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As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended. He is specifically talking about AI, and

As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended. He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work. I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my own field (marketing/tech writing.) Yes, theoretically AI can replace every writer and marketer. The functionality is there. No, this isn’t actually happening, because what’s mattered all along isn’t a generic marketing skill set; but the mental effort to actually provide value. No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring, and the writers that actually have something of value in their writing are doing just fine.

safety1st 8mo ago
I mean it's a title. Titles are under no obligation to condense the entire content of the article into one sentence. People who want to comment on the article should read it first, and then write in good faith. The problem lies in the HN comments which have taken that title and interpreted it through the lens of unrelated political arguments: class warfare, anti-offshoring, etc. etc. I don't think any title would be immune from these people. They're just angry because the Internet has its hooks in their brain, and they're going to post about it. His points are good and people would be wise to read the article and take them to heart. His key points are: 1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that. 2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you. None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait. HN has better moderation than a lot of places but from my vantage point the entire Internet is sinking into this garbage - we're more aware of the problem these days, at least, but everything and everywhere is more consumed by political hot takes than ever before. If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!
- deleted 8mo ago
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- YCpedohaven 8mo ago
  > 1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that. > 2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you. > None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait. They’re both tautologies. No new or useful info to glean. I didn’t need some highly intelligent security researcher to explain these things that are explained by intuition by anyone with an above room temp IQ. There must surely be more to this, and given how many of his other recent blogs are a mix of political rant and a screed against da haterz. I suspect it’s a lot more political on his side than you think. > If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation! lol, gotta love people who whine about HN quality and then just write pointless crybaby paragraphs like this. If you can’t beat em, join em I guess.
harimau777 8mo ago
That still seems super naive, at least if its extended to software engineering. Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded. I don't see how AI will improve that.
- keiferski 8mo ago
  I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable. If you are but still get canned, then you’re just dealing with irrational management, and that predates AI.
  - fsckboy 8mo ago
    >irrational management, and that predates AI actually, it's AI that will be doing the predating
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    Business can remain irrational longer than you can remain financially solvent.
  - francisofascii 8mo ago
    the goalposts for providing value are changing faster than ever
  - DrewADesign 8mo ago
    The problem isn’t whether or not companies need us— it’s about how many of us they need (demand), and how many of us there are (supply), because that determines our value. Companies pay people what they’ll work for, not based on how much they contribute to the bottom line; in economics, paying more than you have to for anything, including labor, is the irrational path. A steady, high demand for software developers has kept salaries high because that’s the only way they could get capable people to work for them. The higher-end of markets aren’t immune to this. As the demand for lower-level workers drops, people will upskill trying to move up rather than get lopped off. Since there are fewer positions the further up the hierarchy you get, you don’t need a huge increase in supply to affect demand. That’s when you start seeing the most experienced, highest-earning people getting shit-canned because someone is willing to do a good-enough version of their role for 2/3 their sizable salary. This can all happen without a single entire role being completely automated out of existence.
ms8 8mo ago
Something similar happened with web search. There used to be many site aggregators curated by people for different categories - kind of like sub-reddits. At the same time, there were purely algorithmic search engines (yahoo, google, etc.). The algorithmic approach won, but aggregators still exist.
cardanome 8mo ago
The problem is that with generative AI, I have no means of protecting my work from being stolen. It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs. Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT. Now that wouldn't be so bad. One could argue copyright has long held back progress in certain areas. The problem is, the rules only apply one way. The rent seeking oligarchs of the tech industry can steal everything but I can't. They can just eat the cost of a lawsuit, I can't. They can just decide to make a special deal with Disney to use their copyrighted material, I can't. Sure the days of free markets capitalism are long gone. A few monopolists controlling the market has long been the norm. But AI makes it even worse. So much worse.
- rdevilla 8mo ago
  > a private repo on Github Delete your github repos and operate your own gitolite instance. Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.
  - paulryanrogers 8mo ago
    That's only a half measure if AI companies ruthlessly consume anything they can get. Microsoft might ignore repo visibility, they can still consume it. OpenAI may have a backdoor by nature of its apps/harnesses running on dev machines that do have copies of your project. I guess you're safe with a privately self hosted project that you only share with people who don't have any AI and won't reshare it. Then again, if you even distribute only binaries then in theory the AI could copy those and reverse engineer them, or just mutate the binaries.
  - palmotea 8mo ago
    > Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop. Someone needs to build an easy to run AI agent that does that automatically, maybe with strategically bad choices (like complex no-op tests, bad algorithms, introduction of security vulnerabilities described as fixing them). I'd run it. Maybe it could even star/interact with other slop repos, so low activity couldn't be used as a filter.
tolerance 8mo ago
I think that the friction lies somewhere in between what you’re observing and what ~safety1st addresses below. The author has a specific issue in mind. Today the author chooses joy and refuses to evoke the woe and worries of the audience thus omitting their concerns; the audience fails to inherit the author’s optimism, likely due to some kind of asymmetry in sociopolitical outlook and status between the two parties. HN is succumbing to the discordant trends in common discourse found elsewhere online. Demographic changes may have something to do with this.
- otterley 8mo ago
  I don’t think it’s demographic changes as much as it is fear of displacement. Until 2 years ago, software engineering appeared to be an ideal career: strong demand for talent combined with high salaries. But with the productivity gains promised (and often achieved) with coding agents, people are understandably afraid. And people who are afraid take defensive measures: denial, anger, excessive criticism, etc. AI becomes, in some sense, “the enemy.” I think that better explains the shift in overall tone.
SecretDreams 8mo ago
> No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring Nah. Humans can be boring too. No one wants to consume AI art in any form because art isn't just about what it is, but also how it came to be. We care about art and history because those things involved humans. And we like understanding the takes of our fellow humans. We don't care about the take of a statistical model on the topics of art and creativity.
grim_io 8mo ago
Try being a translator today. You can provide as much value as you want, you won't get a job anymore.
- halJordan 8mo ago
  That's just factually untrue though. And there are high profile examples I would expect any well read person to know. And we're at the point where you have to essentially choose the factually wrong point of view so there's no worth in even listing the counter examples.
- djhn 8mo ago
  The demand for authorised translators (approved in country X to correctly translate into country X’s native language from a particular language) has been steadily growing with globalisation and international trade. Contracts, court documents, financial records, medical records, birth and death certificates, technical reports: all of these must be translated and stamped by someone with the authority to do so, someone the government has confirmed to be competent. The professional guilds are sounding the alarms, because there aren’t enough translators qualifying.
jbaviat 8mo ago
I _do_ believe the author implied universality on purpose. That’s also close to the YC motto: “make something people want”. Or as Paul Graham puts it: be good. https://paulgraham.com/good.html https://paulgraham.com/good.html

safety1st 8mo ago

I mean it's a title. Titles are under no obligation to condense the entire content of the article into one sentence. People who want to comment on the article should read it first, and then write in good faith. The problem lies in the HN comments which have taken that title and interpreted it through the lens of unrelated political arguments: class warfare, anti-offshoring, etc. etc. I don't think any title would be immune from these people. They're just angry because the Internet has its hooks in their brain, and they're going to post about it. His points are good and people would be wise to read the article and take them to heart. His key points are: 1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that. 2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you. None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait. HN has better moderation than a lot of places but from my vantage point the entire Internet is sinking into this garbage - we're more aware of the problem these days, at least, but everything and everywhere is more consumed by political hot takes than ever before. If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
YCpedohaven 8mo ago
> 1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that. > 2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you. > None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait. They’re both tautologies. No new or useful info to glean. I didn’t need some highly intelligent security researcher to explain these things that are explained by intuition by anyone with an above room temp IQ. There must surely be more to this, and given how many of his other recent blogs are a mix of political rant and a screed against da haterz. I suspect it’s a lot more political on his side than you think. > If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation! lol, gotta love people who whine about HN quality and then just write pointless crybaby paragraphs like this. If you can’t beat em, join em I guess.

harimau777 8mo ago

That still seems super naive, at least if its extended to software engineering. Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded. I don't see how AI will improve that.

keiferski 8mo ago
I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable. If you are but still get canned, then you’re just dealing with irrational management, and that predates AI.
- fsckboy 8mo ago
  >irrational management, and that predates AI actually, it's AI that will be doing the predating
- pixl97 8mo ago
  Business can remain irrational longer than you can remain financially solvent.
- francisofascii 8mo ago
  the goalposts for providing value are changing faster than ever
- DrewADesign 8mo ago
  The problem isn’t whether or not companies need us— it’s about how many of us they need (demand), and how many of us there are (supply), because that determines our value. Companies pay people what they’ll work for, not based on how much they contribute to the bottom line; in economics, paying more than you have to for anything, including labor, is the irrational path. A steady, high demand for software developers has kept salaries high because that’s the only way they could get capable people to work for them. The higher-end of markets aren’t immune to this. As the demand for lower-level workers drops, people will upskill trying to move up rather than get lopped off. Since there are fewer positions the further up the hierarchy you get, you don’t need a huge increase in supply to affect demand. That’s when you start seeing the most experienced, highest-earning people getting shit-canned because someone is willing to do a good-enough version of their role for 2/3 their sizable salary. This can all happen without a single entire role being completely automated out of existence.

ms8 8mo ago

Something similar happened with web search. There used to be many site aggregators curated by people for different categories - kind of like sub-reddits. At the same time, there were purely algorithmic search engines (yahoo, google, etc.). The algorithmic approach won, but aggregators still exist.

cardanome 8mo ago

The problem is that with generative AI, I have no means of protecting my work from being stolen. It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs. Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT. Now that wouldn't be so bad. One could argue copyright has long held back progress in certain areas. The problem is, the rules only apply one way. The rent seeking oligarchs of the tech industry can steal everything but I can't. They can just eat the cost of a lawsuit, I can't. They can just decide to make a special deal with Disney to use their copyrighted material, I can't. Sure the days of free markets capitalism are long gone. A few monopolists controlling the market has long been the norm. But AI makes it even worse. So much worse.

rdevilla 8mo ago
> a private repo on Github Delete your github repos and operate your own gitolite instance. Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.
- paulryanrogers 8mo ago
  That's only a half measure if AI companies ruthlessly consume anything they can get. Microsoft might ignore repo visibility, they can still consume it. OpenAI may have a backdoor by nature of its apps/harnesses running on dev machines that do have copies of your project. I guess you're safe with a privately self hosted project that you only share with people who don't have any AI and won't reshare it. Then again, if you even distribute only binaries then in theory the AI could copy those and reverse engineer them, or just mutate the binaries.
- palmotea 8mo ago
  > Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop. Someone needs to build an easy to run AI agent that does that automatically, maybe with strategically bad choices (like complex no-op tests, bad algorithms, introduction of security vulnerabilities described as fixing them). I'd run it. Maybe it could even star/interact with other slop repos, so low activity couldn't be used as a filter.

tolerance 8mo ago

I think that the friction lies somewhere in between what you’re observing and what ~safety1st addresses below. The author has a specific issue in mind. Today the author chooses joy and refuses to evoke the woe and worries of the audience thus omitting their concerns; the audience fails to inherit the author’s optimism, likely due to some kind of asymmetry in sociopolitical outlook and status between the two parties. HN is succumbing to the discordant trends in common discourse found elsewhere online. Demographic changes may have something to do with this.

otterley 8mo ago
I don’t think it’s demographic changes as much as it is fear of displacement. Until 2 years ago, software engineering appeared to be an ideal career: strong demand for talent combined with high salaries. But with the productivity gains promised (and often achieved) with coding agents, people are understandably afraid. And people who are afraid take defensive measures: denial, anger, excessive criticism, etc. AI becomes, in some sense, “the enemy.” I think that better explains the shift in overall tone.

SecretDreams 8mo ago

> No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring Nah. Humans can be boring too. No one wants to consume AI art in any form because art isn't just about what it is, but also how it came to be. We care about art and history because those things involved humans. And we like understanding the takes of our fellow humans. We don't care about the take of a statistical model on the topics of art and creativity.

grim_io 8mo ago

Try being a translator today. You can provide as much value as you want, you won't get a job anymore.

halJordan 8mo ago
That's just factually untrue though. And there are high profile examples I would expect any well read person to know. And we're at the point where you have to essentially choose the factually wrong point of view so there's no worth in even listing the counter examples.
djhn 8mo ago
The demand for authorised translators (approved in country X to correctly translate into country X’s native language from a particular language) has been steadily growing with globalisation and international trade. Contracts, court documents, financial records, medical records, birth and death certificates, technical reports: all of these must be translated and stamped by someone with the authority to do so, someone the government has confirmed to be competent. The professional guilds are sounding the alarms, because there aren’t enough translators qualifying.

jbaviat 8mo ago

I _do_ believe the author implied universality on purpose. That’s also close to the YC motto: “make something people want”. Or as Paul Graham puts it: be good. https://paulgraham.com/good.html https://paulgraham.com/good.html