Have any of these articles actually addressed HOW software developers are supposed to retrain for good jobs? Personally I have neither the money nor the years to go back to college to get a livable job.
I know some people whose work was already almost completely eliminated by AI (language translation) and they're not doing great. Reality is there's no-one out there looking out for you except yourself and very close family/friends.
Just like everyone else. I have a feeling your definition of “livable” is not in line with the reality that most people face. You share more in common with a stay-at-home mom going back to school to become a phlebotomist than you think. It’s just pride gets in the way
The same way clerical and manufacturing workers retrained when their jobs were replaced by computers/the Internet and robots. That is to say, most won’t.
No - because as a software developer adapting IS the job.
Lately I've been just thinking of hitting ALT+F4 on life for good, as a big FU to the megacorps (not that they would care, but it would give me the satisfaction at least)
I would like to know the answer to this, too.<p>Not really sure what I should be doing on the side since AI seems to be automating a lot of work that I do as an analytics engineer. Maybe in 10 years all I'm doing is feeding in markdowns and project specs to an LLM and reading test outputs. At what point are you just a technician?
Pretty much none of us are doing jobs that existed in colonial America.
There's an off-color joke that could be made here but the real question is the speed of change - we gloss over it but there have been major changes that took centuries, and others that were quite fast, this one seems to be closer to the fast end.
The internet has made it easier than ever to learn new skills. You don't need college unless you're targeting a career that requires, or expects, a degree.
You retrain the same way that we told workers when we decimated the garment and manufacturing industries. You'll get the same amount of government support too.
In my experience, AI has given far more leverage to software engineers than anyone else, because they have a feel for what computers can do, what's easy, what's hard, what's performant, or poorly specified, etc. Therefore I think retraining is mostly about being willing to experiment with AI-assisted workflows and not being too tied to old ways of doing things. As long as you are focused on the problems you are solving, I think you'll do okay.<p>What I'm more concerned about are the younger generation where all the learning tasks have been automated. I have faith that the strong, naturally curious engineering types will still learn to do great engineering, and honestly without some of the mental blocks and calcified assumptions that us greybeards have. But how do they get in the foot in the door and the reps needed to develop senior-level judgment is another question.<p>In some sense we need the current mania to die down and the long-term maintenance implications of heavy AI assistance to become more apparent. Basically I think we need the AI bubble to pop and then 1-2 years for things to stabilize, and then we'll recalibrate on hiring expectations and best practices for AI usage. The current AI maximalist and doomer views I think are both basically driven by capitalist incentives and wishful thinking from investors and a reality check is going to come in some form (whether technically, socially or politically).
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Many of us on this site have worked directly on projects where the efficiency gains ultimately reduced or eliminated positions. If you want to exit the development field, I think the answer is probably the same as for the people whose jobs we helped eliminate.
Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.<p>It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
Sounds amazing. How on earth did he go from shoeing horses to learning about the internal combustion engine? Seems quite the leap that not everyone would be capable of.
He just vibe-repaired cars!<p>Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.<p>And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.
Shoeing horses properly is actually no joke and cars back then were laughably simple. I don’t see how any of that could feel relatable to people in software development now, when almost all jobs that require real smarts and competency require years of study and experience.
Many people in life are underutilized and ready to step up to challenges if given the opportunity.
The flagging here is better than in a Steinberger thread. Unreal and congrats.
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I just wanted to point something out. I hear people say the AI revolution is the biggest one since the industrial revolution. I think it's the biggest revolution since the one that just preceded us, the information (computer) age. So we're still going fairly in order revolution wise.
And my great great grandpa thought horses would lose all their jobs to cars. And they all did and it was never the same again.<p>There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
As someone that works in robotics/automation, it pains me to see people in creative/office verticals getting all the shit with AI these days while hard labor positions, the one that everyone could be doing a bit less because they take a toll on you (working the fields, farms, hazardous tasks) remain pretty much the same.
If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.<p>We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
How long do you give it?
Robots have been used in industry for decades already. Most jobs won't be worth investing in the robot doing it, since human labour is cheaper than the capital investment.
I looked into this (or rather, had Google Deep Research do a 30-page report on it!) and it's still a very long way off. So long, that the AI, or any reference it found, would not even give me a rough timeline, but I suspect it is multiple decades away. The main blocker is a very severe crunch in the supply chain of critical materials, mostly rare earth elements which are essential to make those high power density + high precision motors feasibly.<p>Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.<p>This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.<p>All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.
That doesn't make intuitive sense to me.<p>First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be.<p>If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.
We're waiting for the point that replacing the humans is the cheaper option. Not sure that robot plumbers are in our near future.
To the start of it? Maybe two years?<p>To the end of it? Maybe 40?
> I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.<p>I also think that will be the case. However, not all the jobs are worth being automated. Say, if you are a modern-day horse-riding instructor, I very much doubt the robots will come knocking the door to take your job. Not because they can't, but because the headache is not economically worth it.
Worse, it was just almost all horses. There are a few in Central Park pulling tourists and that’s enough for the Pollyanna’s to point to and go “See! We’ll be fine!”
Horses where the plaything of the rich. Farmers were using oxen not horses for the most part. However the modern plow (invented in the mid 1830s - John Deere being the best known inventor, but others were inventing them about the same time) needed the faster speed of a horse to work well, but if the previous farming technology worked for you then oxen (or donkeys ... - there are several other work animals used in different areas for farming) were better.<p>There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.
Do you have a citation for the horse number? My research [0] shows we have a 1/5 out peak number in ~1900 and our population has 5x since then. This means per capita horses in the country is down 96%, while absolute count is down 80%. Both are huge numbers.<p>0 - <a href="https://datapaddock.com/usda-horse-total-1850-2012/" rel="nofollow">https://datapaddock.com/usda-horse-total-1850-2012/</a>
Presumably you are a human, not a horse, yes? Presumably there is more to your life than dragging around carts all day every day?<p>HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
> the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.<p>Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
Yes, most of the work many people do is virtually meaningless.<p>Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist? Does your work contribute anything to yourself or other humans around you?<p>Or do you get paid a lot of money to sit in an office and update JIRA tickets about tracking ad conversions and increasing engagement OKRs?
> Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist?<p>We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.<p>I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
What's your proposal for ending capitalism in our working lifetimes?
Explain a world in which capitalism ends without a fight?
> HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.<p>That's an underrated comment! Totally agree. So so much of discussion on this topic sort of assumes business as usual (both literally and figuratively) and that AI quickly diffuses through the economy, sucking up all economically useful activity, with humans falling by the wayside as inevitable collateral damage.<p>There's a failure of imagination taking place here that there's no other outcome. Capitalism is an evolved solution to how human community works, but is <i>not</i> inevitable.
This is the Chinese century, and even if China charts a somewhat different course than Western capitalism, it still believes that human beings should spend most of their days in some employment, even if it is just makework. A population with mostly leisure time is viewed as very threatening to social stability. I can see that model being exported to the rest of the world far more than I can imagine your utopia.
Isn't the end of the humanity also the end of capitalism?
Not necessarily! In "Saturn's Children" by Stross, humanity managed to wipe itself out, but post-humans (evolved from former, ahem, entertainment androids) are doing just fine across the Solar System. There's a plot point where one of them discovers that some corporation back on Earth inherited full property rights to her body due to an old pre-human-extinction EULA, and she'll be recycled for parts if she ever sets foot in their jurisdiction (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
Do you expect competing AIs to give up on private ownership of the means of production and using them for profit?
And vice versa.
It'll turn into some starwars robot slave trading, Capitalism will be fine!
Because the capitalists have very big guns and a monopoly on violence.<p>Its very easy to imagine a better world.<p>Its much harder to imagine the Scrooges in power willfully giving it up so that we can build that better world.
It's okay, I'll just use AI to vibengineer a viral basilisk that only targets those who violate the NAP.
It's not <i>just</i> the Scrooges in power. Previous attempts to actually <i>make</i> a better world often made a worse one, and not just because of capitalist opposition.
If you mean attempts like centralized communism - absolutely - and the failure mode should have been obvious from human nature: centralizing great power incentivizes corruption.<p>We don't fully know the failure modes of every alternative yet, but that doesn't mean powerful central governments + capitalism is the best alternative.
Interestingly, the Amish shape their lives around this sort of thing. With any technology, they ask themselves, "Does this make us dependent?" If the answer is yes, they refuse it.
If you're not economically useful, what pressure would you be able to bring against the government and it's drone-based police force if it does things you don't like? General strikes don't work in a world with no human labor needed.<p>Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested. If a sociopath were in power, what would stop them?
> HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism<p>HN is literally owned and operated by venture capitalists why are you surprised by this.
>There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.<p>Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.
It is clear that at the limit, machines will be more capable in nearly every way. I suppose there might be some room for a few exceptions like working around big electromagnets that machines can't get close to... Does that sound great? Is there something else you had in mind which would be reserved for humans and fulfilling?
Intuitively I think we all understand that the % of jobs not doable by steam and iron approaches 0 over time.
But the horses themselves got the better end of the deal - they spend all their time in the field eating hay rather than pulling carts.
The phrase "sent to the glue factory" comes from this era where many horses made redundant were sent to be slaughtered for meat or raw materials.
Or on the shelves of Tesco.
No. The horses <i>were made redundant and no longer exist in such quantities</i><p>So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.<p>Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.<p>The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?<p>Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. (Unless something drastic changes.) That means how long it will take for robots to be practical matters. We don’t know how long it will be, but driverless cars have been coming for 15 years now and they’re still unavailable in most places.<p>People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.<p>Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
You seem to be living under a rock. Yes driverless cars started in 2009, but in 2026 it is very much here. Waymo recently crossed a milestone of more 500k trips I think, we will have millions of driverless cars in the coming years (we’re at 10k right now)
My grandad ran a small letterpress shop and when phototypesetting came in he didn't retrain, he just did smaller and smaller jobs until it was wedding invitations.
“Retraining” is mostly a myth. Former skilled workers just downgrade to service jobs, pushing out younger, less skilled workers in the process.<p>The NYT touched on this issue in a podcast about NAFTA: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/podcasts/the-daily/american-politics-trade.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/podcasts/the-daily/americ...</a>. AI is going to be NAFTA on steroids. Politicians will be able to point to growing top-like GDP to say it was a good thing. But it’s going to brutally hit a lot of people and most of those folks will never regain a secure economic footing.
So far the impact of LLMs have been very much overstated.
Like most (all?) tools, they require a human in the loop to work as intended.
This fear of being replaced by an LLM is unfounded and irrational.<p>The alternatives that may cause such mass displacement like World Models and such are yet to be proven.
LLM's went from generating incoherent garbage, to weird text that seems coherent but isn't (gpt-2), to what we have no with agents passing some of the hardest benchmarks, necessitating benchmark development just to be able to keep up with the rate of progress. They did this in about 5 years.<p>The sheer rate of progress is what is meaningful. If LLM's agents were frozen now without any further improvement, your position would be must more defensible. But that's not what's happening, we are getting breakthroughs almost on a weekly basis.
You’ve been living under a rock dude, have you even tried using it for maths or coding. No human in loop needed.
Amazing. I bet this can really help thousands of programmers who are simply not needed, because companies decided to replace them with AI agents. These philosophical ponders are very comfortable to do when your ass is safe. Most of people don’t have this privilege.<p>> what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?<p>It never was the code. The code is how you solve problems, make stuff happen. The code is a tool. It’s people’s brain that is of value. People learn how to use these tools the best they can. And now they are told that they should become mere supervisors for the AI agents. Simply by trusting the output and QA-ing the result. Because no human can keep track of the AI’s generated mess.
The last hundred times we automated things, we automated muscles. Today, the number of people employed purely for their muscle is very small.<p>This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.
I'm not sure I can quite agree with that. I'd say that spreadsheets definitely reduced the need to manually calculate things, and calculators before that, and the abacus before that.<p>I basically agree with your "higher level reasoning", but not your statement that we previously only automated muscles.
Compilers automated higher level reasoning, at least to a small degree. LLMs themselves are basically just compilers with a much, much, much, much more expansive set of built-in language constructs.<p>(No, compilers are not deterministic)
Can you describe the last time you asked your compiler how you should best approach an interpersonal problem, to research an investment thesis, or to figure out an org chart by analyzing communication patterns within teams?<p>People aren't just using AI for writing code, but for all of their decision making. AI is far from limited to writing code.
<i>> Can you describe the last time you asked your compiler how you should best approach an interpersonal problem</i><p>Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem. It compiled that into a description of how to deal with it.<p><i>> People aren't just using AI for writing code</i><p>Compilers have never been about producing code in particular, though, even if that is where they are most commonly used. A LaTeX compiler, for example, outputs books. To think they are about code exclusively is a grave misunderstanding of what a compiler is.
> Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem. It compiled that into a description of how to deal with it.<p>I might just not know enough compilers, but didn't you write the specification of how to approach the problem, not just the problem itself?
> <i>Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem.</i><p>The LLM usage I see from most people has the LLM write out the specification, asking clarifying questions as needed. If you're using LLMs as you describe, you're using them ineffectively.
<i>> The LLM usage I see from most people has the LLM write out the specification</i><p>If the compiler is writing the specification, what purpose does the person serve? That is not what I'm seeing out in the wild, though. Perhaps what is happening in research labs aside, compilers, even those implemented as an LLM, don't do anything until the user specifies their intent.<p>In fact, you literally recognized that in your earlier comment, asking about my action to specify my problem. Not sure why the story is changing now? There is probably a day where the systems solve your problems before you even know you have them, but we're not there yet. The technology hasn't advanced that much in the span of a couple of hours.<p><i>> asking clarifying questions as needed.</i><p>Sure. Even the earliest, most primitive compilers would seek clarification if there was something that it felt required more information. That's expected.<p><i>> If you're using LLMs as you describe, you're using them ineffectively.</i><p>LLMs are just compilers so they can't do anything else. Maybe you're thinking of some technology that is layered on top of a compiler like an IDE, REPL, or something to that effect?
> This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.<p>That’s very generous of you to call it that way.<p>It’s a parody at best.
Back in the '70s my dad used to tell a joke about his dad. He said that my grandfather had a job that supported his whole large family while my dad was growing up. But unfortunately technology caught up with him, and he was replaced by a device just this big, and he held his fingers apart to demonstrate.<p>Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."<p>Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.<p>It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, and so was the pickle slicer.<p>In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.
I’m trying to figure out this joke. Is the punchline that he was a gigolo and he got replaced be sextoys?
I think the punchline is that workplace romance usually gets both parties fired, regardless of who initiated. Hence, doing "things" with the pickle slicer means the pickle slicer gets fired for participating...
That was my interpretation but nobody ever explained it.
It may be funny when it's a joke, not so when it's real.
My grandpa was a shoemaker. The real change in technology left his family in poverty in Chicago during the depression. I didn't hear anyone joke about that, directly.<p>Jewish humor is frequently about laughing at your own pain. There's a genre of Jewish jokes created in concentration camps.
Well written, and good to reflect on.<p>However, the one thing I feel like is missed by some in these conversations is that what's being built is a general purpose thinking machine, not a coding machine. How are we going to transition from writing code to solving problems when the machines are solving the problems?
The honest AI boosters do claim we won’t solve problems anymore, we will live animals in a zoo, overseen by machines of loving grace.<p>The retard AI boosters, tell us to be AI first, learn this harness bro, loops are yesterday, now it’s graphs, use 100 agents a minimum or be left behind, actually world will require 100X more software engineers.
I don’t particularly like the horse to engine angle because it doesn’t capture the issue well.<p>When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???<p>Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?
How are your plumbing skills?
The knowledge economy was already on the way out in favour of the performance economy even before LLMs. LLMs have also shown that they can produce in the performance space, of course, so it remains to be seen how valuable humans are in that position but so far it would appear that many are willing to pay for a "human connection".
> Become a useless class?<p>Like our capital class overlords?
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.<p>I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.<p>That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
How can you say there are no challenges and things to master when working with AI? Unless you are just doing "Make this. LGTM. Now make this".
> "Make this. LGTM. Now make this".<p>I think well north of 90% of people in software engineering have job expectations that, when assisted/automated with AI, boil down to exactly that.<p>It's a pain in the ass to work at such a job and find challenges or things to master--your superiors don't want you to do that, there's not enough time in the day, and you're tired from LGTM-now-make-this work.<p>That's most software jobs, because that's what most software companies want.
Can you not seek mastery with the new tools, though?<p>It does feel a bit like building on quicksand, but coding has always been that way for me. Well, less so with embedded than webdev, but still.
I used to find joy in knowing how things worked inside-out. Whether it was Postgres, or browser engines, or some detail about compilers... I used to find joy in developing the little techniques that made programming NOT building on quicksand. There was satisfation in what you had done being robust.<p>Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like.
When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)<p>Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers?
It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face).
I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.<p>It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.
When I would code by hand I often found I was concerned with the house of cards in my head, am I remembering the right variable names, did I forget something that would lead to an exploit, etc. Now I can direct the LLM to do the work and the skill is split between having an understanding of the interactions of the technologies, choosing tech that will be less of a pain to update/migrate. You can even put some LLM-bow grease into finding more efficient approaches catching corner cases etc. And just by asking I can have test frameworks setup, I can drill into some pet peeve and it takes less time. Now we still have lots of ops moments, like the radicel distributed git forge forgetting to use encryption for private repos, and I run into this class of problem in my own casual LLM use, but that's where our taste and attention to detail powers need to be spent in this modern developer world.
Did a tailor gain mastery of the sweatshop machine? Did mastery of the automated sewing machines give the same joy to the tailor or was it mind numbing meaningless activity that he would be happier to be free of.
Aside the fact the author sells ai services, training, whatever i can not understand the view how knowledge workers will be replaced while every employee is now forced and expected to work 10-fold and hiring is halted because shortsighted deciders and ... money.<p>The effect on the market is pure GREED and wishful thinking as none of the people in charge of HR or decision making have any idea how this technology actually works.<p>Also - why is everyone comparing this to the industrial revolution? And not f.e. invention of vaccines. No it HAS to be the big big story or you cannot make money with it.<p>All while the actual results are well, great. Helpful, sure. But so are vaccines!<p>Don't buy into this bs, any service or course. d2l.ai is free and wont be stupidly useless next month like whatever hype we sell this week.<p>As the doom stories lose novelty now we get the feel good "my grandpa" stories.
You are not the farrier in this analogy. You are the horse.
Yes, but this time, we're the horse.
> something happened once in the past and turned ok hence you should never ever worry about other vaguely similar things ever again<p>That's how it sounds to me
Don't forget blatantly ignoring all the times something similar happened in the past and <i>didn't</i> turn out fine.<p>Sticking your fingers in your ears and singing "Lalalalalala" will in fact sometimes work for some people, and that is not a good argument for everyone to do it.
The Industrial Revolution took over 100 years. You could argue that WW1 and WW2 were direct, structural consequences of the Industrial Revolution.<p>This has taken months to up-end multiple industries.<p>I don't think the article makes a fair comparison.
I don’t know, somehow the pace seems different, these transitions felt more like the last generation retiring, and the next generation doing something different, instead of it happening to everyone at the same time.
I think the analogy of moving from horses to engines breaks down when going from code to AI as AI can quite plausibly work on itself. It's a fundamentally different game we're playing this time. And there were as many engine jobs as horse jobs (maybe more). The whole point of AI is super human productivity. Even the idea of just using AI means you need less humans because one human with AI can out-produce multiple humans without. It's very difficult to imagine a future where AI can do every job and things don't turn into a sci-fi dystopia.
Funny thing for me, it was NEVER the code...
I like this article, but it took decades for cars to take over: we needed to build vehicles, build roads, build up gas production and distribution... as Bill Gates wrote, one of the differences with the AI disruption is how fast it's coming, since it's almost immaterial (except data centers of course). It may be too fast for humans to adapt like they did in the previous revolutions.
The current trend of comparing AI development to the development of motorised personal transport makes it very easy to remind everyone that undoing the effects of decades of blind "progress" once the negative externalities become unavoidable is much easier said than done.
Unfortunately, work from home made it easy for companies to realize how easily a chat window could fulfill employee interactions
And it threatens not a single profession, but all people doing intellectual work.
On the one hand, it makes sense to think of this as just another revolution as it keeps things familiar, keeps the ground underneath us intact and lets hope it goes this way.<p>On the other hand, if long horizon independent problem solving with almost zero human intervention or support is realized in these models 1-5 years down, then it will lead not to new tech, but essentially a new species of workers that can replace humans at all tasks, In that case, humans wouldn't really have the upper hand as an economical resource to get any work done.
> But it makes me wonder: what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?<p>This exactly. Look, I "love" code but only because of what it allows me to do and there is plenty of code/coding that I don't love. Not to be too hippy-dippy but I'm a builder, I like to build things. Build things for myself, build things for others. The code was _always_ a means to an end.<p>Sure, it was cool I had this skill that many people didn't have but I also used to have skill in managing the windows machines and things like the registry. When I first switched to macOS I felt lost, I had this "skill" that was no longer needed but after a while I realized that was a good thing, I wasn't wasting my time fiddling with crap that was just getting in the way of _using_ my computer.<p>Similarly I may mourn the loss of writing code but at the end of the day code was just a way for me to build, if there are better tools to build (LLMs) then I'm all for it.
I too love building things, but by building things I mean the act of actually building it. Thinking of a problem, devising a solution and then executing the steps to solve the problem, if that doesn’t work, debugging and trying another method and so on. I am not and will never be a fan of buying things, where I just ask for something and it gets made which is what you’re a fan of if you’re honest to yourself.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.<p>This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).<p>I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.<p>As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.<p>A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.<p>Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.
sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.<p>We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.<p>Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.
There’s no demand for human dexterity anyway, and it’s not about money. I like doing intellectual work.<p>They are spending 1T to ruin the quality of work we do, also probably ruining our chances of securing a livelihood and then they want us to for some reason welcome it with open arms and openly say look how great this is and marvel at human obsolescence. Yeah no thanks.
There are two key elements in the current AI fearmongering:<p>1) People think they can predict the future<p>2) People think humans can't adapt<p>The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.<p>Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.<p>Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.
Adapt, sure, but is my life better or worse after adapting? It's a fair question and a fair worry. The goal of most AI companies seems to be to replace some amount of labor with AI. Look how that worked out for our factory workers. They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.
<i>> They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.</i><p>The tech crowd used to say that only the "dumb" ones did that. They said those who were "smart like us" were much more adaptable, learning to code and whatnot to find new, often even better careers. It will be interesting to see if the emperor has clothes.
Why is it whenever people try to downplay the efficacy of LLM’s evangelists go “there’s literally never been anything like this,” but the moment people critique them or try to weigh their impact on society the response is “well it’s nothing we haven’t seen before”?<p>The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation. We are clearly experiencing a moment of sorts, and anybody who is worried about what the fallout will be is just handwaved away as ignorant fear mongers. Unless you are the head of these companies doing it in a disingenuous way to pump up your valuation, then suddenly it’s legitimate - but not so legitimate that we should do anything besides let the US government build a moat for them!
You're mixing a bunch of different "people" in the same bag. I'm not the one saying "there's never been anything like this before".<p>The investment is massive, but not bigger than other projects by an order of magnitude. Major wars were bigger than AI. The dot com bubble was 2-3T dollars.
> The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation.<p>Yes, the absolute numbers might now read TRILLION instead of BILLION or MILLION, but the concept of "Technology so impactful governments shift their economies" is in no way new, and has already happened a bunch of times before in humanity's timeline.<p>I guess that's why you're seeing some of us less stressed out about it, as again, scale is different, because scale today is different in everything, but relatively, we're just repeating another of those "Technology changes everything" milestones that we've done before.
We have never seen governments essentially leverage their economies so heavily, so quickly, for a speculative technology. It is literally propping up a significant portion of the US economy right now.<p>When have we seen anything like this?
> When have we seen anything like this?<p>The US canal and railroad boom in the 1800s definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger", it looks comparatively small. But in their world, back then, it was basically the same thing, just with canals and railroads. Indiana almost financially ruined itself because of their "infrastructure program". The government got involved heavily with the "1862 Pacific Railway Act" as well.<p>And yes, easy to say now that "Duh, that's essentially infrastructure" but at the time, that wasn't as obvious to everyone, as and railroad were newfangled technology, especially deployed like that, on a scale never seen before.
> definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger",<p>And faster. More, bigger, faster. Which substantively changes the situation the same way a musket stops venn diagraming as a “firearm” at some point when compared to a 50-round automatic rifle.
Because they're liars. Plain and simple. Lying is a virtue as long as the lie is powerful enough to sustain attention.
My grandad on one side of the family was a market gardener. He didn't become a farmer.<p>My great grandad on the other side was a lighterman[0]. He didn't become a ship captain.<p>Sometimes professions really are just gone. In both cases in my family it was due to consolidation of resources and concentration of capital/power. Technology was just a catalyst for that.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighterman" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighterman</a>
People are flagging in real time. Maybe the grandfather would have thought you are cowards and frauds who abuse him to push a vibe coding company.
I wish the author had gone deeper
The difference here is that the car was not a centralized cloud service, owned by select few billionaires.<p>So the post does need an asterisk, referring to how it all hinges on availability of open weights and inference hardware.
What a refreshingly positive read
How many of these do we really need? Nothing is happening, and a lot of people are upset about it.<p>They wanted to make money, or at least be a part of history during a transformational era. No dice.
Humans ourselves are a technology. We have incredibly flexible brains and dexterous hands. Up to now, we could always do things that robots couldn't. That was where our job security came from.<p>But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?<p>This is what the article misses and what people have trouble accepting. Yea, this is a technological revolution, but unlike the Industrial Revolution, you can't just upskill your way out of it.
> But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?<p>I've already started to feel this.<p>One thing that made us special was our intelligence. We were, and were always going to be (unless some alien form of life arrived), the most intelligent things on earth. Is that still true today?
We should start with the assumption that humans are valuable and deserve to live with dignity. Any philosophy that doesn’t have that at its center is broken.
We should, but to date anyone that wanted to be treated as though they were valuable and deserved dignity needed some way to apply pressure to ensure that.<p>I'm not optimistic that this will change in the future -- but, I am watching automation erode the amount of pressure that humans can apply.
Yes but same should have been true of animals and humans as a whole did not afford dignity or value to animals. Maybe we will get a taste of our own medicine this time.
I'm curious where you are drawing the line. Why is a human different from a ape/dog/chicken now? I wonder: do they not deserve to live with dignity?
Perhaps. But are humans going to get what they deserve?
Very often the justification for why these things aren't terribly disruptive is that the very best of a certain trade or field will still have a useful skillset. Like the best graphic designers in the world are still more creative and skilled than AI, and the best writers are still better, the best programmers are still better, just that they're all more expensive and slower.<p>But we're not taking into account how it affects the mediocre or average people in these fields. Roughly half of all of these people are below average. Maybe if you're the best you'll always have a job, but what about the guy who legitimately struggled to finish high school? The person who genuinely doesn't have the capacity to earn much more than minimum wage?
I weep for people whose scientistic reductionism has led to such devaluation of humanity. Robots don’t do anything and don’t think anything. Humans do things with and through them. What makes us special is that we exist and love one another.
> Humans ourselves are a technology.<p>Grim.<p><a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...</a>
The economy long moved past the things we can do, hence "bullshit jobs". Our job security has come from our willingness to "look the other way", allowing the job creators to live out lives the rest of us can only imagine. If they didn't placate our insatiable desire to work, that wouldn't last long.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.<p>I LOVE playing "product designer" with LLM. The thing I normally hate and never do, write and update "design docs" being my only lever is awesome. I do already hate how it seems to turn development into a much less social activity. It's great that we don't need other people and a lot of time for some things now, but it's also not.<p>But more importantly, because I also like solving problems and seeing people thrive, I can't overlook that it's all based on stuff taken without consent, how artists were made "obsolete" by what plasters me with slop every day (already, and we didn't even get started). And they're not even going "okay, now that we proved it can work with stolen stuff, let's do it proper". No, this is "the new world now", just keep pushing and squeezing and extract more "value". So wtf? Well, I like solving problems, I love games! One cool game is "catch the thief", another is "call out the sociopath". So let's?<p>But we can't, because we're not building this after deliberation and discussion, we're being herded into it and then make rationalizations for foregone conclusions made in our absence against our interests. Building systems nobody understands that keep making more systems nobody even tries to understand is not some hyper-efficient future, it's no future at all, and nobody with power (however wishy-washy that phrase is) wants to live <i>under</i> any of that, you can be assured.<p>So this all seems more like an airlock to me, an abattoir, not a spaceship that just happens to be kinda dirty and stinky because the focus is on so much grander things. How insincere and stupid so much of it is just can't be overlooked, and very much unlike other technological advancements where the results speak for themselves, where the results (or the improved process to get them), <i>pull</i> something, make it inevitably seep everywhere it is useful. There is so much pushing and hyping, and so precious little good stuff to make for the really bad stuff, all the slop that is produced and clogs up inter-human channels.<p>This is not even progress, this is just subversion, that's my thesis. It's deliberately driven for the easily predictable bad effects it will have.
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"what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?"<p>The phrasing is very LLM. Apparently what you loved about writing blog posts wasn't the writing either, since looks like you are having AI do it too!