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Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
- sp4cec0wb0y 7mo agoMy speed shipping software increased but so did the demands of features by my company.
- 22c 7mo agoPMs can now also ship their half-baked requirements documents even faster thanks to the help of AI.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo agoOr worse. I’ve heard stories from friends where leadership expects huge boosts in productivity due to LLMs, and perceive anything but an order of magnitude boost as incompetence or a refusal to adapt.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoTo be fair, some of it might genuinely be refusal to adapt? If we go by HN comments, there definitely do seem to be at least some people who are letting their hangups prevent them from learning this tech. > It can't think, it just predicts likely tokens > I can't believe this industry I once cherished for rational professionalism has fallen for nondeterministism > Sorry, I'm just not going to participate in destroying the planet with these power hunger DCs > All this stuff actually costs 10x what a human developer costs but they're dumping the service at a low price to make us dependent. > It's a bubble, or a scam, in a year or two everything will go back to normal. Tell me sentiments like these don't get bandied about by devs who want to keep doing things the way they know and like.
- eudamoniac 7mo agoI just don't want to use it. It may or may not be a big deal, I lean toward it not being, but even if it is I would prefer not to use it, so I'm going to resist it as far as possible. I don't pretend it's about any higher principle than me not liking it. I'll wait to get put on a PIP and then I'll do exactly what they ask.
- sdf2df 7mo agoI don't really get this TBH. Shipping speed never/is was the issue. Most companies are terrible at figuring out what exactly they should be allocating resources behind. Speeding up does not solve the problem that most humans who are at the top of the hierarchy are poor thinkers. In fact it compounds it. More noise, nice.
- thewhitetulip 7mo agoYep requirement gathering takes forever Then validation takes forever Writing code is lesser problem than figuring out what we want when we want, and to get stakeholders at one place.
- sdf2df 7mo agoFinally, a fella who gets it. Apple has already shown this decades ago - they got the iPhone and iPod developed and out the door in relatively short-time scales given the impact of the products on the world. Once you know what you want, exactly what you want, things moves fast - really fast.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- thewhitetulip 7mo agoI've seen biz team taking 3 4 months to do UAT But sure let's buy 200$ per month claude to ship things faster lol
- sdf2df 7mo agoLol yeah. Much of the issues re. lack of productivity comes from management who dont have the ability to focus+clarity+confidence of where to go and also create the environment to get the max out of people.
- rishabhaiover 7mo ago> There's suggestive evidence that hiring of young workers (ages 22–25) into exposed occupations has slowed — roughly a 14% drop in the job-finding rate There goes my excuse of not finding a job in this market.
- keybored 7mo ago[flagged]
- programmertote 7mo ago[flagged]
- yodsanklai 7mo ago> that my spouse and her colleagues use AI A LOT for diagnosis and treatment plans I hope they know what they're doing.
- DiscourseFan 7mo agoJust like anything else, you either think "that's definitely wrong" or "huh, I guess that's probably it." If its really serious, you have to pause and make of a judgement call of course.
- alexpotato 7mo agoThere was a recent anecdote from the head of radiology, Mayo Clinic I believe, that went something like this: - AI has allowed radiologists to review a much higher rate of x-rays - The above has led to a dramatic increase in need for faster processing, more storage of scans etc - which in turn led to needing a bigger IT department to manage all of the additional workload There was a similar anecdote about the IRS where the claim is they went from having N accountants to having much fewer accountants but now they need N IT people to manage the new systems.
- behnamoh 7mo agoI don't think there's been much of an impact, really. Those who know how to use AI just got tangentially more productive (because why would you reveal your fake 10x productivity boost so your boss hands you 10x more tasks to finish?), and those w/o AI knowledge stayed the way they were. The real impact is for indie-devs or freelancers but that usually doesn't account for much of the GDP.
- dingnuts 7mo ago[dead]
- piyh 7mo agoWork is freezing hiring and upping spending on tokens for everyone. Don't know if this is effective and I don't think management knows either, but it's what they're doing
- re-thc 7mo ago> Work is freezing hiring and upping spending on tokens for everyone. Doesn't mean the two are related. Is AI just the excuse? We've got tariffs, war, uncertainty and other drama non stop.
- piyh 7mo agoIt's what they're telling us
- pydry 7mo agoWhich story sends a more positive signal to shareholders? "We've frozen hiring because our growth potential is tapped out." "We've frozen hiring because AI can replace employees."
- shimman 7mo agoYou should look into the concepts of skepticism, materialism, and cynicism. Maybe don't trust the leadership of where you work, the leadership that sees you as a number and not a human.
- shimman 7mo ago[flagged]
- aeon_ai 7mo agoWhat’s your proposed alternative, hotshot armchair expert? They do nothing?
- g947o 7mo agoWell, there is such a thing called academic institutions whose revenue does not depend on selling AI products, just as an example.
- shimman 7mo agoMy alternative? Nationalize the company and implement a workplace democracy to replace the executive team + board. I trust the workers more to dictate the direction of a company than most executives. They can't do worse. edit: or what another commentator said, fucking academia. Public universities have done more for humanity than nearly anything to come out of SV. Surveillance capitalism, mass misery + psychosis; it's very telling what our society values when mass amounts of the Earth are desperately trying to ban these very same services to protect children.
- nickphx 7mo agoYou know you're having a real impact when you have to self-report on the impact you're having.
- alexpotato 7mo ago[flagged]
- g947o 7mo agoI am not going to trust a single word from a company whose business is selling you AI products.
- marginalia_nu 7mo ago... and eyeing an IPO.
- SamuelAdams 7mo agoI also thought it was hilarious that they invented a brand new metric that (surprise) makes their product’s long term projection look really good (financially).
- oxag3n 7mo agoThe problem it's not intended for plebs. It just becomes a source of truth for media and corporate decision machines.
- tl2do 7mo agoFrom my experience as a software engineer, doubling my productivity hasn’t reduced my workload. My output per hour has gone up, but expectations and requirements have gone up just as fast. Software development is effectively endless work, and AI has mostly compressed timelines rather than reduced total demand.
- liuliu 7mo agoIt is not going to reduce your workload. It is going to remove one of your co-workers.
- johnfn 7mo agoThis seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
- vkou 7mo ago> This seems unlikely. It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.
- sdf2df 7mo agoErm its been fucked for many years across many professions, it was just less so for software engineering in particular. Now entry into the S-E profession is taking a hit. Also dont forget theres only so many viable revenue-generating and cost-saving projects to take. And said above - overhiring in COVID.
- dvt 7mo agoBecause of overhiring during the post-COVID free money glitch, not because of AI.
- Rury 7mo agoThat's not necessarily a result of AI, you also have to consider the broader economic environment. I mean, it was also difficult to get a job as a graduate in 2008, whereas it's typically been easier to get a job when credit is cheap.
- zthrowaway 7mo agoMy day to day is even busier now with agents all over the place making code changes. The Security landscape is even more complex now overnight. The only negative impact I see is that there’s not much need for junior devs right now. The agent fills that role in a way. But we’ll have to backfill some way or another.
- thatmf 7mo agocigarettes don't cause cancer! -cigarette companies
- keeda 7mo agoExcept this is the company that's been saying "We will cause cancer, please regulate us!"
- oytis 7mo agoPlease regulate our competition! Challenging our monopoly is a national security risk!
- keeda 7mo agoCould you point me to a comment where anyone said regulation should only apply to their competition? Any talk has been for the entire AI industry. If you claim regulation favors the incumbents, well take it up with parent commenter whose comment seems to imply that regulation is needed!
- camdenreslink 7mo agoIncumbents love regulation, because they are much better positioned to comply with it than any upstarts or new challengers. So, when a company like Anthropic gets a decent marketshare, their priority shifts to lobbying for regulation to limit competition. It is a form of regulatory capture.
- keeda 7mo agoThat's what I meant, but as the root comment implied, regulation is needed, so the solution is not laissez-faire. These companies are not going to regulate themselves. Capitalism is going to drive them to relentlessly compete for growth at all costs, a lot of which would be imposed on society. At least they are honest that regulation is needed, unlike Big Tobacco.
- black_13 7mo ago[dead]
- Copyrightest 7mo ago[dead]
- bandrami 7mo agoI don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.
- bandrami 7mo agoThe dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.
- righthand 7mo agoIn my experience it is now twice the amount of merge requests as a follow-up appears to correct any bugs no one reviewed in the first merge request.
- silentkat 7mo agoI’m at a big tech company. They proudly stated more productivity measures in commits (already nonsense). 47% more commits, 17% less time per commit. Meaning 128% more time spent coding. Burning us out and acting like the AI slop is “unlocking” productivity. There’s some neat stuff, don’t get me wrong. But every additional tool so far has started strong but then always falls over. Always. Right now there’s this “orchestrator” nonsense. Cool in principle, but as someone who made scripts to automate with all the time before it’s not impressive. Spent $200 to automate doing some bug finding and fixing. It found and fixed the easy stuff (still pretty neat), and then “partially verified” it fixed the other stuff. The “partial verification” was it justifying why it was okay it was broken. The company has mandated we use this technology. I have an “AI Native” rating. We’re being told to put out at least 28 commits a month. It’s nonsense. They’re letting me play with an expensive, super-high-level, probabilistic language. So I’m having a lot of fun. But I’m not going to lie, I’m very disappointed. Got this job a year ago. 12 years programming experience. First big tech job. Was hoping to learn a lot. Know my use of data to prioritize work could be better. Was sold on their use of data. I’m sure some teams here use data really well, but I’m just not impressed. And I’m not even getting into the people gaming the metrics to look good while actually making more work for everyone else.
- nitwit005 7mo agoThe problem with using unemployment as a metric is hiring is driving by perception. You're making an educated guess as to how many people you need in the future. Anthropic can cause layoffs through pure marketing. People were crediting an Anthropic statement in causing a drop in IBM's stock value, which may genuinely lead to layoffs: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-stock-plunges-ai-threat-142900181.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-stock-plunges-ai-threat-1... We'll probably have to wait for the hype to wear off to get a better idea, but that might take a long while.
- pixl97 7mo agoBetween 2004 and 2008 I did many things in computing as a company that offered my services, one of these was information gathering automation. It almost never immediately lead to decreases in employment. The systems had a to be in place for a while, people had to get used to them, people had to stop making common mistakes with them. Then the 2008 crash happened and those people were gone in a blink of an eye and never replaced. The companies grew in staff after that, but it was in things like sales and marketing.
- nitwit005 7mo agoI'm afraid I can't find the connection between this and what I wrote.
- pixl97 7mo agoLayoffs are very rarely directly correlated with a new technology coming into place. As much as businesses say they are forward looking and looking to increase profits, they'll commonly remain conservative until they are forced by external conditions, say a recession. This is, if AI is going to cause job losses it will feel very small for some time, then it will happen suddenly all at once with little to no time to properly react.
- andai 7mo agoHow is Anthropic getting this data? Are they running science experiments on people's chat history? (In the app, API or both?)
- boxedemp 7mo agoI'm sure they're collecting all kinds of insights from the prompts.
- nl 7mo agoThis is a pretty interesting report. The TL;DR is that there is little measurable impact (and I'd personally add "yet"). To quote: "We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations" My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle. I have doubts that this impact is measurable yet - there is a lag between hiring intention and impact on jobs, and outside Silicon Valley large scale hiring decisions are rarely made in a 3 month timeframe. The most interesting part is the radar plot showing the lack of usage of AI in many industries where the capability is there!
- jiggawatts 7mo ago> My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle. Gemini 3 and Opus 4.6 were the "woah, they're actually useful now!" moment for me. I keep saying to colleagues that it's like a rising tide. Initially the AIs were lapping around our ankles, now the level of capability is at waist height. Many people have commented that 50% of developers think AI-generated code is "Great!" and 50% think its trash. That's a sign that AI code quality is that of the median developer. This will likely improve to 60%-40%, then 70%-30%, etc...
- falkensmaize 7mo agoI don’t see definitive evidence that there is some kind of Moore’s law for model improvement though. Just because this year’s model performs better than last year’s model doesn’t mean next year’s model will be another leap. Most of the big improvements this year seem to be around tooling - I still see Opus 4.6 (which is my daily driver at work) making lots of mistakes.
- nl 7mo agoThings like the METR benchmark aren't sufficient? I mean Moore's law is just a rule of thumb but the curve fits METR just as well..
- recursivedoubts 7mo agoA possible outcome of AI: domestic technical employment goes up because the economics of outsourcing change. Domestic technical workers working with AI tools can replace outsourcing shops, eliminating time-shift issues, etc at similar or lower costs.
- holografix 7mo agoOne of the more interesting takes I heard from a colleague, who’s in the marketing department, is that he uses the corporate approved LLM (Gemini) for “pretend work” or very basic tasks. At the same time he uses Claude on his personal account to seriously augment his job. His rationale is he won’t let the company log his prompts and responses so they can’t build an agentic replacement for him. Corporate rules about shadow it be damned. Only the paranoid survive I guess
- avidiax 7mo agoIt's not his company that will train using his prompts. It's the personal account, unless it is fully paid and he's opted out of training on his prompts.
- ungovernableCat 7mo ago>opted out of training on his prompts I’d argue this can’t be trusted either considering the AI labs already established they’re willing to break laws (copyright) if the ultimate legal consequence is just a small fine or settlement.
- keeda 7mo agoThis rhymes with another recent study from the Dallas Fed: https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0224 https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0224 - suggests AI is displacing younger workers but boosting experienced ones. This matches what we see discussed here, as well as the couple similar other studies we've seen discussed here. Also, it seems to me the concept of "observed exposure" is analogous to OpenAI's concept of "capability overhang" - https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/openai-ending-the-capability-overhang.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/openai-ending-the-capability-over... I think the underlying reason is simply because companies are "shaped wrong" to absorb AI fully. I always harp on how there's a learning curve (and significant self-adaptation) to really use AI well. Companies face the same challenge. Let's focus on software. By many estimates code-related activities are only 20 - 60%, maybe even as low as 11%, of software engineers' time (e.g. https://medium.com/@vikpoca/developers-spend-only-11-of-their-time-coding-what-3a53f65982df https://medium.com/@vikpoca/developers-spend-only-11-of-thei...) But consider where the rest of the time goes. Largely coordination overhead. Meetings etc. drain a lot of time (and more the more senior you get), and those are mostly getting a bunch of people across the company along the dependency web to align on technical directions and roadmaps. I call this "Conway Overhead." This is inevitable because the only way to scale cognitive work was to distribute it across a lot of people with narrow, specialized knowledge and domain ownership. It's effectively the overhead of distributed systems applied to organizations. Hence each team owned a couple of products / services / platforms / projects, with each member working on an even smaller part of it at a time. Coordination happened along the heirarchicy of the org chart because that is most efficient. Now imagine, a single AI-assisted person competently owns everything a team used to own. Suddenly the team at the leaf layer is reduced to 1 from about... 5? This instantly gets rid of a lot of overhead like daily standups, regular 1:1s and intra-team blockers. And inter-team coordination is reduced to a couple of devs hashing it out over Slack instead of meetings and tickets and timelines and backlog grooming and blockers. So not only has the speed of coding increased, the amount of time spent coding has also gone up. The acceleration is super-linear. But, this headcount reduction ripples up the org tree. This means the middle management layers, and the total headcount, are thinned out by the same factor that the bottom-most layer is! And this focused only on the engineering aspect. Imagine the same dynamic playing out across departments when all kinds of adjacent roles are rolled up into the same person: product, design, reliability... These are radical changes to workflows and organizations. However, at this stage we're simply shoe-horning AI into the old, now-obsolete ticket-driven way of doing things. So of course AI has a "capability overhang" and is going to take time to have broad impact... but when it does, it's not going to be pretty.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoI'm working on a project right now, that is heavily informed by AI. I wouldn't even try it, if I didn't have the help. It's a big job. However, I can't imagine vibe-coders actually shipping anything. I really have to ride herd on the output from the LLM. Sometimes, the error is PEBCAK, because I erred, when I prompted, and that can lead to very subtle issues. I no longer review every line, but I also have not yet gotten to the point, where I can just "trust" the LLM. I assume there's going to be problems, and haven't been disappointed, yet. The good news is, the LLM is pretty good at figuring out where we messed up. I'm afraid to turn on SwiftLint. The LLM code is ... prolix ... All that said, it has enormously accelerated the project. I've been working on a rewrite (server and native client) that took a couple of years to write, the first time, and it's only been a month. I'm more than half done, already. To be fair, the slow part is still ahead. I can work alone (at high speed) on the backend and communication stuff, but once the rest of the team (especially shudder the graphic designer) gets on board, things are going to slow to a crawl.
- enraged_camel 7mo ago>> I no longer review every line, but I also have not yet gotten to the point, where I can just "trust" the LLM. Same here. This is also why I haven't been able to switch to Claude Code, despite trying to multiple times. I feel like its mode of operation is much more "just trust to generated code" than Cursor, which let's you review and accept/reject diffs with a very obvious and easy to use UX.
- majormajor 7mo agoMost of the folks I work with who uninstalled Cursor in favor of Claude Code switched back to VSCode for reviewing stuff before pushing PRs. Which... doesn't actually feel like a big change from just using Cursor, personally. I tried Claude Code recently, but like you preferred the Cursor integration. I don't have the bandwidth to juggle four independent things being worked on by agents in parallel so the single-IDE "bottleneck" is not slowing me down. That seems to work a lot better for heavy-boilerplate or heavy-greenfield stuff. I am curious about if we refactored our codebase the right way, would more small/isolatable subtasks be parallelizable with lower cognitive load? But I haven't found it yet.
- boxedemp 7mo agoI think it really depends what you're working on. I do some consulting and found it's not helping the C++ devs as much it's helping the html/js devs.
- dm270 7mo agoFinally someone that says it. I think it’s a multi-variable problem as it handles languages differently. Also working in legacy code can be worse more often than not.
- squirrellous 7mo agoC++ dev here. It’s helping me just fine. Not as much as frontend folks but not far behind either. It’s not quite at the place where LLMs can take over 100% coding, but give it a few more months.
- boxedemp 7mo agoTo be clear I never said or implied it wasn't helping c++ devs. I said I find it helps HTLM/JS development more. And I don't even think it'll stay that way, just that it's what I've seen so far. It's anecdotal of me, I apologize for that.
- thewhitetulip 7mo agoDid you all read about the aws outage for 13hrs because their autonomous AI agent decided to delete everything and write from scratch?
- ares623 7mo agoand they blamed the engineer because insurance doesn't pay for AI failures
- zmmmmm 7mo agothe numbers they show are barely distinguishable from noise as far as I can interpret them. For me, the impact is absolutely in hiring juniors. We basically just stopped considering it. There's almost no work a junior can do that now I would look at and think it isn't easier to hand off in some form (possibly different to what the junior would do) to an AI. It's a bit illusory though. It was always the case that handing off work to a junior person was often more work than doing it yourself. It's an investment in the future to hire someone and get their productivity up to a point of net gain. As much as anything it's a pause while we reassess what the shape of expertise now looks like. I know what juniors did before is now less valuable than it used to be, but I don't know what the value proposition of the future looks like. So until we know, we pause and hold - and the efficiency gains from using AI currently are mostly being invested in that "hold" - they are keeping us viable from a workload perspective long enough to restructure work around AI. Once we do that, I think there will be a reset and hiring of juniors will kick back in.
- chii 7mo agoDoesn't make sense to stop hiring juniors. If AI increases productivity, and juniors are cheaper to hire, but is just as able to hand off tasks to ai as a senior, then it makes more sense to hire more juniors to get them working with an AI as soon as possible. This produces output faster, for which more revenue could be derived. So the only limiting factor is the possibility of not deriving more revenue - which is not related to the AI issue, but broader, macroeconomic issue(s).
- zmmmmm 7mo ago> but is just as able to hand off tasks to ai I think this is the crux of it. Someone who doesn't know the right thing to do just isn't in a position to hand off anything. Accelerating their work will just make them do the wrong thing faster.
- jakobnissen 7mo agoJuniors are not as capable of delegating to AI as seniors are. Delegation to AI requires code review, catching the AI when it doesn’t follow good engineering practices, and catching the AI in semantic mistakes due to the AIs lack of broader context. Those things are all hard for juniors.
- sanex 7mo agoI know multiple devs who would have a very large productivity increase but instead choose to slow down their output on purpose and play video games instead. I get it.
- tayo42 7mo agoThis is what in praise of idleness is about.
- throwaw12 7mo agoPeople who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebase, or integrating new things, or even making fixes. I have stopped writing code, occasionally I jump into the changes proposed by LLM and make manual edits if it is feasible, otherwise I revert changes and ask it to generate again but based on my learnings from the past rejected output I am terrified about what's coming
- boxedemp 7mo agoI'm with you. The project I'm working on is moving at phenomenal velocity. I'm basically spending my time writing specs and performing code reviews. As long as my code review comments and design docs are clear I get a secure, scalable, and resilient system. Tests were always important, but now they are the gatekeepers to velocity.
- truetraveller 7mo agoYou were probably deficient in RESEARCH skills before. No offense to you, since I was also like this once. LLMs research and put the results on the plate. Yes, for people who were deficient in research skills, I can see 2-3x improvements. Note1: I have "expert" level research skills. But LLMs still help me in research, but the boost is probably 1.2x max. But Note2: By research, I mean googling, github search, forum search, etc. And quickly testing using jsfiddle/codepen, etc.
- throwaw12 7mo agono worries, I do not get offended quickly. But I also think you are overestimating your RESEARCH skills, even if you are very good at research, I am sure you can't read 25 files in parallel, summarize them (even if its missing some details) in 1 minute and then come up with somewhat working solution in the next 2 minutes. I am pretty sure, humans can't comprehend reading 25 code files with each having at least 400 lines of non-boilerplate code in 2 minutes. LLM can do it and its very very good at summarizing. I can even steer its summarizing skills by prompting where to focus on when its reading files (because now I can iterate 2-3 times for each RESEARCH task and improve my next attempt based on shortcomings in the previous attempt)
- geuis 7mo agoI really hate to say it, but this article in particular needs a tldr. The author does a web recipe take. Don't put the actual factual info upfront and require parsing through everything to find anything important. Kinda done with this. If you have something important to say, say it up front and back it up with literature later.
- ausbah 7mo agothis keeps me up at night. i’m in a role that is essentially deployment management for LLMs at faang esque company. very little coding or need to code, mostly navigating guis, pipelines, and docker to get deployments updated with a new venting or model version or some patch
- synelabs 7mo agoI'm an SDE with 1 YOE using AI tools heavily (doing "day's work" in ~2 hrs, perfect reviews). Spending most time on specs/review vs. raw coding. Worried I'm optimising short-term output over long-term skill development. Should I consider pivoting to AI/ML roles? Would love advice from anyone who's hired juniors in the current era.
- alexchantavy 7mo agoData point of 1: Having hired juniors as a startup founder, I need more generalists than AI/ML specialists. AI application work right now is basically standard software engineering - you’re finding clever ways to supply the right context to a model within certain constraints. No one knows what’s going to happen in the future. Yes there already are fewer SWE jobs than before because of AI, and yes the days of companies hiring new grads in droves at $300k+ packages are likely over. IMO all you can really do is study what you’re interested in, learn it deeply, and do good work with cool people. If unsure, it’s possible to go back to what you were doing before if the new path doesn’t work out.
- default-kramer 7mo agoI'm not really concerned about the availability of SW dev jobs, but I am concerned about the quality of them. For many companies the velocity (and quality, much to my chagrin) of the code you can produce doesn't really matter. What matters more is whether or not you're building the right thing, and too often you're not. These companies also tend to keep more headcount than seems justified, I think because they are gambling that a few employees are going to do something awesome but they don't know which ones. As AI gets better what will these companies do? I don't think they will fire a bunch of SW devs. I think instead they will embrace the slop and just take more shots, and crazier shots. It doesn't just give us something to do, it also gives a bunch of PHBs something to do.
- Noyra-X 7mo agoWhat's interesting from a practical standpoint: the paper confirms what we're seeing in SME deployments – AI augments, not replaces. But the real productivity gain only kicks in when you redesign the process around the AI, not just bolt it on. Most small businesses skip that step entirely and then wonder why their 'AI tool' isn't delivering. The organizational restructuring is the hard part, not the technology. Anyone here seen teams actually get this right systematically?
- fortzi 7mo agoCan you give an example of how such a redesigned process might look like?
- bob1029 7mo ago> Claude is extensively used for coding, Computer Programmers are at the top, with 75% coverage I think there are some advantages to being first. It's time to re-evaluate strategies if we've been operating under the assumption that this is going to be a bubble, or otherwise largely bullshit. It definitely works. Not everywhere all the time, but often enough to be "scary" now. Some of my prior dismissals like "text 2 sql will never work" are looking pale in the face today.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoIt is a bubble. It also works. Remember the Dotcom bubble, the internet did work but that doesn't mean there wasn't also a real bubble.
- gentleman11 7mo agoI know kids avoiding many high paying careers because of ai right now, and artists just giving up everywhere i look. Thanks, ai
- mikkupikku 7mo agoArt should be done foremost because it's a passion for the artist. If you give up art just because you can no longer sell it, because you're being out competed by computer generated furry porn, then the world hasn't really lost anything of value.
- ausbah 7mo agothat seems a bit harsh. if you’re livelihood has been from making some sort of visual art for however many years and work has even drying up bc of AI, just doing a sudden career pivot is pretty difficult.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoTrue, it's harsh. But the way I see it, artists producing real art from their soul are going to keep at it even while corporate graphic designers and furry porn fanart illustrators are getting decimated. Society at large won't be culturally impoverished by this, so I'm viewing corporate graphic artists with the same mindset as buggy whip manufacturers. Technology coming for the careers of artists isn't even new, the invention of photography greatly diminished demand for painted portrays. Sad for those painters, but photography was then made into an art of it's own, and similarly I think creatively driven people will find new ways to exploit these new tools.
- eudamoniac 7mo ago> artists producing real art from their soul are going to keep at it With what time and money? The statue of David and the Sistine Chapel ceiling would not have come to be from hobbyists. There are precious few culturally relevant works of art that lacked both a patron and a sales motive.
- rando1234 7mo agoHas this been peer-reviewed?
- amelius 7mo agoProductivity up by 10%. Happiness, life satisfaction and feeling of self-worth down by 20%.
- reactordev 7mo agoI call BS on this as the ones displaced aren’t in the workforce anymore. I haven’t been able to work in over a year. Despite me applying to over 200 jobs a month.
- gadders 7mo agoIf people think Elite Overproduction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction) is causing strife now, wait until tens of thousands of people with degrees get thrown out of work.
- spruko 7mo ago[flagged]
- kubb 7mo agoLLM generated comments will kill this website eventually.
- vb7132 7mo agoI was at a big tech for last 10 years, quit my job last month - I feel 50x more productive outside than inside. Here is my take on AI's impact on productivity: First let's review what are LLMs objectively good at: 1. Writing boiler plate code 2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration) 3. Learning new things: Summarizing knowledge, explaining concepts 4. Documentation, menial tasks At a big tech product company #1 #2 #3 are not as frequent as one would think - most of the time is spent in meetings and meetings about meetings. Things move slowly - it's designed to be like that. Majority devs are working on integrating systems - whatever their manager sold to their manager and so on. The only time AI really helped me at my job was when I did a one-week hackathon. Outside of that, integrations of AI felt like more work rather than less - without much productivity boost. Outside, it has proven to be a real productivity boost for me. It checks all the four boxes. Plus, I don't have to worry about legal, integrations, production bugs (eventually those will come). So, depends who you are asking -- it is a huge game changer (or not).
- Madmallard 7mo ago2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration) I have a game written in XNA 100% of the code is there, including all the physics that I hand-wrote. All the assets are there. I tried to get Gemini and Claude to do it numerous times, always with utter failure of epic proportions with anything that's actually detailed. 1 - my transition from the lobby screen into gameplay? 0% replicated on all attempts 2 - the actual physics in gameplay? 0% replicated none of it works 3 - the lobby screen itself? non-functional Okay so what did it even do? Well it put together sort of a boilerplate main menu and barebones options with weird looking text that isn't what I provided (given that I provided a font file), a lobby that I had to manually adjust numerous times before it could get into gameplay, and then nonfunctional gameplay that only handles directional movement and nothing else with sort of half-working fish traveling behavior. I've tried this a dozen times since 2023 with AI and as late as late last year. ALL of the source code is there every single thing that could be translated to be a functional game in another language is there. It NEVER once works or even comes remotely close. The entire codebase is about 20,000 lines, with maybe 3,000 of it being really important stuff. So yeah I don't really think AI is "really good" at anything complex. I haven't really been proven wrong in my 4 years of using it now.
- throwaway613746 7mo ago[dead]
- r3ndr 7mo agoBased on my experience with using AI for development work, it feels like you really need to work with it instead of expecting it to do the work for you. Rather than type the code yourself by hand, you now need to explain the task very clearly, then review or test the generated code and then ask it to refactor and fix the issues you identify. This in itself is work that needs to be done, a different way of working compared to manual coding, but that doesn't mean any significant overall productivity gains are always guaranteed.
- zombot 7mo agoNever trust a statistic you haven't forged yourself.
- dannyboland 7mo agoThere looks to be some errors in the conversion from PDF -> web in this report. For example, the web version of Figure 7 has the legend colours reversed.
- bearjaws 7mo agoWe are rewriting our entire frontend from Webpack + Gatsby to Vite + React, we converted all static pages in one day using Claude Code. We basically have ~40 components and 6 pages to go until complete rewrite, I am sure we will run into bumps in the road, but it's been crazy to watch. We also added i18n (English + Spanish), ThemeProvider for white labeling solution, and WCAG 2A compliance, all in one shot. If I went to a third party and asked them to rewrite just the static pages it would have been $200k and 3 months of work.
- dpacmittal 7mo agoI think this is the happiest path for any coding agent. React + vite is in their blood quite literally.
- macleginn 7mo agoAnthropic should be outsourcing this kind of studies by providing data to non-affiliated researchers instead of doing the analysis themselves.
- quinndupont 7mo agoAI is coming for jobs—but the real risk isn’t where most people are looking. The leading AI exposure indices (Anthropic, Eloundou et al.) focus on which jobs get automated. They treat low exposure as “safe.” But the least exposed workers—cooks, roofers, dishwashers, construction laborers—are often in the worst jobs: low pay, high physical toll, short career spans, and little upward mobility. Safe from AI, but not from burnout or injury. I built JQADI (Job Quality-Adjusted Displacement Index) to combine AI exposure with job quality. It surfaces three kinds of risk: High AI exposure → classic displacement risk Low AI, low quality → “trapped” workers in grinding, unsustainable jobs Moderate AI, low quality → partial automation strips cognitive work and leaves physical drudgery (the “task residual” effect) Findings: 83.5M workers are in low-AI, low-quality jobs. Customer service reps, data entry keyers, and medical records specialists sit at the intersection of high exposure and poor quality. Meanwhile, chief executives and lawyers are both low-exposure and high-quality. The index uses ONET, BLS, and Anthropic exposure data. Code and methodology are open source. LINK https://github.com/quinndupont/JQADI https://github.com/quinndupont/JQADI
- fourside 7mo agoWhat’s your reasoning for labeling lawyers as low-exposure?
- actusual 7mo agoMy partner is a lawyer (prosecutor for a large city). The reason she is at low risk is simply because of the rate of adoption of AI tooling (or ANY tooling for that matter). IT in the public sector (particularly city government) is so much worse than I ever could have imagined before meeting my partner. Our city just spent >$15MM on "case management software" that took 5 years to build by some fly-by-night outfit in California who won the contract, haphazardly bolted together MSFT Azure components, then vanished with zero support. These teams can't in good faith freely adopt AI tooling into their workflow because they don't have the bandwidth to do it well, so they don't do it at all.
- quinndupont 7mo agoThat's largely based on the original analysis and their methodology. "Responsibility" (only attributable to humans) is one reason, another is that judges probably don't want to speak with robots in court.
- bargainbin 7mo agoMuch like LLM output, this seems convincing at first glance but it’s stating assumption as fact; That assumption being “when LLMs get better”. They don’t say what that ceiling is, but then go on to say “it can’t represent someone in court”. Why not? It can reason about more law and precedent than any human can right? As a society surely we want a fair and by the book justice system? Look at GPT 5.4 and Opus, we’re clearly hitting diminishing returns already and these guys are pumping unsustainable amounts of money into them. I’m bullish on AI, it’s been a net positive for me and my team. All I see here though is propaganda disguised as science to convince businesses to shrink their engineering budgets and redirect it to AI companies. TL;DR: AI company says AI is amazing, more at 10.
- Frank_WolfPeake 7mo agoOne thing I’m noticing in organizations is that AI tends to amplify judgment rather than replace it. I think experienced people move faster because they can evaluate the output and redirect it, less experienced people often struggle because they don’t yet know what “good” looks like. The interesting long-term question is how companies rebuild the environments where that judgment gets developed in the first place.
- zackmorris 7mo agoThe endgame will be workers competing with networks of AIs that can solve business problems at all levels. I'm curious how the system will maneuver itself to deprive workers of pay so that they can stay competitive with the ever-decreasing cost of AI. Conversely, I'm curious how disruptors will find ways to provide workers with pay (perhaps through mutual aid networks, grants and alternative socioeconomic systems) so that they can use AI to produce the resources they need outside of the contracting labor market.
- oxag3n 7mo agoWait a second, did they measure exposure from Claude logs and just assumed impact? Let's say I sell snake oil and I survey every buyer, trying to convince everyone doctors won't be needed in the future. First conclusion is that retired population seeks medical services the most (reality check - according to CDC most doctor visits are for infants). Second conclusion is that because it's a snake oil, it heals all the problems and those people will never return to outdated healthcare system.
- m0llusk 7mo agoMost of my recent interviews have been mostly people telling me that I am an idiot because I can't leetcode proficiently enough, so those jobs going away doesn't really effect me and at the same time makes sense. LLMs should be good with the leetcode classics that are the basis for rating software development productivity.
- nickcoffee 7mo agoThe productivity-to-workload compression point is real, but I think the more interesting dynamic is what happens to team shape over time. Running a small sales team with agents, the bottleneck shifted from execution to judgment almost overnight. The work didn't disappear, but who's doing which part of it changed pretty fast. The junior hiring slowdown makes sense in that context. Junior roles were often the execution layer. That layer is getting absorbed. Whether that's bad long-term depends on whether there's still a path to build judgment without first doing the execution work for years. But what can be seen on entry level teams is you typically have 20% of these people that are outstanding, and 80% average. I assume this 20% will simply be able to cover more ground.
- anupamchugh 7mo ago[flagged]