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Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

• SadErn 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• omblivion 4mo ago
  I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools and their growing potential. We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.
  • graemep 4mo ago
    > We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly. Until they go wrong because they are not good inside.
    • an0malous 4mo ago
      I don’t know, I don’t think anyone really cares. I can’t unmute videos on Twitter/X on iOS, it’s been like that for over a year. I get a new disclosure that my data was leaked about every month. Palantir and possible Claude targeted a girl’s school for missile strikes. I still have to tell Claude what day or time it is right now sometimes, or it’ll give me medical advice for my dog and the dosing or some important number is 2-5x off. At my last job, at a YC company, I was explicitly told to stop working on vulnerabilities that let you do things like arbitrarily change a user’s email address through unprotected admin endpoints. Ten years ago I would’ve gotten a raise for this. We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.
      • vinyl7 4mo ago
        > We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore. I've felt this way for a long time now. There's no substance to anything anymore. The US economy feels like a more advanced Nigerian scam, where very few things that the US makes provides anything of actual value and substance. Americans just can't afford quality anymore. We decided we'd like to have significant amounts of garbage rather than fewer quality things. This change was likely due to revving the economy toward quarterly profit goals and GDP growth over everything else. Theoretically, prioritizing investments should have "trickled down" where companies could have more capital to invest in workers, R&Dand quality...but instead it all just got soaked up into executive pay and the stock market.
        • graemep 4mo ago
          Its short termism. its the same throughout the west and beyond. The markets want returns on a one or two year period, not long term investment. Executive pay is almost always tied to short term profits and share prices.
          • Chu4eeno 4mo ago
            Yeah, it's the perversion of capitalism known as publicly traded companies. Once you start noticing private companies (like some restaurant chains) manage to both treat their employees better and serve their customers better than the publicly traded ones, it seems like a very consistent trend. Having pursuit of endless growth to appease otherwise uninvolved shareholders might not be the best way to do "capitalism".
            • graemep 4mo ago
              Someone who is trying to build a business they can sell when they retire, or that they might leave to their kids, thinks on a completely different time scale. Smaller businesses are also run more by personal judgement and relationships than by rules and procedures.
        • 4mo ago
  • jazz9k 4mo ago
    This is true. I have artist friends that are boycotting any company using AI art for their flyers/ads. I looked at some examples and couldn't tell the difference.
    • foobarbecue 4mo ago
      I think you can't tell the difference until the "art" shows details of something you know well -- a place you've been, out a hobby or sport you do. I'm thinking of this awful slop "art" I saw on Wayfair yesterday. As a surfer, it's hilarious. That's not how you stand on a board. It's not even a board. And the wave is terrible-- nobody wants to surf shorebreak like that! https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-art-4-hawaiian-waves-surf-dream-i-wall-decor-set-metal-cbup6901.html https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-art-4-hawai... I guess it could be a useful signal-- if you meet someone and they have it up in their home, you know they don't surf. More generally, I think anything AI produces that's dense with factual details is inherently trash.
    • pc86 4mo ago
      I was just reading comments the other day where people who dragging a company because they apparently used AI for some low level copywriting stuff. No art assets, no code (so far as anyone knows), not actually writing copy but more like "is everything spelled right, does the copy structure flow, have all these points been addressed, etc." Not only that but the only reason anyone even knew is because the company was completely up front and transparent about what they used AI for and what they didn't. There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.
      • watwut 4mo ago
        > There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh. Really? Have you seen how the CEOs marketed it and talked about people in that community? Artists hate it, because they listened to what AI community and leadership were openly saying. The weirdest thing on this all is how people find the hate puzzling considering initial rhetoric coming from the industry itself. And current rhetoric for that matter.
  • vrganj 4mo ago
    The outside world itself will stop working if we replace labor with LLMs. Mass unemployment equals riots equals an end to the status quo.
    • pc86 4mo ago
      This doesn't seem at all related to the above comment - or anything, for that matter. Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.
      • vrganj 4mo ago
        > Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs. I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying? Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?
        • pc86 4mo ago
          You could replace every software engineer on the planet with a perfect LLM tomorrow and it would not lead to mass unemployment-triggered riots. If you're talking about software engineering specifically, you're not correct. If you're talking about all labor, you're talking about something unrelated to the article.
          • vrganj 4mo ago
            To quote the article: > Take copywriting. It was a profession that took years to master and paid well. This changed slowly as more professionals joined the market, even after the demand spike driven by ecommerce and adtech. Now, LLMs have destroyed the job for the vast majority of professionals.
          • philipwhiuk 4mo ago
            The job of software engineering is more or less literally to automate every other job. If there are no software engineers it's because everything is or has been automated. If AI isn't capable of that then there's still software engineering to do and your argument collapses.
  • avaer 4mo ago
    The outside world doesn't even care that things work, they care that it looks like it works long enough. Investors don't care that it's snake oil, as long as they're not left holding the bag. AI is really good at making things that look like they work. This is a steelman of your argument.
    • onraglanroad 4mo ago
      Well yes. This has been the history of the web. Frontpage generated really crappy code but people still used it to create websites. They didn't care about code quality just how it looked.
      • ldng 4mo ago
        Right. But where are Frontpage and Dreamweaver now ?
        • jason_oster 4mo ago
          They were replaced by other WYSIWYG website editors like Wix and Squarespace. These replacements are evidence in favor of the original claim. The specific products are irrelevant.
          • ldng 4mo ago
            It took a VERY VERY long time for these replacement products to appear.
      • sarchertech 4mo ago
        My mom was generating web pages with dreamweaver 25 years ago. People used it sure, but people certainly did care about the quality because it produced unmaintainable code. If people truly didn’t care about the quality people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005.
        • jason_oster 4mo ago
  • archagon 4mo ago
    Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days. Slop code will only accelerate this trend. For the most part, people don’t need a thousand new features; the investment class does. Nobody gets mad at Craigslist.
    • mschuster91 4mo ago
      > Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days. The problem is... what can we practically do? When the village fish monger 200 years ago sold shoddy fish, you could go to him, give him a few whacks with his fish, and even if the fish monger didn't improve the quality of the fish he sold in response, you at least got some kind of feeling you got justice. Nowadays? For most of the world, those responsible for the bad software aren't in the same village any more, for 95% of the world's population the USA is on an entirely different continent. Can't do anything to hold anyone accountable, with the exception of cancelling a 5$/month subscription LOL and yelling at some poor Filipino or Indian callcenter grunt. If you're among the lucky 5% that lives in the US, sure, you can file lawsuits if the problem is egregious enough, but that's expensive and consumer protection has been gutted. And doing a copy of a plumber's brother event? Might give you people treating you like jesus-come-to-earth but in the end you'll still face capital punishment for it, if you don't get taken out by the private security of the uber rich before you can even raise your gun. Whatever the eventual solution to the problem you raise will end up being, it is certain it will not be pretty... bottled up rage is not good for any society.
  • bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    > We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly. How good something is inside is directly responsible for how well it works. Your customers might not care about the former, but they will care when your cuts to the former impact the latter (and they always do impact it, in the end).
• genezeta 4mo ago
  I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age, incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever. If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this: I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart And it never does.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • lukan 4mo ago
    Some knowledge does set you apart - the ability to ship things, people pay for. Not producing holy code in the academic best language.
    • catmanjan 4mo ago
      Ability can't really be compared to knowledge... e.g. you might lose the ability to play the piano, yet retain the knowledge about how to
      • lukan 4mo ago
        I don't know (also english is not my first language), but to me it takes knowledge to know what is the right tool for the job. To know what is required to make the client happy. To know where great code matters and where quick and dirty or nowdays vibe code is sufficient. And that knowledge can be complex. It usually requires knowing how people think and act, who don't know how to open a terminal. Because those are the main people using software.
  • lwhi 4mo ago
    I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent to wayfinders. People who _can_ see the wood for the trees, and are able to understand multiple (sometimes conflicting) requirements and work out a way through that solves the problems that arise, for all involved parties. An understanding of domain, the ability to communicate effectively and a mind that can think laterally, will all be vital.
• rowbin 4mo ago
  I agree, his takes should not be dismissed lightly. I'm not sure about "demand is fixed" though. I feel like software demand has been declared saturated at least a few times.
  • jameshart 4mo ago
    I have been making software professionally for 25 years and in all that time i have never run into the problem that we have run out of things to do.
    • rglullis 4mo ago
      Do not use past events to predict the future, or you risk end up becoming a turkey: https://peteweishaupt.medium.com/talebs-tu-e406eb8859a8 https://peteweishaupt.medium.com/talebs-tu-e406eb8859a8
    • pixel_popping 4mo ago
      Exactly, if we look at what projects are on-going now, look at Startups, they are practically solving all the same thing and most of them will be dead soon, we need to finally reach the era where tools to "zeroshot" anything becomes widespread to create new problems, but even by then, we will have an oversupply of tech workers, many will have to convert to a different field, many will not want to be paid based on callcenter type of work which is prompt-as-much-as-you-can, understandably. It's quite hard to predict what will happen, but in a few years, I bet the unemployment rate of tech workers will be really high, we can just look at how many jobs are currently already replaceable but the owner of it is just lagging in the implementation of automation, it's probably already the large majority of tech jobs.
  • leoncos 4mo ago
    Agreed. The limitations of human context window and communication bandwidth restrict the complexity of large-scale software. LLM will have an extremely large context window and extremely high communication bandwidth in the future. Therefore, even more complex large-scale software will emerge.
  • 4mo ago
• ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago
  > Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles. This is a particularly ignorant thing to say.
  • philipwhiuk 4mo ago
    It's classic https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/physicists.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/physicists.png (Also, both might be out of reach of the current AI architectures)
    • ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago
      Software engineers have the same attitude, but are dumber.
  • tedtimbrell 4mo ago
    To me the author was saying that the cross-domain knowledge needed to collaborate is easier to pick up not that other domains are easy
• pixel_popping 4mo ago
  I agree with all of it, and I think author did a really good job at actually saying what's true, it's almost like developers don't want to hear it. I feel that OP has reach that point because he went out of the basic tooling like Claude Code (at least in its default state) and embrace multi-model, automatic reviewing, fuse, loops and so-on, when it's done right, well, failure rate to solve issues is <1%, this is exactly why you arrive to that kind of depressing thoughts afterward and it's spot-on. Many people will disagree because they are still at the vibe coding stage, not "as much as I can prompt will be automatically done stage". Claude Code imo is deliberately not implementing the best ways for users to work, they have recently implemented Workflows but that's almost a year late, many companies are doing this since always and that's just part of basic tooling nowadays. People talk about models and benchmarks score while genuinely I'm baffled because they seem to ignore that that same benchmark can reach 99% by levering tooling intelligently, we don't really need better models (at least for coding), we just need adoption of proper methods. The day developers will discover that they are already able to solve 300 issues in a single day with ZERO supervision in complex Rust codebases, I'm sure they'll change their mind. Our bottleneck in our team is currently just having the mental bandwidth to type as much as possible, it's kinda sad, it is becoming all absurd. If you are still watching the output of the model for coding tasks, I bet you haven't challenged your own methodologies, yet.
  • sixtram 4mo ago
    Just 300 a day? That's only one ticket every 1.5 minutes. I hope in a year we can fix an issue under 30 seconds with ZERO supervision.
    • pixel_popping 4mo ago
      We will, most work can be parallelized, the same way as developers are able to work together on large codebases, tools can as well.
  • canadiantim 4mo ago
    May I ask what are some of methods you’re using for this level of productivity?
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• grebc 4mo ago
  Your argument boils down to: it’s different this time.
  • draw_down 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • pc86 4mo ago
    Isn't that a perfectly fair argument if you can articulate why?
    • grebc 4mo ago
      There’s not much articulation except some personal snippets about someone caught in the hype cycle of a product, that the hive mind is buzzing about deafeningly. Tools/improvements have rarely been negative in such a massive way except rare instances, and even then society moved on and past those tools to bigger & better things. How many people today seriously consider agriculture as a career prospect but almost all humans who lived in the last 2000 years worked as peasant labor on a farm. We are thriving in comparison to that period of time.
      • red75prime 4mo ago
        This is the technology that aims to replicate all of the human functionality. So, the aim is unprecedented. You might not be convinced that this aim is achievable (despite having the human brain that achieves it, unlike, say, superluminal travel), but, at least, you might be inclined to recognize that something potentially unprecedented is going on.
        • grebc 4mo ago
          Cool. You best worry and stress yourself out about a situation you cannot control then.
          • red75prime 4mo ago
• vrganj 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • polotics 4mo ago
    IMHO that is the most likely of the many dystopian robots-replace-humans scenario: The AI-enhanced become more and more AI-integrated and internally AI-fused and they don't even realize they eventually are not humans at all. The non-AI underclass just hasn't got enough access to resources to survive long term and dies out with a whimper.
  • petesergeant 4mo ago
    > It's time to make your choice Clearly you feel you've made yours, so what are you doing differently now to what you did before?
  • jappgar 4mo ago
    The AI boosters imagine they'll be annointed and rewarded by their new overlords. That's why they're obsessed (to the point of psychosis) with "mastering" the new technique. That's why they're all building a "harness". What they don't realize is that the ironworker still ends up in chains.
  • dist-epoch 4mo ago
    You should read Nick Land, you've only went half-way with the argument. The capitalist class doesn't control Capital, Capital controls the capitalist class.
  • dnc 4mo ago
    I attribute the excitement of the VC and CEO cast to the same underlying motive, but I think there are at least several other ways all this could play out: - the Cul-de-Sac: AI progress flattens as scaling data and compute, RL and algorithmic improvements hit diminishing returns. - democratization: LLMs decentralize, mirroring the shift from mainframes to personal computers. - AI creates new jobs and thus new dependencies for the capitalist class - Any combination of the above.
  • red75prime 4mo ago
• jappgar 4mo ago
  Some food is mass-produced in factories. It tastes bad, and poisons you slowly. Some (less) food is produced on farms and kitchens. It tastes good, and keeps you healthy. I don't really care who/what wrote the code. I don't even really care about the code at all. What I care about is the end product. The problem is not "code quality" the problem is that billionaire sociopaths have removed human judgement (and human morality) from the dev loop. This started long before AI. Coders are hyperfocused on style and missing the substance. We are entering a world where rich bastards can produce evil software without any checks whatsoever. At least when humans were required to write the code, they had to find and retain unscrupulous humans. Now they're completely unfettered, and we're soon going to learn the precise shape of the digital prisons they're constructing.
• scotty79 4mo ago
  Every freelancer that switched to AI feels exactly what happened even if they can't name it. We became for AI what our clients were for us. Some hate it, some love it. To feel safe in life our clients needed to have an actual business. Now when we are the clients of our AI we are scared, because now we need to have an actual viable business. Economic machine that works. Because the old model of just selling our time and effort to a client no longer works, when we are the clients.
• noodletheworld 4mo ago
  I don't entirely disagree, but as with many other posts on this topic… > They will come for finance, biology, law, marketing, all knowledge work. That's their stated goal and they're already teasing it with "ChatGPT for Health" and similar launches. They're working on "harnesses" for other fields, it's just a matter of time before we have "Claude Finance Analyst" or something. … > Beg to disagree. The models will learn good engineering principles at some point. … > Stop and think, don't try to predict the future using (bad) past examples. Don't try to prediction the future based on the past. Also, here is my doomsday prediction. Thats kind of ironic. Heres a more thoughtful take: everything is an s curve. Things start out fast, then they slow down. It happens in learning, in tech, in literally everything. The question (unanswered) is where we are in that curve. Will they get better? Yes. A lot better? A bit better? /shrug
• danieltanfh95 4mo ago
  > The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.
  • steveBK123 4mo ago
    Exactly and this is true of many things. Much of the world is not zero sum, otherwise we'd have fallen into the "malthusian trap" several productivity booms ago.
  • red75prime 4mo ago
    And when the required complexity of software to do the task gets high enough, you assign an agent to do the task instead.
  • rafaelmn 4mo ago
    Entropy makes sure that you can't scale systems into infinite completely.
    • Schiendelman 4mo ago
      We have thought that a few times with earlier technologies - a smaller chip requires less local reduction of entropy than a room sized computer. This may keep going for a long time yet.
  • lelanthran 4mo ago
    >> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. > No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity. There's an upper limit on everything. Maybe there's no ceiling on incidental complexity for s/ware development, but there sure as shit a ceiling on the essential complexity.
    • naveen99 4mo ago
      s/complexity/entropy No ceiling.
  • GeoAtreides 4mo ago
• ryaniscool 4mo ago
  AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace * AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure * there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced There are strong headwinds to all three of these. Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a lot of tech people simply overlaying the progress curve of previous tech booms which is reductive.
  • hyperpape 4mo ago
    > The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace I guess this is trivially true if you say "maximalism" (hell, the maximalists think it will speed up as the AI becomes a super-AI-researcher), but as long as the rate of change is positive and not miniscule, it's hard to predict what 2035 looks like in software development. These things are very hard to quantify, but making the progress that happened from Jan 2025-December 2025 repeat twice in 10 years would be enough for me to say I couldn't predict the day-to-day of a software engineer in 2035.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
    > * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace Frontier AI is already good enough to be very useful for engineering. It's too costly for many places where it could be useful today. The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months. And likely again in the following 18-24 months. At the same time, the cost per watt is going to down ~25%, and at the same time speed will increase (also valuable since time is money).
    • coffeefirst 4mo ago
      > The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months. How do you know that? In 2026 the prices have been spiking. It now costs orders of magnitude more than it did in November.
      • 4mo ago
• keybored 4mo ago
  > > This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless" > > So blog with single post hyping LLMs. Oh and the domain name "human-in-the-loop". Call me suspicious. > If after reading what I just said in the reply above you still think I'm an "AI shill" or "lab shill", there's nothing I can do for you. Yes there isn’t. Because they look indistinguishable. Replacement Inevitability with a human face, along with all the human concern; “I am part of it and it scares me.” > Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm one of the engineers who's constantly committing to improve our agentic tooling, I use different models to do adversarial code reviews, I keep a toolbelt of skills and prompts, etc. I have effectively become the so-called "AI-native engineer" (gosh, I hate that term). Some CEO gloating about replacing all-knowledge-work gets skepticism, eye-rolls and resentment. Someone in the trenches having human feelings about it generates both sympathetic and ecocentric fear. --- And maybe autor intent does not matter? The original submission was massively “popular”. It served its purpose.
  • watwut 4mo ago
    > This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. Literally today I got like 4 AI ads literally mocking "old people still using excel", trying shame and insecure people into some AI whatever product. This is literally the first technology that is trying to scare and mock me into using it. All it actually does is that I am growing to hate it, honestly along with tech industry itself. Which I used to like.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • recitedropper 4mo ago
      I am having a similar sentiment change about our industry as well. The more AI's marketing plays purely on fear and shame, the more I want to see it fail. If Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other power players continue in this direction, I hope the graduation speech boos are just the start.
• Altern4tiveAcc 4mo ago
  >Agents used to be bad at this kind of stuff in my workplace as well, but newer models + agent-friendly documentation + AGENT.md begging agents to read the fucking docs before coding changed this landscape for us here. Wouldn't that be true for humans as well? If you have documentation explaining a rule and you read it, you may not need to reach out to coworkers. Otherwise I think the author's concerns are 100% valid.
• sam_lowry_ 4mo ago
  Whenever someone complaints about LLMs eroding their career, I advise them to read The Profession by Isaac Asimov. TLDR: there will be less programmers and they will be better on average.
  • an0malous 4mo ago
    Do you do this because you hate these people? If I recall the story correctly, it’s basically confirming their worst fears
    • sam_lowry_ 4mo ago
      Because I love sci-fi.
• ufocia 4mo ago
  "I'm finding LLMs also competent at explaining and giving advice on other domain stuff I'm totally new to, which I have cross-checked with Legal/Product Managers and is usually right." "Usually" is the keyword. Until it becomes "always" (counterintuitive for heuristic systems) or "almost always" some human experts will (/may?) be needed to babysit. P.S. "_are_ usually right" since they are "LLMs". Methinks running the response through an LLM could've made it more "right".
  • daveshistory 4mo ago
    I think technically it's referring to the advice, which is in the singular. "These AIs are usually right about things I don't know anything about" sounds like the textbook example of risky thinking though.
  • Delk 4mo ago
    Maybe it's the advice that's usually right.
• philipwhiuk 4mo ago
  > The models will learn good engineering principles at some point. This is just silly. It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits and that they just aren't that good. We're seeing lots of other AI and software engineering brought to bear, but there's nothing 'inevitable' that means this is close. "at some point" is so vague as to be irrelevant. Fusion might be the dominant source of electricity "at some point". Equally, AI knowing good principles could be 30 years away. Don't assume that hard intellectual challenges are solvable on faith. Look at what's currently possible. AI has always been a field where https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png applies heavily.
  • Ukv 4mo ago
    > It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits Maybe, but people have been saying deep learning is about to hit a wall since 2012, and many reasonable-sounding "machines fundamentally can't do X" have since fallen. Feels like we're standing on a roof with floodwater up to our ankles - maybe it stops rising now, but we didn't foresee it getting anywhere near this high in the first place. I do agree that progress will probably be more slow/gradual than others seem to predict, no "hard takeoff", but even being decades away is still relevant to someone starting a career in software development.
• incomingpain 4mo ago
  You are correct that your career is changing, but it's not like AI is going to go away. In the 1990s when crypto went to court. It was determined that really anything coming from AI is protected speech. Very few exceptions, AI cant export a few things. So you're never seeing AI go away, which means you need to transition/adapt.
• alexpandey 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• 6510 4mo ago
  Tax I could do to some extend but I once (for laughs) had a go at scripting up Dutch work hour laws because no one could do it in their head. This was so terrifyingly complex that I'm convinced many laws should be rewritten to make it easier to code. The problem looks something like (not a real example): Type Z hours maximum A per day, B per week, C per month, D per year. E more hours than A is allowed every F weeks but no more than G per month and H per year. More than B is allowed... etc Minimum rest hours I per day, J per week, K per two weeks, L per month. More is allowed every 7.5 days unless it is full moon and maximum hours per day were exceeded at least 3 times in the last 82 days except from solar eclipses or if the Kings is married 12.5 years or if the employee gave birth in the last 472 hours. My employer has software to make the schedules. It cant tell where shifting around shifts is possible but you can try do it and it will tell you why it isn't possible. I was hoping to calculate if multiple shifts can be shifted around to facilitate someones day off. Sometimes it just cant be made to work but if people are willing and there is a hole you end up doing it anyway. (I've done a triple shift once because the coworker wanted to bring his wife to the hospital.) Employees earn undocumented days off... and then you end up with multiple schedules, the real one and the official one. Possibly extra copies depending on who knows what is really going on. This cant be the way... Better just have modern laws that make sense in code.
• mexicocitinluez 4mo ago
  > If the models (and harnesses) keep getting better at the same pace for the foreseeable years, we are heading to a world where the profession is commoditized to the ground. There's this talk about Jevons Paradox but I disagree. The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. This entire section is backwards to me. The current state of a lot of different domains I've been in is that they tend to center around 2-3 major, generic products that all get retrofitted to fit those smaller/medium-sized businesses. Now that the economics have shifted, it makes sense for those businesses to bring on software devs to build software tailored to their problem specifically. And you can't compare copyrighting. It's a totally different field, with different goals and different time tables.
• queenkjuul 4mo ago
  I think people are far too dismissive of just how well-suited programming is to the exact form of LLMs. Extremely formal syntax, limited ambiguity, simple verifiable testing procedures, and colossal well-documented training sets. I don't yet buy that the successes of coding agents will apply nearly as well to other professions. "Correct more often than not when asked a random accounting question" really isn't any indication to me that they'll get there.
  • ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago
    And what's the most important aspect, in my opinion: In programming the LLM can make an hypothesis, try, get feedback, and refine the hypothesis, until it works. This isn't the case in most areas. For example in Law, where everythign is text, you can RL so that an LLM produces an argument which a human would believe to be more reasonable, but you can't get a really fast loop of: make an argument, test it in front of a judge, refine the argument until you win the case.
• stavarotti 4mo ago
  > On novel work: > Work that introduces new methods, highly creative ideas, or solutions that have not been used or experienced before. More generally, an approach that introduces an innovative strategy to solve a complex problem. Something that I've been thinking about for the past year or so is coming to grips with the fact that the vast majority (anecdote) of software engineering work is not novel (and maybe that's okay). Few opportunities lend themselves to doing truly novel work. Other than infrastructure work and highly specialized software, pause and ask yourself when you last encountered software were you said "how the hell did they do that?" or "damn, that's nice" (for me, the most recent was Ghostty). I think much of the angst that people have when they fear for their job is coming to the realization that LLMs can do most of the "standard" work that a lot of highly compensated individuals currently do. We've built livelihoods around this and the threat of that coming to an end is genuinely frightening.
  • thunky 4mo ago
    > I think much of the angst that people have when they fear for their job is coming to the realization that LLMs can do most of the "standard" work that a lot of highly compensated individuals currently do. Amd do it better in most cases imo. Which is also hard to come to terms with, because there is a good bit of elitism/entitlement going around. The idea that a SWE is working at a higher level, which is beyond the reach of mere mortals, so therefore the high compensation is justified. Meanwhile everyone is, for the most part, doing some slight variation of the same thing as you suggested. After starting out working minimum wage jobs I've always thought that the work gets easier and easier from there. Compensation and hard work are negativity correlated.
  • manoji 4mo ago
    This is spot on ! Most of the work we really do is pure boilerplate and should be automated. While there are instances of interesting work those are far and few in between . The most recent instance of "how the hell did they do that?" for me was duckdb.
  • hackingonempty 4mo ago
    > pause and ask yourself when you last encountered software were you said "how the hell did they do that?" Like every month for the past 5 years? The progress in machine learning is dizzying. It is astonishing what can be done now with text, images, audio, video, code, etc... If you don't study it, however, you have no idea how it works or how to do it yourself. oblig. xkcd https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
• jmpman 4mo ago
  In my social network, there are two people impacted by LLMs. One was a security operations manager whose company reduced headcount upon introduction of some new LLM powered security tools. The other was UX designer. Both have been unemployed for 6+ months, and neither are likely to land a job in their field. The government hasn't stepped in and provided them with Universal Basic Income, and I wonder what will happen when my career is similarly impacted? Luckily I'm on the verge of retirement and should be able to support myself. However I have other friends who tried to day trade their 401k instead of work, and although back in the workforce, no longer have a nest egg. What's going to happen to them when they're inevitably put to pasture by AI?
• waffletower 4mo ago
  "There's this talk about Jevons Paradox but I disagree." In my position, our team is clearly displaying "increased demand due to increased efficiency". I admit our position may be situational -- but my anecdote seems more substantive and speculative than "I disagree" from my vantage at least.
• alfalfasprout 4mo ago
  A part of the puzzle that rarely gets discussed is something that predated LLMs entirely-- "software engineering" and "programming" have been conflated for a long time now and there's a huge gamut of roles out there. The practice of writing code, or programming, in recent years has really fallen into two buckets: The vast majority of folks are given a task, they write code to complete that task, and the task completion then counts towards some objective (eg; a new feature, product or fixing a bug). Perjoratively, they've been known as "ticket takers". A much smaller group have instead worked in the other direction-- identifying where improvements can be made to a product, piece of infrastructure, or pain point and transformed that into tasks that can then be solved via code. How much of a role you play in that strategy and formulation has been the real differentiator. Not so much what you know. While these are correlated, they're very different. At a high level, it's been the difference between "developer" and "engineer" but the reality is the titles have become somewhat meaningless in recent years where many "engineers" are just doing the same CRUD tasks over and over. The reason this matters is that at some point, you can only abstract so far... the requirements for what to build have to come from somewhere. At the most extreme case, there's only the CEO and a company that's nothing but AI agents. In the least extreme case (today) each line worker could manage 1 or more LLMs/agents. It's not entirely clear to me or frankly a large portion of those in the industry that we're suddenly on pace for one outcome vs another. But I do think that software isn't particularly unique here other than it was an initial starting point for LLMs to deliver value. All white collar work is at risk including CEOs. And if that happens it would be outlandish to think a utopia emerges... the opposite is far more likely.
• lellow 4mo ago
  Just kudos to OP for coming back. One thing I almost "hate" is that nowadays everyone can put something out there... videos, articles, etc., but when confronted with questions, you never see the discussion continue. YT videos are an example... SO MANY VIDEOS... People genuinely asking some good questions... and radio silence.
• iyeyerjdsd 4mo ago
  [dead]
• Havoc 4mo ago
  Im not (yet) in the firing line but much like OP I’m rather worried as to where this is all going on a societal level. Programmers may fall first but other knowledge work won’t be far behind.
  • matheusmoreira 4mo ago
    I'm quite worried too. I think we're all going to be screwed if we don't achieve the fabled post scarcity society.
• insane_dreamer 4mo ago
  > since the demand is not infinite, not all of them can be hired to do that. One copywriter is now doing the job of 10, but the demand is fixed. The demand is not going to 10x just because you have 10x more supply. This is the key insight, and one that I find myself repeating to people over and over. Yeah, you'll still need a HITL for some tasks. But because it only takes 1 person to do 10 people's work, that's a 90% workforce reduction, essentially killing off entire professions. So "find the next thing" will work for the lucky 10%. And given the $T of investment including all datacenter and energy to run them (we collectively decided to forget about climate change because AI so shiny), the only way to get the desired ROI is to decimate as many professions as possible. A couple of days ago talked to a parent of one of my kids teammates and it turns out he's an illustrator who has been able to support his family for the past 10 years on his considerable skill. And all of a sudden, AI has taken it away, not gradually, but almost overnight. No one wants to pay for illustrators because midjourney is "good enough". What is that person supposed to do now? It's not like he can find another company to work for, or move to a city where there are "jobs", it's the end of a career that he spend a couple of decades honing his skills for. It was sobering. Yeah, he could sell his own art on Etsy or something, but there's a limited market -- it's not like people are going to buy 10x works of art on Etsy than before. So essentially, that entire profession is on life support. And lest someone say "use the AI tools yourself, become the prompt engineer", they're missing the point that the marketing person who was hiring illustrators no longer wants to do so because they can just prompt-design it themselves and no one cares about quality anymore anyway.
• hootz 4mo ago
  >The reports I get from people I know are that my company is not on the extreme edge of vibecoding, so leaving it for a potentially worse environment is not a good trade. I'm in a similar situation right now. I might get a job offer for a 60% pay raise, however that means leaving a company with conservative views on AI to join an "agent-first" AI focused one.
• teleforce 4mo ago
  I think the replies were pre-mature since when I commented on HN the comments total still has not reached 1000, but he already linked the replies already in the blog. Perhaps should have waited the comments to settle down in the original HN post, so that he can chose the most relevant and the interesting comments before posting the replies. Personally, I'd really appreciate it if the original OP article author can respond to my comment in the previous post [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442851