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The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-

The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. Other white collar business/bullshit job (ala Graeber) work is meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate those thoughts, thinking about market positioning, etc. Maybe tools like Cowork can help to find files, identify tickets, pull in information, write Excel formulas, etc. What’s different about coding is no one actually cares about code as output from a business standpoint. The code is the end destination for decided business processes. I think, for that reason, that code is uniquely well adapted to LLM takeover. But I’m not so sure about other white-collar jobs. If anything, AI tooling just makes everyone move faster. But an LLM automating a new feature release and drafting a press release and hopping on a sales call to sell the product is (IMO) further off than turning a detailed prompt into a fully functional codebase autonomously.

DaedalusII 8mo ago
when the work involves navigating a bunch of rules with very ambiguous syntax, AI will automate them to the point computers automated rules based systems with very precise syntax in the 1990s https://hazel.ai/tax-planning https://hazel.ai/tax-planning this software (which i am not related to or promoting) is better at investment planning and tax planning than over 90% of RIAs in the US. It will automate RIA to the point that trading software automated stock broking. This will reduce the average RIA fee from 1% per year to 0.20% or even 0.10% per year just like mutual fund fees dropped in the early 00s
- arctic-true 8mo ago
  You could have beaten the returns of most financial professionals over the last several years by just parking your money in the S&P 500, and yet plenty of people are still making a lucrative career out of underperforming it. In some fields, “being better and cheaper” does not always spell victory.
  - DaedalusII 8mo ago
    you are right on beating money managers. when I said investment planning, I meant planning the size and tax structures for investments. this software automates all of the technical work that goes on inside financial planning firms, which is done by tens of thousands of white collar professionals in US/UK/EU, et c. it will then lead to price competitiveness. more expensive silly companies will exist, but the cheap ones get the scale. SP500 index funds have over 1 trillion in the top 3 providers. cathy wood has like 6-7 billion. BNYMellon is the custodian of $50 trillion of investment assets. robinhood has $324bn. silly companies get the headlines though
lich_king 8mo ago
> making slides/decks to communicate those thoughts, That use case is definitely delegated to LLMs by many people. That said, I don't think it translates into linear productivity gains. Most white collar work isn't so fast-paced that if you save an hour making slides, you're going to reap some big productivity benefit. What are you going to do, make five more decks about the same thing? Respond to every email twice? Or just pat yourself on the back and browse Reddit for a while? It doesn't help that these LLM-generated slides probably contain inaccuracies or other weirdness that someone else will need to fix down the line, so your gains are another person's loss.
- sebmellen 8mo ago
  Yeah, but this is self-correcting. Eventually it will get to a point where the data that you use to prompt the LLM will have more signal than the LLM output. But if you get deep into an enterprise, you'll find there are so many irreducible complexities (as Stephen Wolfram might coin them), that you really need a fully agentically empowered worker — meaning a human — to make progress. AI is not there yet.
LPisGood 8mo ago
I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? If you weren’t doing much of that before, I struggled to think of how you were doing much engineering at all, save some more niche extremely technical roles where many of those questions were already answered, but even still, I should expect you’re having those kinds of discussions, just more efficiently and with other engineers.
- sebmellen 8mo ago
  Well that’s why AI will not replace the software engineer!
- tayo42 8mo ago
  Ime a team or project lead does that and the rest of the engineers maybe do that on a smaller scale but mostly implement.
- danans 8mo ago
  > I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? I'd suspect the kind that's going away.
  - LPisGood 8mo ago
    That kind was already reserved for junior roles, contractors, and off shoring.
    - r0m4n0 8mo ago
      I’m not sure everyone would agree with that statement. As a more senior engineer at a big tech company, our execs still believe more code output is expected by level. Hell they even measure and rate you on lines of code deltas. I don’t agree with it or believe it’s smart but it’s the world we live in
8note 8mo ago
> unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. huh? maybe im in the minority, but the thinking:coding has always been 80:20 spend a ton of time thinking and drawing, then write once and debug a bit, and it works this hasnt really changed with Llm coding either, except that for the same amount of thinking, you get more code output
- sebmellen 8mo ago
  Yeah, ratios vary depending on how productive you are with code. For me it was 50:50 and is now 80:20, but only because I was a relatively unproductive coder (struggled with language feature memorization, etc.) and a much more productive thinker/architect.
  - overgard 8mo ago
    "Struggling with language feature memorization" is what we call "unemployed", not "relatively unproductive".
    - sebmellen 8mo ago
      No. You can be a very productive developer and have the syntax be more of a blocker than application design, and the same in reverse. I interview a lot of people, and I've seen people who are astoundingly good at micro-systems, very complex regexes, etc. white struggling massively with system design. And vice versa. People have different talents. But, in my experience, AI will vastly improve the success of the developer who's better at orchestration, architecture, and system design than the developer who's very good at tiny micro-system type of work. Yes, there is still a need for someone who can read and understand regexes... but is there anywhere near as much of a need as before? Not at all. Now. there are very many dual threats, and most truly senior engineers are both. These people now have an even bigger leg up, because they have an understanding of system mechanics + the superpower of Claude Code/etc. They don't have to waste as much time on boilerplate and raw implementation, and yet they can check the output of their input to the AI. They are also probably better equipped to build testing harnesses, etc., that adapt well to agentic use.
ozgrakkurt 8mo ago
Thinking is always the hardest part and the bottleneck for me. It doesn’t capture everyone’s experience when you say thinking is the smaller part of programming. I don’t even believe a regular person is capable of producing good quality code without thinking 2x the amount they are coding
- jama211 8mo ago
  Most people (and most businesses) aren’t making good quality code though. Most tools we use have horrible codebases. Therefore now the code can often be a similar quality to before, just done far faster.
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  Agree. I remember in school in the 1980s reading that a good programmer can write about 10 lines of code a day (citing The Mythical Man-Month) and I thought "that's ridiculous, I can write hundreds of lines a day" but didn't understand that's including all the time understanding requirements, thinking about design, testing, debugging, etc. Writing the code is a small portion of what a software engineer does.
  - pmontra 8mo ago
    Also remember that programs were much smaller, code had to be typed in full and read accurately because compilers were slow and you didn't want to waste time for a syntax error. Anyway it's common even today to work half a day thinking, debugging, testing and eventually git diff shows only two changed lines.
- sebmellen 8mo ago
  As I wrote in a separate comment to someone who responded to me, there is a difference between: (a) thinking about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and (b) the thinking that is required during implementation. {type (a)} was always the majority of my time, but {type (b)} consumed a lot of effort, especially for languages or syntaxes I wasn't very familiar with. {type (b)} consumes very little of my time now.
overgard 8mo ago
> The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP. No coder I've ever met has thought that thinking was anything other than the BIGGEST allocation of time when coding. Nobody is putting their typing words-per-minute on their resume because typing has never been the problem. I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less cognitively intense than sending emails and making slide decks. I honestly think a project managers job is actually a lot easier to automate, if you're going to go there (not that I'm hoping for anyone's job to be automated away). It's a lot easier for an engineer to learn the industry and business than it is for a project manager to learn how to keep their vibe code from spilling private keys all over the internet.
- Kiro 8mo ago
  Our job is not the intellectual exercise you think it is. We're not smarter than anyone else and software development is not automatically more thought-intensive than other jobs. The fact that programming is the first job task to be fully automated says it all.
  - whaleidk 8mo ago
    It’s weird that you equate time spent thinking with intelligence and egotism. Plenty of “normal people” jobs require lots of time spent thinking like art, writing, product and ad design. The only one implying taking time to think equals big brain master race is you
    - Kiro 8mo ago
      "Normal people"? "Big brain master race"? The only one implying weird things here is you.
  - overgard 8mo ago
    When coders need a break from intense coding, what do they do with the remaining hours of the day? Usually, administrative stuff -- sending emails, attending meetings (if they can organize when their meetings are), filing expense reports, etc. IE, the stuff that's easy. Also while I wasn't attempting to suggest that thinking more = higher iq (just that it requires a lot of careful thought), average IQ's per job score are quite a bit higher in software engineering fields.

DaedalusII 8mo ago

when the work involves navigating a bunch of rules with very ambiguous syntax, AI will automate them to the point computers automated rules based systems with very precise syntax in the 1990s https://hazel.ai/tax-planning https://hazel.ai/tax-planning this software (which i am not related to or promoting) is better at investment planning and tax planning than over 90% of RIAs in the US. It will automate RIA to the point that trading software automated stock broking. This will reduce the average RIA fee from 1% per year to 0.20% or even 0.10% per year just like mutual fund fees dropped in the early 00s

arctic-true 8mo ago
You could have beaten the returns of most financial professionals over the last several years by just parking your money in the S&P 500, and yet plenty of people are still making a lucrative career out of underperforming it. In some fields, “being better and cheaper” does not always spell victory.
- DaedalusII 8mo ago
  you are right on beating money managers. when I said investment planning, I meant planning the size and tax structures for investments. this software automates all of the technical work that goes on inside financial planning firms, which is done by tens of thousands of white collar professionals in US/UK/EU, et c. it will then lead to price competitiveness. more expensive silly companies will exist, but the cheap ones get the scale. SP500 index funds have over 1 trillion in the top 3 providers. cathy wood has like 6-7 billion. BNYMellon is the custodian of $50 trillion of investment assets. robinhood has $324bn. silly companies get the headlines though

lich_king 8mo ago

> making slides/decks to communicate those thoughts, That use case is definitely delegated to LLMs by many people. That said, I don't think it translates into linear productivity gains. Most white collar work isn't so fast-paced that if you save an hour making slides, you're going to reap some big productivity benefit. What are you going to do, make five more decks about the same thing? Respond to every email twice? Or just pat yourself on the back and browse Reddit for a while? It doesn't help that these LLM-generated slides probably contain inaccuracies or other weirdness that someone else will need to fix down the line, so your gains are another person's loss.

sebmellen 8mo ago
Yeah, but this is self-correcting. Eventually it will get to a point where the data that you use to prompt the LLM will have more signal than the LLM output. But if you get deep into an enterprise, you'll find there are so many irreducible complexities (as Stephen Wolfram might coin them), that you really need a fully agentically empowered worker — meaning a human — to make progress. AI is not there yet.

LPisGood 8mo ago

I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? If you weren’t doing much of that before, I struggled to think of how you were doing much engineering at all, save some more niche extremely technical roles where many of those questions were already answered, but even still, I should expect you’re having those kinds of discussions, just more efficiently and with other engineers.

sebmellen 8mo ago
Well that’s why AI will not replace the software engineer!
tayo42 8mo ago
Ime a team or project lead does that and the rest of the engineers maybe do that on a smaller scale but mostly implement.
danans 8mo ago
> I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? I'd suspect the kind that's going away.
- LPisGood 8mo ago
  That kind was already reserved for junior roles, contractors, and off shoring.
  - r0m4n0 8mo ago
    I’m not sure everyone would agree with that statement. As a more senior engineer at a big tech company, our execs still believe more code output is expected by level. Hell they even measure and rate you on lines of code deltas. I don’t agree with it or believe it’s smart but it’s the world we live in

8note 8mo ago

> unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. huh? maybe im in the minority, but the thinking:coding has always been 80:20 spend a ton of time thinking and drawing, then write once and debug a bit, and it works this hasnt really changed with Llm coding either, except that for the same amount of thinking, you get more code output

sebmellen 8mo ago
Yeah, ratios vary depending on how productive you are with code. For me it was 50:50 and is now 80:20, but only because I was a relatively unproductive coder (struggled with language feature memorization, etc.) and a much more productive thinker/architect.
- overgard 8mo ago
  "Struggling with language feature memorization" is what we call "unemployed", not "relatively unproductive".
  - sebmellen 8mo ago
    No. You can be a very productive developer and have the syntax be more of a blocker than application design, and the same in reverse. I interview a lot of people, and I've seen people who are astoundingly good at micro-systems, very complex regexes, etc. white struggling massively with system design. And vice versa. People have different talents. But, in my experience, AI will vastly improve the success of the developer who's better at orchestration, architecture, and system design than the developer who's very good at tiny micro-system type of work. Yes, there is still a need for someone who can read and understand regexes... but is there anywhere near as much of a need as before? Not at all. Now. there are very many dual threats, and most truly senior engineers are both. These people now have an even bigger leg up, because they have an understanding of system mechanics + the superpower of Claude Code/etc. They don't have to waste as much time on boilerplate and raw implementation, and yet they can check the output of their input to the AI. They are also probably better equipped to build testing harnesses, etc., that adapt well to agentic use.

ozgrakkurt 8mo ago

Thinking is always the hardest part and the bottleneck for me. It doesn’t capture everyone’s experience when you say thinking is the smaller part of programming. I don’t even believe a regular person is capable of producing good quality code without thinking 2x the amount they are coding

jama211 8mo ago
Most people (and most businesses) aren’t making good quality code though. Most tools we use have horrible codebases. Therefore now the code can often be a similar quality to before, just done far faster.
SoftTalker 8mo ago
Agree. I remember in school in the 1980s reading that a good programmer can write about 10 lines of code a day (citing The Mythical Man-Month) and I thought "that's ridiculous, I can write hundreds of lines a day" but didn't understand that's including all the time understanding requirements, thinking about design, testing, debugging, etc. Writing the code is a small portion of what a software engineer does.
- pmontra 8mo ago
  Also remember that programs were much smaller, code had to be typed in full and read accurately because compilers were slow and you didn't want to waste time for a syntax error. Anyway it's common even today to work half a day thinking, debugging, testing and eventually git diff shows only two changed lines.
sebmellen 8mo ago
As I wrote in a separate comment to someone who responded to me, there is a difference between: (a) thinking about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and (b) the thinking that is required during implementation. {type (a)} was always the majority of my time, but {type (b)} consumed a lot of effort, especially for languages or syntaxes I wasn't very familiar with. {type (b)} consumes very little of my time now.

overgard 8mo ago

> The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP. No coder I've ever met has thought that thinking was anything other than the BIGGEST allocation of time when coding. Nobody is putting their typing words-per-minute on their resume because typing has never been the problem. I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less cognitively intense than sending emails and making slide decks. I honestly think a project managers job is actually a lot easier to automate, if you're going to go there (not that I'm hoping for anyone's job to be automated away). It's a lot easier for an engineer to learn the industry and business than it is for a project manager to learn how to keep their vibe code from spilling private keys all over the internet.

Kiro 8mo ago
Our job is not the intellectual exercise you think it is. We're not smarter than anyone else and software development is not automatically more thought-intensive than other jobs. The fact that programming is the first job task to be fully automated says it all.
- whaleidk 8mo ago
  It’s weird that you equate time spent thinking with intelligence and egotism. Plenty of “normal people” jobs require lots of time spent thinking like art, writing, product and ad design. The only one implying taking time to think equals big brain master race is you
  - Kiro 8mo ago
    "Normal people"? "Big brain master race"? The only one implying weird things here is you.
- overgard 8mo ago
  When coders need a break from intense coding, what do they do with the remaining hours of the day? Usually, administrative stuff -- sending emails, attending meetings (if they can organize when their meetings are), filing expense reports, etc. IE, the stuff that's easy. Also while I wasn't attempting to suggest that thinking more = higher iq (just that it requires a lot of careful thought), average IQ's per job score are quite a bit higher in software engineering fields.