12 ms·

Why didn't AI “join the workforce” in 2025?

237 points by zdw 10mo ago

dandelionv1bes 10mo ago
The response to the Sal Khan op-ed resonated with me, along with other parts of this article. Something I’ve been digging more into is some of the figures around proposed job losses from AI. I think I even posted a simulation paper last week. After posting that, I came across numerous papers which critique Frey & Osborne’s approach, who are some of the forefathers for the AI job losses figures we see banded around commonly these days. One such paper is here but i can dig out others: https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/3197111/wp2019n10.pdf https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_... It has made me very cautious around bold statements on AI - and I was already at the cautious end.
- Retric 10mo ago
  Job losses aren’t directly tied to productivity, in the short term it’s all about expectations. Many companies are laying people off and then trying to get staff back when it doesn’t work. How much of this is hype and how much is sustained is difficult to determine right now.
  - firstplacelast 10mo ago
    It never made sense to blame AI in the first place for tech layoffs. You have a new tool that you think can supercharge your employees, make them ~10x productive, be leveraged to disrupt all sorts of industries, and have the workforce best suited to learn and use these tools to their full potential. You think the value of labor may soon collapse, but there are piles of money to be made before that happens. If you truly believed that, you would be spinning up new projects and offshoots as this is a serious arms race with a ton of potential upside (not just in developing AI, but in leveraging it to build things cheaper). Allegedly every dollar you spent on an engineer is potentially worth 10x(?) what it was a couple years ago. Meaning your profit per engineer could soar, but tech companies decided they don't want more profit? AI is mostly solved and the value of labor has already collapsed? Or AI is a nice band-aid to prop up a smaller group of engineers while we weather the current economic/political environment and most CXO's don't believe there are piles of money to be had by leveraging AI now or the near future.
    - CharlieDigital 10mo ago
      > you would be spinning up new projects and offshoots If the engineers can 10x their output, this actually exposes the product leadership since I find it unlikely that they can 10x the number of revenue generating projects or 10x their product spec development.
      - polypolypoly2 10mo ago
        AI improvements will chase the bottlenecks if product spec begins to hamper the dev process, guess what'll be the big focus on e.g. that year's YC
    - asa400 10mo ago
      > Allegedly every dollar you spent on an engineer is potentially worth 10x(?) what it was a couple years ago. Meaning your profit per engineer could soar, but tech companies decided they don't want more profit? Exactly, so many of these claims are complete nonsense. I'm supposed to believe that boards/investors would be fine with companies doing massive layoffs to maintain flat/minuscule growth, when they could keep or expand their current staffing and massively expand their market share and profits with all this increased productivity? It's ridiculous. If this stuff had truly increased productivity at the levels claimed we would see firms pouring money into technical staff to capitalize on this newfound leverage.
    - arwhatever 10mo ago
      I’ve had this same thought, although less well-articulated: AI is supposedly going to obviate the need for white collar workers, and the best all the CEOs can come up with is the exact current status quo minus the white collar workers?
matt3210 10mo ago
A previous company I worked for is San Francisco was very anti remote, but they announced on linked in that they are ok with remote engineers suddenly. It seems it’s still a workers market at least in SF. I’d AI could do it or even reduced head count I don’t think that would be the case.
- n_u 10mo ago
  what company?
- ehnto 10mo ago
  I think a practical measure still useful right now, which does capture a lot of the "non-performance" capabilities of an employee, is as follows: "Why has my job not been outsourced yet, since it is far cheaper?" Those are probably the same reasons why AI won't take your job this year. Raw coding metrics are a very small part of being a cog in a company, which is not me saying it will never happen. Just me saying that thos focus on coding performance kind of misses the forest for the trees.
  - felipeerias 10mo ago
    The adoption of AI tools for software development will probably not result in sudden layoffs but rather on harder to measure changes, like smaller teams being able to tackle significantly more ambitious projects than before. I suspect that another kind of impact is already happening in organisations where AI adoption is uneven: suddenly some employees appear to be having a lot more leisure time while apparently keeping the same productivity as before.
senordevnyc 10mo ago
Pretty ironic that he complains about Kahn citing someone who told him AI agents are capable of replacing 80% of call center employees, right after quoting Gary Marcus of all people, claiming LLMs will never live up to the hype. If you want to focus on what AI agents are actually capable of today, the last person I'd pay any attention to is Marcus, who has been wrong about nearly everything related to AI for years, and does nothing but double down.
- Jonovono 10mo ago
  What has he been wrong about? He was way ahead of predicting the scaling limitations, llm not making it to agi.
  - verdverm 10mo ago
    What scaling limitations, Gemini 3 shows us that is not over yet, and little brother flash is a hyper sparse, 1T parameter model (aiui) that is both fast and good I agree with GP, Marcus has not been an accurate or significant voice, could care lass what he has to say about ai. He's not a practitioner anymore in my mind
- renewiltord 10mo ago
  Gary Marcus is just a free Outrage As A Service. People politically align with him and then feel the need to go along with the rest of the charade.
- rvz 10mo ago
  Well clearly LLMs are not AGI, and all such calls of them being 'AGI' have been a pump and dump scam. So he got that dead right for years.
  - senordevnyc 10mo ago
    Who has said that "LLMs are AGI"?
    - 10mo ago
jcastro 10mo ago
> In one example I cite in my article, ChatGPT Agent spends fourteen minutes futilely trying to select a value from a drop-down menu on a real estate website Man dude, don't automate toil add an API to the website.It's supposed to have one!
- stvltvs 10mo ago
  It probably has one that the web form is already using, but if agentic AI requires specialized APIs, it's going to be a while before reality meets the hype.
edfletcher_t137 10mo ago
> But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities. > So, this is how I’m thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the predictions. I’m done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by vibes. The impacts of the technologies that already exist are already more than enough to concern us for now… SPOT ON, let us all take inspiration. "The impacts of the technologies that already exist are already more than enough to concern us for now"!
doctorpangloss 10mo ago
Cal Newport looked in the wrong places. He has no visibility into the usage of ChatGPT to do homework. The collapse of Chegg should tell you, with no other public information, that if 30% of students were already cheating somehow, somewhat weakly, they are now doing super-powerful cheating, and surely more than 30% of students at this stage. It’s also kind of stupid to hand wave away, programming. Programmers are where all the early adopters of software are. He’s merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities. Programmers, I’m sure, were also the first to use Google and smartphones. “It doesn’t work for me” is missing the critical word “yet” at the end, and really, is it saying much that forecasts about adoption in the metric, “years until when Cal Newport’s arbitrary criteria of what agent and adoption means meets some threshold only inside Cal Newport’s head” is hard to do? There are 700m active weeklies for ChatGPT. It has joined the workforce! It just isn’t being paid the salaries.
- bpavuk 10mo ago
  read it again. he criticizes the hype built around 2025 as the Year X for agents. many were thinking that "we'll carry PCs in our pockets" when Windows Mobile-powered devices came out. many predicted 2003 as the Year X for what we now call smartphones. no, it was 2008, with the iPhone launch.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- lukev 10mo ago
  Wow, homework is an insane example of a "workforce." Homework is in some ways the opposite of actual economic labor. Students pay to attend school, and homework is (theoretically) part of that education; something designed to help students learn more effectively. They are most certainly not paid for it. Having a LLM do that "work" is economically insane. The desired learning does not happen, and the labor of grading and giving feedback is entirely wasted. Students use ChatGPT for it because of perverse incentives of the educational system. It has no bearing on economic production of value.
bpavuk 10mo ago
a stellar piece, Cal, as always. short and straight to the point. I believe that Codex and the likes took off (in comparison to e.g. "AI" browsers) because the bottleneck there was not reasoning about code, it was about typing and processing walls of text. for a human, the interface of e.g. Google Calendar is ± intuitive. for a LLM, any graphical experience is an absolute hellscape from performance standpoint. CLI tools, which LLMs love to use, output text and only text, not images, not audio, not videos. LLMs excel at text, hence they are confined to what text can do. yes, multimodal is a thing, but you lose a lot of information and/or context window space + speed. LLMs are a flawed technology for general, true agents. 99% of the time, outside code, you need eyes and ears. we have only created a self-writing paper yet.
- Yizahi 10mo ago
  Codex and the like took off because there existed a "validator" of its work - a collection of pre-existing non-LLM software - compilers, linters, code analyzers etc. And the second factor is very limited and defined grammar of programming languages. Under such constraints it was much easier to build a text generator which will validate itself using external tools in a loop, until generated stream makes sense. And the other "successful" industry being disrupted is the one where there is no need validate output, because errors are ok or irrelevant. A text not containing much factual data, like fiction or business-lingo or spam. Or pictures, where it doesn't matter which color is a specific pixel, a rough match will do just fine. But outside of those two options, not many other industries can use at scale an imprecise word or media generator. Circular writing and parsing of business emails with no substance? Sure. Not much else.
  - zarzavat 10mo ago
    This is the reasoning deficit. Models are very good at generating large quantities of truthy outputs, but are still too stupid to know when they've made a serious mistake. Or, when they are informed about a mistake they sometimes don't "get it" and keep saying "you're absolutely right!" while doing nothing to fix the problem. It's a matter of degree, not a qualitative difference. Humans have the exact same flaws, but amateur humans grow into expert humans with low error rates (or lose their job and go to work in KFC), whereas LLMs are yet to produce a true expert in anything because their error rates are unacceptably high.
observationist 10mo ago
I've seen organizations where 300 of 500 people could effectively be replaced by AI, just by having some of the the remaining 200 orchestrate and manage automation workflows that are trivially within the capabilities of current frontier models. There's a whole lot of bullshit jobs and work that will get increasingly and opaquely automated by AI. You won't see jobs go away unless or until organizations deliberately set out to reduce staff. People will use AI throughout the course of their days to get a couple of "hours" of tasks done in a few minutes, here and there, throughout the week. I've already seen reports and projects and writing that clearly comes from AI in my own workplace. Right now, very few people know how to recognize and assess the difference between human and AI output, and even fewer how to calibrate work assignments. Spreadsheet AIs are fantastic, reports and charting have just hit their stride, and a whole lot of people are going to appear to be very productive without putting a whole lot of effort into it. And then one day, when sufficiently knowledgable and aware people make it into management, all sorts of jobs are going to go quietly away, until everything is automated, because it doesn't make sense to pay a human 6 figures what an AI can do for 3 figures in a year. I'd love to see every manager in the world start charting the Pareto curves for their workplaces, in alongside actual hours worked per employee - work output is going to be very wonky, and the lazy, clever, and ambitious people are all going to be using AI very heavily. Similar to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11850241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11850241 https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/tm8mha/op_automated_their_job_over_a_year_ago_and_didnt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/tm8m... Part of the problem is that people don't know how to measure work effectively to begin with, let alone in the context of AI chatbots that can effectively do better work than anyone a significant portion of the adult population of the planet. The teams that fully embrace it, use the tools openly and transparently, and are able to effectively contrast good and poor use of the tools, will take off.
- consp 10mo ago
  > because it doesn't make sense to pay a human 6 figures what an AI can do for 3 figures in a year. Humans have one bit over "AI": You can't blame and fire "AI" when it inevitably goes wrong.
- skobux 10mo ago
milancurcic 10mo ago
> The industry had reason to be optimistic that 2025 would prove pivotal. In previous years, AI agents like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex had become impressively adept at tackling multi-step computer programming problems. Both of these agents launched mid-2025.
- bpavuk 10mo ago
  don't forget Aider from 2023
  - outofpaper 10mo ago
    Still working hard and now we also have Aider-ce.
- LPisGood 10mo ago
  I’m confused. Claude is a few years old.
  - bpavuk 10mo ago
    but not Claude Code. it was released just this summer (I guess?)
  - advisedwang 10mo ago
    The parent comment specifically referenced Claude Code, which launched in Feb 2025 [1] and went GA May 2025 [2]. Codex also launched May 2025 [3]. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet [2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4 [3] https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex/
- userbinator 10mo ago
  That makes me wonder how much of the article is true, and how much was hallucinated by an AI.
evil-olive 10mo ago
> But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities. yes, 100% I think that way too often, discussions of the current state of tech get derailed by talking about predictions of future improvements. hypothetical thought experiment: I set a New Year's resolution for myself of drinking less alcohol. on New Year's Eve, I get pulled over for driving drunk. the officer wants to give me a sobriety test. I respond that I have projected my alcohol consumption will have decreased 80% YoY by Q2 2026. the officer is going to smile and nod...and then insist on giving me the sobriety test. compare this with a non-hypothetical anecdote: I was talking with a friend about the environmental impacts of AI, and mentioned the methane turbines in Memphis [0] that are being used to power Elon Musk's MechaHitler slash CSAM generator. the friend says "oh, but they're working on building nuclear power plants for AI datacenters". and that's technically true...but it misses the broader point. if someone lives downwind of that data center, and they have a kid who develops asthma, you can try to tell them "oh in 5 years it'll be nuclear powered". and your prediction might be correct...but their kid still has asthma. 0: https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/ https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
yieldcrv 10mo ago
everyone excited about AI agents doesn’t have to evaluate the actual output they do Very few people do so neither Altman, the many CEOs industry wide, Engineering Managers, Software Engineers, “Forward Deployed Engineers” have to actually inspect their demos show good looking output its just the people in support roles that have to be like “wait a minute, this is very inconsistent” all while everyone is doing their best not to get replaced its clanker discrimination and mixed with clanker incompetence
- XorNot 10mo ago
  "good looking output" is exactly the problem. They're all good at good looking output which survives a first glance.
relaxing 10mo ago
There needs to be a companion to Betteridge’s law that addresses AI-related headlines with “because since the beginning of time the field of artificial intelligence over-promises and under-delivers.”
drusepth 10mo ago
"People using AI" had a meaningful change when they "joined the workforce" in 2025. We may not have gotten fully-autonomous employees, but human employees using AI are doing way more than they could before, both in depth and scale. Claude Code is basically a full-time "employee" on my (profitable) open source projects, but it's still a tool I use to do all the work. Claude Code is basically a full-time "employee" at my job, but it's still a tool I use to do all the work. My workload has shifted to high-level design decisions instead of writing the code, which is kind of exactly what would have happened if AI "joined the workforce" and I had a bunch of new hires under me. I do recognize this article is largely targeted at non-dev workforces though, where it _largely_ holds up but most of my friends outside of the tech world have either gotten new jobs thanks to increased capability through AI or have severely integrated AI into whatever workflows they're doing at work (again, as a tool) and are excelling compared to employees who don't utilize AI.
- llmslave2 10mo ago
  > human employees using AI are doing way more than they could before, both in depth and scale Funny how that doesn't show up in any productivity or economic metrics...
  - 9rx 10mo ago
    Bit too soon to tell, no? Claude Code wasn't released until the latter half of Q2, offering little time for it to show up in those figures, and Q3 data is only preliminary right now. Moreover, it seems to be the pairing with Opus 4.5 that lends some credence to the claims. However, it was released in Q4. We won't have that data for quite a while. And like Claude Code, it came late in the quarter, so realistically we really need to wait on Q1 2026 figures, which hasn't happened yet and won't really start to appear until summertime and beyond. That said, I expect you are right that we won't see it show up. Even if we assume the claim is true in every way for some people, it only works for exceptional visionaries who were previously constrained by typing speed, which is a very, very, very small segment of the developer population. Any gains that small group realize will be an unrecognizable blip amid everything else. The vast majority of developers need all that typing time and more to have someone come up with their next steps. Reducing the typing time for them doesn't make them any more productive. They were never limited by typing speed in the first place.
llmslave2 10mo ago
Once again, more evidence mounts that AI is massively overhyped and limited in usefulness, and once again we will see people making grandiose claims (without evidence of course) and predictions that will inevitably fall flat in the future. We are, of course, perpetually just 3-6 months away from when everything changes. I think Carmack is right, LLM's are not the route to AGI.
- cindyllm 10mo ago
  [dead]
aranelsurion 10mo ago
> I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities. So well put. LLMs are useful for a great many things. It's just that being the best new product of the recent years, maybe even defining a decade doesn't cut it. It has to be the century-defining, world-ending, FOMO-inducing massive thing to put Skynet to shame and justify investments in trillion dollars. It's either AI joining the workforce soon, or Nvidia and OpenAI aren't that valuable. I guess it manages to maximize shareholder value, and make AI feel like a disappointment.
simonw 10mo ago
Agents as staff replacements that can tackle tasks you would normally assign to a human employee didn't happen in 2025. Agents as LLMs calling tools in a loop to perform tasks that can be handled by typing commands into a computer absolutely did. Claude Code turns out to be misnamed: it's useful for way more than just writing code, once you figure out how to give it access to tools for other purposes. I think the browser agents (like the horribly named "ChatGPT Agent" - way to burn a key namespace on a tech demo!) have acted as a distraction from this. Clicking links is still pretty hard. Running Bash commands on the other hand is practically a solved problem.
- hecanjog 10mo ago
  We still sandbox, quarantine and restrict them though, because they can't really behave as agents, but they're effective in limited contexts. Like the way waymo cars kind of drive on a track I guess? Still very useful, but not the agents that were being sold, really. Edit: should we call them "special agents"? ;-)
  - jdross 10mo ago
    Have you been in a Waymo recently or used Tesla FSD 14.2? I live in Austin and my Model 3 is basically autonomous - regularly going for hours from parking space to destination parking space without my touching the steering wheel, navigating really complex situations including construction workers using hand motions to signal the car.
    - esafak 10mo ago
      Thanks for collecting training data for the rest of us, 'coz I don't trust Musk with my life.
    - senordevnyc 10mo ago
      Have you been in a Waymo recently or used Tesla FSD 14.2? One of these things is not like the other...
  - Culonavirus 10mo ago
fragmede 10mo ago
In December of 2025, I took five tickets I was assigned in Jira and threw them at codex, which just did them, and with the help of MCPs, codex was able to read the ticket, generate some code, test the code, update gitlab, create a merge request on Gitlab, and update the Jira with the MR. CodeRabbit then reviewed the MR before a human had to look at it. It didn't happen in 2025, but I see it happening for 2026.
stevage 10mo ago
This article seems based in a poorly defined statement. What does "joining the workforce" actually mean? There are plenty of jobs that have already been pretty much replaced by AI: certain forms of journalism, low-end photoshop work, logo generation, copywriting. What does the OP need to see in order to believe that AI has "joined the workforce"?
- tim333 10mo ago
  It was from Altman's blog: > We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies... "materially change the output of companies" seems fairly defined and didn't happen in most cases. I guess some kicked out more slop but I don't think that's what he meant.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - grumbel 10mo ago
    TikTok, Youtube, news, blogs, … are getting flooded with AI generated content, I'd call that a pretty substantial "change in output". I think the mistake here is expecting that AI is just making workers in older jobs faster, when the reality is, more often than not, that it changes the nature of the task itself. Whenever AI reached the "good enough" point, it doesn't do so in a way that nicely aligns with human abilities, quite the opposite, it might be worse at performing a task, but be able to perform it 1000x faster. That allows you to do things that weren't previously possible, but it also means that professionals might not want to rely on using AI for the old tasks. A professional translator isn't going to switch over to using AI, the quality isn't there yet, but somebody like Amazon could offer a "OCR & translate all the books" service and AI would be good enough for it, since it could handle all the books that nobody has the time and money to translate manually. Which in turn will eventually put the professional translator out of a job when it gets better than good enough. We aren't quite there yet, but getting pretty close. In 2025 a lot of AI went from "useless, but promising" to "good enough".
ahussain 10mo ago
Agentic AI companies are doing millions in revenue. Just because agents haven’t spread to the entire economy yet doesn’t mean they are not useful for relatively complex tasks.
- XorNot 10mo ago
  Okay but so is like, the 3 store chain which does my cars tires. Millions in revenue ain't hard to hit with extremely modest business.
- sandworm101 10mo ago
  And just because people are thowing money at an AI company doesnt mean they have or will ever have a marketable product. The #1 product of nearly every AI company is hope, hope that one day they will replace the need to pay real employees. Hope like that allows a company to cut costs and fund dividends ... in the short term. The long term is some other person's problem. (Ill change my mind the day Bill Gates trusts MS copilot with his personal banking details.)
  - aik 10mo ago
    When did hacker news become laggard-adopter/consumer-news. Cal is a consumer of AI - interesting article for this community, but not this community. I thought hacker news was for builders and innovators - people who see the potential of a technology for solving problems big and small and go and tinker and build and explore with it, and sometimes eventually change the world (hopefully for the better). Instead of sitting on the sidelines grumbling about that some particular tech that hasn’t yet changed the world / met some particular hype (yet). Incredibly naive to think AI isn’t making real difference already (even without/before replacing labor en masse.) Actually try to explore the impact a bit. It’s not AGI, but doesn’t have to be to transform. It’s everywhere and will do nothing but accelerate. Even better, be part of proving Cal wrong for 2026.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  not much in income tho
- 10mo ago
moezd 10mo ago
I recall someone saying stories of LLMs doing something useful to "I have a Canadian girlfriend" stories. Not trying to discredit or be a pessimist, can anyone elaborate how exactly they use these agents while working in interdependent projects in multi-team settings in e.g. regulated industries?
- heyitsguay 10mo ago
  Agreed. I've never seen a concrete answer with an outcome that can be explained in clear, simple terms.
  - moron4hire 10mo ago
    Lately, it seems like all the blogs have shifted away from talking about productivity and are now talking about how much they "enjoy" working with LLMs. If firing up old coal plants and skyrocketing RAM prices and $5000 consumer GPUs and violating millions of developers' copyrights and occasionally coaxing someone into killing themselves is the cost of Brian From Middle Management getting to Enjoy Programming Again instead of having to blame his kids for not having any time on the weekends, I guess we have no choice but to oblige him his little treat.
    - wiseowise 10mo ago
      It’s the honeymoon period with crack all over again. Everyone feels great until their teeth start falling out.
  - jdross 10mo ago
    I work in insurance - regulated, human capital heavy, etc. Three examples for you: - our policy agent extracts all coverage limits and policy details into a data ontology. This saves 10-20 mins per policy. It is more accurate and consistent than our humans - our email drafting agent will pull all relevant context on an account whenever an email comes in. It will draft a reply or an email to someone else based on context and workflow. Over half of our emails are now sent without meaningfully modifying the draft, up from 20% two months ago. Hundreds of hours saved per week, now spent on more valuable work for clients. - our certificates agent will note when a certificate of insurance is requested over email and automatically handle the necessary checks and follow up options or resolution. Will likely save us around $500k this year. We also now increasingly share prototypes as a way to discuss ideas. Because the cost to vibe code something illustrative is very low, an it’s often much higher fidelity to have the conversation with something visual than a written document
wcfrobert 10mo ago
I don't see how AI can bring about 10%+ annual economic growth, let alone infinite abundance, without somehow crossing the bit-to-atom interface. Without a breakthrough in general-purpose robotics - which feels decades away - agents will just be confined to optimizing B2B SaaS. Human utility is rooted in the physical environment. I find digital abundance incredibly uninspiring.
- svara 10mo ago
  I'm mostly a fan of AI coding tools, but I think you're basically right about this. I think we'll see more specialized models for narrow tasks (think AlphaFold for other challenges in drug discovery, for example) as well, but those will feel like individual, costly, high impact discoveries rather than just generic "AI". Our world is human-shaped and ultimately people who talk of "AGI" secretly mean an artificial human. I believe that "intelligence", the way the word is actually used by people, really just means "skillful information processing in pursuit of individual human desires". As such, it will never be "solved" in any other way than to build an artificial human.
  - Applejinx 10mo ago
    No, when you bring in the genetic algorithm (something LLM AI can be adjacent to by the scale of information it deals in) you can go beyond human intelligence. I work with GA coding tools pretty regularly. Instead of prompting it becomes all about devising ingenious fitness functions, while not having to care if they're contradictory. If superhuman intelligence is solved it'll be in the form of building a more healthy society (or, if you like, a society that can outcompete other societies). We've already seen this sort of thing by accident and we're currently seeing extensive efforts to attack and undermine societies through exploiting human intelligence. To a genetic algorithm techie that is actually one way to spur the algorithm to making better societies, not worse ones: challenge it harder. I guess we'll see if that translates to life out here in the wild, because the challenge is real.
    - ozmodiar 10mo ago
      The troubling thing here is: what is a "better" society? As you said, it's just the one that outcompetes the other societies on the globe. We'd like to believe such a thing is an egalitarian "healthy" liberal society, but it's just as likely to be some form of enslaved/boot stomping on face society. Some think people won't accept this, but given human history I'm pretty sure they will. I think these sorts of societies are more of a local minima, but they only need to grant enough of a short term boost to unseat the other major powers. Once competition is out of the way they'll probably survive as a bloated mess for quite some time. The price of entry is so high they won't have to worry about being unseated by competition unless they really screw the pooch. I think this is the troubling conclusion a lot of people, including those in power, are reaching.
thw09j9m 10mo ago
I'm a staff level SWE at a company that you've all heard of (not a flex, just providing context). If my manager said to me tomorrow: "I have to either get rid of one of your coworkers or your use of AI tools, which is it?" I would, without any hesitation, ask that he fire one of my coworkers. Gemini / Claude is way more useful to me than any particular coworker. And now I'm preparing for my post-software career because that coworker is going to be me in a few years. Obviously I hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- episteme 10mo ago
  Is that a useful thought experiment? Claude benefits you as an individual more than a coworker, but I find I hard to believe your use of Claude is more of a value add to the business than an additional coworker. Especially since that coworker will also have access to Claude. In the past we also just raised the floor on productivity, do you think this will be different?
  - shrubble 10mo ago
    There’s often the question of communication overhead between people; Claude would remove that.
    - stanleykm 10mo ago
      No that’s not true at all. Humans can deal with ambiguity and operate independently. Claude can’t do that. You’re trading one “problem” for an entirely different one in this hypothetical.
    - signa11 10mo ago
      > There’s often the question of communication overhead between people; Claude would remove that. ... and replace that with communication overhead with claude ?
ineedasername 10mo ago
It pretty much did join the work force. Listen to the fed chair, listen to related analysis, the unexpected overperformance of GDP isn’t directly attributed AI but it is very much in the “how did that happen?” conversation. And there’s plenty of softer, more anecdotal evidence in addition to that to respond to the headline with “It did.” The fact that it has been gradual and subtle as the very first agent tools reach production readiness, gain awareness in the public, start being used…? That really doesn’t seem at all unexpected as the path than “joining” would follow.
- asa400 10mo ago
  > the unexpected overperformance of GDP isn’t directly attributed AI but it is very much in the “how did that happen?” conversation. We spent an amount of money on data centers that was so large that it managed to overcome a self-imposed kick in the nuts from tariffs and then some. The amount of money involved rivals the creation of the railroad system in the United States. Of course GDP overperformed in that scenario. Where did AI tool use show up in the productivity numbers?
  - ineedasername 10mo ago
    Productivity increase is what showed in the numbers. AI is the partial attribution chair Powell gave for the reason. Quotes from December meeting: "Reporter: ...do you believe that we’re experiencing a positive productivity shock, whether from AI or policy factors or whatever?" "Powell: So, yeah, I mean, I never thought I would see a time when we had, you know, five, six years of 2 percent productivity growth. This is higher. You know, this is definitely higher. And it was—before, it could be attributed to AI. I think you—I also think if you look at what AI can do and if you use it in your personal life, as I imagine many of us have, you can see the prospects for productivity. I think it makes people who use it more productive. It may make other people have to find other jobs, though. So it could have productivity implications" And: "Reporter: If I could just follow up on the SEP. You have a whole lot of—big increase in the growth numbers, but not a big decline in the unemployment numbers. And is that an AI factor in there?" "Powell: So it is—the implication is obviously higher productivity. And some of that may be AI." He also hedges in places, hesitant to say "Yes that's the reason". I'm not sure anything in the data sets they use could directly capture it as the reason so that's too high a bar for evidence- to require some line item in the reports with a direct attribution. He could be wrong, it might not be AI, but I don't have any reason to thing his sense of things is wrong either.
biophysboy 10mo ago
> So, this is how I’m thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the predictions. I’m done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by vibes. A lot of the predictions come from interviews and presentations with top tech executives. Their job is to increase the perceived value of their product, not to offer an objective assessment. I've gotten a lot of value out of reading the views of experienced engineers; overall they like the tech, but they do not think it is a sentient alien that will delete our jobs. I have also gotten a lot of value out of Cembalest's recent "eyes on the market", which looks at the economic side of this AI push.
- MichaelRo 10mo ago
  Snake oil salesmen will predict that "this will be the year when the snake oil you buy from us will cure all ailments". Nothing new under the sun.
  - tempodox 10mo ago
    And publications can expect more readers for breathless hype articles than for sober analyses.
  - Verdex 10mo ago
    Interestingly enough, my understanding is that some snakes in Asia can be used to produce oil that helps joint problems. American snakes weren't useful for this. So something that was sort of useful in a niche application was co-opted by people who didn't know how to make it work and then ultra hyped. The parallels are spot on.
    - irishcoffee 10mo ago
      That’s actually how it started. Some water snake native to china, when the oil is extracted it contains omega-3 fatty acid, which does help arthritis. It was turned into a scam in the west. Seems like a lot of work to get omega-3 in a consumable form.
    - tdeck 10mo ago
Nio1024 10mo ago
[flagged]
- lovich 10mo ago
  Please stop spamming us with obvious AI generated posts. What’s truly scarce are humans who stay humble, don’t lie, and actually communicate their thoughts instead of delegating all interactions to an automaton. If you give as little a shit about us as to just dump machine generated text at us, why should we listen to you? And that’s giving you the benefit of the doubt based on your post and account that you are trying to run some AI platform and aren’t just some consensus manufacturing bot. Edit: nope, benefit of the doubt is gone. A ~3 month old account. The second comment you had which was the first with any interaction[1] is from another ~3 month old account that is even more obviously a bot. I guess we just have Reddit style Bot nets on this forum forever [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534990
  - econ 10mo ago
    When I doubt the originally of my posting I just add something like 911 was an inside job or release the Epstein files which still is pretty convincingly human. But who knows, in the future the internet might be full of bots making jokes about Jews.
    - osamabinladen 10mo ago
      > in the future the internet might be full of bots making jokes about Jews. this is the present (see instagram, x/twitter)
      - econ 10mo ago
        I think those are humans
  - Nio1024 10mo ago
    I come from a non-English-speaking country, and I admit that I use translation tools to communicate here, but I’m not a bot. I was introduced to Hacker News by a friend a few months ago to learn, because the quality of discussion here is consistently high. I want to clarify that every post I make reflects my own thoughts after carefully reading the content. Thank you for taking the time to reply.
dinobones 10mo ago
A brief history of programming: 1. Punch cards -> Assembly languages 2. Assembly languages -> Compiled languages 3. Compiled languages -> Interpreted languages 4. Interpreted languages -> Agentic LLM prompting I've tried the latest and greatest agentic CLI and toolings with the public SOTA models. I think this is a productivity jump equivalent to maybe punch cards -> compiled languages, and that's it. Something like a 40% increase, but nowhere close to exponential.
- defrost 10mo ago
  1. Punch cards -> Assembly languages Err, in my direct experience it was Punch Cards -> FORTAN Here, for example, is the Punch Card for a single FORTRAN statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FortranCardPROJ039.agr.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FortranCardPROJ039.agr.jp... PunchCards were an input technology, they were in no way limited to either assembley languages or to FORTRAN. You might be thinking of programming in assembly via switch flipping or plug jacking.
  - asadotzler 10mo ago
    They're simply bluffing, and you called them on it. Thanks for your service. Too many people think they can just bullshit and bluff their way along and need to be taken down a peg, or for repeat offenders, shunned and ostracized.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
  Except punch cards are a data storage format, not a language. Some of the the earliest computers were programmed by plugboard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard#Early_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard#Early_computers ) so that might be thought of as a precursor to machine language / assembly language. And compiled and interpreted languages evolved alongside each other in the 1950s-1970s.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  That's jump if you are a junior. It falls down hard for the seniors doing more complex stuff. I'm also reminding that we tried whole "make it look like human language" with COBOL and it turned out that language wasn't a bottleneck, the ability of people to specify exactly what they want was the bottleneck. Once you have exact spec, even writing code on your own isn't all that hard but extracting that from stakeolders have always been the harder part of the programming.
nprateem 10mo ago
And we enter the Trough of Discontent...
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
signa11 10mo ago
the title is bit misleading, and all the article sez is to ``` To find out more about why 2025 failed to become the Year of the AI Agent, I recommend reading my full New Yorker piece . ``` so essentially, just go and read the new-yorker piece here: https://archive.ph/VQ1fT https://archive.ph/VQ1fT
themafia 10mo ago
Headline only response: Same reason my toddler children didn't.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
moonshotideas 10mo ago
Have y’all tried Claude code using opus 4.5 - I believe it has fully joined the workforce, had my grandma build and deploy her own blog with a built in cms and an admin portal, post editor, integrate uploads with GitHub, add ci/cd and took about 2 hours mostly because she types slow
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  Terrible productivity loss vs. signing up for a hosted Wordpress site.
thatgerhard 10mo ago
I use an agent in all my day to day coding now. It's a lot small tasks to speed me up, but it's definitely in use.
nwmcsween 10mo ago
If anyone was around for the dot-com bubble any company internet related or with a web like name was irrationally funded, P/E didn't matter, burn didn't matter, product didn't matter. AI has all the same markers of a the dot com bubble and eventually venture capital will dry up and many AI companies will go bust with a few remaining that make something useful with an unmet niche.
- Marciplan 10mo ago
  regardless if you were around or not, this take has been repeated a quintillion times by now
  - passwordoops 10mo ago
    Because it's the correct take
    - hobofan 10mo ago
      Doesn't mean it's a valuable take. It doesn't even significantly matter whether it's a bubble or not, but whether its a "bad" bubble. I think Steve Eisman (of housing bubble fame) recently made the argument that it's probably a bubble, but it doesn't seem to have the hallmarks it would have to turn it into a crisis. e.g. no broad immediate exposure for the general populace (as in housing/crypto bubbles).
      - red-iron-pine 10mo ago
        > It doesn't even significantly matter whether it's a bubble or not, but whether its a "bad" bubble. there are billions and billions of dollars invested in there -- it matter significantly to a lot of people. the bubble popping may trash the US and possibly global economy. "it doesn't matter" has to be one of the worst AI takes I've seen...
  - clownpenis_fart 10mo ago
    [dead]
js8 10mo ago
I think the issue is that everybody assumes the economy operates under some kind of "free market" conditions: limited by available labor but with unlimited potential demand. In that situation, AI could indeed cause massive unemployment. But this is perhaps not the case. By pesimistic estimates half of the people work in bs jobs that have no real value to society, and every capitalist is focused on rent extraction now. If the economy can operate under such conditions, it doesn't really need more productivity growth, it is already demand-limited.
delis-thumbs-7e 10mo ago
I predict all house cats will be replaced by robots by 2027. People just do not realise how great of an effect the AI and robotics will have on home pet ownership. However as a CEO of a publicly listed company ”Robot-cats-that-are-totally-like-awesome-and-are-gonna-like-totally-be-as-lovable-as-real-ones Inc.” I am seeing this change from first row seat. We plan to be on the helm of the new pet-robot future, which not furry and cute, but cold and boring. Sources? What, but, you are not a journalist, you are not suppose to challenge what I say, I’m a CEO! No I’m not just using media to create artificial hype to pull investors and make money on bullshit that is never gonna work! How can you say that! It’s a real thing, trust me bro!
poulpy123 10mo ago
The answer is reasoning. It is obvious now that whatever quality LLM have, they don't think and reason, they are just statistical machine outputing whatever they training set as most probable. They are useful, and they can mimic thinking to a certain level, mainly because they have been trained on a inhumane amount of data that no person could learn in one life. But they do not think, and the current algorithms are clearly a dead end for thinking machines.
- cbdevidal 10mo ago
  Reasoning keeps improving, but they still have a ways to go https://arcprize.org/leaderboard https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
  - vaylian 10mo ago
    What we need is reasoning as in "drawing logical conclusions based on logic". LLMs do reasoning by recursively adding more words to the context window. That's not logical reasoning.
    - tim333 10mo ago
      It's debatable that humans do "drawing logical conclusions based on logic". Look at politics and what people vote for. They seem to do something more like pattern matching.
      - coldtea 10mo ago
        Maybe we say that when we don't like those conclusions? After all I can guarantee the other side (whatever it is) will say the same thing for your "logical" conclusions. It is logic, we just don't share the same predicates or world model...
      - isodev 10mo ago
        Humans are far from logical. We make decisions within the context of our existence. This includes emotions, friends, family, goals, dreams, fears, feelings, mood, etc. it’s one of the challenges when LLMs are being anthropomorphised, reasoning/logic for bots is not the same as that for humans.
officerk 10mo ago
Link to the NewYorker piece: https://archive.ph/VQ1fT https://archive.ph/VQ1fT
CharlieDigital 10mo ago
If you think about the real-world and the key bottleneck with most creative work projects (this includes software), it's usually context (in the broadest sense of the word). Humans are good at this because they are truly multi-modal and can interact through many different channels to gather additional context to do the requisite task at hand. Given incomplete requirements or specs, they can talk to co-workers, look up old documents from a previous release, send a Slack or Teams message, setup a Zoom meeting with stakeholders, call customers, research competitors, buy a competitors product and try it out while taking notes of where it falls short, make a physical site visit to see the context in which the software is to be used and environmental considerations for operation. Point is that humans doing work have all sorts of ways to gather and compile more context before acting or while they are acting that an LLM does not and in some cases cannot have without the assistance of a human. This process in the real world can unfurl over days or weeks or in response to new inputs and our expectation of how LLMs work doesn't align with this. LLMs can sort of do this, but more often than not, the failure of LLMs is that we are still very bad at providing proper and sufficient context to the LLM and the LLMs are not very good at requesting more context or reacting to new context, changing plans, changing directions, etc. We also have different expectations of LLMs and we don't expect the LLM to ask "Can you provide a layout and photo of where the machine will be set up and the typical operating conditions?" and then wait a few days for us to gather that context for it before continuing.
ramoz 10mo ago
Claude Code became a critical part of my workflow in March 2025. It is now the primary tool.
stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
I really don’t agree with the author here. Perplexity has, for me, largely replaced Cal Newport’s job (read other journalists work and synthesize celebrity and pundit takes on topic X). I think the take that Claude isn’t literally a human so agents failed is silly and a sign of motivated reasoning. Business processes are going to lag the cutting edge by years in any conditions and by generations if there is no market pressure. But Codex isn’t capable of doing a substantial portion of what I would have had to pay a freelancer/consultant to do? Any LLM can’t replace a writer for a content mill? Nonsense. Newport needs to open his eyes and think harder about how a journalist can deliver value in the emerging market.
- FromTheFirstIn 10mo ago
  But it isn’t joining the workforce. Your perspective is that it could, but the point that it hasn’t is the one that’s salient. Codex might be able to do a substantial portion of what a freelancer can do, but even you fell short of saying it can replace the freelancer. As long as every ai agent needs its hand held the effect on the labor force is an increase in costs and an increase in outputs where quality doesn’t matter. It’s not a reduction of labor forces
  - stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
    OK, let me fall less short. It has replaced the freelancer for me. I communicate product requirements. It builds the product immediately at trivial cost. It’s better than a human. There are jobs I would have considered hiring out that I don’t because the machine is better. Nothing you said about labor effects in the large even logically follow. Have you even used one of these systems?
    - FromTheFirstIn 10mo ago
      Yup
notepad0x90 10mo ago
I think it depends on what "join" means. I see no reason why it has to be "replace a human". People used to have secretaries back in the day, we don't anymore, we all do our own thing, but in a way, LLMs are our secretaries of sorts now. Or our personal executive assitants, even if you're not an executive. I don't know what else LLMs need to do? get on the payroll? People are using them heavily. You can't even google things easily without triggering an LLM response. I think the current millenial and older generation is too used to the pre-LLM way of things, so the resistance will be there for a long time to come. but kids doing homeworks with LLMs will rely on them heavily once they're in the work force. I don't know how people are not as fascinated and excited about this. I keep watching older scifi content, and LLMs are now doing for us what "futuristic computer persona" did in older scifi. Easy example: You no longer need copywriters because of LLMs. You had spell/grammar checkers before, but they didn't "understand" context and recommend different phrasing, and check for things like continuity and rambling on.
- habinero 10mo ago
  > You no longer need copywriters because of LLMs You absolutely do still need copyeditors for anything you actually care about.
  - notepad0x90 10mo ago
    But why? I routinely see typos and grammar errors on major news articles. LLMs catch that stuff really well, it's like the one thing they're good at. They can be as opinionated as humans on the subject. Perhaps sycophantic mainstream models might be to eager to please, but that's not an issue with the tech itself. I like to think that every publication that is using LLMs to write content has also replaced copyeditors/writers with them.
fennecfoxy 10mo ago
Because rather than let me and my team focus on building the guts of something that works well, my employer was insistent we build PoCs of cut-down concepts that don't make any sense at all. Like using AI to fill in a form. Instead of a proper autonomous agent (which was the project's goal). Now that AI is "mainstream" and big bubble big money big career/promotion options for management I expect much more of this behaviour going into 2026.
PeterStuer 10mo ago
I have seen few people fired because of AI in 2025. Instead, I've seen plenty not hired because the existing employees are now producing 2x the work, or tackling jobs themselves that would previously have been outsourced.
lunias 10mo ago
Because AI is not actually autonomous, it can't join the workforce. You have to bring it to work with you. Once you've brought it to work, you need to tell it what to work on. This is the hardest part. My AI usage exploded in 2025, but a lot of this stuff still requires a decent amount of technical know-how to set up and operate effectively. It also costs money, or requires hardware that many don't possess.
samrus 10mo ago
To understand why they syck at real world tasks, you gotta realize what LLMs are as a model. What do they model? They model static sequences, an example of which is language, the first thing they were used on. What are those? 'Sequences' is self explanatory. 'Static' is interesting, it means that the future state of the sequence is not dependent on your current action. As opposed to dynamical, which means the next state is a function of your current action/prediction, and your next action is a function of that resulting state and so on and so on. An example of a dynamical system is easy, the stock market. If you sell 100 dollars of nvidia stock right now, it would have no effect on the market, but if you sold 50 billion dollars of nvidia stock, the market will definitely react, at least a little. You current action can change the future state of the system. An example of a static system the way LLMs are trained on sentence pairs where you could have the sentence pair "i went to the bank. Swimming in the river was alot of fun" ans you give the LLM the first sentence and ask it to tell you what type of bank the sentect is referring to. If the LLM incorrectly says financial bank, the second sentence doesnt magically change to talk about a cashing a check, it stays the exact same. It stays the same whther the LLM guesses right or wrong. You just tell it whether its right or wrong If your not scared of equations, a static system is y = f(x), and a dynamical system is a_1 = g(s_1), s_2 = h(a_1) and so on. Static systems are modelled by supervised/self-supervised learning, dynamical systems are modelled by reinforcement learning. LLMs at their core are trained in a self supervised way (the RLHF is afterwards, not on the core of the foundation model) so they cant model a situation where their actions can have consequences that they have to plan for. They dont model the idea of planning at all. Thats why they can write pretty well. And can even pretend to have furhter capabilities, but they fall short of actually being able to do things because that requires planning and understanding the dynamical nature of the real world Training an LLM or any modality of foundation model in a dynamical way would be the biggest improvement in AI since the attention mechanism

237 points by zdw 10mo ago

The response to the Sal Khan op-ed resonated with me, along with other parts of this article. Something I’ve been digging more into is some of the figures around proposed job losses from AI. I think I even posted a simulation paper last week. After posting that, I came across numerous papers which critique Frey & Osborne’s approach, who are some of the forefathers for the AI job losses figures we see banded around commonly these days. One such paper is here but i can dig out others: https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/3197111/wp2019n10.pdf https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_... It has made me very cautious around bold statements on AI - and I was already at the cautious end.

Retric 10mo ago
Job losses aren’t directly tied to productivity, in the short term it’s all about expectations. Many companies are laying people off and then trying to get staff back when it doesn’t work. How much of this is hype and how much is sustained is difficult to determine right now.
- firstplacelast 10mo ago
  It never made sense to blame AI in the first place for tech layoffs. You have a new tool that you think can supercharge your employees, make them ~10x productive, be leveraged to disrupt all sorts of industries, and have the workforce best suited to learn and use these tools to their full potential. You think the value of labor may soon collapse, but there are piles of money to be made before that happens. If you truly believed that, you would be spinning up new projects and offshoots as this is a serious arms race with a ton of potential upside (not just in developing AI, but in leveraging it to build things cheaper). Allegedly every dollar you spent on an engineer is potentially worth 10x(?) what it was a couple years ago. Meaning your profit per engineer could soar, but tech companies decided they don't want more profit? AI is mostly solved and the value of labor has already collapsed? Or AI is a nice band-aid to prop up a smaller group of engineers while we weather the current economic/political environment and most CXO's don't believe there are piles of money to be had by leveraging AI now or the near future.
  - CharlieDigital 10mo ago
    > you would be spinning up new projects and offshoots If the engineers can 10x their output, this actually exposes the product leadership since I find it unlikely that they can 10x the number of revenue generating projects or 10x their product spec development.
    - polypolypoly2 10mo ago
      AI improvements will chase the bottlenecks if product spec begins to hamper the dev process, guess what'll be the big focus on e.g. that year's YC
  - asa400 10mo ago
    > Allegedly every dollar you spent on an engineer is potentially worth 10x(?) what it was a couple years ago. Meaning your profit per engineer could soar, but tech companies decided they don't want more profit? Exactly, so many of these claims are complete nonsense. I'm supposed to believe that boards/investors would be fine with companies doing massive layoffs to maintain flat/minuscule growth, when they could keep or expand their current staffing and massively expand their market share and profits with all this increased productivity? It's ridiculous. If this stuff had truly increased productivity at the levels claimed we would see firms pouring money into technical staff to capitalize on this newfound leverage.
  - arwhatever 10mo ago
    I’ve had this same thought, although less well-articulated: AI is supposedly going to obviate the need for white collar workers, and the best all the CEOs can come up with is the exact current status quo minus the white collar workers?

matt3210 10mo ago

A previous company I worked for is San Francisco was very anti remote, but they announced on linked in that they are ok with remote engineers suddenly. It seems it’s still a workers market at least in SF. I’d AI could do it or even reduced head count I don’t think that would be the case.

n_u 10mo ago
what company?
ehnto 10mo ago
I think a practical measure still useful right now, which does capture a lot of the "non-performance" capabilities of an employee, is as follows: "Why has my job not been outsourced yet, since it is far cheaper?" Those are probably the same reasons why AI won't take your job this year. Raw coding metrics are a very small part of being a cog in a company, which is not me saying it will never happen. Just me saying that thos focus on coding performance kind of misses the forest for the trees.
- felipeerias 10mo ago
  The adoption of AI tools for software development will probably not result in sudden layoffs but rather on harder to measure changes, like smaller teams being able to tackle significantly more ambitious projects than before. I suspect that another kind of impact is already happening in organisations where AI adoption is uneven: suddenly some employees appear to be having a lot more leisure time while apparently keeping the same productivity as before.

senordevnyc 10mo ago

Pretty ironic that he complains about Kahn citing someone who told him AI agents are capable of replacing 80% of call center employees, right after quoting Gary Marcus of all people, claiming LLMs will never live up to the hype. If you want to focus on what AI agents are actually capable of today, the last person I'd pay any attention to is Marcus, who has been wrong about nearly everything related to AI for years, and does nothing but double down.

Jonovono 10mo ago
What has he been wrong about? He was way ahead of predicting the scaling limitations, llm not making it to agi.
- verdverm 10mo ago
  What scaling limitations, Gemini 3 shows us that is not over yet, and little brother flash is a hyper sparse, 1T parameter model (aiui) that is both fast and good I agree with GP, Marcus has not been an accurate or significant voice, could care lass what he has to say about ai. He's not a practitioner anymore in my mind
renewiltord 10mo ago
Gary Marcus is just a free Outrage As A Service. People politically align with him and then feel the need to go along with the rest of the charade.
rvz 10mo ago
Well clearly LLMs are not AGI, and all such calls of them being 'AGI' have been a pump and dump scam. So he got that dead right for years.
- senordevnyc 10mo ago
  Who has said that "LLMs are AGI"?
  - 10mo ago

jcastro 10mo ago

> In one example I cite in my article, ChatGPT Agent spends fourteen minutes futilely trying to select a value from a drop-down menu on a real estate website Man dude, don't automate toil add an API to the website.It's supposed to have one!

stvltvs 10mo ago
It probably has one that the web form is already using, but if agentic AI requires specialized APIs, it's going to be a while before reality meets the hype.

edfletcher_t137 10mo ago

> But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities. > So, this is how I’m thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the predictions. I’m done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by vibes. The impacts of the technologies that already exist are already more than enough to concern us for now… SPOT ON, let us all take inspiration. "The impacts of the technologies that already exist are already more than enough to concern us for now"!

doctorpangloss 10mo ago

Cal Newport looked in the wrong places. He has no visibility into the usage of ChatGPT to do homework. The collapse of Chegg should tell you, with no other public information, that if 30% of students were already cheating somehow, somewhat weakly, they are now doing super-powerful cheating, and surely more than 30% of students at this stage. It’s also kind of stupid to hand wave away, programming. Programmers are where all the early adopters of software are. He’s merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities. Programmers, I’m sure, were also the first to use Google and smartphones. “It doesn’t work for me” is missing the critical word “yet” at the end, and really, is it saying much that forecasts about adoption in the metric, “years until when Cal Newport’s arbitrary criteria of what agent and adoption means meets some threshold only inside Cal Newport’s head” is hard to do? There are 700m active weeklies for ChatGPT. It has joined the workforce! It just isn’t being paid the salaries.

bpavuk 10mo ago
read it again. he criticizes the hype built around 2025 as the Year X for agents. many were thinking that "we'll carry PCs in our pockets" when Windows Mobile-powered devices came out. many predicted 2003 as the Year X for what we now call smartphones. no, it was 2008, with the iPhone launch.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
lukev 10mo ago
Wow, homework is an insane example of a "workforce." Homework is in some ways the opposite of actual economic labor. Students pay to attend school, and homework is (theoretically) part of that education; something designed to help students learn more effectively. They are most certainly not paid for it. Having a LLM do that "work" is economically insane. The desired learning does not happen, and the labor of grading and giving feedback is entirely wasted. Students use ChatGPT for it because of perverse incentives of the educational system. It has no bearing on economic production of value.

bpavuk 10mo ago

a stellar piece, Cal, as always. short and straight to the point. I believe that Codex and the likes took off (in comparison to e.g. "AI" browsers) because the bottleneck there was not reasoning about code, it was about typing and processing walls of text. for a human, the interface of e.g. Google Calendar is ± intuitive. for a LLM, any graphical experience is an absolute hellscape from performance standpoint. CLI tools, which LLMs love to use, output text and only text, not images, not audio, not videos. LLMs excel at text, hence they are confined to what text can do. yes, multimodal is a thing, but you lose a lot of information and/or context window space + speed. LLMs are a flawed technology for general, true agents. 99% of the time, outside code, you need eyes and ears. we have only created a self-writing paper yet.

Yizahi 10mo ago
Codex and the like took off because there existed a "validator" of its work - a collection of pre-existing non-LLM software - compilers, linters, code analyzers etc. And the second factor is very limited and defined grammar of programming languages. Under such constraints it was much easier to build a text generator which will validate itself using external tools in a loop, until generated stream makes sense. And the other "successful" industry being disrupted is the one where there is no need validate output, because errors are ok or irrelevant. A text not containing much factual data, like fiction or business-lingo or spam. Or pictures, where it doesn't matter which color is a specific pixel, a rough match will do just fine. But outside of those two options, not many other industries can use at scale an imprecise word or media generator. Circular writing and parsing of business emails with no substance? Sure. Not much else.
- zarzavat 10mo ago
  This is the reasoning deficit. Models are very good at generating large quantities of truthy outputs, but are still too stupid to know when they've made a serious mistake. Or, when they are informed about a mistake they sometimes don't "get it" and keep saying "you're absolutely right!" while doing nothing to fix the problem. It's a matter of degree, not a qualitative difference. Humans have the exact same flaws, but amateur humans grow into expert humans with low error rates (or lose their job and go to work in KFC), whereas LLMs are yet to produce a true expert in anything because their error rates are unacceptably high.

observationist 10mo ago

I've seen organizations where 300 of 500 people could effectively be replaced by AI, just by having some of the the remaining 200 orchestrate and manage automation workflows that are trivially within the capabilities of current frontier models. There's a whole lot of bullshit jobs and work that will get increasingly and opaquely automated by AI. You won't see jobs go away unless or until organizations deliberately set out to reduce staff. People will use AI throughout the course of their days to get a couple of "hours" of tasks done in a few minutes, here and there, throughout the week. I've already seen reports and projects and writing that clearly comes from AI in my own workplace. Right now, very few people know how to recognize and assess the difference between human and AI output, and even fewer how to calibrate work assignments. Spreadsheet AIs are fantastic, reports and charting have just hit their stride, and a whole lot of people are going to appear to be very productive without putting a whole lot of effort into it. And then one day, when sufficiently knowledgable and aware people make it into management, all sorts of jobs are going to go quietly away, until everything is automated, because it doesn't make sense to pay a human 6 figures what an AI can do for 3 figures in a year. I'd love to see every manager in the world start charting the Pareto curves for their workplaces, in alongside actual hours worked per employee - work output is going to be very wonky, and the lazy, clever, and ambitious people are all going to be using AI very heavily. Similar to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11850241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11850241 https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/tm8mha/op_automated_their_job_over_a_year_ago_and_didnt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/tm8m... Part of the problem is that people don't know how to measure work effectively to begin with, let alone in the context of AI chatbots that can effectively do better work than anyone a significant portion of the adult population of the planet. The teams that fully embrace it, use the tools openly and transparently, and are able to effectively contrast good and poor use of the tools, will take off.

consp 10mo ago
> because it doesn't make sense to pay a human 6 figures what an AI can do for 3 figures in a year. Humans have one bit over "AI": You can't blame and fire "AI" when it inevitably goes wrong.
skobux 10mo ago

milancurcic 10mo ago

> The industry had reason to be optimistic that 2025 would prove pivotal. In previous years, AI agents like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex had become impressively adept at tackling multi-step computer programming problems. Both of these agents launched mid-2025.

bpavuk 10mo ago
don't forget Aider from 2023
- outofpaper 10mo ago
  Still working hard and now we also have Aider-ce.
LPisGood 10mo ago
I’m confused. Claude is a few years old.
- bpavuk 10mo ago
  but not Claude Code. it was released just this summer (I guess?)
- advisedwang 10mo ago
  The parent comment specifically referenced Claude Code, which launched in Feb 2025 [1] and went GA May 2025 [2]. Codex also launched May 2025 [3]. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet [2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4 [3] https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex/
userbinator 10mo ago
That makes me wonder how much of the article is true, and how much was hallucinated by an AI.

evil-olive 10mo ago

> But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities. yes, 100% I think that way too often, discussions of the current state of tech get derailed by talking about predictions of future improvements. hypothetical thought experiment: I set a New Year's resolution for myself of drinking less alcohol. on New Year's Eve, I get pulled over for driving drunk. the officer wants to give me a sobriety test. I respond that I have projected my alcohol consumption will have decreased 80% YoY by Q2 2026. the officer is going to smile and nod...and then insist on giving me the sobriety test. compare this with a non-hypothetical anecdote: I was talking with a friend about the environmental impacts of AI, and mentioned the methane turbines in Memphis [0] that are being used to power Elon Musk's MechaHitler slash CSAM generator. the friend says "oh, but they're working on building nuclear power plants for AI datacenters". and that's technically true...but it misses the broader point. if someone lives downwind of that data center, and they have a kid who develops asthma, you can try to tell them "oh in 5 years it'll be nuclear powered". and your prediction might be correct...but their kid still has asthma. 0: https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/ https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/

yieldcrv 10mo ago

everyone excited about AI agents doesn’t have to evaluate the actual output they do Very few people do so neither Altman, the many CEOs industry wide, Engineering Managers, Software Engineers, “Forward Deployed Engineers” have to actually inspect their demos show good looking output its just the people in support roles that have to be like “wait a minute, this is very inconsistent” all while everyone is doing their best not to get replaced its clanker discrimination and mixed with clanker incompetence

XorNot 10mo ago
"good looking output" is exactly the problem. They're all good at good looking output which survives a first glance.

relaxing 10mo ago

There needs to be a companion to Betteridge’s law that addresses AI-related headlines with “because since the beginning of time the field of artificial intelligence over-promises and under-delivers.”

drusepth 10mo ago

"People using AI" had a meaningful change when they "joined the workforce" in 2025. We may not have gotten fully-autonomous employees, but human employees using AI are doing way more than they could before, both in depth and scale. Claude Code is basically a full-time "employee" on my (profitable) open source projects, but it's still a tool I use to do all the work. Claude Code is basically a full-time "employee" at my job, but it's still a tool I use to do all the work. My workload has shifted to high-level design decisions instead of writing the code, which is kind of exactly what would have happened if AI "joined the workforce" and I had a bunch of new hires under me. I do recognize this article is largely targeted at non-dev workforces though, where it _largely_ holds up but most of my friends outside of the tech world have either gotten new jobs thanks to increased capability through AI or have severely integrated AI into whatever workflows they're doing at work (again, as a tool) and are excelling compared to employees who don't utilize AI.

llmslave2 10mo ago
> human employees using AI are doing way more than they could before, both in depth and scale Funny how that doesn't show up in any productivity or economic metrics...
- 9rx 10mo ago
  Bit too soon to tell, no? Claude Code wasn't released until the latter half of Q2, offering little time for it to show up in those figures, and Q3 data is only preliminary right now. Moreover, it seems to be the pairing with Opus 4.5 that lends some credence to the claims. However, it was released in Q4. We won't have that data for quite a while. And like Claude Code, it came late in the quarter, so realistically we really need to wait on Q1 2026 figures, which hasn't happened yet and won't really start to appear until summertime and beyond. That said, I expect you are right that we won't see it show up. Even if we assume the claim is true in every way for some people, it only works for exceptional visionaries who were previously constrained by typing speed, which is a very, very, very small segment of the developer population. Any gains that small group realize will be an unrecognizable blip amid everything else. The vast majority of developers need all that typing time and more to have someone come up with their next steps. Reducing the typing time for them doesn't make them any more productive. They were never limited by typing speed in the first place.

llmslave2 10mo ago

Once again, more evidence mounts that AI is massively overhyped and limited in usefulness, and once again we will see people making grandiose claims (without evidence of course) and predictions that will inevitably fall flat in the future. We are, of course, perpetually just 3-6 months away from when everything changes. I think Carmack is right, LLM's are not the route to AGI.

cindyllm 10mo ago
[dead]

aranelsurion 10mo ago

> I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities. So well put. LLMs are useful for a great many things. It's just that being the best new product of the recent years, maybe even defining a decade doesn't cut it. It has to be the century-defining, world-ending, FOMO-inducing massive thing to put Skynet to shame and justify investments in trillion dollars. It's either AI joining the workforce soon, or Nvidia and OpenAI aren't that valuable. I guess it manages to maximize shareholder value, and make AI feel like a disappointment.

simonw 10mo ago

Agents as staff replacements that can tackle tasks you would normally assign to a human employee didn't happen in 2025. Agents as LLMs calling tools in a loop to perform tasks that can be handled by typing commands into a computer absolutely did. Claude Code turns out to be misnamed: it's useful for way more than just writing code, once you figure out how to give it access to tools for other purposes. I think the browser agents (like the horribly named "ChatGPT Agent" - way to burn a key namespace on a tech demo!) have acted as a distraction from this. Clicking links is still pretty hard. Running Bash commands on the other hand is practically a solved problem.

hecanjog 10mo ago
We still sandbox, quarantine and restrict them though, because they can't really behave as agents, but they're effective in limited contexts. Like the way waymo cars kind of drive on a track I guess? Still very useful, but not the agents that were being sold, really. Edit: should we call them "special agents"? ;-)
- jdross 10mo ago
  Have you been in a Waymo recently or used Tesla FSD 14.2? I live in Austin and my Model 3 is basically autonomous - regularly going for hours from parking space to destination parking space without my touching the steering wheel, navigating really complex situations including construction workers using hand motions to signal the car.
  - esafak 10mo ago
    Thanks for collecting training data for the rest of us, 'coz I don't trust Musk with my life.
  - senordevnyc 10mo ago
    Have you been in a Waymo recently or used Tesla FSD 14.2? One of these things is not like the other...
- Culonavirus 10mo ago

fragmede 10mo ago

In December of 2025, I took five tickets I was assigned in Jira and threw them at codex, which just did them, and with the help of MCPs, codex was able to read the ticket, generate some code, test the code, update gitlab, create a merge request on Gitlab, and update the Jira with the MR. CodeRabbit then reviewed the MR before a human had to look at it. It didn't happen in 2025, but I see it happening for 2026.

stevage 10mo ago

This article seems based in a poorly defined statement. What does "joining the workforce" actually mean? There are plenty of jobs that have already been pretty much replaced by AI: certain forms of journalism, low-end photoshop work, logo generation, copywriting. What does the OP need to see in order to believe that AI has "joined the workforce"?

tim333 10mo ago
It was from Altman's blog: > We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies... "materially change the output of companies" seems fairly defined and didn't happen in most cases. I guess some kicked out more slop but I don't think that's what he meant.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- grumbel 10mo ago
  TikTok, Youtube, news, blogs, … are getting flooded with AI generated content, I'd call that a pretty substantial "change in output". I think the mistake here is expecting that AI is just making workers in older jobs faster, when the reality is, more often than not, that it changes the nature of the task itself. Whenever AI reached the "good enough" point, it doesn't do so in a way that nicely aligns with human abilities, quite the opposite, it might be worse at performing a task, but be able to perform it 1000x faster. That allows you to do things that weren't previously possible, but it also means that professionals might not want to rely on using AI for the old tasks. A professional translator isn't going to switch over to using AI, the quality isn't there yet, but somebody like Amazon could offer a "OCR & translate all the books" service and AI would be good enough for it, since it could handle all the books that nobody has the time and money to translate manually. Which in turn will eventually put the professional translator out of a job when it gets better than good enough. We aren't quite there yet, but getting pretty close. In 2025 a lot of AI went from "useless, but promising" to "good enough".

ahussain 10mo ago

Agentic AI companies are doing millions in revenue. Just because agents haven’t spread to the entire economy yet doesn’t mean they are not useful for relatively complex tasks.

XorNot 10mo ago
Okay but so is like, the 3 store chain which does my cars tires. Millions in revenue ain't hard to hit with extremely modest business.
sandworm101 10mo ago
And just because people are thowing money at an AI company doesnt mean they have or will ever have a marketable product. The #1 product of nearly every AI company is hope, hope that one day they will replace the need to pay real employees. Hope like that allows a company to cut costs and fund dividends ... in the short term. The long term is some other person's problem. (Ill change my mind the day Bill Gates trusts MS copilot with his personal banking details.)
- aik 10mo ago
  When did hacker news become laggard-adopter/consumer-news. Cal is a consumer of AI - interesting article for this community, but not this community. I thought hacker news was for builders and innovators - people who see the potential of a technology for solving problems big and small and go and tinker and build and explore with it, and sometimes eventually change the world (hopefully for the better). Instead of sitting on the sidelines grumbling about that some particular tech that hasn’t yet changed the world / met some particular hype (yet). Incredibly naive to think AI isn’t making real difference already (even without/before replacing labor en masse.) Actually try to explore the impact a bit. It’s not AGI, but doesn’t have to be to transform. It’s everywhere and will do nothing but accelerate. Even better, be part of proving Cal wrong for 2026.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
not much in income tho
10mo ago

moezd 10mo ago

I recall someone saying stories of LLMs doing something useful to "I have a Canadian girlfriend" stories. Not trying to discredit or be a pessimist, can anyone elaborate how exactly they use these agents while working in interdependent projects in multi-team settings in e.g. regulated industries?

heyitsguay 10mo ago
Agreed. I've never seen a concrete answer with an outcome that can be explained in clear, simple terms.
- moron4hire 10mo ago
  Lately, it seems like all the blogs have shifted away from talking about productivity and are now talking about how much they "enjoy" working with LLMs. If firing up old coal plants and skyrocketing RAM prices and $5000 consumer GPUs and violating millions of developers' copyrights and occasionally coaxing someone into killing themselves is the cost of Brian From Middle Management getting to Enjoy Programming Again instead of having to blame his kids for not having any time on the weekends, I guess we have no choice but to oblige him his little treat.
  - wiseowise 10mo ago
    It’s the honeymoon period with crack all over again. Everyone feels great until their teeth start falling out.
- jdross 10mo ago
  I work in insurance - regulated, human capital heavy, etc. Three examples for you: - our policy agent extracts all coverage limits and policy details into a data ontology. This saves 10-20 mins per policy. It is more accurate and consistent than our humans - our email drafting agent will pull all relevant context on an account whenever an email comes in. It will draft a reply or an email to someone else based on context and workflow. Over half of our emails are now sent without meaningfully modifying the draft, up from 20% two months ago. Hundreds of hours saved per week, now spent on more valuable work for clients. - our certificates agent will note when a certificate of insurance is requested over email and automatically handle the necessary checks and follow up options or resolution. Will likely save us around $500k this year. We also now increasingly share prototypes as a way to discuss ideas. Because the cost to vibe code something illustrative is very low, an it’s often much higher fidelity to have the conversation with something visual than a written document

wcfrobert 10mo ago

I don't see how AI can bring about 10%+ annual economic growth, let alone infinite abundance, without somehow crossing the bit-to-atom interface. Without a breakthrough in general-purpose robotics - which feels decades away - agents will just be confined to optimizing B2B SaaS. Human utility is rooted in the physical environment. I find digital abundance incredibly uninspiring.

svara 10mo ago
I'm mostly a fan of AI coding tools, but I think you're basically right about this. I think we'll see more specialized models for narrow tasks (think AlphaFold for other challenges in drug discovery, for example) as well, but those will feel like individual, costly, high impact discoveries rather than just generic "AI". Our world is human-shaped and ultimately people who talk of "AGI" secretly mean an artificial human. I believe that "intelligence", the way the word is actually used by people, really just means "skillful information processing in pursuit of individual human desires". As such, it will never be "solved" in any other way than to build an artificial human.
- Applejinx 10mo ago
  No, when you bring in the genetic algorithm (something LLM AI can be adjacent to by the scale of information it deals in) you can go beyond human intelligence. I work with GA coding tools pretty regularly. Instead of prompting it becomes all about devising ingenious fitness functions, while not having to care if they're contradictory. If superhuman intelligence is solved it'll be in the form of building a more healthy society (or, if you like, a society that can outcompete other societies). We've already seen this sort of thing by accident and we're currently seeing extensive efforts to attack and undermine societies through exploiting human intelligence. To a genetic algorithm techie that is actually one way to spur the algorithm to making better societies, not worse ones: challenge it harder. I guess we'll see if that translates to life out here in the wild, because the challenge is real.
  - ozmodiar 10mo ago
    The troubling thing here is: what is a "better" society? As you said, it's just the one that outcompetes the other societies on the globe. We'd like to believe such a thing is an egalitarian "healthy" liberal society, but it's just as likely to be some form of enslaved/boot stomping on face society. Some think people won't accept this, but given human history I'm pretty sure they will. I think these sorts of societies are more of a local minima, but they only need to grant enough of a short term boost to unseat the other major powers. Once competition is out of the way they'll probably survive as a bloated mess for quite some time. The price of entry is so high they won't have to worry about being unseated by competition unless they really screw the pooch. I think this is the troubling conclusion a lot of people, including those in power, are reaching.

thw09j9m 10mo ago

I'm a staff level SWE at a company that you've all heard of (not a flex, just providing context). If my manager said to me tomorrow: "I have to either get rid of one of your coworkers or your use of AI tools, which is it?" I would, without any hesitation, ask that he fire one of my coworkers. Gemini / Claude is way more useful to me than any particular coworker. And now I'm preparing for my post-software career because that coworker is going to be me in a few years. Obviously I hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
episteme 10mo ago
Is that a useful thought experiment? Claude benefits you as an individual more than a coworker, but I find I hard to believe your use of Claude is more of a value add to the business than an additional coworker. Especially since that coworker will also have access to Claude. In the past we also just raised the floor on productivity, do you think this will be different?
- shrubble 10mo ago
  There’s often the question of communication overhead between people; Claude would remove that.
  - stanleykm 10mo ago
    No that’s not true at all. Humans can deal with ambiguity and operate independently. Claude can’t do that. You’re trading one “problem” for an entirely different one in this hypothetical.
  - signa11 10mo ago
    > There’s often the question of communication overhead between people; Claude would remove that. ... and replace that with communication overhead with claude ?

ineedasername 10mo ago

It pretty much did join the work force. Listen to the fed chair, listen to related analysis, the unexpected overperformance of GDP isn’t directly attributed AI but it is very much in the “how did that happen?” conversation. And there’s plenty of softer, more anecdotal evidence in addition to that to respond to the headline with “It did.” The fact that it has been gradual and subtle as the very first agent tools reach production readiness, gain awareness in the public, start being used…? That really doesn’t seem at all unexpected as the path than “joining” would follow.

asa400 10mo ago
> the unexpected overperformance of GDP isn’t directly attributed AI but it is very much in the “how did that happen?” conversation. We spent an amount of money on data centers that was so large that it managed to overcome a self-imposed kick in the nuts from tariffs and then some. The amount of money involved rivals the creation of the railroad system in the United States. Of course GDP overperformed in that scenario. Where did AI tool use show up in the productivity numbers?
- ineedasername 10mo ago
  Productivity increase is what showed in the numbers. AI is the partial attribution chair Powell gave for the reason. Quotes from December meeting: "Reporter: ...do you believe that we’re experiencing a positive productivity shock, whether from AI or policy factors or whatever?" "Powell: So, yeah, I mean, I never thought I would see a time when we had, you know, five, six years of 2 percent productivity growth. This is higher. You know, this is definitely higher. And it was—before, it could be attributed to AI. I think you—I also think if you look at what AI can do and if you use it in your personal life, as I imagine many of us have, you can see the prospects for productivity. I think it makes people who use it more productive. It may make other people have to find other jobs, though. So it could have productivity implications" And: "Reporter: If I could just follow up on the SEP. You have a whole lot of—big increase in the growth numbers, but not a big decline in the unemployment numbers. And is that an AI factor in there?" "Powell: So it is—the implication is obviously higher productivity. And some of that may be AI." He also hedges in places, hesitant to say "Yes that's the reason". I'm not sure anything in the data sets they use could directly capture it as the reason so that's too high a bar for evidence- to require some line item in the reports with a direct attribution. He could be wrong, it might not be AI, but I don't have any reason to thing his sense of things is wrong either.

biophysboy 10mo ago

> So, this is how I’m thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the predictions. I’m done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by vibes. A lot of the predictions come from interviews and presentations with top tech executives. Their job is to increase the perceived value of their product, not to offer an objective assessment. I've gotten a lot of value out of reading the views of experienced engineers; overall they like the tech, but they do not think it is a sentient alien that will delete our jobs. I have also gotten a lot of value out of Cembalest's recent "eyes on the market", which looks at the economic side of this AI push.

MichaelRo 10mo ago
Snake oil salesmen will predict that "this will be the year when the snake oil you buy from us will cure all ailments". Nothing new under the sun.
- tempodox 10mo ago
  And publications can expect more readers for breathless hype articles than for sober analyses.
- Verdex 10mo ago
  Interestingly enough, my understanding is that some snakes in Asia can be used to produce oil that helps joint problems. American snakes weren't useful for this. So something that was sort of useful in a niche application was co-opted by people who didn't know how to make it work and then ultra hyped. The parallels are spot on.
  - irishcoffee 10mo ago
    That’s actually how it started. Some water snake native to china, when the oil is extracted it contains omega-3 fatty acid, which does help arthritis. It was turned into a scam in the west. Seems like a lot of work to get omega-3 in a consumable form.
  - tdeck 10mo ago

Nio1024 10mo ago

[flagged]

lovich 10mo ago
Please stop spamming us with obvious AI generated posts. What’s truly scarce are humans who stay humble, don’t lie, and actually communicate their thoughts instead of delegating all interactions to an automaton. If you give as little a shit about us as to just dump machine generated text at us, why should we listen to you? And that’s giving you the benefit of the doubt based on your post and account that you are trying to run some AI platform and aren’t just some consensus manufacturing bot. Edit: nope, benefit of the doubt is gone. A ~3 month old account. The second comment you had which was the first with any interaction[1] is from another ~3 month old account that is even more obviously a bot. I guess we just have Reddit style Bot nets on this forum forever [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534990
- econ 10mo ago
  When I doubt the originally of my posting I just add something like 911 was an inside job or release the Epstein files which still is pretty convincingly human. But who knows, in the future the internet might be full of bots making jokes about Jews.
  - osamabinladen 10mo ago
    > in the future the internet might be full of bots making jokes about Jews. this is the present (see instagram, x/twitter)
    - econ 10mo ago
      I think those are humans
- Nio1024 10mo ago
  I come from a non-English-speaking country, and I admit that I use translation tools to communicate here, but I’m not a bot. I was introduced to Hacker News by a friend a few months ago to learn, because the quality of discussion here is consistently high. I want to clarify that every post I make reflects my own thoughts after carefully reading the content. Thank you for taking the time to reply.

dinobones 10mo ago

A brief history of programming: 1. Punch cards -> Assembly languages 2. Assembly languages -> Compiled languages 3. Compiled languages -> Interpreted languages 4. Interpreted languages -> Agentic LLM prompting I've tried the latest and greatest agentic CLI and toolings with the public SOTA models. I think this is a productivity jump equivalent to maybe punch cards -> compiled languages, and that's it. Something like a 40% increase, but nowhere close to exponential.

defrost 10mo ago
1. Punch cards -> Assembly languages Err, in my direct experience it was Punch Cards -> FORTAN Here, for example, is the Punch Card for a single FORTRAN statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FortranCardPROJ039.agr.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FortranCardPROJ039.agr.jp... PunchCards were an input technology, they were in no way limited to either assembley languages or to FORTRAN. You might be thinking of programming in assembly via switch flipping or plug jacking.
- asadotzler 10mo ago
  They're simply bluffing, and you called them on it. Thanks for your service. Too many people think they can just bullshit and bluff their way along and need to be taken down a peg, or for repeat offenders, shunned and ostracized.
ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
Except punch cards are a data storage format, not a language. Some of the the earliest computers were programmed by plugboard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard#Early_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard#Early_computers ) so that might be thought of as a precursor to machine language / assembly language. And compiled and interpreted languages evolved alongside each other in the 1950s-1970s.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
That's jump if you are a junior. It falls down hard for the seniors doing more complex stuff. I'm also reminding that we tried whole "make it look like human language" with COBOL and it turned out that language wasn't a bottleneck, the ability of people to specify exactly what they want was the bottleneck. Once you have exact spec, even writing code on your own isn't all that hard but extracting that from stakeolders have always been the harder part of the programming.

nprateem 10mo ago

And we enter the Trough of Discontent...

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

signa11 10mo ago

the title is bit misleading, and all the article sez is to ``` To find out more about why 2025 failed to become the Year of the AI Agent, I recommend reading my full New Yorker piece . ``` so essentially, just go and read the new-yorker piece here: https://archive.ph/VQ1fT https://archive.ph/VQ1fT

themafia 10mo ago

Headline only response: Same reason my toddler children didn't.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

moonshotideas 10mo ago

Have y’all tried Claude code using opus 4.5 - I believe it has fully joined the workforce, had my grandma build and deploy her own blog with a built in cms and an admin portal, post editor, integrate uploads with GitHub, add ci/cd and took about 2 hours mostly because she types slow

phantasmish 10mo ago
Terrible productivity loss vs. signing up for a hosted Wordpress site.

thatgerhard 10mo ago

I use an agent in all my day to day coding now. It's a lot small tasks to speed me up, but it's definitely in use.

nwmcsween 10mo ago

If anyone was around for the dot-com bubble any company internet related or with a web like name was irrationally funded, P/E didn't matter, burn didn't matter, product didn't matter. AI has all the same markers of a the dot com bubble and eventually venture capital will dry up and many AI companies will go bust with a few remaining that make something useful with an unmet niche.

Marciplan 10mo ago
regardless if you were around or not, this take has been repeated a quintillion times by now
- passwordoops 10mo ago
  Because it's the correct take
  - hobofan 10mo ago
    Doesn't mean it's a valuable take. It doesn't even significantly matter whether it's a bubble or not, but whether its a "bad" bubble. I think Steve Eisman (of housing bubble fame) recently made the argument that it's probably a bubble, but it doesn't seem to have the hallmarks it would have to turn it into a crisis. e.g. no broad immediate exposure for the general populace (as in housing/crypto bubbles).
    - red-iron-pine 10mo ago
      > It doesn't even significantly matter whether it's a bubble or not, but whether its a "bad" bubble. there are billions and billions of dollars invested in there -- it matter significantly to a lot of people. the bubble popping may trash the US and possibly global economy. "it doesn't matter" has to be one of the worst AI takes I've seen...
- clownpenis_fart 10mo ago
  [dead]

js8 10mo ago

I think the issue is that everybody assumes the economy operates under some kind of "free market" conditions: limited by available labor but with unlimited potential demand. In that situation, AI could indeed cause massive unemployment. But this is perhaps not the case. By pesimistic estimates half of the people work in bs jobs that have no real value to society, and every capitalist is focused on rent extraction now. If the economy can operate under such conditions, it doesn't really need more productivity growth, it is already demand-limited.

delis-thumbs-7e 10mo ago

I predict all house cats will be replaced by robots by 2027. People just do not realise how great of an effect the AI and robotics will have on home pet ownership. However as a CEO of a publicly listed company ”Robot-cats-that-are-totally-like-awesome-and-are-gonna-like-totally-be-as-lovable-as-real-ones Inc.” I am seeing this change from first row seat. We plan to be on the helm of the new pet-robot future, which not furry and cute, but cold and boring. Sources? What, but, you are not a journalist, you are not suppose to challenge what I say, I’m a CEO! No I’m not just using media to create artificial hype to pull investors and make money on bullshit that is never gonna work! How can you say that! It’s a real thing, trust me bro!

poulpy123 10mo ago

The answer is reasoning. It is obvious now that whatever quality LLM have, they don't think and reason, they are just statistical machine outputing whatever they training set as most probable. They are useful, and they can mimic thinking to a certain level, mainly because they have been trained on a inhumane amount of data that no person could learn in one life. But they do not think, and the current algorithms are clearly a dead end for thinking machines.

cbdevidal 10mo ago
Reasoning keeps improving, but they still have a ways to go https://arcprize.org/leaderboard https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
- vaylian 10mo ago
  What we need is reasoning as in "drawing logical conclusions based on logic". LLMs do reasoning by recursively adding more words to the context window. That's not logical reasoning.
  - tim333 10mo ago
    It's debatable that humans do "drawing logical conclusions based on logic". Look at politics and what people vote for. They seem to do something more like pattern matching.
    - coldtea 10mo ago
      Maybe we say that when we don't like those conclusions? After all I can guarantee the other side (whatever it is) will say the same thing for your "logical" conclusions. It is logic, we just don't share the same predicates or world model...
    - isodev 10mo ago
      Humans are far from logical. We make decisions within the context of our existence. This includes emotions, friends, family, goals, dreams, fears, feelings, mood, etc. it’s one of the challenges when LLMs are being anthropomorphised, reasoning/logic for bots is not the same as that for humans.

officerk 10mo ago

Link to the NewYorker piece: https://archive.ph/VQ1fT https://archive.ph/VQ1fT

CharlieDigital 10mo ago

If you think about the real-world and the key bottleneck with most creative work projects (this includes software), it's usually context (in the broadest sense of the word). Humans are good at this because they are truly multi-modal and can interact through many different channels to gather additional context to do the requisite task at hand. Given incomplete requirements or specs, they can talk to co-workers, look up old documents from a previous release, send a Slack or Teams message, setup a Zoom meeting with stakeholders, call customers, research competitors, buy a competitors product and try it out while taking notes of where it falls short, make a physical site visit to see the context in which the software is to be used and environmental considerations for operation. Point is that humans doing work have all sorts of ways to gather and compile more context before acting or while they are acting that an LLM does not and in some cases cannot have without the assistance of a human. This process in the real world can unfurl over days or weeks or in response to new inputs and our expectation of how LLMs work doesn't align with this. LLMs can sort of do this, but more often than not, the failure of LLMs is that we are still very bad at providing proper and sufficient context to the LLM and the LLMs are not very good at requesting more context or reacting to new context, changing plans, changing directions, etc. We also have different expectations of LLMs and we don't expect the LLM to ask "Can you provide a layout and photo of where the machine will be set up and the typical operating conditions?" and then wait a few days for us to gather that context for it before continuing.

ramoz 10mo ago

Claude Code became a critical part of my workflow in March 2025. It is now the primary tool.

stocksinsmocks 10mo ago

I really don’t agree with the author here. Perplexity has, for me, largely replaced Cal Newport’s job (read other journalists work and synthesize celebrity and pundit takes on topic X). I think the take that Claude isn’t literally a human so agents failed is silly and a sign of motivated reasoning. Business processes are going to lag the cutting edge by years in any conditions and by generations if there is no market pressure. But Codex isn’t capable of doing a substantial portion of what I would have had to pay a freelancer/consultant to do? Any LLM can’t replace a writer for a content mill? Nonsense. Newport needs to open his eyes and think harder about how a journalist can deliver value in the emerging market.

FromTheFirstIn 10mo ago
But it isn’t joining the workforce. Your perspective is that it could, but the point that it hasn’t is the one that’s salient. Codex might be able to do a substantial portion of what a freelancer can do, but even you fell short of saying it can replace the freelancer. As long as every ai agent needs its hand held the effect on the labor force is an increase in costs and an increase in outputs where quality doesn’t matter. It’s not a reduction of labor forces
- stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
  OK, let me fall less short. It has replaced the freelancer for me. I communicate product requirements. It builds the product immediately at trivial cost. It’s better than a human. There are jobs I would have considered hiring out that I don’t because the machine is better. Nothing you said about labor effects in the large even logically follow. Have you even used one of these systems?
  - FromTheFirstIn 10mo ago
    Yup

notepad0x90 10mo ago

I think it depends on what "join" means. I see no reason why it has to be "replace a human". People used to have secretaries back in the day, we don't anymore, we all do our own thing, but in a way, LLMs are our secretaries of sorts now. Or our personal executive assitants, even if you're not an executive. I don't know what else LLMs need to do? get on the payroll? People are using them heavily. You can't even google things easily without triggering an LLM response. I think the current millenial and older generation is too used to the pre-LLM way of things, so the resistance will be there for a long time to come. but kids doing homeworks with LLMs will rely on them heavily once they're in the work force. I don't know how people are not as fascinated and excited about this. I keep watching older scifi content, and LLMs are now doing for us what "futuristic computer persona" did in older scifi. Easy example: You no longer need copywriters because of LLMs. You had spell/grammar checkers before, but they didn't "understand" context and recommend different phrasing, and check for things like continuity and rambling on.

habinero 10mo ago
> You no longer need copywriters because of LLMs You absolutely do still need copyeditors for anything you actually care about.
- notepad0x90 10mo ago
  But why? I routinely see typos and grammar errors on major news articles. LLMs catch that stuff really well, it's like the one thing they're good at. They can be as opinionated as humans on the subject. Perhaps sycophantic mainstream models might be to eager to please, but that's not an issue with the tech itself. I like to think that every publication that is using LLMs to write content has also replaced copyeditors/writers with them.

fennecfoxy 10mo ago

Because rather than let me and my team focus on building the guts of something that works well, my employer was insistent we build PoCs of cut-down concepts that don't make any sense at all. Like using AI to fill in a form. Instead of a proper autonomous agent (which was the project's goal). Now that AI is "mainstream" and big bubble big money big career/promotion options for management I expect much more of this behaviour going into 2026.

PeterStuer 10mo ago

I have seen few people fired because of AI in 2025. Instead, I've seen plenty not hired because the existing employees are now producing 2x the work, or tackling jobs themselves that would previously have been outsourced.

lunias 10mo ago

Because AI is not actually autonomous, it can't join the workforce. You have to bring it to work with you. Once you've brought it to work, you need to tell it what to work on. This is the hardest part. My AI usage exploded in 2025, but a lot of this stuff still requires a decent amount of technical know-how to set up and operate effectively. It also costs money, or requires hardware that many don't possess.

samrus 10mo ago

To understand why they syck at real world tasks, you gotta realize what LLMs are as a model. What do they model? They model static sequences, an example of which is language, the first thing they were used on. What are those? 'Sequences' is self explanatory. 'Static' is interesting, it means that the future state of the sequence is not dependent on your current action. As opposed to dynamical, which means the next state is a function of your current action/prediction, and your next action is a function of that resulting state and so on and so on. An example of a dynamical system is easy, the stock market. If you sell 100 dollars of nvidia stock right now, it would have no effect on the market, but if you sold 50 billion dollars of nvidia stock, the market will definitely react, at least a little. You current action can change the future state of the system. An example of a static system the way LLMs are trained on sentence pairs where you could have the sentence pair "i went to the bank. Swimming in the river was alot of fun" ans you give the LLM the first sentence and ask it to tell you what type of bank the sentect is referring to. If the LLM incorrectly says financial bank, the second sentence doesnt magically change to talk about a cashing a check, it stays the exact same. It stays the same whther the LLM guesses right or wrong. You just tell it whether its right or wrong If your not scared of equations, a static system is y = f(x), and a dynamical system is a_1 = g(s_1), s_2 = h(a_1) and so on. Static systems are modelled by supervised/self-supervised learning, dynamical systems are modelled by reinforcement learning. LLMs at their core are trained in a self supervised way (the RLHF is afterwards, not on the core of the foundation model) so they cant model a situation where their actions can have consequences that they have to plan for. They dont model the idea of planning at all. Thats why they can write pretty well. And can even pretend to have furhter capabilities, but they fall short of actually being able to do things because that requires planning and understanding the dynamical nature of the real world Training an LLM or any modality of foundation model in a dynamical way would be the biggest improvement in AI since the attention mechanism