Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- 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.
by chrsw - 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.by nitwit005
- 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.
by aintnolove - Every job loss and suicide is a dollar in an AI investor’s pocket.
- 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.
by sethammons - 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.
- 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.
by iririririr - > 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...
by iLoveOncall - 99% of the AI product pitches I see here are for some kind of marketing tool. Its really sadby thenthenthen
- 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.by lagrange77
- > 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.
by zkmon - 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.by prymitive
- 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.
by chewbacha - People gloss over memory retention way too much. You become like a manager who knows about the overview, but not the ins and outs (to a lesser degree).
Maybe it's only me and my inexperience, but only reviewing doesn't make me as "in" as doing it myself.
- > My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less. Guess it worked then. I'm happy to take a paycut to never deal with vibecode and toxic environment where every estimate is borked due to agentic coding.by conqrr
- > my memory retention of the work done with an LLM is worse than doing it myself self
Do you think this is more because you are less close to the work? Or because there is simply more work being done/more to remember, so you're remembering a similar amount, but a smaller fraction?
Or both, or something else?
by gcanyon - Where are you getting that from? It's a productivity tool. Someone who knows what they're doing can leverage LLMs to improve their productivity. Someone who doesn't know what they're doing will be able to increase their output but not do it as effectively and with lower quality.
If anything, it now requires more skill to maximize. If you have strong product and engineering experience you can get even more out of an LLM than one of those skills alone.
by driverdan - > My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less.
I think it's useful to divide companies doing software development, as well as specific jobs within a company, into two groups:
1) Companies where software is the product - where what you are working on is directly what is making the company money, and differentiating what they sell from what other companies are selling. These are the jobs you want, and where you will be valued.
2) Companies where software is only a component of the product, regarded as non-critical, or not product related at all - just internal IT systems. These are NOT the jobs you want!
In a type 1) job the company (unless it is run by idiots) recognizes that better developers = better product = more profits. They will seek out experienced skilled developers and pay them what the market demands.
In a type 2) job you are not regarded as a profit-generating asset, but rather as overhead - an expense to be minimized. The company will be looking for the cheapest, least experienced people they think can do the job. Maybe they will outsource, and/or nowadays try to use LLMs as a way to avoid needing to hire better quality developers. The development work may still in fact be demanding and require skilled developers to be done well, but if the company mindset is that developers are an expense not an asset, then they will try to get the job done with the cheapest labor regardless.
So, yeah, if at all possible don't work on things like IT systems or on products where it is not blindingly obvious to management that software quality is directly related to profitability.
- >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.
- 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.
by bloaf - > we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions
Yeah, sure you are. Report back when it happens.
by ballsac - Good luck to that non-programmer person when support tickets start coming in.by bojan
- > In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week.
This is curious to me, as at my workplace we never had such subscriptions for small- to mid-size stuff and always built the corresponding tooling in-house.
by layer8 - > There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI.
And there probably always will be.
When the choices are "hand all of our highly sensitive internal data over to one of several other companies, all of which have questionable financials and very cozy relationships with adtech" or "invest in a whole bunch of expensive GPU servers plus internal talent to run our own models", vs "keep on doing what we've been doing, which is still working just fine", why would a non-tech Fortune 500 company choose either of the former options?
by danaris - > In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week.
That's gonna turn out well :-)
Maybe they only need it to work for the next 6 months of enhancements...
by lelanthran - > 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?
by nicce - 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-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.
by dahart - They cut out the peaky-peak (16%), and then fit a time-lagged smoother, it looks like. The dots are more like bls.by jvanderbot
- 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.by cjbgkagh
- > 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).
by mk89