncowboy 1y ago
  > "If it's going to happen it will" - That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable You're right in general, but I don't think that'll save you/us from OP's statement. This is simple economic incentives at play. If AI-coding is even marginally more economically efficient (i.e. more for less) the "old way" will be swept aside at breathtaking pace (as we're seeing). The "from my cold dead hands" hand-coding crowd may be right, but they're a transitional historical footnote. Coding was always blue-collar white-collar work. No-one outside of coders will weep for what was lost.
  • shkkmo 1y ago
    > more economically efficient I suspect we'll find that the amount of technical debt and loss of institutional knowledge incured by misuse of these tools was initially underappreciated. I don't doubt that the industry will be transformed, but that doesn't mean that these tools are a panacea.
    • loandbehold 1y ago
      I read about AI assistants allegedly creating tech debt but my experience is opposite. Claude Code makes it easy to refactor helping to reduce tech debt. Tech debt usually happens because refactoring takes time but is hard to justify to upper management because upper management only sees new features but not quality of code. With Claude Code refactoring is much faster so it gets done.
      • chongli 1y ago
        Are you talking about refactoring code you’re already familiar with? Or a completely unknown codebase that no one else at the company knows anything about and you’ve been tasked with fixing?
        • loandbehold 1y ago
          Both. But I'm not talking about fixing. I'm talking about refactoring.
• bigfudge 1y ago
  > That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along. This feels like kicking someone when they’re down! Given the current state of corporate and political America, it doesn’t look likely there will be any pressure for anything but enshittification to me. Telling people at the coal face to stay cheerful seems unlikely to help. What mechanism do you see for not giving up to actually change the experience of people in 10 ish years time?
  • atoav 1y ago
    > Telling people at the coal face to stay cheerful seems unlikely to help. That isn't what they said tho. They said you have to do something, not that you should just be happy. Doing something can involve things that historically had a big impact in improving working conditions, like collective action and forming unions. The opposite advice would be: "Everything's fucked, nothing you can do will change it, so just give up." Needless to say that is bad advice unless you are a targeted individual in a murderous regime or similar.
  • tehjoker 1y ago
    Unionization. Work speed-ups are a classic management assault on the working man.
• atoav 1y ago
  > That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along. Correct. But it becoming shittier is the strong default, with forces that you constantly have to fight against. And the reason is very simple: Someone profits from it being shittier and they have a lot of patience and resources.
• creesch 1y ago
  > That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go. Realizing that attitude in myself at times has given me so much more peace of mind. Just in general, not everything needs to be as fast and efficient as possible. Not to mention the times where in the end I spend a lot of time and energy in trying to be faster only to end up with this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/ As far as LLM use goes, I don't need moar velocity! so I don't try to min max my agentic workflow just to squeeze out X amount more lines code. In fact, I don't really work with agentic workflows to begin with. I more or less still use LLMs as tools external to the process. Using them as interactive rubber duckies. Things like deciphering spaghetti code, do a sanity check on code I wrote (and being very critical of the suggestions they come up with), getting a quick jump start on stuff I haven't used again (how do I get started with X of Y again?), that sort of stuff. Using LLMs in the IDE and other agentic use is something I have worked with. But to me it falls under what I call "lazy use" where you are further and further removed from the creation of code, the reasoning behind it, etc. I know it is a highly popular approach with many people on HN. But in my experience, it is an approach that makes skills of experienced developers atrophy and makes sure junior developers are less likely to pick them up. Making both overly reliant on tools that have been shown to be less than reliable when the output isn't properly reviewed. I get the firm feeling that velocity crowd works in environments where they are judged by the amount of tickets closed. Basically "feature complete, test green, merged, move on!". In that context, it isn't really "important" that the tests that are green are also refactored by the thing itself, just that they are green. It is a symptom of a corporate environment where the focus is on these "productivity" metrics. From that perspective I can fully see the appeal for LLM heavy workflows as they most certainly will have an impact on metrics like "tickets closed" or "lines of code written".
  • jckahn 1y ago
    > Just in general, not everything needs to be as fast and efficient as possible. It does when you are competing for getting and keeping employment opportunities.
    • 1y ago
• zdragnar 1y ago
  > “more more more” If you're a salaried or hourly employee, you aren't paid for your output, you are paid for your time, with minimum expectations of productivity. If you complete all your work in an hour... you still owe seven hours based on the expectations of your employment agreement, in order to earn your salary and benefits. If you'd rather work in an output based capacity, you'll want to move to running your own contacting business in a fixed-bid type capacity.
  • SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
    That's funny, because, at more than one place I've worked as a salaried employee, when I had to work OT, the narrative was "you're salary because you're paid to get the job done, doesn't matter how many hours it takes". Unfortunately, "the job" somehow never worked out to be less than 40 hours a week.
    • tom_ 1y ago
      In many (most?) salary jobs, employees are typically paid both to get the job done, and to supply at least N hours of their time for the company to have them use as it sees fit.
      • SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        Yeah, I've been in industry for over a decade, still don't understand the value of salary for the devs.
    • zdragnar 1y ago
      > you are paid for your time, with minimum expectations of productivity There's legal distinctions between part time and full time employment. Hence, you are expected to put in a minimum number of hours. However, there's nothing to say that the minimum expectation is the minimum for classification for full time employment. If AI lets you get the job done in 1 hour when you otherwise would have worked overtime, you're still technically being paid to work more than that one hour, and I don't know of any employer that'll pay you to do nothing.
• dfxm12 1y ago
  moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go. My company has been preparing for this for a while now, I guess, as my backlog clearly has years' worth of work in it and positions of people who have left the org remain unfilled. My colleagues at other companies are in a similar situation. Considering round after round of layoffs, if I got ahead a little bit and found that I had nothing else to do, I'd be worried for my job. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable Yes, I agree, but the deck is usually stacked against the worker, especially in America. I doubt this will be the issue that promotes any sort of collectivism.
• brailsafe 1y ago
  > That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along. If the structures and systems that are in-place only facilitate life getting more difficult in some way, then it probably will, unless it doesn't. Housing getting nearly unownable is a symptom of that. Climate change is another.