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AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that

AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time. Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on the mismanagement and/or ridiculously over-engineered/over-complicated custom tech stacks companies run if they say "AI" anywhere in their reports.

marcosdumay 5mo ago
Apparently there has been some AI-caused firing on companies that spent so much on AI that needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break. From the way people are talking, Facebook seems to be in that category. There is probably some AI-caused firing coming soon on companies that vibe-coded so much that people abandon their products. I expect Microsoft start is on Github. I have been repeating for months that AI hasn't caused any firing. But it doesn't seem to be technically correct anymore.
- indoordin0saur 5mo ago
  > companies that spent so much on AI that they needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break The observation that AI layoffs would be self-fulfilling prophecy is one I haven't heard before but I'm inclined to agree with it.
munk-a 5mo ago
AI is absolutely responsible for executive suites dumping huge budgets that could be more productively elsewhere. There are extremely helpful tools out there but people are being too gullible when it comes to advertised ROIs and the blame inevitably falls on engineering, not management, when all the devs fail to 10x overnight.
- Pavilion2095 5mo ago
  A text generator can't be responsible for decisions that people make. You're giving them too much agency. Idk how they did it, but so many people seem to hate AI instead of people who are pushing it.
  - dymk 5mo ago
    Obviously people are angry at the people pushing it, not the Claude LLM model weights itself.
HDBaseT 5mo ago
There is plenty of companies already firing people due because of AI, or at least, that's why they proclaim. There is also plenty of freelance / artistry type people who would of had work before (i.e creating Halloween, mothers day, Easter, etc) promotional material which is now just outsourced to AI. You see some of the biggest companies on Earth posting AI stuff for special event, etc. Most aren't at the stage of using full AI "art" for advertisements (except maybe Coke) but some of these companies would already have full time artists, which they've bypassed. Their jobs are not forever and eventually will get killed.
- locknitpicker 5mo ago
  > There is plenty of companies already firing people due because of AI, or at least, that's why they proclaim. AI is clearly a scapegoat. If you are a CEO who is pressured to show results but can't improve revenue in this economy and can't downsize because of the red flags it represents to investors, AI represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a two-for-one special and both cut staff and portray themselves as leaders in the sector that's achieving massive efficiency gains. Even FANGs are toning down their rah-rah AI propaganda, and Amazon goes as far as to ask their SDEs to stop with the AI bullshit and just try to use it purposefully.
  - achierius 5mo ago
    > AI represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a two-for-one special and both cut staff and portray themselves as leaders in the sector that's achieving massive efficiency gains. This is not what a scapegoat is. Definitionally, a scapegoat is innocent; here, however, AI is being used as a tool of disciplining labor.
esalman 5mo ago
AI is absolutely directly responsible. Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer. Most people are taking credits, and internships are getting cancelled left and right.
- tetromino_ 5mo ago
  > Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer That's a bit like asking them to choose between AI credits and a visit to the dentist. No engineer has ever hosted an intern in the hopes of improving their project's velocity; people host interns because "it's the right thing to do" for the industry, because it's psychologically satisfying for many people, and to build cred and/or experience as a mentor. And companies nudge their employees to host interns to hopefully influence potentially-valuable-in-the-future smart youngsters to come back as a year or two later as full time employees.
  - ElProlactin 5mo ago
    > And companies nudge their employees to host interns to hopefully influence potentially-valuable-in-the-future smart youngsters to come back as a year or two later as full time employees. And there's less incentive to do this when you anticipate needing fewer employees.
    - pfannkuchen 5mo ago
      His point is that the engineers wanting to opt for "not intern" isn't really a data point on whether interns are helpful. It may instead be a data point on the propensity for people to opt out of work when they have a good excuse.
      - fragmede 5mo ago
        Wouldn't it go the other way? Instead of working, you're "mentoring the intern" over a long lunch and telling them long meandering stories about company lore.
resident423 5mo ago
At the moment is the significant part, how long do we expect this to last now that AI is capable of generating novel ideas like solutions to Erdos conjectures?
- karlgkk 5mo ago
  Wow that sure sounds smart! The problem, of course, is that generating a one time solution to a problem is a much easier problem space than a many-input task with human product concerns
  - nilkn 5mo ago
    Synthesizing a ton of inputs to help clarify a decision or set of options is exactly one of the easiest and most powerful use cases for AI agents right now.
    - karlgkk 5mo ago
      I didn’t say it wasn’t :) All i said is that one type of task is easier than another
      - nilkn 5mo ago
        I don't think that part is true, either. The average human could be trained to use an agent to synthesize information in their job to help make product decisions. The average human could not be trained to evaluate whether a reasoning model produced a correct proof in research-level mathematics. To be sure: reviewing a candidate proof at this level written by AI is significantly easier and faster than writing and creating it from scratch. But it's still not something hardly any humans could credibly do.
        karlgkk 5mo ago
        I didn’t say any of that either, all I said was for ai, one type of task is easier than another I said nothing about a human’s capabilities, which are most certainly different than an AI’s This is the second time you’ve said a bunch of stuff I didn’t say, and then tried to argue with me over it.
closeparen 5mo ago
The narrative "we don't need as many staff because of AI" is a labor disciplining device whether or not it is true. Remaining engineers, loaded up with more projects under the threat of layoffs and with no outside opportunities, work nights and weekends to get them done. Then it is literally true that we accomplished more with less. And in a sense it is even "because of AI." But not in the way that you're supposed to think they mean it.
- indoordin0saur 5mo ago
  This is so true. I'm not one of these people that think AI is not going to be revolutionary eventually, but the way I see upper management acting is basically exactly as you say. As a threat to discipline better labor.
locknitpicker 5mo ago
> AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time. I disagree. AI is often depicted as autonomous agents YOLOing features, but they excel at pattern matching from free form text and examples, and execute feedback loops. This means that they are particularly apt at small maintenance tasks spread across the project following clear high level guidance. This is your typical junior task, the kind of task that is plausibly very boring and repetitive that is validation-heavy until it stumbles upon an unexpected turn and forces a senior to step in. Once you offload these tasks to an agent running on a background, what exactly is left for a junior to do? Juniors can arguably lean on AI coding agents to tackle more complex and more extensive work, but the truth if the matter is that they lack the skill and tools to effectively address this sort of work. They can get things to build but they fail to get things to make sense or be maintainable. So what is a junior dev to do?

marcosdumay 5mo ago

Apparently there has been some AI-caused firing on companies that spent so much on AI that needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break. From the way people are talking, Facebook seems to be in that category. There is probably some AI-caused firing coming soon on companies that vibe-coded so much that people abandon their products. I expect Microsoft start is on Github. I have been repeating for months that AI hasn't caused any firing. But it doesn't seem to be technically correct anymore.

indoordin0saur 5mo ago
> companies that spent so much on AI that they needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break The observation that AI layoffs would be self-fulfilling prophecy is one I haven't heard before but I'm inclined to agree with it.

munk-a 5mo ago

AI is absolutely responsible for executive suites dumping huge budgets that could be more productively elsewhere. There are extremely helpful tools out there but people are being too gullible when it comes to advertised ROIs and the blame inevitably falls on engineering, not management, when all the devs fail to 10x overnight.

Pavilion2095 5mo ago
A text generator can't be responsible for decisions that people make. You're giving them too much agency. Idk how they did it, but so many people seem to hate AI instead of people who are pushing it.
- dymk 5mo ago
  Obviously people are angry at the people pushing it, not the Claude LLM model weights itself.

HDBaseT 5mo ago

There is plenty of companies already firing people due because of AI, or at least, that's why they proclaim. There is also plenty of freelance / artistry type people who would of had work before (i.e creating Halloween, mothers day, Easter, etc) promotional material which is now just outsourced to AI. You see some of the biggest companies on Earth posting AI stuff for special event, etc. Most aren't at the stage of using full AI "art" for advertisements (except maybe Coke) but some of these companies would already have full time artists, which they've bypassed. Their jobs are not forever and eventually will get killed.

locknitpicker 5mo ago
> There is plenty of companies already firing people due because of AI, or at least, that's why they proclaim. AI is clearly a scapegoat. If you are a CEO who is pressured to show results but can't improve revenue in this economy and can't downsize because of the red flags it represents to investors, AI represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a two-for-one special and both cut staff and portray themselves as leaders in the sector that's achieving massive efficiency gains. Even FANGs are toning down their rah-rah AI propaganda, and Amazon goes as far as to ask their SDEs to stop with the AI bullshit and just try to use it purposefully.
- achierius 5mo ago
  > AI represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a two-for-one special and both cut staff and portray themselves as leaders in the sector that's achieving massive efficiency gains. This is not what a scapegoat is. Definitionally, a scapegoat is innocent; here, however, AI is being used as a tool of disciplining labor.

esalman 5mo ago

AI is absolutely directly responsible. Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer. Most people are taking credits, and internships are getting cancelled left and right.

tetromino_ 5mo ago
> Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer That's a bit like asking them to choose between AI credits and a visit to the dentist. No engineer has ever hosted an intern in the hopes of improving their project's velocity; people host interns because "it's the right thing to do" for the industry, because it's psychologically satisfying for many people, and to build cred and/or experience as a mentor. And companies nudge their employees to host interns to hopefully influence potentially-valuable-in-the-future smart youngsters to come back as a year or two later as full time employees.
- ElProlactin 5mo ago
  > And companies nudge their employees to host interns to hopefully influence potentially-valuable-in-the-future smart youngsters to come back as a year or two later as full time employees. And there's less incentive to do this when you anticipate needing fewer employees.
  - pfannkuchen 5mo ago
    His point is that the engineers wanting to opt for "not intern" isn't really a data point on whether interns are helpful. It may instead be a data point on the propensity for people to opt out of work when they have a good excuse.
    - fragmede 5mo ago
      Wouldn't it go the other way? Instead of working, you're "mentoring the intern" over a long lunch and telling them long meandering stories about company lore.

resident423 5mo ago

At the moment is the significant part, how long do we expect this to last now that AI is capable of generating novel ideas like solutions to Erdos conjectures?

karlgkk 5mo ago
Wow that sure sounds smart! The problem, of course, is that generating a one time solution to a problem is a much easier problem space than a many-input task with human product concerns
- nilkn 5mo ago
  Synthesizing a ton of inputs to help clarify a decision or set of options is exactly one of the easiest and most powerful use cases for AI agents right now.
  - karlgkk 5mo ago
    I didn’t say it wasn’t :) All i said is that one type of task is easier than another
    - nilkn 5mo ago
      I don't think that part is true, either. The average human could be trained to use an agent to synthesize information in their job to help make product decisions. The average human could not be trained to evaluate whether a reasoning model produced a correct proof in research-level mathematics. To be sure: reviewing a candidate proof at this level written by AI is significantly easier and faster than writing and creating it from scratch. But it's still not something hardly any humans could credibly do.
      - karlgkk 5mo ago
        I didn’t say any of that either, all I said was for ai, one type of task is easier than another I said nothing about a human’s capabilities, which are most certainly different than an AI’s This is the second time you’ve said a bunch of stuff I didn’t say, and then tried to argue with me over it.

closeparen 5mo ago

The narrative "we don't need as many staff because of AI" is a labor disciplining device whether or not it is true. Remaining engineers, loaded up with more projects under the threat of layoffs and with no outside opportunities, work nights and weekends to get them done. Then it is literally true that we accomplished more with less. And in a sense it is even "because of AI." But not in the way that you're supposed to think they mean it.

indoordin0saur 5mo ago
This is so true. I'm not one of these people that think AI is not going to be revolutionary eventually, but the way I see upper management acting is basically exactly as you say. As a threat to discipline better labor.

locknitpicker 5mo ago

> AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time. I disagree. AI is often depicted as autonomous agents YOLOing features, but they excel at pattern matching from free form text and examples, and execute feedback loops. This means that they are particularly apt at small maintenance tasks spread across the project following clear high level guidance. This is your typical junior task, the kind of task that is plausibly very boring and repetitive that is validation-heavy until it stumbles upon an unexpected turn and forces a senior to step in. Once you offload these tasks to an agent running on a background, what exactly is left for a junior to do? Juniors can arguably lean on AI coding agents to tackle more complex and more extensive work, but the truth if the matter is that they lack the skill and tools to effectively address this sort of work. They can get things to build but they fail to get things to make sense or be maintainable. So what is a junior dev to do?