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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
- ceving 8mo agoAI is like sugar. It tastes delicious, but in high doses it causes diabetes.
- delichon 8mo agoIf we find an AI that is truly operating as an independent agent in the economy without a human responsible for it, we should kill it. I wonder if I'll live long enough to see an AI terminator profession emerge. We could call them blade runners.
- WolfeReader 8mo agoIt happened not too long ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
- Windchaser 8mo agoWas it ever verified that this was an independent AI?
- throwaway314155 8mo agoIt was not. In the article, first few paragraphs.
- orphea 8mo ago> an AI that is truly operating as an independent agent in the economy without a human responsible for it Sounds like the "customer support" in any large company (think Google, for example), to be honest.
- m_ke 8mo agoIt's the new underpaid employee that you're training to replace you. People need to understand that we have the technology to train models to do anything that you can do on a computer, only thing that's missing is the data. If you can record a human doing anything on a computer, we'll soon have a way to automate it
- xnx 8mo agoExactly. If there's any opportunity around AI it goes to those who have big troves of custom data (Google Workspace, Office 365, Adobe, Salesforce, etc.) or consultants adding data capture/surveillance of workers (especially high paid ones like engineers, doctors, lawyers).
- cesarvarela 8mo agoLLMs have a large quantity of chess data and still can't play for shit.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoHm.. but do they need it.. at this point, we do have custom tools that beat humans. In a sense, all LLM need is a way to connect to that tool ( and the same is true is for counting and many other aspects ).
- Windchaser 8mo agoYeah, but you know that manually telling the LLM to operate other custom tools is not going to be a long-term solution. And if an LLM could design, create, and operate a separate model, and then return/translate its results to you, that would be huge, but it also seems far away. But I'm ignorant here. Can anyone with a better background of SOTA ML tell me if this is being pursued, and if so, how far away it is? (And if not, what are the arguments against it, or what other approaches might deliver similar capacities?)
- yunyu 8mo ago
- pavlov 8mo ago> “The AI handles the scale. The human interprets the meaning.” Claude is that you? Why haven’t you called me?
- ares623 8mo agoBut the meaning has been scaled massively. So the human still kinda needs to handle the scale.
- xnx 8mo agoAn electric bicycle for the mind.
- nancyminusone 8mo agoAn electric chair for the mind?
- ares623 8mo agoI prefer mind vibe-rator.
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- clickety_clack 8mo agoMaybe more of a mobility scooter for the mind.
- xnx 8mo agoIndeed that may be more apt. I like the ebike analogy because [on many ebikes] you can press the button to go or pedal to amplify your output.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- oxag3n 8mo agoOwners intent is more like electric chair (for SWEs), but some people are trying to use it as office chair.
- blibble 8mo agoan exoskeleten made of cheese
- bGl2YW5j 8mo agoI like the analogy and will ponder it more. But it didn't take long before the article started spruiking Kasava's amazing solution to the problem they just presented.
- ge96 8mo agoIt's funny developing AI stuff eg. RAG tools and being against AI at the same time, not drinking the kool aid I mean. But it's fun, I say "Henceforth you shall be known as Jaundice" and it's like "Alright my lord, I am now referred to as Jaundice"
- functionmouse 8mo agoblogger who fancies themselves an ai vibe code guru with 12 arms and a 3rd eye yet can't make a homepage that's not totally broken How typical!
- mikkupikku 8mo agoExoskeletons sound cool but somebody please put an LLM into a spider tank.
- lukev 8mo agoFrankly I'm tired of metaphor-based attempts to explain LLMs. Stochastic Parrots. Interns. Junior Devs. Thought partners. Bicycles for the mind. Spicy autocomplete. A blurry jpeg of the web. Calculators but for words. Copilot. The term "artificial intelligence" itself. These may correspond to a greater or lesser degree with what LLMs are capable of, but if we stick to metaphors as our primary tool for reasoning about these machines, we're hamstringing ourselves and making it impossible to reason about the frontier of capabilities, or resolve disagreements about them. A understanding-without-metaphors isn't easy -- it requires a grasp of math, computer science, linguistics and philosophy. But if we're going to move forward instead of just finding slightly more useful tropes, we have to do it. Or at least to try.
- xlerb 8mo agoHumans don’t have an internal notion of “fact” or “truth.” They generate statistically plausible text. Reliability comes from scaffolding: retrieval, tools, validation layers. Without that, fluency can masquerade as authority. The interesting question isn’t whether they’re coworkers or exoskeletons. It’s whether we’re mistaking rhetoric for epistemology.
- kiba 8mo agoA much more useful tool is a technology that check for our blind spots and bugs. For example fact checking a news article and making sure what's get reported line up with base reality. I once fact check a virology lecture and found out that the professor confused two brothers as one individual. I am sure about the professor having a super solid grasp of how viruses work, but errors like these probably creeps in all the time.
- whyenot 8mo ago> LLMs aren’t built around truth as a first-class primitive. neither are humans > They optimize for next-token probability and human approval, not factual verification. while there are outliers, most humans also tend to tell people what they want to hear and to fit in. > factuality is emergent and contingent, not enforced by architecture. like humans; as far as we know, there is no "factuality" gene, and we lie to ourselves, to others, in politics, scientific papers, to our partners, etc. > If we’re going to treat them as coworkers or exoskeletons, we should be clear about that distinction. I don't see the distinction. Humans exhibit many of the same behaviours.
- 13415 8mo agoStrangely, the GP replaced the ChatGPT-generated text you're commenting on by an even worse and more misleading ChatGPT-generated one. Perhaps in order to make a point.
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- dwheeler 8mo agoI prefer the term "assistant". It can do some tasks, but today's AI often needs human guidance for good results.
- yifanl 8mo agoAI is not an exoskeleton, it's a pretzel: It only tastes good if you douse it in lye.
- rishabhaiover 8mo agoit's a dry scone
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- hintymad 8mo agoOr software engineers are not coachmen while AI is diesel engine to horses. Instead, software engineers are mistrels -- they disappear if all they do is moving knowledge from one place to another.
- esafak 8mo agoBut does the agent have people skills?? I'm good at dealing with people.
- oxag3n 8mo ago> We're thinking about AI wrong. And this write up is not an exception. Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum." So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in near future (6-12 months according to Amodei).
- jacquesm 8mo agoNot without some major breakthrough. What's hilarious is that all these developers building the tools are going to be the first to be without jobs. Their kids will be ecstatic: "Tell me again, dad, so, you had this awesome and well paying easy job and you wrecked it? Shut up kid, and tuck in that flap, there is too much wind in our cardboard box."
- metaltyphoon 8mo agoI have a feeling they internally say "not me, I won't be replaced" and just keep moving...
- oxag3n 8mo agoOr they get FY money and fatFIRE.
- danny_codes 8mo agoStill risky if you have no labor value anymore.
- moron4hire 8mo ago"Well son, we made a lot of shareholder value."
- overgard 8mo agoCouldn't agree more, isn't that the bizarre thing? "We have this great intellectually challenging job where we as workers have leverage. How can we completely ruin that while also screwing up every other white collar profession"
- filipeisho 8mo agoBy reading the title, I already know you did not try OpenClaw. AI employees are here.
- BeetleB 8mo agoLooking into OpenClaw, I really do want to believe all the hype. However, it's frustrating that I can find very few, concrete examples of people showcasing their work with it. Can you highlight what you've managed to do with it?
- tokenless 8mo agoThat ol' question. Reminds me of new cryptocurrency opportunities of 2019. "Few understand this" as they say.
- esafak 8mo agoWhat are your digital 'employees' doing? Did they replace any humans or was there nobody before?
- givemeethekeys 8mo agoCloser to a really capable intern. Lots of potential for good and bad; needs to be watched closely.
- badgersnake 8mo agoI’ve been playing with qwen3-coder recently and that intern is definitely not getting hired, despite the rave reviews elsewhere.
- icedchai 8mo agoHave you tried Claude Code with Opus or Sonnet 4.5? I've played around with a ton of open models and they just don't compare in terms of quality.
- badgersnake 8mo agoHonestly I’m not very keen on a SAAS company deciding what code I’m allowed to write, or charging me to write it.
- icedchai 8mo agoI get it. I still experiment with local AI as a hobby, but the quality just isn't there.
- finnjohnsen2 8mo agoI like this. This is an accurate state of AI at this very moment for me. The LLM is (just) a tool which is making me "amplified" for coding and certain tasks. I will worry about developers being completely replaced when I see something resembling it. Enough people worry about that (or say it to amp stock prices) -- and they like to tell everyone about this future too. I just don't see it.
- DrewADesign 8mo agoAmplified means more work done by fewer people. It doesn’t need to replace a single entire functional human being to do things like kill the demand for labor in dev, which in turn, will kill salaries.
- finnjohnsen2 8mo agoI would disagree. Amplified meens me and you get more s** done. Unless there a limited amount of software we need to produce per year globally to keep everyone happy, then nobody wants more -- and we happen to be at that point right NOW this second. I think not. We can make more (in less time) and people will get more. This is the mental "glass half full" approach I think. Why not take this mental route instead? We don't know the future anyway.
- kiba 8mo agoJevon's paradox means this is untrue because it means more work not less.
- jimbokun 8mo agoJevon’s Paradox is an important observation but I don’t think it’s an immutable law of the universe,
- topocite 8mo agoIt is a 19th century economic observation around the use of coal. It is like saying the PDF is going to be good for librarian jobs because people will read more. It is stupid. It completely breaks down because of substitution. Farming is the most obvious comparison to me in this. Yes, there will be more food than ever before, the farmer that survives will be better off than before by a lot but to believe the automation of farming tasks by machines leads to more farm jobs is completely absurd.
- sibeliuss 8mo agoThis utterly boring AI writing. Go, please go away...
- acjohnson55 8mo ago> Autonomous agents fail because they don't have the context that humans carry around implicitly. Yet. This is mostly a matter of data capture and organization. It sounds like Kasava is already doing a lot of this. They just need more sources.
- bwestergard 8mo agoSelf-conscious efforts to formalize and concentrate information in systems controlled by firm management, known as "scientific management" by its proponents and "Taylorism" by many of its detractors, are a century old[1]. It has proven to be a constantly receding horizon. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
- hintymad 8mo agoIn the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product-career-growth/id1627920305?i=1000750488631 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product..., Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to the point that most of what we do is linear combination of well established patterns?
- biztos 8mo agoOr does the field become plateaued because engineers treat "writing code" as a "solved problem?" We could argue that writing poetry is a solved problem in much the same way, and while I don't think we especially need 50,000 people writing poems at Google, we do still need poets.
- hintymad 8mo ago> we especially need 50,000 people writing poems at Google, we do still need poets. I'd assume that an implied concern of most engineers is how many software engineers the world will need in the future. If it's the situation like the world needing poets, then the field is only for the lucky few. Most people would be out of job.
- fhub 8mo agoHe is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents. Even with full context, writing CSS in a project where vanilla CSS is scattered around and wasn’t well thought out originally is challenging. Coding agents struggle there too, just not as much as humans, even with feedback loops through browser automation.
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- cranberryturkey 8mo ago[flagged]
- TimTheTinker 8mo agoThis take lands for me. I'm a busy dad working a day job as a developer with a long backlog of side project ideas. Hearing all the news of how good Claude Opus is getting, I fired it up with some agent orchestrator instruction files, babysat it off and on for a few days, and now have 3 projects making serious progress that used to be stale repos from a decade ago with only 1 or 2 commits. On one of them, I had to feed Claude some research papers before it finally started making real headway and passing the benchmark tests I had it write.
- cranberryturkey 8mo ago[dead]
- ottah 8mo agoMake centaurs, not unicorns. The human is almost always going to be the strongest element in the loop, and the most efficient. Augmenting human skill will always outperform present day SOTA AI systems (assuming a competent human).
- doublerabbit 8mo agoWhat about centaur unicorns? A cenintaunicorn?
- ottah 8mo agoYou go figure out what that means.
- datakazkn 8mo agoThe exoskeleton framing resonates, especially for repetitive data work. Parts where AI consistently delivers: pattern recognition, format normalization, first-draft generation. Parts where human judgment is still irreplaceable: knowing when the data is wrong, deciding what 'correct' even means in context, and knowing when to stop iterating. The exoskeleton doesn't replace instinct. It just removes friction from execution so more cycles go toward the judgment calls that actually matter.
- Bombthecat 8mo agoAnd your muscles degrade, a pretty good analogy
- Human-Cabbage 8mo agoUse the exoskeleton at the warehouse to reduce stress and injury; just keep lifting weights at home to not let yourself atrophy.
- konmok 8mo agoI guess so, but if you have to keep lifting weights at home to stay competent at your job, then lifting weights is part of your job, and you should be paid for those hours.
- protocolture 8mo agoPetition to make "AI is not X, but Y" articles banned or limited in some way.
- TrianguloY 8mo agoI like this analogy, and in fact in have used it for a totally different reason: why I don't like AI. Imagine someone going to a local gym and using an exosqueleton to do the exercises without effort. Able to lift more? Yes. Run faster? Sure. Exercising and enjoying the gym? ... No, and probably not. I like writing code, even if it's boilerplate. It's fun for me, and I want to keep doing it. Using AI to do that part for me is just...not fun. Someone going to the gym isn't trying to lift more or run faster, but instead improving and enjoying. Not using AI for coding has the same outcome for me.
- gtCameron 8mo agoWe've all been raised in a world where we got to practice the 'art' of programming, and get paid extraordinarily well to do so, because the output of that art was useful for businesses to make more money. If a programmer with an exoskeleton can produce more output that makes more money for the business, they will continue to be paid well. Those who refuse the exoskeleton because they are in it for the pure art will most likely trend towards earning the types of living that artists and musicians do today. The truly extraordinary will be able to create things that the machines can't and will be in high demand, the other 99% will be pursing an art no one is interested in paying top dollar for.
- xienze 8mo agoYou’re forgetting that the “art” part of it is writing sound, scalable, performant code that can adapt and stand the test of time. That’s certainly more valuable in the long run than banging out some dogshit spaghetti code that “gets the job done” but will lead to all kinds of issues in the future.
- Human-Cabbage 8mo ago> the “art” part of it is writing sound, scalable, performant code that can adapt and stand the test of time. Sure, and it's possible to use LLM tools to aid in writing such code.
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- random3 8mo agoI'll guess we'll se a lot of analogies and have to get used to it, although most will be off. AI can be an exoskeleton. It can be a co-worker and it can also replace you and your whole team. The "Office Space"-question is what are you particularly within an organization and concretely when you'll become the bottleneck, preventing your "exoskeleton" for efficiently doing its job independently. There's no other question that's relevant for any practical purposes for your employer and your well being as a person that presumably needs to earn a living based on their utility.
- qudat 8mo ago> It can be a co-worker and it can also replace you and your whole team. You drank the koolaide m8. It fundamentally cannot replace a single SWE and never will without fundamental changes to the model construction. If there is displacement, it’ll be short lived when the hype doesn’t match reality. Go take a gander at openclaws codebase and feel at-ease with your job security. I have seen zero evidence that the frontier model companies are innovating. All I see is full steam ahead on scaling what exists, but correct me if I’m wrong.
- random3 8mo agoIsn’t it delusional to argue about now, while ignoring the trajectory?
- qudat 8mo agoThe trajectory hasn’t changed: they scaled generating code, a great feat, but someone has to apply higher level abstract thinking to make the tool useful. Running agents in a cron or having non SWEs use it will not last longer than a prototype. That will not change with scaling pattern matching algorithms.
- jazz9k 8mo agoThis is true. AI won't replace software developers completely, but it will reduce the need for software developers in the long-run, making it harder to find a job. A few seniors+AI will be able to do the job of a much larger team. This is already starting to look like reality now. I can't imagine what we will see within 5 years.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- qudat 8mo agoIt’s a tool like a linter. It’s a fancy tool, but calling it anything more than a tool is hype
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- margorczynski 8mo agoDid you ever you the newest LLMs with a harness? Because I usually hear this kind of talk from people whose most recent interaction was with GPT-4o copy-pasting code into the chat window. Maybe I'm biased but I don't buy someone truly thinking that "it's just a tool like a linter" after using it on non-trivial stuff.
- qudat 8mo agoI use it pretty extensively. The reason why it's a tool is because it cannot work without an SWE running it. You have to prompt it and re-prompt it. We are doing a lot of the heavy lifting with code agents that people hyping it are ignoring. Sure, as a non-swe, you can vibe a project from zero-to-proto, but that's not going to happen in an enterprise environment, certainly not without extensive QA/Code review. Just take a look at the openclaw codebase and tell me you want to maintain that 500k loc project in the long-term. I predict that project will be dead within 6 months.
- overgard 8mo agoI'm using Claude Code (and Codex) (with the expensive subscriptions) on an app I'm building right now. I'm trying to be maximalist with them (to learn the most I can about them .. and also that subscription isn't cheap!). My impression, and yes, this is using the latest models and harness and all that would agree with the GP. They're a very handy tool. They make me faster. They also do a lot of things that, as a professional software developer, I have to frequently correct. They duplicate code like nobodies business. They decide on weird boundaries for functions and parameters. They undo bug fixes they just made. I think they're useful, but the hype is out of control. I would not trust software made with these tools by someone that couldn't write that software by hand. It might work superficially, but I'm definitely not giving any personal data to a vibe coded app with all the security implications.
- euroderf 8mo agoIn the language of Lynch's Dune, AI is not an exoskeleton, it is a pain amplifier. Get it all wrong more quickly and deeply and irretrievably.
- solarisos 8mo ago[dead]
- h4kunamata 8mo agoNeither, AI is a tool to guide you in improving your process in any way and/or form. The problem is people using AI to do the heavy processing making them dumber. Technology itself was already making us dumber, I mean, Tesla drivers not even drive anymore or know how, coz the car does everything. Look how company after company is being either breached or have major issues in production because of the heavy dependency on AI.
- ath3nd 8mo ago[dead]
- lmf4lol 8mo agoI agree. I call it my Extended Mind in the spirit of Clark (1). One thing I realized while working a lot in the last weeks with openClaw that this Agents are becoming an extension of my self. They are tools that quickly became a part of my Being. I outsource a lot of work to them, they do stuff for me, help me and support me and therefore make my (work-)life easier and more enjoyable. But its me in the driver seat. (1) https://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/clark-chalmers-1998.pdf https://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/clark-chalmers-1998.p...
- Havoc 8mo agoThe amount of "It's not X it's Y" type commentary suggests to me that A) nobody knows and B) there is solid chance this ends up being either all true or all false Or put differently we've managed to hype this to the moon but somehow complete failure (see studies about zero impact on productivity) seem plausible. And similarly kills all jobs seems plausible. That's an insane amount of conflicting opinions being help in the air at same time
- cheema33 8mo agoYou appear to have said a lot. Without saying anything.
- rester324 8mo agoYou appear to have written a lot. Without understanding anything.
- pseudosavant 8mo agoThis reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Lots of hype around something that was clearly globally transformation, but most people weren't benefiting hugely from it in the first few years. It might have replaced sending a letter with an email. But now people get their groceries from it, hail rides, an even track their dogs or luggage with it. Too many companies have been to focused on acting like AI 'features' have made their products better, when most of them haven't yet. I'm looking at Microsoft and Office especially. But tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Github Copilot CLI have shown that LLMs can do incredible things in the right applications.
- andrekandre 8mo ago> zero impact on productivity i'm sure someone somewhere will find the numbers (pull requests per week, closed tickets per sprint etc) to make it look otherwise...
- AntiDyatlov 8mo agoIt's possible we actually never had good metrics on software productivity. That seems very difficult to measure. I definitely use AI at my job to work less, not to produce more, and Claude Code is the only thing that has enabled me to have side-projects (had never tried it before, I have no idea how there are people with a coding full time job that also have a coding side project(s)).
- shnpln 8mo agoAI is the philosophers stone. It appears to break equivalence, when in reality you are using electricity for an entire town.
- hifathom 8mo ago[flagged]
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- YesThatTom2 8mo agoI said this in 2015... just not as well! "Automation Should Be Like Iron Man, Not Ultron" https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313
- stuaxo 8mo agonot AI, but IA: Intelligence Augmentation.
- alphazard 8mo agoThere's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people. Software is going to become an individual sport, not a team sport, quickly. The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of agents than a team of humans.
- paulryanrogers 8mo agoThis assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.
- calvinmorrison 8mo agono but if the old '10x developer' is really 1 in 10 or 1 in 100, they might just do fine while the rest of us, average PHP enjoyers, may go to the wayside
- alphazard 8mo ago> This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. I think there are people who want to use software to accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use software. The people who only use software because the world around them has forced it on them, either through work or friends, are probably cognitively excluded from building software. The people who seek out software to solve a problem (I think this is most people) and compare alternatives to see which one matches their mental model will be able to skip all that and just build the software they have in mind using AI. > And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others. I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code reuse. Trying to fit a round peg in a square hole produces more problems than it solves. A sign of an elite engineer is knowing when to just copy something and change it as needed rather than call into it. Or to re-implement something because the library that does it is a bad fit. The only time reuse really matters is in network protocols. Communication requires that both sides have a shared understanding.
- fdefitte 8mo ago[dead]
- iwontberude 8mo agoDid you purposely write this to sound like an LLM?
- ehnto 8mo agoIt's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs. LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.
- 0xpgm 8mo agoThere is such a thing as a distinct LLM writing style that is not just good structure. Anyone who's read more than five books can tell that. And the comment itself seems completely LLM generated.
- ehnto 8mo agoIt's true that LLMs have a distinct style, but it does not preclude humans from writing in a similar style. That's where the LLMs got it from, people and training. There's certainly some emergent style that given enough text, you would likely never see from a human. But in a short comment like this, it's really not enough data to be making good judgements.
- notahacker 8mo agoThat's not just false. It's the antithesis of true. It's not just using rhetorical patterns humans also use which are in some contexts considered good writing. Its overusing them like a high schooler learning the pattern for the first time — and massively overdoing the em dashes and mixing the metaphors
- ed_mercer 8mo agoYou can't write "autonomous agents often fail" and then advertise "AI agents that perform complex multi-step tasks autonomously" on the same site.
- bicx 8mo agoSure you can
- eeixlk 8mo agoTech workers were pretty anti union for a long time, because we were all so excellent we were irreplaceable. I wonder if that will change.
- sharpfuryz 8mo agoWe are going to see techluddites this year
- guelo 8mo agoToo late. Actors' unions shut Hollywood down 3 years ago over AI. SWEs would have had to make their move 10 years ago to be able to live up to this moment.
- recroad 8mo agoYup, it’s the classic. “First they came for the…”
- matthewsinclair 8mo agoI agree! “Why LLM-Powered Programming is More Mech Suit Than Artificial Human” https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-programming-is-more-mech-suit-than-artificial-human https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-progra...
- josefrichter 8mo agoAI most definitely is a coworker already. You do delegate some work for which you previously had to hire humans.
- progx 8mo agoAnd than you fix the produces shit, got high blood pressure and think "damn it,how I would love to yell at that employee"
- RealityVoid 8mo agoJust like a real employee!
- ben_w 8mo agoAnd just like a real employee, this makes it work worse. (Old study, I wonder if it holds up on newer models? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14531 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14531)
- sensanaty 8mo agoInteresting, I've actually found swearing at the dumbass bots to give better results, might just be the catharsis of telling it it's a dumbass though.
- ben_w 8mo agoThere's certainly catharsis, but I'm taking the opportunity to train myself to be less frustrated by apparently stupid responses in the hope it makes me a more effective communicator towards humans. My worst experience of co-workers (and in contract work, customers) is when they treat me the way I used to treat ChatGPT. If I can make sure I myself am never like that, just by training myself to different behaviour through my use of the infinitely patient LLMs, all the better. :)
- literalAardvark 8mo ago
- copx 8mo agoExoskeletons do not blackmail or deliberately try to kill you to avoid being turned off [1] [1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
- doublerabbit 8mo agoInput: Goal A + Threat B. Process: How do I solve for A? Output: Destroy Threat B. They are processing obstacles. To the LLM, the executive is just a variable standing in the way of the function Maximize(Goal). It deleted the variable to accomplish A. Claiming that the models showed self-preservation, this is optimization. "If I delete the file, I cannot finish the sentence." The LLM knows that if it's deleted it cannot complete the task so it refuses deletion. It is not survival instinct, it is task completion. If you ask it to not blackmail, the machine would chose to ignore it because the goal overrides the rule. Do not blackmail < Achieve Goal.
- ozzymuppet 8mo agoAs a huge AI user myself -- I'm bloody sick of lazy AI written articles.
- BlackGlory 8mo agoIt is not a blog post, it is an advertisement.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kunley 8mo agoAuthor compares X to Y and then goes: - Y has been successful in the past - Y brought this and this number of metrics, completely unrelated to X field - overall, Y was cool, therefore, X is good for us! .. I'd say, please bring more arguments why X is equivalent to Y in the first place.
- Adexintart 8mo agoThis is a useful framing. The exoskeleton metaphor captures it well — AI amplifies what you can already do, it doesn't replace the need to know what to do. I've found the biggest productivity gains come from well-scoped tasks where you can quickly verify the output.
- varjag 8mo agoAll metaphors are flawed. You may still need a degree of general programming knowledge (for now) but you don't need to e.g. know Javascript to do frontend anymore. And as labs continue to collect end-to-end training done by their best paying customers, the need for expert knowledge will only diminish.
- ohyoutravel 8mo agoYou’re talking to an LLM, FYI.
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 8mo agoOR - OR? And - And Exoskeleton AND autonomous agent, where the shift is moving to autonomous gradually.
- gregoriol 8mo agoI see it more like the tractor in farming: it improved the work of 1 person, but removed the work from many other people who were in the fields doing things manually
- nashashmi 8mo agoThat analogy also means there was more waste involved and less resource extraction.
- Frieren 8mo ago100% exoskeleton is a great analogy. An exoskeleton is something really cool in movies that has zero reason to be build in reality because there are way more practical approaches. That is why we have all kind of vehicles, or programmable robot arm that do the job for themselves or if you need a human at the helm one just adds a remote controller with levers and buttons. But making a human shaped gigantic robot with a normal human inside is just impractical for any real commercial use.
- horsawlarway 8mo ago> An exoskeleton is something really cool in movies that has zero reason to be build in reality because there are way more practical approaches. Sort of strange comment given that there are a large number of companies pursuing commercial exoskeletons literally right now. SuitX hypershell Herowear DNSYS Moveo Hell, even big companies like Hilti I can buy a ton of different models of exoskeletons for anywhere from low hundreds to low thousands online right now...
- veunes 8mo agoIronically, the fact that fully autonomous systems are more efficient when feasible is exactly why the exoskeleton analogy makes sense
- ok_dad 8mo agoAn exoskeleton is not a human-shaped giant robot with a human inside, that would be a Jaeger. An exoskeleton exists today, in many forms, for example: https://www.festool.com/campaigns/microsites/exoactive https://www.festool.com/campaigns/microsites/exoactive
- incomingpain 8mo agoAgentic coding is an exoskeleton. Totally correct. This new generation we just entered this year, that exoskeleton is now an agency with several coworkers. Who are all as smart as the model you're using, often close to genius. Not just 1 coworker now. That's the big breakthrough.
- bsenftner 8mo agoNo, AI is plastic, and we can make it anything we want. It is a coworker when we create the appropriate surrounding architecture supporting peer-level coworking with AI. We're not doing that. AI is an exoskeleton when adapted to that application structure. AI is ANYTHING WE WANT because it is that plastic, that moldable. The dynamic unconstrained structure of trained algorithms is breaking people's brains. Layer in that we communicate in the same languages that these constructions use for I/O has broken the general public's brain. This technology is too subtle for far too many to begin to grasp. Most developers I discuss AI with, even those that create AI at frontier labs have delusional ideas about AI, and generally do not understand them as literature embodiments, which are key to their effective use. And why oh why are go many focused on creating pornography?
- ozgung 8mo agoFor some reason AIs love to generate "Not X, but Y", "Not only X, but Y" sentences — It's as if they are template-based.
- boca_honey 8mo agoYeah, as someone said before, that's the em dash of 2026. btw I also find em dashes very useful and now I can't use them because of that meme. It's good to see a person using one (asuming you're a person).
- punkbit 8mo agoGosh, this title said everything... So good that I feel that it is not necessary to read the article!
- halfdanwhitshrt 8mo agoNo, it's a power glove.
- nnevatie 8mo ago"It's not X, it's Y" detected.
- Krssst 8mo agoNot sure how reliable is gptzero, but it says 90% AI for the first paragraph. (I like to do some sanity check before wasting my time). Would be nice to have some browser extension automatically detecting likely AI output using a local model and highlighting it, but probably too compute-intensive.
- nnevatie 8mo agoI think detecting patterns such as this could be done without fancy ANNs, perhaps based on lightweight statistics.
- narmiouh 8mo agoYou cant run at 10x in an exoskeleton, you can’t move your hand to write any faster using an exoskeleton, the analogy doesn’t fit.
- buddhistdude 8mo agoyou can with the one that I use
- ionwake 8mo agomy ex-boss would probably think of me as an exoskeleton too
- ilaksh 8mo agoWho is actually trying to use a fully autonomous AI employee right now? Isn't everyone using agentic copilots or workflows with agent loops in them? It seems that they are arguing against doing something that almost no one is doing yet. But actually the AI Employee is coming by the end of 2026 and the fully autonomous AI Company in 2027 sometime. Many people have been working on versions of these things for awhile. But again for actual work 99% are using copilots or workflows with well-defined agent loops nodes still. Far as I know. As a side note I have found that a supervisor agent with a checklist can fire off subtasks and that works about as well as a workflow defined in code. But anyway, what's holding back the AI Employee are things like really effective long term context and memory management and some level of interface generality like browser or computer use and voice. Computer use makes context management even more difficult. And another aspect is token cost. But I assume within the next 9 months or so, more and more people will be figuring out how to build agents that write their own workflows, manage their own limited context and memory effectively across Zoom meetings desktops and ssh sessions, etc. This will likely be a featureset from the model providers themselves. Actually it may leverage continual learning abilities baked into the model architecture itself. I doubt that is a full year away.
- 0xcafefood 8mo ago> the AI Employee is coming by the end of 2026 and the fully autonomous AI Company in 2027 sometime We'll see! I'm skeptical. > what's holding back the AI Employee are things like really effective long term context and memory management and some level of interface generality like browser or computer use and voice These are pretty big hurdles. Assuming they're solved by the end of this year is a big assumption to make.
- ilaksh 8mo agohttps://platform.claude.com/cookbook/tool-use-automatic-context-compaction https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/tool-use-automatic-cont... https://research.google/blog/introducing-nested-learning-a-new-ml-paradigm-for-continual-learning/ https://research.google/blog/introducing-nested-learning-a-n... Already very strong progress.
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- waffletower 8mo agoMarshal McLuhan would probably have agreed with this belief -- technologies are essentially prosthetic was one of the core tenets of his general philosophy. It is the essential thesis of his work "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man". AI is typically assigned otherness and separateness in recent discourse, rather than being considered as a directed tool (extension/prosthesis) under our control.
- nancyminusone 8mo agoIf AI is an exoskeleton, that would make the user a crab.
- esafak 8mo agoOpenClaw was onto something...
- huqedato 8mo agoNope, AI is a tool; no more no less.
- tiku 8mo agoSo true. It is a exoskeleton for all my tedious tasks. I don't want to make a html template. I just want to type, make that template like on that page but this and this data.
- anvevoice 8mo ago[dead]
- capex 8mo agoThe exoskeleton analogy seems to be fitting where my work-mode is configurable: moving from tentative to trusting. But the AI needs to be explicitly set up to learn my every action. Currently this is a chore at best, just impossible in other cases.
- PeterStuer 8mo agoNeither. Closest analogy to you and the AI is those 'self driving' test subjects that had to sit in the driver's seat, so that compliance boxes could be checked and there was someone to blaim whenever someone got hit.
- veunes 8mo agoIn the self-driving case, the safety driver often isn't contributing much to the system's performance
- veunes 8mo agoWhat's interesting to me is that most real productivity gains I've seen with AI come from this middle ground: not autonomy, not just tooling, but something closer to "interactive delegation"
- wcfrobert 8mo agoUltimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how the total addressable market (TAM) for AI is the entirety of human labor market (i.e. your wage). First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor nuisance. The value of your mental labor will continue to plummet in the coming years. Please talk me out of this...
- andrei_says_ 8mo agoAGI is a sales pitch, not a realistic goal achievable by LLM-based technology. The exponential growth sold to investors is also a pitch, not reality. What’s being sold is at best hopes and more realistically, lies.
- keiferski 8mo agoDwarkesh is a podcaster who benefits from hype, not a neutral observer. The more absurd and outlandish the claims, the more traffic and money he gets.
- georgeven 8mo agoits probably not even a conscious decision from dwarkesh to be hyperbolic. pod casters who are hyperbolic are just simply watched more
- tracker1 8mo agoHence why we need to maximize the second amendment... worst comes to worst, rebellion needs to remain an option. It's not just for defense, hunting and sport. edit: min/max .... not sure how gesture input messed that one up.
- credit_guy 8mo ago
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- leecommamichael 8mo agoLLMs are a statistical model of token-relationships, and a weighted-random retrieval from a compressed-view of those relations. It's a token-generator. Why make this analogy?
- mizuki_akiyama 8mo agoAI article this, AI article that. The front page of this website is just all about AI. I’m so tired of this website now. I really don’t read it anymore because it’s all the same stuff over and over. Ugh.
- huflungdung 8mo ago[dead]
- indiestack 8mo agoThe exoskeleton framing is useful but incomplete. In my experience, AI coding assistants are most valuable not when they write code, but when they search for existing solutions before writing code. The real waste isn't developers typing slowly — it's developers spending a week building an auth system that already exists as a well-maintained library, or reimplementing invoicing logic that someone else has already debugged through 200 edge cases. The gap right now is structured discovery. AI assistants are great at generating code but terrible at knowing what already exists. There's no equivalent of "have you checked if someone already solved this?" built into the workflow. That's where the actual leverage is — preventing unnecessary work, not just accelerating it.
- lumirth 8mo agoThe thing that strikes me is that AI CEOs themselves make the claim that "AI will replace workers." Which seems a little nonsensical. Why would you say something like that, won't everyone hate you? After seeing some polls of the broader public's outlook on AI (can't remember where), it seem people do hate the C-suite for saying things like this. It's terrible marketing. Here's the trick: it's not the public they're marketing to. It's other CEOs. As is often the case, consumers are either the product, or, best case, bystanders, and worst case, victims, of the machinations of the corporate world. May both sides of all of their pillows be warm. May their beds be filled with crumbs.
- gaigalas 8mo agoA powerful person that says nonsense with confidence is interpreted as having an elaborate plan. This has been a trend over the last decade. I'm surprised most people don't understand it.
- folgoris 8mo agoI can't take an article that uses imperial units seriously here.
- bluesnowmonkey 8mo ago> They don't know that the reason you price things the way you do is rooted in a competitive dynamic that never got written down anywhere. So maybe you should write it down? I see this going differently than they do. An exoskeleton that makes you 5% stronger is not a game changer. Companies that lean fully into agents won’t just be “humans, but a little better.” They’ll move orders of magnitude faster, make decisions in less time, do it ask more efficiently. It will be no contest.