4 ms·

>Overall, we're saving money, developer time, and preventing bugs that would make it to production. So it's a win-win-win! "We" and "win" are both doing a lot

>Overall, we're saving money, developer time, and preventing bugs that would make it to production. So it's a win-win-win! "We" and "win" are both doing a lot of heavy-lifting here, as they are whenever talks about LLM labor destruction.

kelnos 1y ago
I mean, ok, maybe in a general sense, but do you really think the company is going to hire and employ someone just to sit and decide what E2E tests to run on every PR? No, of course not. What's going to happen instead is that either 1) all tests will continue to run, and productivity will continue to drop, or 2) PR authors will manually decide what tests to run, wasting their time (and they'll get it wrong sometimes, or have subtle unconscious biases that make them less likely to run the tests that take a longer amount of time, and/or the ones more likely to surface bugs in their PR). So this is in theory a good thing: an LLM replacing a tedious task that no one was going to be hired to do anyway. And besides, labor destruction could be a truly wonderful thing, if we had a functional, empathetic society in which we a) ensure that people have paths to retrain for new jobs while their basic needs are met by the state (or by the companies doing the labor destruction), and/or b) allow people whose jobs are destroyed to just not work at all, but provide them with enough resources to still have a decent life (UBI plus universal health care basically). My utopia is one where there is no scarcity, and no one has to work to survive and have a good life. If I could snap my fingers and eliminate the need for every single job, and replace it with post-scarcity abundance, I would. People would build things and do science and help others because it gives them pleasure to do so, not because they have to in order to survive. And for people who just want to live lives of leisure, that would be fine, too. I don't think humanity will ever get to this state, mind you, but I can dream of a better world.
- catigula 1y ago
  Why do engineers care about productivity again?

kelnos 1y ago

I mean, ok, maybe in a general sense, but do you really think the company is going to hire and employ someone just to sit and decide what E2E tests to run on every PR? No, of course not. What's going to happen instead is that either 1) all tests will continue to run, and productivity will continue to drop, or 2) PR authors will manually decide what tests to run, wasting their time (and they'll get it wrong sometimes, or have subtle unconscious biases that make them less likely to run the tests that take a longer amount of time, and/or the ones more likely to surface bugs in their PR). So this is in theory a good thing: an LLM replacing a tedious task that no one was going to be hired to do anyway. And besides, labor destruction could be a truly wonderful thing, if we had a functional, empathetic society in which we a) ensure that people have paths to retrain for new jobs while their basic needs are met by the state (or by the companies doing the labor destruction), and/or b) allow people whose jobs are destroyed to just not work at all, but provide them with enough resources to still have a decent life (UBI plus universal health care basically). My utopia is one where there is no scarcity, and no one has to work to survive and have a good life. If I could snap my fingers and eliminate the need for every single job, and replace it with post-scarcity abundance, I would. People would build things and do science and help others because it gives them pleasure to do so, not because they have to in order to survive. And for people who just want to live lives of leisure, that would be fine, too. I don't think humanity will ever get to this state, mind you, but I can dream of a better world.

catigula 1y ago
Why do engineers care about productivity again?