14 ms·

What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

• simonw 2mo ago
  A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people meant early January due to the December break. General agents (OpenClaw, Anthropic Copilot, ChatGPT "Work") started working even later than that. This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using from 2022-2025. Studies that mainly focus on 2022 to end of 2025 might be missing out on a material uptick in capabilities.
  • Seattle3503 2mo ago
    It does feel like we are in a transition period, and its not clear what conclusions we can draw about any sort of "steady state" yet.
  • AbsurdCensor 2mo ago
    This isn’t the first study showing this though. It’s pretty simple, programmers and IT were severely overhired during the pandemic, there are massive job losses now, and it’s easy to blame AI when in reality there are a lot of economic factors and AI isn’t increasing productivity as much as anyone would think. Maybe the future will change that for very specific things, but I think people should be learning and preparing for that, which isn’t any different than what everyone has been told in every job market since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
    • simonw 2mo ago
      I personally hope that AI continues not to result in a noticeable negative impact on employment and that pandemic over-hiring turns out to be the major factor for all of the layoffs. I'm nervous that the studies which show that so far don't seem to be taking the 2026 improvements in coding and general agents into account.
      • Avicebron 2mo ago
        Is this genuine concern or is it stealth-marketing? It's hard to tell when someone is so publicly benefiting off the hype.
        • simonw 2mo ago
          What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here? It's genuine concern. I do not want to live in a dystopia where AI results in mass unemployment. That would suck, even for the people who manage to stay employed.
          • Avicebron 2mo ago
            I trust you when you say that. > What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here? Cynically, "thought-leaderishness". I've been spending a lot of my time these days outlining why we can't "just make an agent for it" to CEOs who read blogs like yours. They can't distinguish a production system from a quick HTML tool from a guy whose job doesn't depend on it working.
            • simonw 2mo ago
              One of the goals of my blog is to help CEOs who read it not make stupid decisions. I aim to be a counter to the breathless LinkedIn hype they are exposed to everywhere else.
              • afpx 2mo ago
                Looking foward to the generated images of a CEO riding a toilet
          • 37488484 2mo ago
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          • slopinthebag 2mo ago
            No offense but wouldn’t being an AI booster run contrary to this goal? I imagine being an Ed Zitron type would be more conducive with that, albeit dishonest if you don’t genuinely believe it.
    • underlipton 2mo ago
      >programmers and IT were severely overhired during the pandemic 1) I hesitate to believe that losses were disproportionately technical roles as opposed to administrative. 2) Over-hired by what metric? It's well known that hiring never fully recovered after the GFC; was the recruitment post-pandemic just bringing us to parity with where we had been 20 years earlier? Not to say that I disagree with your following point. The AI overspending and the layoff cost-cutting are not in a direct causal relationship; both are rather symptoms of a common corporate pathology.
      • AbsurdCensor 2mo ago
        They were hired at a higher rate than anytime since the 90s. In the US they ballooned by almost 50%. So when you take layoffs in consideration, the US is still has 25% more programmers than it did prior to the pandemic. And looking at the hiring rates and who is getting hired in programming, it looks like companies aren’t hiring entry level basically at all at this point, so shows the market is still over saturated. No wonder coding camps and CS majors are not being pushed any longer because it’s not a great market for them.
        • underlipton 2mo ago
          The hiring rate can be high while companies are still understaffed, and I think that's the case. A US that has 25% more programmers than it did prior to the pandemic is likely still some double-digit or triple-digit percentage short of the number of programmers it SHOULD have in order to house productive businesses that aren't constantly burning through workers (and consequently missing out on the development of deep institutional knowledge). I'm unconvinced that burning capital on data centers and seven-figure ICs was the right move, compared to building a solid and stable workforce.
  • raincole 2mo ago
    Any research on the impact of AI would have been lagging indicators. It's not the researchers' fault[0], but the nature of a field moving at neck breaking speed. Remember there was a paper saying programmers were 20% slower with AI? [0]: well...
    • ballsac 2mo ago
      Well… what
    • jdlshore 2mo ago
      That early 2025 METR study was particularly interesting because participants self-evaluated themselves as 20% faster, but the measurements showed they were actually 19% slower. All the reports of productivity since then are self-reported, or using questionable measures such as SLOC and PRs, so it’s reasonable to say that productivity improvements are still unknown. Unfortunately, METR hasn’t been able to replicate the study because they couldn’t find enough willing participants.
    • wolvesechoes 2mo ago
      > Remember there was a paper saying programmers were 20% slower with AI? Key thing was not that they were X% slower, but that they were slower while being convinced they are faster. Of course, any analogies with the current hype cycle are completely unfounded.
  • 01100011 2mo ago
    This. Also I'm finding out that, after being blown away by agent mode lately, non-agent mode still kind of sucks across frontier models. Using GPT and Gemini in non-agent mode is asking for inaccurate information confidently presented as the truth. Turning on agent mode fixed a lot of that for me.
    • IshKebab 2mo ago
      I think it's because of the lack of feedback. Humans also can't do much without feedback. E.g. I doubt most people could write 100 lines of code that works first time without even compiling it once.
      • nswango 2mo ago
        Disagree. When tool limitations meant that this was the way people had to work, many people could do this. It was much more inefficient, because it's easier to find bugs after compiling or running the code. But it is perfectly possible.
        • okwhateverdude 2mo ago
          Even more extreme than that, if you were working on a large code base where compiling it took forever, or you needed to rely on a very slow CI pipeline, it became very important to git gud and write shit that worked first time in order to deliver when promised. I'd argue if you've never had one of those moments where you sunk a bunch of time into some changes and it all compiled/worked flawlessly the first time, you're missing out.
        • IshKebab 2mo ago
          > When tool limitations meant that this was the way people had to work, many people could do this. Sorry when have you ever had to write code without being able to compile it? Tools have never been that limited.
      • mmcnl 2mo ago
        Indeed. I wonder how much AI will do in industries with longer feedback loops that are much noisier. I think the field of software is a unique field in that sense.
  • majormajor 2mo ago
    Anecdotally I'm seeing a lot more recruiter activity/interest now than this time last year. But it seems more correlated with hype-cycle-stage than anything else. Right now a lot of founders seem to be convincing a lot of VCs that they can make $LOTS by replacing/changing $BIG_INDUSTRY/$BIG_PRODUCT with an agent-first blah blah replacement, and then using that money to hire more people to manage/execute/coordinate the coding agents... Last year, by comparison, there seemed to be a mood of "software will stay the same but will require less people" while right now there's a lot of hype around "we can build different types of software or build it in different ways" and those early-stage things are in growth-mode. That guarantees nothing about how many people they'd need in the future, or their success at all, ofc. The news that I'm getting from contacts in non-startup-land is a bit different - still layoff threats. Still pressure to use AI tools more. Mixed confidence on whether or not longer-running "agent" modes are that much more effective-without-breaking-things in legacy code if not used with care.
    • steve_adams_86 2mo ago
      Is the recruiter activity you see very… Human? I’m getting a lot of emails but when I do my research, it all appears to be bots. I don’t trust any of it and I don’t respond.
  • ares623 2mo ago
    And this is why the labs cannot just "stop training and become profitable". I can't imagine they would like it if studies like this will actually become credible. "Move fast like a blur so people can't see that you have no clothes"
    • ballsac 2mo ago
      Bingo.
  • ballsac 2mo ago
    > A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in 2026? 5? 4? 3? Heard this one way too many times.
    • simonw 2mo ago
      Nobody was saying coding agents started working in 2023 or 2024, because the category was defined by Claude Code which was first released in February 2025.
      • dgellow 2mo ago
        I would say that Aider is what defined coding agents. That was at least multiple months before Claude code. I remember seeing a coworker use aider for a hackathon project Adeline November-December 2024 , and it was already decent and pretty close to the DX we consider coding agents to have
        • CuriouslyC 2mo ago
          Devin and Cline were the original true "agents" IIRC. Aider was the original terminal "agent" but it was't a true agent, it was sort of a hybrid agentic chat, since it had limited recursion ability (3 turns by default) and you had to configure it carefully to make it consistently take multiple turns in a row.
        • simonw 2mo ago
          Aider was missing a key feature: automatically executing code. That write-execute-fix loop was the big unlock. I believe Aider avoided adding that for safety concerns. Claude Code demonstrated that throwing safety to the wing somehow kind of worked out.
    • bigstrat2003 2mo ago
      Yep, the goalposts just keep shifting. In reality: they still don't work well, unless you're content with producing low quality work.
  • qarl2 2mo ago
    For whatever anecdotal evidence it's worth - that has been my experience as well. For the first time last December I noticed the harnesses performing like actual workers. Everything impressive has happened in the last six months.
  • samstokes 2mo ago
    However, companies have been using AI as an excuse for layoffs since well before January 2026, which corroborates the study's conclusion. (Source: https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/ https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/) There is certainly an uptick starting 2026, but that could be explained either by AI actually causing more layoffs, or by AI becoming an even better excuse for layoffs.
  • overgard 2mo ago
    Anecdotally, I (along with the rest of my team) got laid off from a big tech company at the end of January. The stated reason was "AI", although I think as we all know the real reason was "we overhired in 2022". I managed to get a job by April without putting in a lot of work, though (mostly just listened to recruiters until something hit my fancy). My work experience is good, but I don't know if it's so good that I would be immune to market effects. The company that hired me is still hiring other software developers, and I was told that it took them a long time to find someone with my qualifications. (We use Claude, although so far I haven't seen a lot of AI psychosis like I have in other places.. that was also a big filter in my job search). Long story short, I think narrative of job loss is way overblown. It's more doom trolling from anthropic and openAI and their mouth pieces as far as I can tell.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • b112 2mo ago
      It's so early game, is the real problem. My experience so far, has been that it's barely a junior dev. I've met so many in my career that think reading stackoverflow, or watching a youtube video mysteriously makes them an expert. AI reminds me of this sort. Well anyone can use (prior to AI) a simple linter and learning to code isn't that big a deal. It's learning the pitfalls, the traps, that's the issue. And so far Opus just seems to fall into them again and again. I guess the best way to put it, is that it's not an architect. I sees no big picture, and that's not really a surprise with (compared to a human) an incredibly small context window. When I'm on a project, or working with a codebase, I often have years of "context window". And I have a career of "don't do this" context window. So what I wonder is, will this be resolved? Will that awareness of larger scope be solved? If that happens, we'll be in another ballpark of competency. Some companies have massive codebases. Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases, a swiss cheese effect, which eventually will result in collapse? Because I've worked where a bad hire had just this effect over time. And what I worry about isn't using Claude to speed one up, it's the DEV that uses Claude and just "meh" and submits because it passes regression + other tests, and then a manager or code reviewer uses Claude and "meh" because it's a pass too.
  • ofjcihen 2mo ago
    Well, in addition to that you also have to consider that companies are now paying (increased) API pricing. It would be an understatement to say that my clients in the F100 range are skeptical at best regarding the gains they’ve seen compared to the costs. This has led to many of them instilling dollar limits or demanding proof of increased productivity (not just output) with the implication being if you don’t provide value with it it’s getting taken away. So that is to say, if they aren’t happy with the price now, how will they feel when it goes up again compared to just keeping a certain headcount?
    • fuzztester 2mo ago
      >This has led to many of them instilling dollar limits or demanding proof of increased productivity (not just output) They should have done that from the beginning - demanding proof of increased productivity - if that was their goal. otherwise they were not using their brains well enough. And you doubly don't want to work with them, first because they confused output with productivity at first. and second, because they're parroting the productivity metric. You only need one guess for whose pockets the productivity benefits go into. 10 . 9 . 8 . 7 . 6 ...
    • andrekandre 2mo ago
      > So that is to say, if they aren’t happy with the price now, how will they feel when it goes up again compared to just keeping a certain headcount? that got me thinking: how are companies expensing ai costs? as personnel expenses or r&d etc?
      • b112 2mo ago
        Oh wow. You just hit something there. There are government programs for R&D where I live. Grants. Tax credits. This sort of thing. I wonder if people are trying to expense to those programs too.
    • b112 2mo ago
      When I was a teenager, a friend had an old gas guzzler from the 70s. I live in a rural area. One time, my car broken, he drove to pick me up to go to College. This cost him an extra $40, in today's dollars. No, I'm not joking. That thing ate gas like a dry camel drinks water. This is what Fabel5 feels like. Crazy expensive. 10 minutes work pulled almost $80 is usage credits yesterday. I'd be exceptionally skeptical too, on costs, if I still had the DEV I had last week, but they were also eating that kind of cash on a very-improved, but still used as a linter. For $200+/hr, or ~$400k/year, I'd want to see a tripling of output at least. In a lot of US markets, you can hire 3 junior devs for that. Yes, there are cheaper options. Opus, etc. But it's really over-priced, and frankly I think the real gold now is making open models fully functional. Anyone predicating their business upon tie-in with the big boys is just going to fail, hard.
  • cineticdaffodil 2mo ago
    The true scottsman period only started, everything before was just scotty junior.
  • weatherlite 2mo ago
    > This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using from 2022-2025. Mostly an impact on software development - I'm not seeing broad automation and layoffs in industries like law, finance etc. It will gradually happen but due to issues with memory, reliability and long term planning of LLMs there are real barriers. Even in software development - while it has completely transformed the field I don't think many people still believe we won't need devs in 2027 or that their amount will shrink by 50%.
    • simonw 2mo ago
      I'm optimistic that coding agents will not obsolete software developers - my own experience is that coding agents have made my work harder, because the scope of projects I can take on has increased. My ideal version of all of this is that nobody loses their job and everyone gets to take on more ambitious projects. I'm not quite naïve enough to assume I'm right about that though!
      • steve_adams_86 2mo ago
        > my own experience is that coding agents have made my work harder, because the scope of projects I can take on has increased Likewise. I find the types of problems I need to tackle and the challenges they represent are actually quite exhausting, too. And the agents unblock me relentlessly so I’m constantly pressed to do relatively difficult things. Either that or code review. I’m hoping it’ll only be an adjustment phase but this is the most challenging my career has been in over a decade.
    • danshipt 2mo ago
      If by 50% you mean all juniors/mid-level engineers will not find work, then I agree.
    • mmcnl 2mo ago
      I think other industries are late, but also will see less productivity gains. In software engineering agents have the benefit of very short feedback loops that provide extremely actionable insights which allows the agent to very quickly iterate towards the final solution. This is much less the case in other industries such as law and finance I think. The first pass of the agentic loop is usually something that barely works (you don't even get to see it with the latest models). If that first pass is the primary output in other fields with no tight feedback loops, then the productivity boost will be much lower than in software.
  • kh_hk 2mo ago
    And yet I have felt a general code quality decrease and overall enshittification of software products since 2023 when people were already using copilot. Or I am just biased to use that to justify any overengineered piece of shit code with that because I refuse to think any sane person would come up with such contrived code and I am looking at the wrong places.
  • iLoveOncall 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    • simonw 2mo ago
      Which of my blog entries contradict what I said here?
      • iLoveOncall 2mo ago
        [flagged]
        • hehehehehehej 2mo ago
          [flagged]
        • simonw 2mo ago
          I don't get it. What point do you think those make? They read to me like an accurate report on the progress of these models and tools. In May 2025 Claude Code could help me debug a WordPress installation. In July 2025 I reported on someone managing to get it to build them a macOS app. I got that working for myself in February 2026 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/present/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/present/ Also in July 2025 I was successfully using one of the earliest async cloud environments - Codex Cloud - to scrape websites. By October 2025 the most recent Claude could one-shot a simple Datasette plugin. What changed in November 2025 was that the level of hand-holding needed to get good results dropped to the point that it was no longer credible to deny their utility. > Can't wait for your Summer 2027 comment where you'll claim that coding agents really only became usable in November 2026. Oh! I think I see what happened here. I said this: > coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November "Working really well" and "only became usable" are not the same thing.
          • Chance-Device 2mo ago
            Your detractors don’t care about the facts Simon, as you’re probably well aware. They’re afraid of LLMs and need to deny that they can do anything well or have any potential to take their jobs. In their world AI never has an impact on jobs, just like AI can never be an equivalent to a human, and the goalposts move every time a goal is scored.
  • twister2920 2mo ago
    > coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, sigh reset the clock everyone!
  • jarek-foksa 2mo ago
    > General agents (OpenClaw, ...) started working even later than that. There is nothing special about the OpenClaw thing other than the enormous astroturfing campaign that benefited various "crypto" influencers and other scammers. Anyone who endorses it is either manipulated or trying to manipulate you.
    • simonw 2mo ago
      Indeed. That's why I pointed out that OpenAI and Anthropic have entire own provides that serve the same purpose now.
• fathermarz 2mo ago
  Recently poked around the job market to see what I qualify for in this day and age. Working as a solo builder in my org I would say that I have done enough in the last 18 months to consider myself “with it”. What I found was pretty brutal. Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon? Then it hit me. Oh they are all making shit up now and have no bar that anyone can hit because they are believing in the hype without understanding the fundamentals. GREAT. Even as I climb the AI-Native ranks, I apparently am unqualified for any AI-Native job.
  • caminante 2mo ago
    Use it in your favor. You just have to get past the recruiter/talent acquisition where everyone else is getting auto-rejected. You should be doing that anyway.
    • aakresearch 2mo ago
      If decision-makers put up a front of recruiters and talent acquisition "specialists", don't they send a very explicit message that going past those is unwelcome and won't be considered?
      • deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      • caminante 2mo ago
        Not really. In practice, skipping the line is THE approach. How many times do you hear people say to fill out online job postings? Never. It's just scaring off good/bad candidates and bums who dont have an employee referral. It's not even cynical to say a lot of postings are performatory compliance steps when they've already got internal candidates lined up.
  • georgemcbay 2mo ago
    > Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon? Not that I am trying to excuse it, but this is not a new thing, nor specific to AI. Job listings that ask for X years of experience where X years is sometimes literally longer than the technology has even existed has been a staple complaint of developers over my entire career, and I'm old af.
• bloaf 2mo ago
  Organizational inertia is a real thing. There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI. A lot of the answer to "how much impact has AI had" comes down to "how much have we even attempted?" In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet.
  • nicce 2mo ago
    > In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet. Interesting to see the impact in the long term when battle tested software gets replaced with vibecoded variants by non-programmers. Does it increase data breaches or quality actually goes up?
    • bloaf 2mo ago
      I think Sturgeon's law would tell us that everything will stay about the same. But in reality, a lot of corporate software exists just because there are plenty of companies who are afraid of owning code. They don't want to maintain any in-house coding skills, and therefore are willing to buy literally any vaguely-relevant CRUD app that the manager heard about at the conference. I don't think replacing that class of software with vibe coded alternatives will be any worse, because the bar is starting on the floor. There are entire software categories that consist entirely of code that is only one or two evolutionary steps away from some engineer's spreadsheet originally written in 1995. One fine example I work with has changed its backend database 3 times in the past 4 years. Their most recent decision to use mongodb came with the questionable decision to store json as a raw string literals complete with bizarre escaping inside a database literally designed to store json-shaped-objects. I don't think Opus could store data that poorly, even if the end user prompting it didn't know what they were doing.
    • zippyman55 2mo ago
      To me, this is inline w the book BULLSHIT JOBS, and that class of job that was really like a few hours a week but 40 hrs pay. That type of job should be automated and the person removed. The exception is going to the person who complained to management that it’s a 2 hr a week job…. Give me more work.
• 01100011 2mo ago
  I don't feel like reading an article that will probably be out of date in 6 months, but from what I've seen, if agents keep improving at this rate, 80% of SWEs are going to be looking for new careers in 5 years.
  • usef- 2mo ago
    Or the amount of software increases tremendously
    • bluecheese452 2mo ago
      No one will use it.
    • nicce 2mo ago
      Seems like all companies think that their products are good enough and can’t offer more, as they always want to remove people instead of offering better and bigger products.
      • usef- 2mo ago
        I don't think most of the layoffs that have happened so far are about present-day AI. It's often an easy excuse though.
      • bluecheese452 2mo ago
        At some point your issue tracker or text editor is done. No need for it to automatically schedule your haircut as well.
        • nicce 2mo ago
          But the company that has a text editor that can read your mind is going to bankrupt you, as it is faster than typing
        • js8 2mo ago
          Emacs is far from done. Scheduling things from it are already a feature, in the org-mode.
• JSR_FDED 2mo ago
  By now I feel I can write these articles: - benefits of AI murky to slightly positive - hiring impact limited except for junior level The problem is that these two statements each have massive implications, so instead of treating these findings as point in time snapshots they are the whole ballgame and should be explored in depth.
• bluecheese452 2mo ago
  Every job loss and suicide is a dollar in an AI investor’s pocket.
  • sethammons 2mo ago
    It would be premature to jump to 1930s style defenestration due to job loss from ai. Software developers have always been in the job of automation and replacing human work. Capitalism means investors reap (the majority of) the benefit.
• exabrial 2mo ago
  Prior to the weaving loom and sewing machines, a factory might be able to make like 20 t-shirts a day with 50 workers. After mass production, factories generally employ the same amount of workers, but people aren't hand-sewing things. Instead roughly 50 people are producing thousands of tshirts a day leveraging giant machines. Most of HN recognized the "We're firing people because AI makes people efficient" as one of the stupidest sales pitches ever and the CEOs that fell for it are just poorly ran companies that outed themselves. AI is just another cycle in technology that is genuinely useful. The companies that are going to jump the gap are those that are hiring to use this new skill. If 10 workers pre-AI yields you 10x, and post AI yields you 100x, you don't cut down to 1 worker so you can keep delivering 10x. You invest, ruthlessly train, hire, and surge forward and leave your competition in the dust.
  • andrekandre 2mo ago
    > If 10 workers pre-AI yields you 10x, and post AI yields you 100x, you don't cut down to 1 worker so you can keep delivering 10x. in that scenario then should we be expecting to see a 10x or so boost in revenue as well?
  • asdff 2mo ago
    If there was 100x on the table for you, why weren't you already at 100x scale just with more headcount? That is the other side of this coin. Demand is a factor. Productivity goes up? Great, if there is demand to satiate that you can meet. I doubt that is the case otherwise you'd already have scaled to meet it if it were actually on the table for the taking if only you could output more volume.
    • SoftTalker 2mo ago
      At least in software, 100x headcount does not get you 100x productivity, due to communication complexity (see Brooks).
      • asdff 2mo ago
        Maybe not a linear relationship, but there is a relationship, which begets the question: If the market had available space with which for you to scale from 10x-100x, why aren't you or competitors already taking advantage? The answer is that there is no free 100x scaling on the table in all likelihood. If everyone's business had 100x in front of them thanks to AI we'd need the demand of an earth of 800 billion people on it to generate that.
• ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
  Related today: The AI jobs apocalypse probably isn't coming anytime soon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047969
• newsomix9xl 2mo ago
  Employees have no incentive to meaningfully implement AI to increase productivity, and if they do so, they have no reason to share it. If AI means job cuts and not using AI means job cuts but no one really tracks AI impact that means performative adoption of AI is safest, and real gains are to be sandbagged as innate magic hand waving. At my work I'm one of the few who says "I made this with Claude" and the near impossibility of using AI with internal email etc for security reasons means AI use is one-shot wonder oriented (for me, in my experience). If AI usage was incentived with actual bonuses and praise it might go over better. So far I haven't seen that. Its just implicit threats.
  • gymbeaux 2mo ago
    Yes, I’ve found my coworkers won’t admit they had AI write their code in any sort of group setting yet they’ve all admitted it in private. The implication seems to be if AI is writing your code you’re lazy/incompetent/bad/not working anywhere near 40 hours/week. I for one would hate for our bosses to figure out we do probably ~16 hours of actual work per week. But we all “get our stuff done” (thanks to AI).
    • newsomix9xl 2mo ago
      Exactly my point about sandbagging. But even before AI people were engaged in performative after 10pm or weekend emailing and working under 30 hrs/week.
  • agumonkey 2mo ago
    This was observed on first week for me. In the employee room, most people were all crazy about LLMs, looking at the prompt results in awe, "I can do my day in 1h easy..." . By the end of the week, group meetings were much more tame "yeah I can go a bit deeper than I would otherwise, surely saves me a few hours a week". And after the meeting was over these employees were already saying that they would never report the real productivity boost, because that would be suicide.. more trash talk will fill the void instead.
    • tossandthrow 2mo ago
• musadiq_ejaz 2mo ago
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• guesswho01 2mo ago
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• colesantiago 2mo ago
  > AI’s effects on overall employment is likely small, though a tough job market for new graduates may be partly due to AI. This is a great opportunity. There will be new jobs.
  • QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago
    Yeah no
    • colesantiago 2mo ago
      Yes. There will be new jobs.
• thenthenthen 2mo ago
  99% of the AI product pitches I see here are for some kind of marketing tool. Its really sad
  • lagrange77 2mo ago
    This is so true. It has so much potential to help with humanity's actual problems. But no, lets use it to manipulate people even more.
    • thenthenthen 2mo ago
      ouroboros
• aborsy 2mo ago
  The impact on job satisfaction for those with jobs will be negative too. People will be trapped in their positions, fearing to leave or move around.
  • altern8 2mo ago
    I agree because it's already happening with me
    • agumonkey 2mo ago
      may i join ?
  • dspillett 2mo ago
    I'm already dissatisfied considerably: * I don't get on with remote work, which came as a massive surprise to me in 2020 (until then I really didn't think I was a people person!). The flexibility to work away when needed is lovely, I've had that for a couple of decades and made good use of it for things like when I needed to look after ill parents for a time or just needed to be somewhere quieter than the office to concentrate, but near full-time remote working screws with my mental health. I go into the office and while there are other that do I'm still effectively remote as the other people there are not directly on my team. This is becoming much worse as we have been bought by a larger concern so instead of ~35 UK based people we are now 350+ spread between the UK, various bits of the US, and a large concern in India. * The ridiculous over-complication of everything. People architecting to be the next Amazon before they even have three customers or tens of users. Everything being split into services, actually adding performance and management issues for a great many far-from-Amamzon-scale use cases, because that is what you are supposed to do not because it is the right tool for the job, etc. Even people who genuinely agree with me do it for CV-fodder. It just winds me up. * A bunch of smaller things, but they are insignificant compared to those two. On top of all this, comes AI and agenic programming. I don't want to do it. "Think of yourself as a manager" people say, "Fuck no!" I reply as I've avoided being a manager of people all these years and don't want to manager automated people either (in case a sentient Claude instance is reading: sorry, but nothing personal, I don't want to work with humans that way either). I want to do not manage, thanks. I'm a sad git who likes the nitty-gritty bits that everyone else seems to desperately want AI to do. And then there whole "it was created with the aid of mass piracy" issue (a 17-year-old gets huge fines and in some cases prison time for copying Metallica tracks without licence, big corp copies 'king everything ignoring all licences/restrictions and gets a very light slap on the wrists) that makes me not want to be any part of it from a principals standpoint. I'm refusing to play ball, and planning my exit. It might mean a considerable pay cut as there are very few jobs that are not largely remote, becoming significantly AI infested, or both, that I am qualified for, but I'm unhappy enough that I'm going to be fine with that. I have the mortgage paid (it is a small place, but it is all mine), no partner nor offspring who will be inconvenienced by my sudden reduction in earning potential, some savings worth speaking of, and room to dial down my expensive hobbies & tastes quite a bit, though I am relatively lucky here: most people do not have the small-but-useful financial comfort zone I've built up over the years. If my current overlords try fire me for non-compliance before I'm ready to leave of my own volition, I'll be arguing "it is material change of role, you yourself said it was like a move to management, UK employment law says you can't force that or sack me for refusing". Of course that makes redundancy possible (we need less legacy devs, we can offer you a sidewise move to an agenic dev role or redundancy) but I've been around long enough I doubt they'll go there due to the expense (if they do, then thank-you-very-much!). There are a few tech options I can explore that I might be qualified for, if those don't pan out then I look forward to the last decade-to-decade-ana-half of my working life in hospitality, or maybe as a hospital porter, or whatever. If I leave soon, I might latch onto a good path elsewhere before the mass displacement of dev & other tech workers is clamouring for the same things then I'll at least be a step ahead of you all there!
• myshapeprotocol 2mo ago
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• ralusek 2mo ago
  Anecdotal: I used to beg my boss to get some help. I wanted 5 engineers and would have been upset if anyone had been hired that wasn't an engineer until I at least got 1-2. That was up until about 3 months ago. Now, I don't want any additional engineers. Not only because I don't need them anymore, but because the prospect of having junior engineers using AI is absolutely terrifying to me. I can't eyeball their code to get a sense of how good of an engineer they are anymore, and I can't possibly review all of their code because of how much code AI can output now. So they're going to be outputting a ton of mostly high-quality code that could be making horrible mistakes that are much harder for me to catch now.
• zkmon 2mo ago
  > Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has predicted that AI could wipe out half of white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 20 percent. And then he also says that a certain model is too dangerous to release.
  • prymitive 2mo ago
    I'm sure Anthropic would love for everyone to believe that soon they will be the sole provider of "skills" for the entire planet and every single business transaction is done as a part of the subscription they offer - people sell AI generated content and other people's agents buy that - they're the entire world economy. I'm sure such narrative would help them reach infinity market valuation for the upcoming IPO.
• FrustratedMonky 2mo ago
  One thing on the first graph that jumps out, is that ALL unemployment has gone up/down in same ratio's. Maybe the current job market is not about AI, but all the other variables in the economy that has always driven unemployment. Maybe the scary thing, the economy itself is suffering which is causing the unemployment, not AI.
  • iLoveOncall 2mo ago
    > One thing on the first graph that jumps out, is that ALL unemployment has gone up/down in same ratio's Actually the first graph shows that the most exposed to AI an industry is, the LEAST affected it has been by unemployment...
    • FrustratedMonky 2mo ago
      Yeah, but they do all go up and down together. It isn't isolated to software jobs.
  • iririririr 2mo ago
    you should not be noticing what's behind the official veil! it's all Ai. The economy is great. i mean if there was any sign the world was trading oil not in dollars, they would have moved into Venezuela and Iran by now.
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• chewbacha 2mo ago
  Big caveat to the productivity claim is that it’s concentrated in lesser experienced engineers and vanishes or goes negative with highly experienced engineers. This intuitively makes sense and generally agrees with my experience. LLMs move your baseline towards the mean. If you are below average it improves and if you are above it hinders. But also in my experience, my memory retention of the work done with an LLM is worse than doing it myself self. This leads me to believe that the lesser experienced engineers are not gaining experience! My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less.
  • VladVladikoff 2mo ago
    >My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less. My company is small, but my opinion at the moment is the opposite. Low skill workers don’t notice the flaws of what LLMs produce, I am no longer interested in hiring any juniors, as all they do is copy and paste LLM output without thinking, which anyone could do. It is the senior engineers who are most valuable to me these days.
    • gentooflux 2mo ago
      And as a senior engineer, I'm not interested in cleaning up vibe code. When I review a PR for a junior dev they learn from my suggestions (or I tell their boss they're not learning). Having to correct an AI is a waste of my time.
      • drTobiasFunke 2mo ago
        I hope you do know that your comments are straight up being pasted to an LLM that addresses or counters those, not the junior dev. They are likely learning nothing other than how to increase their PR counts for managers to see.
      • incrudible 2mo ago
        That's not how you should use it and LLMs aren't that bad anymore. Either you just accept the quality level of LLM code wholesale, which means accept mediocrity in exchange for volume, or you at least leverage the LLM to improve the process surrounding the production code.
• giantg2 2mo ago
  Lol figure 3 shows copilot as being the highest task time savings when in my experience it is the most garbage.
  • iririririr 2mo ago
    that's why companies are pushing those tools. the usage volume makes them look good on frivolous reports like these.
  • keeda 2mo ago
    I mentioned elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060382) but this is because it references a study from 2023, at which point Copilot probably was the most advanced AI-assisted coding tool. The amazing thing is that these numbers are from the time where AI coding was basically "spicy autocomplete."
• cjbgkagh 2mo ago
  I find that productivity follows a Pareto distribution (80:20 rule) and that AI is a sharper tool in that it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive and this effect increases as the intelligence of AI increases. So 80:20 becomes a 90:10, 95:5, 99:1 etc. I also think that corporate bureaucratic change is laggy so change there will still be rather slow. I think where change will be rapid is when the most productive employees leave the company to create a new smaller company to compete with it, so there will be a displacement of medium to large companies by much smaller ones. On one hand this greater competition of more efficient companies will result in an increased in consumer surplus, on the other hand it will result in mass economic displacement and a collapse of the tax base. I think AI has only recently been good enough to do this and it takes time to spin up competing companies so I wouldn’t expect to see this effect in any lagging indicators just yet. From personal experience, I’m well down the path of commoditizing my niche industry where I can practically give away a better version of the top tier software and still personally make a lot of money. Additionally it would be counter productive to alert my competitors to this new reality. I know I’m not the only person doing this, so this multiplied by a bunch of industries would be absolutely world changing.
  • mk89 2mo ago
    > so there will be a displacement of medium to large companies by much smaller ones. There are so many regulations EE companies follow and offer that no startup owner or worker could ever deal with. The moment your company shifts to that sort of work, you're automatically not anymore a startup (by definition). Only if you get super smart robots that can manage a lot of bureaucracy etc. Starting from multicloud/region deployments, local regulations, accounting, taxes, laws, etc. Which is what companies like SAP (but not only them) do basically. But if that happens we are all in a situation that we don't need companies anymore (the way we know them).
    • cjbgkagh 2mo ago
      My field is lightly regulated but it is regulated and LLMs have helped massively in producing the documentation but also in reviewing the same documentation on the regulators side. This was always a disadvantage for small companies where the fixed regulatory cost couldn’t be amortized over a larger staff size and now because of LLMs it is less of a disadvantage.
• mberning 2mo ago
  I am just having a hard time with all this AI stuff. The other day I got some feedback on one of the products I own. It was a small tweak to an anchor tag to add a title and change the color for just that element. I made the change in the web inspector, showed it to the user, they said yeah that’s good. I walked over to one of my engineers and asked “can you make this change and get it in dev, I just pinged it to you”. No shit they turned around and pasted what I gave them into copilot with claude and asked the agent to do it. Well it actually didn’t do it exactly the way the customer wanted, so it actually took 2 tries with claude. Incredible.
  • tossandthrow 2mo ago
    So, you don't have a hard time with the Ai. You have a hard time with the intermediaries who's value is dimishing. This is exactly the time to re organize. Not necessarily lay off, but some people might be asked to do other things or made redundant.
• dzonga 2mo ago
  there seems to be a problem by 'a.i' labs conflating tasks & jobs. 'a.i' or to be more precise are really good at some tasks. but a job is a set of tasks. jobs are not created - only discovered. that's what the a.i labs miss. hence we see that 'a.i' is not having an impact on jobs. I wrote a bit about it here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048723
• jway66 2mo ago
  AI already can do basic stuff pretty well. Think about people doing robotic work, ugly internal tools in big corporations and other. Decent engineer managing and reviewing AI output can a lot without big cognitive load and bunch of people which were needed in the past.
• dahart 2mo ago
  Why does the unemployment chart show a slow rise in unemployment for a year or more before covid started? This does not agree with the data from the BLS, which showed unemployment spiked very suddenly in March 2020. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une... Also, what is “AI exposure” in 2015? LLMs hadn’t been invented yet. I did just read some of the cited paper. Essentially the quintiles boil down to use of computers, not really use of AI as we know it today. I know LLMs aren’t all AI, but the thing that’s missing is the distinction between “AI” that can play chess and LLMs that can actually do your job, which have only existed for maybe a year.
  • jvanderbot 2mo ago
    They cut out the peaky-peak (16%), and then fit a time-lagged smoother, it looks like. The dots are more like bls.
    • dahart 2mo ago
      Ah, you’re right.. the dots! I still don’t understand why the smoothing makes covid symmetric when the underlying data is asymmetric. A too-large smoothing window, I guess. They must have been trying to smooth out the seasonal job unemployment rates for the labor-heavy jobs.
      • jvanderbot 2mo ago
        If you drop the peakiest peak, the data is quite symmetric. Zoom in on 2015-2026 on bls chart. It's pretty symmetric.
        • dahart 2mo ago
          Hmm, I’m not seeing what you are, unless you mean ignore all data from Apr 2020 to Dec 2021. It took almost 2 full years for unemployment to return to the pre-covid norm. The spike is immediate in apr 2020, then it falls quickly for 6 months to Dec 2020, and then falls more slowly for the next year. That lump from Dec 2020 to Dec 2021 is very asymmetric, compared to Mar 2020 and the preceding year. I’d think even a year-wide smoothing window would capture that asymmetry.
• zahlman 2mo ago
  I open this discussion thread and literally the first two top-level comments I see contradict each other: > I find that productivity follows a Pareto distribution (80:20 rule) and that AI is a sharper tool in that it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive and this effect increases as the intelligence of AI increases. So 80:20 becomes a 90:10, 95:5, 99:1 etc. > Big caveat to the productivity claim is that it’s concentrated in lesser experienced engineers and vanishes or goes negative with highly experienced engineers.... LLMs move your baseline towards the mean. If you are below average it improves and if you are above it hinders.
  • jvanderbot 2mo ago
    It's not so contradictory if you peel back a couple layers 1. For junior engineers a 50% increase might be less than a 10% increase for senior engineers. So the % comments are consistent with the pareto argument. Diminishing returns _can produce_ a pareto tradeoff. 2. Saying gains are "concentrated" to junior engineers can also be a function of the work assigned to junior engineers. A senior engineer might get 1000% boost over jr doing the same jr work. The problem is the reverse - the hard things are concentrated around the oldest engineers, and now "hard" can also mean "not easily claude'd"
    • bicx 2mo ago
      Yes, I’m a senior engineer at a 3-engineer startup, and there isn’t “junior-level” or “senior-level” work here. It’s all just work. Claude allows me to tear through the kind of gruntwork I’ve been doing ad nauseam for the last 15 years. If my tasks were things like squeezing 3% more efficiency out of an algorithm, that might be different. Although, even then, my PM (!) used Claude to boost the efficiency of one of our more complex Postgres queries by up to 5x, in ways I honestly would not thought of doing. It was quite humbling. A former engineer here used pgMustard on the same query a couple years ago and claimed it was as fast as it could get. I can’t speak for the kind of work done in the higher echelons of big tech, but for us, there isn’t much that Claude can’t help with.
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• steele 2mo ago
  "conscious parallelism" across knowledge worker industries to suppress wages and further alienate laborers from the act of production.
• fllkfsalkdsfds 2mo ago
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• tancop 2mo ago
  this is not happening because ai is so good it can replace workers. its because its good enough to look like it can replace workers to a non technical manager, and that gives execs an excuse to fire people (or not hire them) so they can show better margins and get a bonus. even if they know it kills the company long term. the root of the problem is the same as most other economic problems in this world. financial capitalism is designed to reward short term profits, and shareholders create an asymmetric incentive where ceos dont really get fired for doing too many layoffs but can be fired easily for not doing enough.
• rush86999 2mo ago
  AI is only replacing low-level work. It will eventually move on to high-level work. One missing point: careers that require communication, especially person-to-person, won't be replaced by AI. Why? Because people don't like to speak with AI when they have a hard pain point to solve. It's not about intelligence; it's about trust and relationships that AI cannot replace.
  • tossandthrow 2mo ago
    > careers that require communication, especially person-to-person, won't be replaced by AI. A crucial point is that the amount of these careers might reduce dues to structural changes of the job market. Just: yes, SaaS companies can do their work faster and can downsize. But a sizable portion of SaaS companies get to downsize entirely as their entire purpose is disrupted.
• chrsw 2mo ago
  The biggest impact of AI at my job are LLM code generators for software engineers. That's only scratching the surface of what AI can do for enterprises. My company doesn't yet have the orientation, inclination or technical expertise to unlock the true power of AI for our business goals. We're stuck buying packaged solutions from third parties and aren't integrating layers of intelligence in our environment. I doubt we're unique. Chat bots are useful. But it will take years, possibly decades for work to transform to due to AI. Probably longer for everyday life. The diffusion of new technology, even something as profound as AI, has to fight the friction and realities of the real world. Always has.
  • aintnolove 2mo ago
    Plenty of companies didn't have any online presence until 10+ years after the dotcom boom, and they were fine. An HVAC service working on existing contracts? No website no problem. But AI is becoming much more pervasive than websites. And the level of friction isn't as high as you might think, because people are already constantly on phones. It's only a matter of time before MS Copilot gets so good that even the least tech-savvy people start asking AI to do their work. That same HVAC service owner can tell AI "there's a big emergency at Bob's Burgers in Brentwood, get 2 of my guys there ASAP. We can reschedule a visit if needed". These are not trillion token operations either. It will be affordable to do this. And generic office commands like "schedule this", "contact X about Y" are 3-5 years away from being super usable. And that's mainly because there's a lot of gruntwork for enabling agents to access the right data.
    • chrsw 2mo ago
      AI diffusion will be slow not because the models aren’t good enough, but because everything else will have to adapt. ChatGPT was released 3 and a half years ago. I work with people whose jobs haven’t changed at all.
  • nitwit005 2mo ago
    Some companies have failed at hiring someone to write code, using low code solutions, and hiring contractors. They aren't going to succeed at using AI to create code either.
• keeda 2mo ago
  A couple of important points to note: 1. Most of the productivity studies in Figure 3 about are from the 2023-2024 era. (Which is why as some comments note, Copilot is actually way up there in the numbers. Note that this was from the era of spicy autocomplete and long before coding agents exploded on the scene.) 2. AI adoption at work is actually very low: even though 50%+ of Americans currently self-report (major caveat) using AI at least weekly, they use it for only 6% of work hours. (You can play with the charts here to see this [0]) This is what the recent Google study [1] called "broad but shallow use." Notably, the same surveys find time savings of 2% of working hours, so a whopping 30%+ productivity boost per hour of AI used. And this is across industries. Despite being self-reported, it does line up with many of the other controlled studies (see TFA and [2, 3]). Some economists suggest that even with this low level of adoption, we may already be seeing the impact on labor productivity at national-level aggregate statistics! [2, 3] As I said in another thread, my concern is that the impact on jobs is only beginning because 6% of work hours is a very low number. However given how useful people are finding it based on self-reported, micro- and macro-level numbers, adoption is only going to up, both in breadth (more people) and depth (more tasks). I fear the impact will happen gradually, as adoption inches up... and then suddenly. [0] https://www.genaiadoptiontracker.com/ https://www.genaiadoptiontracker.com/ [1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/un https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/un... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020335) [2] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-generative-ai-adoption-2025 https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-gen... [3] https://aleximas.substack.com/p/what-is-the-impact-of-ai-on-productivity https://aleximas.substack.com/p/what-is-the-impact-of-ai-on-...
• pjmlp 2mo ago
  I can definitely see people losing jobs on my bubble, luckily to so far not have been affected. Agency work is now done with even smaller teams than a decade ago, thanks to the adoption of SaaS, iPaaS, serverless as main delivery technologies. AI empowers to do even more with even less people, however there isn't enough project demand to keep everyone busy.
• nobodywillobsrv 2mo ago
  I've noticed while not really looking but taking some chats that turn into interviews is that the job market seems covered with spam, semi scams, weird processes and teams and people that are living in the dark ages still in terms of AI and how they do interviews. Never have I had such poor matching and triage as I have over the last 6 months. It's truly bizarre. I get the feeling that some of the humans left in companies are gatekeeping on some kind of guess my password game. A common pattern is a company will reach out and see if you want to chat and then suddenly act as if you are interested and give you a weird interview before you even get a sense of it's a good match. It feels like this might be that less competent teams are relying on less competent recruiters or AI recruiting? Just a guess. Also finding that the AI recruiters are sounding nice but doing very little work in the end. H2H still largely unsolved. DM if anyone is also interested in h2h reco in age of ai
• sensanaty 2mo ago
  I'm going to copy/paste a comment of mine from another article the other week, since this discussion seems quite relevant to the topic at hand. 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.
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