4 ms·

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI

by yanis_t 8mo ago

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount of bread with only 5 people. You have a choice: fire 5 people, or produce 2,000 loaves per month. But does the city really need that many loaves? To make matters worse, all your competitors also have the same semi-automatic ovens...

hansmayer 8mo ago
> Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount of bread with only 5 people. That is actually the case with a lot of bakeries these days. But the one major difference being,the baker can rely with almost 100% reliability that the form, shape and ingredients used will be exact to the rounding error. Each time. No matter how many times they use the oven. And they don't have to invent strategies on how to "best use the ovens", they don't claim to "vibe-bake" 10x more than what they used to bake before etc... The semi-automated ovens just effing work! Now show me an LLM that even remotely provides this kind of experience.
- therealdrag0 8mo ago
  Eh accuracy and reliability is a different topic hashed out many times on HN. This thread is about productivity. I’m a staff engineer and I don’t know a single person not using AI. My senior engineers are estimating 40% gains in productivity.
  - maltelau 8mo ago
    And every time the issue is side-stepped by chatbot proponents. Accuracy and reliability are necessary to know real productivity. If you have produced code that doesn't work right, you haven't "produced" anything (except in the economic sense of managing to get someone to pay for it). For example, if you produce 5x more code at 5% reliability, the net result is a -75% change in productivity (ignoring the overhead costs of detecting said reliability).
    - hansmayer 8mo ago
      Exactly this. High productivity if all you do is generate slop and brainrot videos. If you are going to generate code with it... well how productive was the genius at the AWS who used Kiro to cause that December outage ? 3 years ago that would have been a career-ending choice of productivity tools.
    - therealdrag0 8mo ago
      We’ve all been waiting for the reliability shoe to drop for, what, a year now? It’s only slop of you don’t understand the code, prompt, and result, and skip code reviews. You can have large productivity gains without reducing quality standards.
      - hansmayer 8mo ago
        > It’s only slop of you don’t understand the code, prompt, and result, and skip code reviews. You can have large productivity gains without reducing quality standards. So essentially like delegating all work to a beginner programmer only 10x more frustrating? Well, that's not what I would classify under "Pocket PhD" or "Nation of PhDs in a datacenter", which is the bullshit propaganda the AI CEOs are relentlessly pushing. We should not have to figure this out for them - they were saying this will write ALL code in 6 months from "now", the last time "now" being January 2026, so in little over 4.5 months. No, we should not be fixing this mess, f*k understanding the prompts and doing the code reviews of the AI slop. Why does it not work as advertised?
        therealdrag0 7mo ago
        I’m not here to defend bs propaganda. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone defend that stuff. I don’t know if you’re shifting goalposts or that’s what you’ve always been worried about. I’m just saying the productivity gains are real, even in serious production level and life critical systems. If you are only able to think in binaries, no-AI or phd-AI, that’s a you problem.
        hansmayer 7mo ago
- gbbloke 8mo ago
  "vibe-bake" is maybe the best thing I've heard in a long time. Thank you for that, you made my day!
  - hansmayer 8mo ago
    Gladly - well now don't just sit with this great neologism, push it out, lets make it at least as 20% as popular as the term "microslop" :)
0x3f 8mo ago
A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris paribus.
- JR1427 8mo ago
  This is what I find interesting - the response from most companies is "we will need fewer engineers because of AI", not "we can build more things because of AI". What is driving companies to want to get rid of people, rather than do more? Is it just short-term investor-driven thinking?
  - 0x3f 8mo ago
    I think it's an excuse to do needed lay offs without saying as much. So yes, preserving signals, essentially. I've never met a tech company that didn't love expanding work to fill capacity, even if the work is of little value.
  - salawat 8mo ago
    The optimization function of capitalism and it's instrumental convergence. The AI Alignment problem is already here, and it is us.
  - scruple 8mo ago
    How much more productive are we supposed to be in engineering? Are we 10x'ing our testing capability at the same time? QA is already a massive bottleneck at my $DAYJOB. I'm not sure what benefits the company at-large derives from having the typing machine type faster.
    - SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
      Perhaps this is one of the understanding gaps that crop up around AI development? At my current company and most others I've worked at, testing capability is part of the same bucket because engineers do their own QA.
turblety 8mo ago
Maybe the bakery expands to make more than just loaves of bread, maybe different cakes, sandwiches, maybe expand delivery to nearby towns.
bojan 8mo ago
On another note, if you had 100 engineers and you lay almost all of them off and keep 5 super-AI-accelerated engineers, and your competitor keeps 50 of such engineers, your competitor is still able to iterate 10x as fast. So you still lay people off at the risk of falling behind.
slopinthebag 8mo ago
I don't think it's valid to reduce the act of creating software to an assembly line, especially with Amdahl's law.
driverdan 8mo ago
Writing software isn't like a small bakery with fixed demand. There are always more features to build and improvements to do than capacity allows. For better or worse software products are never finished.
ataraxao 8mo ago
[dead]
cowlby 8mo ago
I'm starting to think for software it's produce 2,000 loaves per month. I'm realizing now software was supply-constrained and organizations had to be very strategic about what apps/UIs to build. Now everything and anything can be an app and so we can build more targeted frontends for all kinds of business units that would've been overlooked before.

by yanis_t 8mo ago

hansmayer 8mo ago

> Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount of bread with only 5 people. That is actually the case with a lot of bakeries these days. But the one major difference being,the baker can rely with almost 100% reliability that the form, shape and ingredients used will be exact to the rounding error. Each time. No matter how many times they use the oven. And they don't have to invent strategies on how to "best use the ovens", they don't claim to "vibe-bake" 10x more than what they used to bake before etc... The semi-automated ovens just effing work! Now show me an LLM that even remotely provides this kind of experience.

therealdrag0 8mo ago
Eh accuracy and reliability is a different topic hashed out many times on HN. This thread is about productivity. I’m a staff engineer and I don’t know a single person not using AI. My senior engineers are estimating 40% gains in productivity.
- maltelau 8mo ago
  And every time the issue is side-stepped by chatbot proponents. Accuracy and reliability are necessary to know real productivity. If you have produced code that doesn't work right, you haven't "produced" anything (except in the economic sense of managing to get someone to pay for it). For example, if you produce 5x more code at 5% reliability, the net result is a -75% change in productivity (ignoring the overhead costs of detecting said reliability).
  - hansmayer 8mo ago
    Exactly this. High productivity if all you do is generate slop and brainrot videos. If you are going to generate code with it... well how productive was the genius at the AWS who used Kiro to cause that December outage ? 3 years ago that would have been a career-ending choice of productivity tools.
  - therealdrag0 8mo ago
    We’ve all been waiting for the reliability shoe to drop for, what, a year now? It’s only slop of you don’t understand the code, prompt, and result, and skip code reviews. You can have large productivity gains without reducing quality standards.
    - hansmayer 8mo ago
      > It’s only slop of you don’t understand the code, prompt, and result, and skip code reviews. You can have large productivity gains without reducing quality standards. So essentially like delegating all work to a beginner programmer only 10x more frustrating? Well, that's not what I would classify under "Pocket PhD" or "Nation of PhDs in a datacenter", which is the bullshit propaganda the AI CEOs are relentlessly pushing. We should not have to figure this out for them - they were saying this will write ALL code in 6 months from "now", the last time "now" being January 2026, so in little over 4.5 months. No, we should not be fixing this mess, f*k understanding the prompts and doing the code reviews of the AI slop. Why does it not work as advertised?
      - therealdrag0 7mo ago
        I’m not here to defend bs propaganda. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone defend that stuff. I don’t know if you’re shifting goalposts or that’s what you’ve always been worried about. I’m just saying the productivity gains are real, even in serious production level and life critical systems. If you are only able to think in binaries, no-AI or phd-AI, that’s a you problem.
        hansmayer 7mo ago
gbbloke 8mo ago
"vibe-bake" is maybe the best thing I've heard in a long time. Thank you for that, you made my day!
- hansmayer 8mo ago
  Gladly - well now don't just sit with this great neologism, push it out, lets make it at least as 20% as popular as the term "microslop" :)

0x3f 8mo ago

A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris paribus.

JR1427 8mo ago
This is what I find interesting - the response from most companies is "we will need fewer engineers because of AI", not "we can build more things because of AI". What is driving companies to want to get rid of people, rather than do more? Is it just short-term investor-driven thinking?
- 0x3f 8mo ago
  I think it's an excuse to do needed lay offs without saying as much. So yes, preserving signals, essentially. I've never met a tech company that didn't love expanding work to fill capacity, even if the work is of little value.
- salawat 8mo ago
  The optimization function of capitalism and it's instrumental convergence. The AI Alignment problem is already here, and it is us.
- scruple 8mo ago
  How much more productive are we supposed to be in engineering? Are we 10x'ing our testing capability at the same time? QA is already a massive bottleneck at my $DAYJOB. I'm not sure what benefits the company at-large derives from having the typing machine type faster.
  - SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
    Perhaps this is one of the understanding gaps that crop up around AI development? At my current company and most others I've worked at, testing capability is part of the same bucket because engineers do their own QA.

turblety 8mo ago

Maybe the bakery expands to make more than just loaves of bread, maybe different cakes, sandwiches, maybe expand delivery to nearby towns.

bojan 8mo ago

On another note, if you had 100 engineers and you lay almost all of them off and keep 5 super-AI-accelerated engineers, and your competitor keeps 50 of such engineers, your competitor is still able to iterate 10x as fast. So you still lay people off at the risk of falling behind.

slopinthebag 8mo ago

I don't think it's valid to reduce the act of creating software to an assembly line, especially with Amdahl's law.

driverdan 8mo ago

Writing software isn't like a small bakery with fixed demand. There are always more features to build and improvements to do than capacity allows. For better or worse software products are never finished.

ataraxao 8mo ago

[dead]

cowlby 8mo ago

I'm starting to think for software it's produce 2,000 loaves per month. I'm realizing now software was supply-constrained and organizations had to be very strategic about what apps/UIs to build. Now everything and anything can be an app and so we can build more targeted frontends for all kinds of business units that would've been overlooked before.