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I was never excited for automation. Automation doesn't mean we do less. It means that we do as much work, and now also the work has a higher complexity ceiling;

I was never excited for automation. Automation doesn't mean we do less. It means that we do as much work, and now also the work has a higher complexity ceiling; you need to understand the systems that are being automated, and need to maintain the automation. More things are possible, but everything is more complex, and of course, you still need to work 40 hours a week. Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem. And yes, I only talked about automation, but the same high-level issues apply to LLMs, but with different downsides: you need to check the LLM output which becomes a bigger topic, and then potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more.

Aurornis 1y ago
Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation. I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever. > Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem. This is broadly false. Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. Once that leap happens it becomes accepted as the new normal, so it never feels like automation is making changes.
- everdrive 1y ago
  >Being adaptable now is more important than ever. I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply. >At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it. When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.
    - dingnuts 1y ago
      it's called being the employer. if you own the capital and you automate the labor then it's your call what to do with the extra time
    - BeetleB 1y ago
      > When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there. This was most employers during COVID :-) I worked fewer hours, and still got more done than most of my team. Since I didn't come to office, no one knew. As long as I responded to emails/messages in a timely fashion, no one cared.
      - bravetraveler 1y ago
        I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour. As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again? "Where's the loyalty?" I hear someone ask. It passed with a family member and employers that had no compassion. All this to say, I fully support your testing of the water. It's a strategy I've picked up/adapted, too. The poster above should enjoy the time saved by automation/hike. I shitpost.
        godelski 1y ago
        The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day. We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holders are the real customers and they seem to be doing perfectly fine regardless of if it's a hiring spree or firing. Regardless of if it's even a global pandemic. There's 4 companies worth more than $3T, one more than $4T. 11 are worth more than $1T. It's only been 7 years since we broke that $1T barrier. Most of the growth has happened recently too. Even Apple has had bigger swings since the pandemic. Idk, I don't think these companies are in trouble anywhere near what they claim. More concerning is this rapid growth in value without corresponding game changing products. Sure, we got AI but it hasn't changed the game like the iPhone did. I'd give up AI a lot sooner than I'd give up my smartphone, even if all it did was make calls, play music, and have a web browser. A pocket computer is very handy
- deleted 1y ago
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- candiddevmike 1y ago
  I think "bottom up" or worker led automation works far, far better than top down. Leadership always comes up with "efficiency" ideas for automation without ever spending a day in the life of the people who will use the automation. And they almost always fail to realize any gains but disrupt everyone's workflow.
- jadelcastillo 1y ago
  It's an interesting analogy. But one difference between dishwashers and LLMs is that you don't need to check the dishes afterward (if you maintain and use it properly).
  - almosthere 1y ago
    Yeah but to continue the analogy, the washer was JUST invented and your clothes will come out ruined for a while.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Oh man, remember how much bigger a deal it was that you had to separate your clothes into the exact right categories and run the machine with different kinds of loads? Modern detergent, it's basically all machine wash cold, with far fewer exceptions compared to 30 years ago.
      - AlexandrB 1y ago
        I don't think it's just the detergent. Modern clothes are made of shitty, synthetic fabrics. This is also why most people don't have to iron anything anymore. The tradeoff is microplastics[1], comfort/breathability, and durability. Classic example is jeans. Modern jeans are ridiculously stretchy compared to "real" cotton denim because they contain tons synthetic fibers. However I run through jeans at an alarming pace - even compared to when I was a kid. They wear quickly, tear easily, and generally don't last. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laundry-is-a-top-source-of-microplastic-pollution-heres-how-to-clean-your-clothes-more-sustainably https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laundry-is-a-top-source...
      - denimnerd42 1y ago
        im not sure how youre getting around the physics of white lint on dark clothing. and i separate plastic clothing from cotton or wool clothing because cotton usually just gets machine dried but i dont want to put my wool or plastic clothing through that process because its not necessary.
    - 1y ago
- fragmede 1y ago
  The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 10x the widgets in the same amount of time thanks to a new automated widget machine, if you're capital, you now have 10x the widgets to sell. Awesome! However, if you're labor, you still have a 40/hr a week job, regardless of how many widgets you make in a week. And the boss is counting how many widgets you make on the new machine they bought. At the edges of this in the tech industry we have website building. The market haven't yet totally adjusted to the lower costs of labor. What used to take 10 hours to build and you'd charge a client $3,000 for, now takes 2 hours but since the client was previously paying $3,000 for that service, you're not going to charge them less, you're going to take on additional clients. Or spend more time at the beach. In this scenario, the programmer is capital, not labor, and gets to reap the rewards of automation. Until the market catches up, anyway. Given that the industrial machine in the website builder's factory is a laptop and a cloud hosting bill, it's unclear if the Marxist division between capital and labor, burgousie and proletariat is still the right place to draw the lines, but the trade off is still there. If you're selling your time in exchange for money, automation means a faster conveyor belt that you need to adapt to, but you're still working 40/h a week. If you're selling widgets, automation means more widgets to sell.
  - rightbyte 1y ago
    Petite bourgeoisie maybe?
  - harvey9 1y ago
    The customer who was paying 3000 for a website may now be going to somewhere like Wix.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      That client was going to use Wix before AI. B2B sales is a whole thing, and businesses pay to have a human to talk to, not a website.
- everforward 1y ago
  > Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted. CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechanics of CNC, we can't manufacture something more precise than we can measure. LLMs are inverted; it's incredibly easy to get them to output something, and hard to validate that the output is correct. The analogy falls apart if you apply that same constraint to CNC and PCB machines. If they each had a 10% chance of creating a faulty product in a way that can only be detected by the purchaser of the final product, we would probably go back to hand-assembling them. > Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. I suspect there will be a spectrum, as there historically has been. Some companies will use AI heavily and get crazy velocity, but have poor stability as usage uncovers bugs in a poorly understood codebase because AI wrote most of it. Others will use AI less heavily and ship fewer features, but have fewer severe bugs and be more able to fix them because of deep familiarity with the codebase. I suspect stability wins for many use cases, but there are definitely spaces where being down for a full day every month isn't the end of the world.
  - throwaway31131 1y ago
    Validation that a PCB was manufactured correctly is... easy. Disagree, but how about VLSI. It's hugely automated. Moore's Law is exponential but team sizes aren't. That productivity gap is made up for with huge amounts of automation. And nothing is easy about manufacturing validation of an ASIC. I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against, and I think that's what you're trying to get at. If all software had that then software could have an "easy" validation story too, I suppose. I have mixed feelings about precise specifications in software. On the one hand the hardware engineer in me thinks everything should have an exact specification. On the other hand, that's throws away the "soft" advantage which is important for some types of software. So there is a spectrum.
- edflsafoiewq 1y ago
  You recoup the saving of home automation immediately as additional leisure time. But for most people, work automation neither reduces your working time nor increases your wage.
- lovich 1y ago
  > I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever. Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation. People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute. If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines
- jononor 1y ago
  Are you sure you spend less time per week on clothes washing than people did before the clothes washer? I suspect that before, people would wash their clothes considerably more seldom - which might even out the efficiency gains of the machine.
jstummbillig 1y ago
This is just empirically not true. Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity (with one relatively recent but currently very important caveat, the housing market). Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  A bigger caveat is that measuring improvement by 'prosperity' is both vague (are you using GDP, GDP/capita or GDP/capita of the lowest 10%) and arbitrary (perhaps a better measure is the life expectancy of the poorest 10%).
  - jstummbillig 1y ago
    That does not seem like a caveat at all, given that the improvement is completely obvious for all of these.
- subsection1h 1y ago
  > Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity All of my grandparents retired in their 50s with fat pensions and then lived into their late 80s without having ever stepped foot on a college campus.
  - jstummbillig 1y ago
    You can do that today. But there was a no episode in history where that would have bene the norm or more likely than it is today. Anecdotes are just that.
    - lovich 1y ago
      Where? The only place I can think of giving pensions at that age anymore is the military. And you aren’t getting a fat pension without being an officer which requires a degree
microtonal 1y ago
I think it all hinges on recognizing what opportunities automation helps. For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt. There are a lot of tasks that you do not do often enough to commit them fully to memory, but every time you do them it takes a lot of time. LLM-based automation really speeds up these tasks. Similar for refactors that an IDE or language server cannot do, some kinds of scripts etc. On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code. It’s all about getting a feeling for the right opportunities. As with any tool.
- brendoelfrendo 1y ago
  > For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt. > On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code. See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test run, modify as necessary, and ultimately let the AI loose and hope for the best. Meanwhile, I probably have a script kicking around somewhere that will rename a batch of files, and I can modify it pretty quickly to match a new pattern, test it out, and be confident that it will do exactly what I expect it to do. Is one of these paths faster than the other? I'm not sure; it's probably a wash. The AI would definitely be faster if I was confident I could trust it. But I'm not sure how I can cross that threshold in my mind and be confident that I can trust it.
j45 1y ago
Premature automation is what causes problems. Too many people are trying to jump to the end when they don't even have their day to day managed or efficient today can tend to carry forward efficiency in a number of business workflows. Checking the LLM output is required when it's not consistent, in many cases maintaining the benefit requires the human to know more on the subject than the LLM.
surajrmal 1y ago
Do you like washing laundry at the river or carrying water from the well back to your house? You cannot talk in generalities about this topic as it is too broad. There are definitely many things which when automated loses out on some edge cases. But most folks don't need artisanal soap.
HardCodedBias 1y ago
Automation increases productivity. Without automation we would all be living in poverty.
Xevion 1y ago
Lowkey it kind of sounds like capitalism is the problem here, not automation.
- pdntspa 1y ago
  This needs to be boosted more to this community; WE are creating the tools of our own oppression. The folks at the top know how susceptible we are to being nerd-sniped and how readily we will build these things for them.
  - sothatsit 1y ago
    I want to create automation and greater efficiencies because I believe it is good for the world to have better goods and services, cheaper. The bigger problem I see is not automation, it is the exploitation of addictive behaviours to “capture attention”.
    - cool_man_bob 1y ago
      I don’t give a fuck how cheap you make bread and circuses. The only goods and services I give a fuck about anymore are the ones that won’t be made cheaper with automation.
      - sothatsit 1y ago
        Speak for yourself. I want cheaper building costs so we can build more housing, cheaper and safer vehicles, higher quality food so we can all be healthier, better medical technology and medicines so we can solve more diseases, and new washing-machine-like technologies so I can spend more time with friends/family. That’s not to mention that greater leverage on my labour would give me even more flexibility to choose the work I want to do, and how much I want to work. Bread is already so cheap as to not notice the price most of the time. But other goods and services are absolutely not that cheap. And there’s certainly higher quality that could be achieved, especially in areas like medicine. It is a lack of imagination to not see all the ways in which cheaper goods and services could improve our lives.
6gvONxR4sf7o 1y ago
As always, labor is a marketplace, and the supply side boils down to a) how much the next person else is willing to work (all else equal), and b) external forces (like overtime requirements kicking in at 40 hours).
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BeetleB 1y ago
My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it. Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more. I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more issues you'll find. Suddenly we needed to achieve 4x more, and that meant finding 4x more problems. The thing about automation is that it doesn't speed up debugging time. This leads to more stress. One senior guy took me aside and said management would not reward me for my efforts, but will get the benefit of all my work. He was right. Eventually, I left because I automate things to make my life easier. If it's not making my life easier (or getting me more money), why should I do it? Since then, whenever I get a new job, I test the waters. If the outcome is like that first job, I stop working on process improvements, and look for another job.
- donatj 1y ago
  I have a friend who automated his entire days work down to the click of a single button. He did not tell management because they were pretty scummy. He got written up for not "looking busy" despite his output being higher than his coworkers. Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    I guess it is right there in the name, isn't it?
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    > He got written up for not "looking busy" despite his output being higher than his coworkers. Also my experience with that first job. I would get the work done quicker than others, and leave around 5pm (most stayed beyond 6pm). The message was clear: "There's always work to do. If you're getting work done early, you need to do more!" I got worse ratings than people who achieved less. It also explains why coworkers refused to learn how to automate things. Again: I automate to make my life easier. If it isn't working, I shouldn't do it.
bdangubic 1y ago
> and then potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more. I hear this so often these days and I quite do not understand this part. If I trust LLM do to "X" that means i have made a determination that LLM is top-notch with "X" (if I did not make this determination then letting LLMs do X would be lunacy) and henceforth I do not give a flying hoot to know "X" and if my "X" skills deteriorate it is same thing as when we got equipment to tend to our corn fields and my corn picking skills deteriorated. of course I am being facetious here but you get the point.
kogasa240p 1y ago
IMO it's an economic problem (GDP must always rise because reasons) and the hedonic treadmill at play. I would even argue against the complexity point and rather point to overengineering being the root cause; an example would be using a robot arm to automate a cup of coffee instead of using existing vending machines for that purpose. > potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more. There were some papers from microsoft that highlighted this point https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
mclau153 1y ago
You could remove "you still need to work 40 hours a week"
risyachka 1y ago
Its like a factory. First things were made by hand, slowly - they were expensive and you could make a living making things. Now those things are made in factories. And they are 99% automated - like where software is going. And whats left is to be a mindless factory worker doing repetitive things all day for a living wage. But hey, you are so productive - now you make 100k items in a day. Must feel nice.

Aurornis 1y ago

Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation. I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever. > Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem. This is broadly false. Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. Once that leap happens it becomes accepted as the new normal, so it never feels like automation is making changes.

everdrive 1y ago
>Being adaptable now is more important than ever. I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply. >At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it. When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    it's called being the employer. if you own the capital and you automate the labor then it's your call what to do with the extra time
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    > When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there. This was most employers during COVID :-) I worked fewer hours, and still got more done than most of my team. Since I didn't come to office, no one knew. As long as I responded to emails/messages in a timely fashion, no one cared.
    - bravetraveler 1y ago
      I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour. As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again? "Where's the loyalty?" I hear someone ask. It passed with a family member and employers that had no compassion. All this to say, I fully support your testing of the water. It's a strategy I've picked up/adapted, too. The poster above should enjoy the time saved by automation/hike. I shitpost.
      - godelski 1y ago
        The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day. We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holders are the real customers and they seem to be doing perfectly fine regardless of if it's a hiring spree or firing. Regardless of if it's even a global pandemic. There's 4 companies worth more than $3T, one more than $4T. 11 are worth more than $1T. It's only been 7 years since we broke that $1T barrier. Most of the growth has happened recently too. Even Apple has had bigger swings since the pandemic. Idk, I don't think these companies are in trouble anywhere near what they claim. More concerning is this rapid growth in value without corresponding game changing products. Sure, we got AI but it hasn't changed the game like the iPhone did. I'd give up AI a lot sooner than I'd give up my smartphone, even if all it did was make calls, play music, and have a web browser. A pocket computer is very handy
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candiddevmike 1y ago
I think "bottom up" or worker led automation works far, far better than top down. Leadership always comes up with "efficiency" ideas for automation without ever spending a day in the life of the people who will use the automation. And they almost always fail to realize any gains but disrupt everyone's workflow.
jadelcastillo 1y ago
It's an interesting analogy. But one difference between dishwashers and LLMs is that you don't need to check the dishes afterward (if you maintain and use it properly).
- almosthere 1y ago
  Yeah but to continue the analogy, the washer was JUST invented and your clothes will come out ruined for a while.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Oh man, remember how much bigger a deal it was that you had to separate your clothes into the exact right categories and run the machine with different kinds of loads? Modern detergent, it's basically all machine wash cold, with far fewer exceptions compared to 30 years ago.
    - AlexandrB 1y ago
      I don't think it's just the detergent. Modern clothes are made of shitty, synthetic fabrics. This is also why most people don't have to iron anything anymore. The tradeoff is microplastics[1], comfort/breathability, and durability. Classic example is jeans. Modern jeans are ridiculously stretchy compared to "real" cotton denim because they contain tons synthetic fibers. However I run through jeans at an alarming pace - even compared to when I was a kid. They wear quickly, tear easily, and generally don't last. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laundry-is-a-top-source-of-microplastic-pollution-heres-how-to-clean-your-clothes-more-sustainably https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laundry-is-a-top-source...
    - denimnerd42 1y ago
      im not sure how youre getting around the physics of white lint on dark clothing. and i separate plastic clothing from cotton or wool clothing because cotton usually just gets machine dried but i dont want to put my wool or plastic clothing through that process because its not necessary.
  - 1y ago
fragmede 1y ago
The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 10x the widgets in the same amount of time thanks to a new automated widget machine, if you're capital, you now have 10x the widgets to sell. Awesome! However, if you're labor, you still have a 40/hr a week job, regardless of how many widgets you make in a week. And the boss is counting how many widgets you make on the new machine they bought. At the edges of this in the tech industry we have website building. The market haven't yet totally adjusted to the lower costs of labor. What used to take 10 hours to build and you'd charge a client $3,000 for, now takes 2 hours but since the client was previously paying $3,000 for that service, you're not going to charge them less, you're going to take on additional clients. Or spend more time at the beach. In this scenario, the programmer is capital, not labor, and gets to reap the rewards of automation. Until the market catches up, anyway. Given that the industrial machine in the website builder's factory is a laptop and a cloud hosting bill, it's unclear if the Marxist division between capital and labor, burgousie and proletariat is still the right place to draw the lines, but the trade off is still there. If you're selling your time in exchange for money, automation means a faster conveyor belt that you need to adapt to, but you're still working 40/h a week. If you're selling widgets, automation means more widgets to sell.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  Petite bourgeoisie maybe?
- harvey9 1y ago
  The customer who was paying 3000 for a website may now be going to somewhere like Wix.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    That client was going to use Wix before AI. B2B sales is a whole thing, and businesses pay to have a human to talk to, not a website.
everforward 1y ago
> Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted. CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechanics of CNC, we can't manufacture something more precise than we can measure. LLMs are inverted; it's incredibly easy to get them to output something, and hard to validate that the output is correct. The analogy falls apart if you apply that same constraint to CNC and PCB machines. If they each had a 10% chance of creating a faulty product in a way that can only be detected by the purchaser of the final product, we would probably go back to hand-assembling them. > Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. I suspect there will be a spectrum, as there historically has been. Some companies will use AI heavily and get crazy velocity, but have poor stability as usage uncovers bugs in a poorly understood codebase because AI wrote most of it. Others will use AI less heavily and ship fewer features, but have fewer severe bugs and be more able to fix them because of deep familiarity with the codebase. I suspect stability wins for many use cases, but there are definitely spaces where being down for a full day every month isn't the end of the world.
- throwaway31131 1y ago
  Validation that a PCB was manufactured correctly is... easy. Disagree, but how about VLSI. It's hugely automated. Moore's Law is exponential but team sizes aren't. That productivity gap is made up for with huge amounts of automation. And nothing is easy about manufacturing validation of an ASIC. I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against, and I think that's what you're trying to get at. If all software had that then software could have an "easy" validation story too, I suppose. I have mixed feelings about precise specifications in software. On the one hand the hardware engineer in me thinks everything should have an exact specification. On the other hand, that's throws away the "soft" advantage which is important for some types of software. So there is a spectrum.
edflsafoiewq 1y ago
You recoup the saving of home automation immediately as additional leisure time. But for most people, work automation neither reduces your working time nor increases your wage.
lovich 1y ago
> I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever. Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation. People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute. If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines
jononor 1y ago
Are you sure you spend less time per week on clothes washing than people did before the clothes washer? I suspect that before, people would wash their clothes considerably more seldom - which might even out the efficiency gains of the machine.

jstummbillig 1y ago

This is just empirically not true. Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity (with one relatively recent but currently very important caveat, the housing market). Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.

philipwhiuk 1y ago
A bigger caveat is that measuring improvement by 'prosperity' is both vague (are you using GDP, GDP/capita or GDP/capita of the lowest 10%) and arbitrary (perhaps a better measure is the life expectancy of the poorest 10%).
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  That does not seem like a caveat at all, given that the improvement is completely obvious for all of these.
subsection1h 1y ago
> Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity All of my grandparents retired in their 50s with fat pensions and then lived into their late 80s without having ever stepped foot on a college campus.
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  You can do that today. But there was a no episode in history where that would have bene the norm or more likely than it is today. Anecdotes are just that.
  - lovich 1y ago
    Where? The only place I can think of giving pensions at that age anymore is the military. And you aren’t getting a fat pension without being an officer which requires a degree

microtonal 1y ago

I think it all hinges on recognizing what opportunities automation helps. For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt. There are a lot of tasks that you do not do often enough to commit them fully to memory, but every time you do them it takes a lot of time. LLM-based automation really speeds up these tasks. Similar for refactors that an IDE or language server cannot do, some kinds of scripts etc. On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code. It’s all about getting a feeling for the right opportunities. As with any tool.

brendoelfrendo 1y ago
> For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt. > On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code. See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test run, modify as necessary, and ultimately let the AI loose and hope for the best. Meanwhile, I probably have a script kicking around somewhere that will rename a batch of files, and I can modify it pretty quickly to match a new pattern, test it out, and be confident that it will do exactly what I expect it to do. Is one of these paths faster than the other? I'm not sure; it's probably a wash. The AI would definitely be faster if I was confident I could trust it. But I'm not sure how I can cross that threshold in my mind and be confident that I can trust it.

j45 1y ago

Premature automation is what causes problems. Too many people are trying to jump to the end when they don't even have their day to day managed or efficient today can tend to carry forward efficiency in a number of business workflows. Checking the LLM output is required when it's not consistent, in many cases maintaining the benefit requires the human to know more on the subject than the LLM.

surajrmal 1y ago

Do you like washing laundry at the river or carrying water from the well back to your house? You cannot talk in generalities about this topic as it is too broad. There are definitely many things which when automated loses out on some edge cases. But most folks don't need artisanal soap.

HardCodedBias 1y ago

Automation increases productivity. Without automation we would all be living in poverty.

Xevion 1y ago

Lowkey it kind of sounds like capitalism is the problem here, not automation.

pdntspa 1y ago
This needs to be boosted more to this community; WE are creating the tools of our own oppression. The folks at the top know how susceptible we are to being nerd-sniped and how readily we will build these things for them.
- sothatsit 1y ago
  I want to create automation and greater efficiencies because I believe it is good for the world to have better goods and services, cheaper. The bigger problem I see is not automation, it is the exploitation of addictive behaviours to “capture attention”.
  - cool_man_bob 1y ago
    I don’t give a fuck how cheap you make bread and circuses. The only goods and services I give a fuck about anymore are the ones that won’t be made cheaper with automation.
    - sothatsit 1y ago
      Speak for yourself. I want cheaper building costs so we can build more housing, cheaper and safer vehicles, higher quality food so we can all be healthier, better medical technology and medicines so we can solve more diseases, and new washing-machine-like technologies so I can spend more time with friends/family. That’s not to mention that greater leverage on my labour would give me even more flexibility to choose the work I want to do, and how much I want to work. Bread is already so cheap as to not notice the price most of the time. But other goods and services are absolutely not that cheap. And there’s certainly higher quality that could be achieved, especially in areas like medicine. It is a lack of imagination to not see all the ways in which cheaper goods and services could improve our lives.

6gvONxR4sf7o 1y ago

As always, labor is a marketplace, and the supply side boils down to a) how much the next person else is willing to work (all else equal), and b) external forces (like overtime requirements kicking in at 40 hours).

deleted 1y ago

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BeetleB 1y ago

My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it. Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more. I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more issues you'll find. Suddenly we needed to achieve 4x more, and that meant finding 4x more problems. The thing about automation is that it doesn't speed up debugging time. This leads to more stress. One senior guy took me aside and said management would not reward me for my efforts, but will get the benefit of all my work. He was right. Eventually, I left because I automate things to make my life easier. If it's not making my life easier (or getting me more money), why should I do it? Since then, whenever I get a new job, I test the waters. If the outcome is like that first job, I stop working on process improvements, and look for another job.

donatj 1y ago
I have a friend who automated his entire days work down to the click of a single button. He did not tell management because they were pretty scummy. He got written up for not "looking busy" despite his output being higher than his coworkers. Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.
- anonymars 1y ago
  I guess it is right there in the name, isn't it?
- BeetleB 1y ago
  > He got written up for not "looking busy" despite his output being higher than his coworkers. Also my experience with that first job. I would get the work done quicker than others, and leave around 5pm (most stayed beyond 6pm). The message was clear: "There's always work to do. If you're getting work done early, you need to do more!" I got worse ratings than people who achieved less. It also explains why coworkers refused to learn how to automate things. Again: I automate to make my life easier. If it isn't working, I shouldn't do it.

bdangubic 1y ago

> and then potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more. I hear this so often these days and I quite do not understand this part. If I trust LLM do to "X" that means i have made a determination that LLM is top-notch with "X" (if I did not make this determination then letting LLMs do X would be lunacy) and henceforth I do not give a flying hoot to know "X" and if my "X" skills deteriorate it is same thing as when we got equipment to tend to our corn fields and my corn picking skills deteriorated. of course I am being facetious here but you get the point.

kogasa240p 1y ago

IMO it's an economic problem (GDP must always rise because reasons) and the hedonic treadmill at play. I would even argue against the complexity point and rather point to overengineering being the root cause; an example would be using a robot arm to automate a cup of coffee instead of using existing vending machines for that purpose. > potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more. There were some papers from microsoft that highlighted this point https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

mclau153 1y ago

You could remove "you still need to work 40 hours a week"

risyachka 1y ago

Its like a factory. First things were made by hand, slowly - they were expensive and you could make a living making things. Now those things are made in factories. And they are 99% automated - like where software is going. And whats left is to be a mindless factory worker doing repetitive things all day for a living wage. But hey, you are so productive - now you make 100k items in a day. Must feel nice.