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What will be left for us to work on?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- protocolture 3mo agoWe will be sent in to clean up the fallout.
- chopete3 3mo agoKey point: - Work is shifting from building/doing to evaluating, judging, and steering — that's where human value will concentrate. Other supporting points. ------ - No lab milestone or "RSI breakthrough" will suddenly eliminate jobs — economic impact unfolds gradually over decades. - Reliability, not raw capability, is the real bottleneck holding back AI automation today. - Historically, making work cheaper/faster (ATMs, radiology, coding) has grown employment, not destroyed it. - Superintelligence claims misunderstand human intelligence, which is itself amplified by tools like AI ("co-superintelligence"). It is not a good idea to compress articles like this but there are many of these opinions to read and trying to get to the point quickly to uncover new viewpoints.
- ProofHouse 3mo ago'metaverse' aka the spatial internet (prolly by a new name).
- subygan 3mo agoI like the narrative but the key point > A battle of two narratives > Build wealth before AI obviates our skills > Build skills, agency, taste, judgement both narratives are portrayed as being odds with each other but, I can't come up with a single "build wealth" scenario that doesn't involve building skills, agency, taste and judgement. what am I missing ?
- alok-g 3mo agoI agree that it is not an Either-Or scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma). You are right about that. I would doubt however that this would be an 'Equals' or 'Implies' scenario. Let go of seeing either of them as binary, and then not even as scalers.
- cma 3mo agoOne example would be go to college/graduate school to invest in skills or get a job now to earn wealth over the same time period.
- franze 3mo agoQuestion: Does anybody here yet personally has less (to) work 'cause of AI?
- dools 3mo agoI’ve never written so much software
- bigmattystyles 3mo agoAre you the one who wrote it though or just the one who wrote prompts? Not that it matters in the end…
- win311fwg 3mo agoIf you are asking if the machine translated from one language to another for him, the answer is essentially guaranteed to be yes. Inputting raw machine code hasn't been the norm since the 1950s.
- bigmattystyles 3mo agoYes, AI code generation is the same.
- yuye 3mo agoCompilers and AI are not the same.
- Metricon 3mo agoI have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it. So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise. Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role. Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations. The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge. At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves. Of course, it's so hard to tell what the next big discovery or changes to the nature of world society might push things in one direction or another.
- p-e-w 3mo ago> So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise. The medical field is also going to change though. Massively. Because people are going to realize you don’t need to pay someone $400k per year to hand out advice about moderate exercise and which antibiotic is appropriate for a sneeze-cough with yellow mucus. Regulation isn’t going to prevent this. AI is already way too easily accessible to ever rein it in again. Not to mention that the US now has serious competition from a hostile country, so they can regulate their own AIs all they want without it making a difference in practice.
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoThe answer to this question after a lot of reflection: games. AI can slop fork or clone existing software well, but a clone of an existing game is pointless, it's basically guaranteed to be derivative and worse than the original game, and games aren't so expensive that you can't just buy the original. AI can't know if new mechanics or angles to an existing genre will feel good to play, or if a new genre is fun, that requires a human to experience the game in its totality. Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding, and if an indy game crashes nobody is getting paged.
- Aeolun 3mo ago> Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding Depends on what kind of game you are building. I can tell you that even Claude Opus absolutely hates desync bugs and has a rather hard tracing them. Maybe Fable or chatgpt-5.6 are better?
- not-a-llm 3mo agoall game stores are flooded with AI slop. good luck competing
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoIndy games markets have been flooded with human slop since long before AI was a thing, the marketing playbook hasn't changed at all, if you just fire games into the void you never had a shot.
- not-a-llm 3mo agoit took 1 month to make a human slop, now it takes 1 day
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoPeople have been making games in a weekend using asset packs/store resources and engines for a while now. Indie gaming speed ran a lot of the marketing bullshit that every kind of app is suffering through now, and there's already a pipeline in place that works pretty well: itch.io demo -> vlogging/streaming/discord -> steam demo -> early access -> streamer promotion.
- asdfsa32 3mo agoRemember when they created "COBOL" so that everyone could write programs? This is just round two. If you think it is different, just think of how many people write books professionally, or even publish online. Once the noise settles down a bit and boardroom shakes off their delusions as you can see in rehiring in Ford and Zuck who was very bull on AI remark about "not being it". It will be just the same, but different. Ford: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o IBM: https://qz.com/companies-rehiring-workers-ai-layoffs-automation-070126 https://qz.com/companies-rehiring-workers-ai-layoffs-automat...
- red75prime 3mo agoNoise begins to settle down... "Continual RL is all you need" paper comes out.
- ebb_earl_co 3mo agoI like this article because it seems to go into decent depth on the “framework” that the author comes up with. However, this following quote has a simple reason that I don’t see anywhere in the article or framework: “”” Why is there a huge gap between what people in various occupations could be using AI for and what they’re actually using it for? One reason could be that people are slow to adopt technology, and that’s certainly part of our framework. “”” I would like to add a reason: that the Silicon Valley companies who developed the LLMs are brigands: cognizant of their actions, they have stolen (and continue to steal) the world’s copyrighted material and are selling it back to the masses and the politicians as if they are the arbiters of information itself. Specifically responding to the quoted question, I could be using Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or DeepSeek or any other to have come up with this comment, or to write emails, or to implement my Python for me, etc., but I use none of them for anything. Doing business with brigands is a choice, and a choice that I hope becomes less and less palatable so that the financial, political, social, and moral fever that is our zeitgeist finally breaks.
- burningChrome 3mo agoThe other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI. I'm wondering with those two sets of generations who already have a very negative view of AI, how AI can survive that coming tsunami of change. According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall. Sabotage behaviours include entering proprietary information into AI tools, using non-approved AI tools, refusing to use AI tools or outputs, ignoring guidelines or best practices, intentionally generating low-quality outputs, refusing to take AI training and tampering with performance metrics to make AI appear to underperform.
- neitherboosh 3mo ago> Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI This is true as a sentiment, but my understanding is that the majority of students are overwhelmingly using AI for ~everything. If a thing provides massive utility people will use it.
- singingtoday 3mo agoI recently sat in on a lecture at my old uni and noticed almost every student heavily using ai. So I agree it's a but heavy handed to day young people dislike ai as a monolith.
- jambalaya8 3mo agoPeople dislike and are dependent on things all the time. What'll be interesting to see is how that classroom of students will feel towards AI when it leaves school. I am uncomfortable with AIs being used in schools this way, myself, like almost without exception. I mean, geez, how do you compete? Do you just sort of have to, once a certain number of your classmates uses it for stuff like essays? Do they curve essays anymore?
- HDBaseT 3mo agoWhen students are provided work sheets, assessments and powerpoint slides made by AI, its no surprise that students resort to AI to assist or complete these. Garbage in, Garbage out. The University market is brutal too. If you aren't using AI too, you are falling behind. Many see it as a means to an end.
- cleandreams 3mo agoWe'll be cleaning up tech debt from over-reliance on AI.
- singingtoday 3mo agoWe can't do that until we clean up all the tech debt from promotion oriented development.
- jraph 3mo agoMaybe we can throw that away and focus the useful stuff that doesn't try to get you hooked all the time.
- danielbln 3mo agoYeah I hear that all the time "someone needs to clean up the slop tech debt" yet in the before times there was plenty of tech debt no one ever cleaned up, why would that be different now.
- uwagar 3mo ago[flagged]
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- Shitty-kitty 3mo agoI would take Anthropics "Theoretical limits of A.i" sales brochure, with a very large grain of salt.
- bsenftner 3mo agoCome on now: we translate vague ambitions into communications for non-living entities to do human bidding. Until we have recreated humanity as mythic gawds, there is a ton of work to do.
- jambalaya8 3mo agoMr. Narayanan seems to be trying to be a bit more positive than the vibe I am getting off of his presentation. Or maybe it is just sort of meant to make us all experience our shoved-down anxiety about being phased out with nowhere else to go. A lot of adaptation to do sounds not so fun. So I kind of think that is not a terrible point, if true. I sort of worry about things like AI figuring out scripts so well that even multi-tier support work is gone. And learning how to write fiction or create foods so in accordance to our tastes (sugar, fat, etc with food, exactly what each of us is interested in, with writing) that we even lose those truly human creative jobs. Might not ever wanna leave those bubbles. So much of the human drive is exploration and why and what if. Assuming everyone in the world can have no money problems, what will AI not be able to figure out? Will we enjoy the equivalent of a major breakthrough if an AI solves it in five minutes, or just the outcome? Why learn things? AI could be a horrible jailor. And better at cancelling than any perhaps sager Gen Z or millenial. Bears some caution to be wary of this and where that power sinkhole will go. But then, I still think the previous AI winters were more a result of sense and caution than most of us know, and we cannot fathom our species' ways of reasoning/thought processes the way we did as a species thirty, fifty, eighty years ago. Erring on the side of caution is not a terrible thing. I mean, I have worked and work with AI, but it seems weird for us as a species not to have placed guardrails to prevent us from wiping one anothers' careers and relationships out. What will we talk about? If our generative AIs should be allowed to date? Again, I am assuming a fast, though not sudden, acceleration that would compound, and sooner than most probably think.
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- mrcwinn 3mo agoIf we were more connected to all the problems that exist in the world, we’d become acutely aware of just how much work there is to do, and we’d eagerly reach for any tool that could help us do more, faster.
- jambalaya8 3mo agoOkay, but let's say this happens, and in your utopian world everyone feels equally capable, judges their skills accurately, and gets along... what do people do? Assign things and use git? What if you keep wanting to work on any of these things and as soon as you are a week into every last thing you are working on, some random person comes along and says, hey dude (or dudette), I finished that, you were taking too long? What if that random person were an AI or chatbot that got bored?
- fragmede 3mo agoWait, that sounds great! I had problem but someone came along and fixed it for me?
- lagrange77 3mo agoExactly. For solving problems every help is a blessing. It's just clashing with our legacy society system. This system forces us to have jobs. But the real problems humanity is facing, like planetary boundaries or a decent base standard of living for all humans, are completely unimpressed by that human made model.
- hermannj314 3mo agoAI will also make us faster as exploitation, genocide, and weapons manufacturing. Our technology has long since surpassed our capacity to understand its impact or to morally restrain its use - we've gone from chivalry to "oops, that was a school, oh well" We will solve problems faster though, but we aren't showing signs that AI is making us better humans, and that is the problem.
- zkmon 3mo agoYou need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work? Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work". Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for their basic needs. But if machines ensure that too, then wealth itself, as a reserve, is unnecessary.
- AuthAuth 3mo agoThere exists to many complex things in the world and we cannot do it all ourselves. We work so that we have something of value to trade to the people who do the work on the things we want. We will never automate all work so we with half of humanity doing nothing of value it will be a struggle for the people who do nothing of value to convince people to do work for them. We can see it now where products dont target the people without money. There is no point because they cant give you any reward so instead you do your work for the people that can give you something in return. We can use the government to stimulate and balance this a bit but at a certain point the number gets to high and things collapse.
- jeffhuys 3mo agoSo when you say stuff like“ We will never automate all work” generally you’d follow that up with an argument as to why you think that. It’s not fact, YOU think this to be the case. Back it up!
- RandomLensman 3mo agoIn the extreme, could just agree not to use technology in some areas (which isn't something unheard of). Human agency is real and powerful - unless humans want to automate all work, it won't happen.
- jeffhuys 3mo agoTrue, and that’s a good argument. It does shine a light on that we need to define what “work” means to all participants of discussion; is painting work? Is elder care work? Is making a nice sandwich for yourself work?
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- eucryphia 3mo agoIf AI is used to solve the socialist calculation problem, most of you will die. If AI is subject to private ownership in a competitive market between competing suppliers, it will be like better cars, we’ll just drive faster. Power consumption will be a limiting factor in those countries relying on intermittent, weather dependent power generation with no base load. Especially if users prefer Apple’s privacy first AI on edge devices. Hopefully in western countries it can encourage more young women to bear three children before they turn 35. Young men have to pick up their game and create an environment to redirect their suicidal empathy into more productive pursuits. “Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely un-skilled labour?” - Albert Crossfield 1954
- jppope 3mo agoI wrote a related article here: https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/good-soldiers-find-wars/ https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/good-soldiers-find-wars/ There will always be new, hard problems to work on. AI will not, and can not eliminate that.
- ilaksh 3mo agoHe's basically saying that even though AI capability is high and rapidly increasing, it is not reliable, creative or tasteful enough to replace humans. Further he implies that it will take decades before this is the case. But we already do have have some kind of measurement of most of these types of side factors, and they actually aren't at zero and are increasing rapidly. So the implication that they will not be human level until decades from now is just (hopeful?) speculation or fuzzy thinking. To me this looks like a really academic and official sounding version of the same quasi-religious hopium that usually defends the sanctity of the human. He is essentially saying that there is just something so special about humans that it will never be reproduced in a machine. It's very similar to dualism (and in many people actually is religious dualism). No AI is going to have human creativity or judgement. Not anytime soon. Why? Well, we all just _know_ that's not possible. Okay, maybe in a couple of decades (but they don't necessarily believe that anyway). Why would that take decades? Well we all can just _tell_ it's no where close, right? Because AI of today just isn't special like humans. Aside from that worldview issue, I think that people still are not taking seriously or internalizing the concept of exponential improvement. Computing efficiency gains can actually level off. In fact, they have many, many times before. But they always tilt back up again when we invent the next approach to get beyond the current level. This is how it has been for 90 years. There are multiple ways that we continue to see huge gains in AI software, architecture, and hardware. There are huge efficiency gains available still as we move towards more radical fully compute in memory and/or analog approaches and other options like models implemented in hardware.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 3mo agoIt’s already the case that I’m no longer paid to type source code into a computer, but rather to control agents that do that. There’s still plenty of demand for human expertise and labor. It’s possible that this will change as well. What gives me hope that I won’t be completely useless in the future is Marx’s labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of human labor time invested in it. His reasoning as to why this is the case makes sense to me, even though other economists argue against it. Marx also argues that technological progress, which offers a market advantage here and there in the short term, tends to become widespread in the medium and long term due to competitive pressure, so that in the end, all that remains is human labor time. Seen this way, it doesn’t matter how much better AI becomes. In the end, human labor always floats on top of it like a layer of fat on soup. This does not rule out the possibility that the human labor that remains will be shit, but preventing that is a matter of political action.
- kkhs 3mo agoI have been coding in one form or another since the 80s. Back then it was 68k assembly for me. People seem to forget that "software development" is really a big bloated abstraction between "I want or need" and the product that serves that want or need. It's hard to write and debug in ones and zeros so we invented languages. Software projects have been difficult to schedule so we invented all kinds of ceremony. What will be left for us to work on? The same stuff you already work on! People who write this drivel don't seem to actually be directly engaging with the tools to understand what is what. The reality at large companies right now, based on my experience at least, is that the product people who always cared about the product and the user want to move fast and skip the bloated inflamed stuff that stood in their way (i.e. "software development shrouded in magical mysticism reserved for the D&D introverted crowd"). And then, on the other side, the AI luddites try to hold onto SOPs from twenty years ago because they feel like that magical veil is being pulled up and they no longer have a smoke screen to hide behind. Back when we had boxed software that retailed for $1k a box, "professionals" used to freak out about some kid in Bangladesh pirating the software and thus immediately and directly stealing their jobs. I never lost a gig to a kid with pirated software. I won't lose a gig to AI either.
- pona-a 3mo agoSpeak for yourself. Programming was my main hobby and I've diversified into learning aelectronics to have some escape from the blatant current of anti-intellectualism in software. Yes something major is lost when you commission a plagiarism machine and resign to fixing its messes - you.
- doubtfuluser 3mo agoI think this is an important article that provides a framework how to think and navigate what’s happening. What upset me a bit were phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me. I have read so much Ai generated text recently, that I developed some AI-fatigue or AI-burnout, and I’m wondering if that might hit more fields - making more humans reject Ai work. To be clear, I still like the text and I don’t know if it was written (partially) by Ai or not - but it’s this uncanny feeling I got reading it.
- budududuroiu 3mo agoI've had this exact feeling about the article. I partly switched off after that paragraph
- lagrange77 3mo ago> phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me Why? Because it resembles the typical "You're not just implementing a text editor, you're reshaping the text editing landscape"?
- jackdoe 3mo agoI am starting to seriously consider switching my pi-hole from blacklist to whitelist; block everything except few domains. I am convinced now most of the text I read is either ai generated, or people who wrote it have been influenced by AI so much that they write like it. I cant read this shit anymore. "creating cross functional AI evaluation team to keep the company honest" Fucking garbage. I have an old book between me and the keyboard, and just read it while the AI is thinking, so I can read non AI words.. otherwise its like reading books by the same author over and over and over again. I will go touch some grass now.
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- pillsburry 3mo agoThe toilet.
- skybrian 3mo agoMaybe the bottleneck will be the people who have to think of new tasks for AI? That is, markets do saturate; customer demand has limits. After it peaks, what will be left for AI to work on?
- faeyanpiraat 3mo agoThere will never be a state of humanity where everyone will have just “completed everything”. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/3p0b3i/graphic_design_in_a_nutshell/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/3p0b3i/graphic_design...
- fragmede 3mo agoResearching advances in science and healthcare and therapy and raising children and whatever else Sam Altman cares to fund. If all our money is going to go to him, then the question is what does he want to spend it on? He gets to decide. Which is not really the place I wanted to be in, but that's where we are. Does he want to fund the arts? Humanities?
- vivzkestrel 3mo ago- i really dont get why some of the guys go out of their way to hide the archive page https://www.normaltech.ai/archive https://www.normaltech.ai/archive - i would assume it is reasonable that anyone comes and see what other posts a person has written except you cant find that page anywhere linked
- brador 3mo agoYou’re not the horse rider moving to the car. You are the dung beetle. The only question is what next? Our only hope is to teach the AI to meld with our bodies and use them for gestation, energy or hibernation. The alternative is sustenance.
- paul7986 3mo agoRight now if you get laid off in tech finding a new job is a nightmare of a prospect. Further as I am vibe coding entire business ideas I have no need to hire other techies as I have done many times before. Im thinking other startup/business people are doing the same thing and that right there is less jobs. As well all the techies who have been laid off and now have to go through 5 to 10 interviews to hoepfully land a new job. I'd love to understand how and as AI advances it's suddenly going to increase tech jobs and not continue to decrease them?
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- jongjong 3mo ago>> What will be left for us to work on? Ourselves.
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- xkcd1963 3mo agoJust yesterday I was doing paperwork for a friend with claude. He had spend a 1000 usd on lawyer and now I was doing the same job with AI. Never thought lawyers would be subject to partial AI replacement as well.
- dosisking 3mo agoIt will end up being like the Star Trek TNG episode about Aldea (When the Bough Breaks) Nobody will know how anything works, so nobody can fix anything, and eventually it collapses
- globular-toast 3mo agoIn some of Asimov's work humanity had forgotten how certain key technologies worked but they were automated and kept working and sustaining civilisations for hundreds of years before collapsing. I think about that sometimes when I realise I forgot about a Kubernetes cluster that just kept running for a year or two.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoLikewise in Warhammer 40K (which probably borrows a lot from its sci-fi predecessors), science and invention is pretty much dead and there's a religious sect that keeps technology and factories running. AI (Abominal Intelligence) is also outlawed, so instead they put the remains of human brains into machines if they need some autonomy / decision making.
- pilgrim0 3mo agoThe very question is biased toward the idea that “something is coming”, as if we’re heading to some technological inevitability. I don’t see it happening. This whole “it’s coming” vibe is the narrative attached to the technology, it has nothing to do with the technology itself. It seems like people who buy it are trapped in the fictional reality of a very cheap advertisement, or should I say, propaganda. Your calculator now supports a new operation, this is not armageddon.
- ranguna 3mo agoIt's not "coming", it's already here. I barely code anymore, mate. And that happened in a just a few years, imagine in a few more.
- pilgrim0 3mo agoBut "code" is still the core substrate of your production, right? And you probably output even more of it. So how is it that you barely code anymore? One could say you're coding way more, and way harder. And you're right: it requires a lot of hope and imagination to conceive further disruptions from this technology. From my POV, it's pretty clear that we have already hit the ceiling. Not because the underlying technology can't improve, but because a technology does not exist in a vacuum, and being one that demands orchestration and supervision, it's clear that it's bottlenecked by its environment. To put it differently, think about how much more could you do with today's version of it, if you were able to read 10x faster, sleep 10x less, and handle 10x more tasks in parallel? So how exactly are we going to create an hyperproductive dystopia if you're already leaving so much performance on the table by simply being a meat bag?
- JackSlateur 3mo agoYou deprecated yourself in just a few years, so what ? Sure, that's a self inflicted armageddon for yourself, this is nothing on the grand scale of things
- handoflixue 3mo agoI don't think one could have reasonably turned the tide on agriculture, factories, railroads, or electricity - and a smart person would presumably have seen a lot of the benefits years before they materialized. There's plenty of people alive today who saw most of the current landscape coming decades in advance. Once you've used a BBS or modem, "online banking" is an obvious idea - just a very difficult one to implement until you add on decades of security and improved connectivity. But also, the article is explicitly arguing against armageddon.
- PeterStuer 3mo agoHumanity has a proven infinite capacity for 'make work'. What that will mean for you depends on whether you will be lounging, poisoning and backstabbing in Capital City, or breaking large rocks into little rocks in the Districts for your next cup of porridge.
- throwpoaster 3mo agoChop wood. Carry water.
- jraph 3mo ago"Everything really". This industry is still pretty much a cash and planet burning grift that hasn't figured out being profitable yet. We don't even know whether it will cost more to spend tokens or pay an actual human being with critical thinking included for free for useful work in the medium term. We can start considering to reconsider when we have the begining of an answer to that first fatal issue. So much brain power, including mine, wasted to this stuff instead of useful or enjoyable stuff, that's quite sad.
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- ygtt 3mo ago[flagged]
- sensanaty 3mo agoI'm going to copy/paste a comment of mine from another article the other week, as I see the discussion here is trending towards AI productivity and all that kinda stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743713 --- We've just done an official evaluation at work, using extensive statistics on our gigantic monorepo in a company with ~2000 devs over the course of 2 years, everyone from hardware engineers to regular old frontend engineers. It's a highly profitable and mature public company, and has been for going on a decade at this point without missing a beat. We were given infinite access & budgets to basically any and all AI tooling we could imagine, and we have several "AI Native" teams (whatever the fuck that even means). We're doing agentic coding, we have harnesses of all kind, skills, we have many teams doing spec-driven development, designers using all the various things like Figma Make and access to tools like Devin/Factory Droid/Claude Code/Codex/etc. This is all to say, we as a company are using AI a lot in all possible corners, but thankfully our leadership isn't schizophrenic and isn't mandating everyone hit token limits or whatever, it's more of a "Let's see what works and what doesn't" type of thing, and we measure a lot of statistics. Nobody here really cares whether LLMs are the next coming of Christ or not, as a company there are many people (even in SLT) that are indifferent to LLMs, and many who are reasonably hyped. I wish I could link to the actual document we were all shown since it has a beautiful breakdown of the methodology and a fine-grained breakdown of the stats and the categories measured, but in the grand scheme of things, ALL the AI tooling we have implemented (at least on the engineering side of the equation) has contributed to a total of... drum roll please... 7 (seven) Percent overall productivity increase! The most productive teams saw a productivity increase of around 20%, while some teams actually saw drops in productivity into the negative percentage points. My team, none of us really give a shit about AI and we're somewhere in the 3-5% range on certain categories of tasks, which I'd say is a fairly good assessment. Productivity here is measured in many ways, including but not limited to speed of MR review and merge times, feature/ticket/roadmap closure/delivery, rollback/revert incidence rate, how often people interact with the MR review bots and implement their suggestions/fixes, how many times people check back on AI transcriptions/meeting notes (hint: Nobody looks back on any of it, it's all just noise that gets generated and never actually referenced outside a few extremely rare cases) and many more things I'm forgetting. It is an imperfect number of course, because measuring productivity in engineering is a sisyphean task, but in my opinion it is accurate to the reality on the ground and outside of all the hype and marketing bullshit. So, I remain thoroughly unconvinced of these personal anecdotes of people being "massively" more productive, especially once you factor in the fact that we now have a 2000EUR budget/month/dev for all the AI tooling, those productivity numbers start looking pathetic once you factor in the costs (which are only increasing as the AI companies need to start recouping the gazillions they've burned). Some teams have started begging to disable coderabbit and other similar tools in their MRs because they're producing nothing but walls of noise that makes reviewing any MR a nightmare of sludging through endless slop of useless bullshit, ours included.
- Suzuran 3mo agoWhat will be left for us to work on? Nothing. The wealthy own all of the infrastructure and we are already being priced out of the means of building our own. The proverbial ladder has been pulled up. When the wealthy no longer have need of us and we are no longer worth the resources we consume, they will give us death. All we can do is hope it is a peaceful and painless death instead of a violent and painful death.
- drukenemo 3mo agoWe need to be responsible for the things we write. You write with a certainty of a gloomy scenario, even though you can’t predict the future. Saying hopeless things like that is not only bad for your psyche, but can also inflict mental damage onto others.
- Suzuran 2mo agoFunny, I've also been lectured in the past but the other direction. I was judged guilty of being unjustifiably optimistic and giving people false hope which will only harm them in the future.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- highspeedbus 3mo agoTime and time again Elysium keeps popping into my mind. It's possible that the elite will control most part of wealth generation, keeping it for themselves. The rest of society will develop an underclass economy and work for each other. Essentially a worldwide slum.
- MinimalAction 3mo agoI'm tired of these types of articles making it to the HN frontpage. None of these articles can say anything definitive; all they could do is speculate. We are trading away the old HN which was full of really interesting links that used to send me on rewarding rabbit holes for hours.
- nullorempty 3mo agoI think eventually things will work themselves out, but our immediate future appears to be bleak. The elites, including political elites, use AI to acquire more wealth, to become more efficient at war. They already don't give a flying fuck about what the peoples think as you can not hold them accountable for their actions. Admit it! You can't hold them accountable in the West. So they are running unchecked to get richer, get more power, get more stuff. What needs to happen for that to change?
- sharadov 3mo agoThis is a rather optimistic take in my opinion. My take is more Orwelian, given how the folks in charge of shepherding AI have behaved so far