"Fourth, we will not find ourselves working less. Rather, there will be a bimodal outcome: those unable to find a place in the new AI-powered industry will fall out of it entirely, while those that remain are worked harder and harder as they drive automated development systems. Five PRs a week? Hah! Try fifty. Or five hundred."
My experience with AI/LLMs summed up. The baseline expectation got higher. I didn't get any time back. My life didn't become easier.
As it was the case with all productivity catalysts in the past. The Industrial Revolution promised machines would work and we’d get to have leisure time. Instead, it brought 16 hour factory shifts. This will be no different
To paraphrase Marx, "And so, the equivalent amount of labour required to produce the goods needed to sustain a worker for a day is, say, 4 hours. But that doesn't mean the selfsame worker can work for no longer that 4 hours! He can be forced to work six, or eight, or twelve hours a day, and whatever additional goods he produces — that's the surplus product, which in this case goes straight to line up the factory owner's pockets".
Literally no one, no one even claimed we would work less due to AI. It is one of many absurd claims about AI here. There was no period in which we would get think pieces predicting more leisure time.
We had plenty of think pieces about making people obsolete, about destruction, generally in celebratory tone. I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment".
I think this is largely right. Software engineering as a stable, high-earning and in demand career is a thing of the past.
Those who make it work from here are those who've changed their work completely to resemble something more like a hands-off tech lead. There will of course be the lucky few who've made it work as artisans without direct commercial pressures to conform to the new "right way to do it". But the careers many of us have had is not a path available for others to follow anymore.
The irony of automating away "inefficiencies", "drudgery" and the "labour intensive" parts of other professions stings all the more when the sharp end of that shtick is pointed back in our direction.
> Third, once destroyed those industries will not meaningfully return. This is not a process that will result in a natural ebb and flow. Once the software development profession is disrupted, it will stay that way as talent pipelines dry up and expertise ages out
I can echo that. If/when I am replaced with an LLM, I plan on switching to a hands-on profession - welder, electrician, machinist. I am also not planning on ever going back to software... errr... prompt "engineering".
Great piece, well written and succinctly sums up my thoughts.
The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated shit. I pushed back, it apologised, and then generated more crap that had nothing to do with reality, I pushed back, we looped again, still just total fiction: “the drums don’t come in until bar 16” on a song that opens with a drum loop, that kind of crap.
We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.
I’m guessing it’s that humans don’t have capacity to deal with this kind of scenario - it’s like having a junior staff member who is utterly incredible 90% of the time - completely convincing in their certainty and skill level, and then 10% of the time you catch them doing a shit in their desk drawer because they couldn’t be arsed to walk to the toilet. AI’s are basically sociopaths.
I was with the article - especially the bit about the 10% an LLM loses and how that loss can be de-amplified across eventual meaning, but then...
"My first instinct is to laugh and shake my head. One need not look very far to find indignant software developers absolutely certain that their jobs cannot possibly be automated away by the very tools their industry contemporaries are creating to replace them. I suspect you’d also not have to look far into their posting histories to find those same people comparing cabbies to buggy whip makers."
What a rude and callous comment. I'm one of those developers, I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails. Laugh at me as I defend my lifelong career, why don't you? I'm also one who decries such things as the removal of local services, taxi and otherwise, for those in the cloud. Screw you, man.
classic example of the goomba fallacy - "all software engineers are one single person-caricature I have in my head and are therefore a stupid walking contradiction whenever two of them express different opinions".
Do these hypothetical laid off software engineers with no empathy for buggy drivers exist outside the imagination of people who hate software engineers?
> I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails
If you don't mind could you please elaborate on what tasks or knowledge your job requires that you feel an LLM isn't even _fractionally_ capable of? I understand if you said that out of emotion and frustration, but if you're serious I'm intensely and genuinely curious because nowadays it seems like the frontier models are capable of more programming tasks than not with the proper harness and engineer. When was the last time you tried?
I just want to emphasize that this is not a further provocation, just potentially in awe of what you do at your job and would like to know more.
It's not easy being a developer right now. We went from being dorky and unpopular in school to being superstars (at work) and now the writing's on the wall. I can sympathize, but I'll concede that our recently developed attention for the state of nature and the fair distribution of capital is .. interesting.
There’s no irony. Author made a straw man of some bad, bad developer laughing at poor cabbies and it all clicked once VCs came for the fellow professionals.
Tech bro lamenting and berating developers how immoral and hypocritical they’re for “laughing” (has this ever happened?) at other professions, while doing the same. Story as old as time.
The point of this sentence is to show that there are Software Developers who are looking at this in a short-sighted way. There doesn't seem anything rude about it.
They might very well go away. There is definitely an AI bubble, and it remains to be seen whether it deflates gradually or pops spectacularly. Geoeconomics might destroy them by constraining their access to hardware. The capabilities are real, but whether those capabilities are realised is a different matter.
What is China subsidises its inference providers to provide like utility level "intelligence" at or below cost globally until all the knowledge jobs in the west go the way of the manufacturing ones..
Providing services below cost is how SV and American tech operated last 25 years. It was the same pattern again and again - sell bellow cost, competition cant compete, create quasi monopoly, enshittify and start earning.
OpenAI and Anthropic still sells tokens under cost.
Are people seriously getting use out of LLMs? Everything they produce is extermely sloppy in my experience, like actually mostly useless. I really dont understand the hype. Its very confusing.
Every time I have actually engaged in conversations with people making the same claim you do, it turned out they did not really invest time into learning how to work with coding agents: They assumed, given that they’re developers, the know how to code, and thus would knew how to steer a coding agent.
That is a wrong assumption, however. An agent is an entirely new tool in your toolbox, with no similarity to any of those you already have. You will need to learn how to wield it, like a new programming language or technology you’re unfamiliar with. You will need to do some small side projects to learn. You will need to develop a feeling for how it reacts to your inputs, when to reset the session, pass it links to documentation or interrupt it.
None of this comes intuitively. It takes time and effort, and if you’re not ready to consciously invest that, coding agents are not going to work efficiently for you. That doesn’t take away from their utility though.
I am convinced the people who swear by them either have very different work tasks from me, or they have very different ideas about what a job well done looks like.
I feel like everything I apply these things to sends me up a much messier and long winded route to a useable result, when compared to just doing it myself from the jump. Even the things they're ostensibly good at like sorting data comes out so messy it's practically net zero by the time you're done with quality control.
I tend to do the main structural parts myself and tell it to fill in the gaps and add tests, which sort of works 70% of the time. It may not be worth what my company is being charged.
I work 40 hours a week at a company I care very little for. Despite that, I still have to make 40 hours. I also have a side-project that I do in my free time. I do not have the energy to sit behind my desk for >40 hrs a week
So I walk, program, sit, get coffee, read a bit, come back and review the code. Most of the time it's fine, sometimes I had forgotten to mention something, and have to correct it, but this step doesn't take more than ~15 mins.
I then have a feature that would've taken me multiple days. Not because I need multiple days, but because I do not have the 8 hours of continuous time to work on it.
People have forgotten that when you start your programming day, you have to get up to speed which takes me longer than others. Let's say this takes ~15 mins. That means that if you spend 2 hours programming, ~12% of that was just getting back into the groove. LLMs do this instantly, it reads context, you can ask it questions, and you're up to speed again in less than a minute.
The point here is not that LLMs provide high quality code, but they do save you a bit of time and energy, which is worth a lot in my opinion.
A lot of inventions haven't been that ground-breaking; only there to save time. You can wash the dishes by hand, but you can also have a machine do it while you go watch TV.
I am getting serious use out of LLMs, and everyone else who does knows that those claiming otherwise are only getting slop because they’re not giving it enough guard rails, likely because they’re uninitiated, likely because they hate AI in the first place.
"Fourth, we will not find ourselves working less. Rather, there will be a bimodal outcome: those unable to find a place in the new AI-powered industry will fall out of it entirely, while those that remain are worked harder and harder as they drive automated development systems. Five PRs a week? Hah! Try fifty. Or five hundred."
My experience with AI/LLMs summed up. The baseline expectation got higher. I didn't get any time back. My life didn't become easier.
As it was the case with all productivity catalysts in the past. The Industrial Revolution promised machines would work and we’d get to have leisure time. Instead, it brought 16 hour factory shifts. This will be no different
> Instead, it brought 16 hour factory shifts.
To paraphrase Marx, "And so, the equivalent amount of labour required to produce the goods needed to sustain a worker for a day is, say, 4 hours. But that doesn't mean the selfsame worker can work for no longer that 4 hours! He can be forced to work six, or eight, or twelve hours a day, and whatever additional goods he produces — that's the surplus product, which in this case goes straight to line up the factory owner's pockets".
Why would it? Who, with a half brain, thought that you’d ever work less?
Literally no one, no one even claimed we would work less due to AI. It is one of many absurd claims about AI here. There was no period in which we would get think pieces predicting more leisure time.
We had plenty of think pieces about making people obsolete, about destruction, generally in celebratory tone. I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment".
Fantastic article. However author never considered that I'm looking forward to my job being automated. That's like a whole point of programming.
I think this is largely right. Software engineering as a stable, high-earning and in demand career is a thing of the past.
Those who make it work from here are those who've changed their work completely to resemble something more like a hands-off tech lead. There will of course be the lucky few who've made it work as artisans without direct commercial pressures to conform to the new "right way to do it". But the careers many of us have had is not a path available for others to follow anymore.
The irony of automating away "inefficiencies", "drudgery" and the "labour intensive" parts of other professions stings all the more when the sharp end of that shtick is pointed back in our direction.
> Third, once destroyed those industries will not meaningfully return. This is not a process that will result in a natural ebb and flow. Once the software development profession is disrupted, it will stay that way as talent pipelines dry up and expertise ages out
I can echo that. If/when I am replaced with an LLM, I plan on switching to a hands-on profession - welder, electrician, machinist. I am also not planning on ever going back to software... errr... prompt "engineering".
Great piece, well written and succinctly sums up my thoughts.
The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated shit. I pushed back, it apologised, and then generated more crap that had nothing to do with reality, I pushed back, we looped again, still just total fiction: “the drums don’t come in until bar 16” on a song that opens with a drum loop, that kind of crap.
We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.
I’m guessing it’s that humans don’t have capacity to deal with this kind of scenario - it’s like having a junior staff member who is utterly incredible 90% of the time - completely convincing in their certainty and skill level, and then 10% of the time you catch them doing a shit in their desk drawer because they couldn’t be arsed to walk to the toilet. AI’s are basically sociopaths.
I was with the article - especially the bit about the 10% an LLM loses and how that loss can be de-amplified across eventual meaning, but then...
"My first instinct is to laugh and shake my head. One need not look very far to find indignant software developers absolutely certain that their jobs cannot possibly be automated away by the very tools their industry contemporaries are creating to replace them. I suspect you’d also not have to look far into their posting histories to find those same people comparing cabbies to buggy whip makers."
What a rude and callous comment. I'm one of those developers, I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails. Laugh at me as I defend my lifelong career, why don't you? I'm also one who decries such things as the removal of local services, taxi and otherwise, for those in the cloud. Screw you, man.
classic example of the goomba fallacy - "all software engineers are one single person-caricature I have in my head and are therefore a stupid walking contradiction whenever two of them express different opinions".
Do these hypothetical laid off software engineers with no empathy for buggy drivers exist outside the imagination of people who hate software engineers?
Not the OP but this line really got my attention
> I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails
If you don't mind could you please elaborate on what tasks or knowledge your job requires that you feel an LLM isn't even _fractionally_ capable of? I understand if you said that out of emotion and frustration, but if you're serious I'm intensely and genuinely curious because nowadays it seems like the frontier models are capable of more programming tasks than not with the proper harness and engineer. When was the last time you tried?
I just want to emphasize that this is not a further provocation, just potentially in awe of what you do at your job and would like to know more.
Is this sarcastic or do you just not see the irony?
It's not easy being a developer right now. We went from being dorky and unpopular in school to being superstars (at work) and now the writing's on the wall. I can sympathize, but I'll concede that our recently developed attention for the state of nature and the fair distribution of capital is .. interesting.
There’s no irony. Author made a straw man of some bad, bad developer laughing at poor cabbies and it all clicked once VCs came for the fellow professionals.
Tech bro lamenting and berating developers how immoral and hypocritical they’re for “laughing” (has this ever happened?) at other professions, while doing the same. Story as old as time.
I think you wanted to be offended and didn't even understand the point. Maybe I'm also being rude.
The point of this sentence is to show that there are Software Developers who are looking at this in a short-sighted way. There doesn't seem anything rude about it.
> These tools are here. They’re not going away.
They might very well go away. There is definitely an AI bubble, and it remains to be seen whether it deflates gradually or pops spectacularly. Geoeconomics might destroy them by constraining their access to hardware. The capabilities are real, but whether those capabilities are realised is a different matter.
Deepseek is realistic about this and is offering great prices.
I think that once companies are more realistic about token demand they can start making a profit
What is China subsidises its inference providers to provide like utility level "intelligence" at or below cost globally until all the knowledge jobs in the west go the way of the manufacturing ones..
Providing services below cost is how SV and American tech operated last 25 years. It was the same pattern again and again - sell bellow cost, competition cant compete, create quasi monopoly, enshittify and start earning.
OpenAI and Anthropic still sells tokens under cost.
Yup, and the marginal value of the boutique models is much lower than the marginal cost. Most workflows have no need for american models.
Are people seriously getting use out of LLMs? Everything they produce is extermely sloppy in my experience, like actually mostly useless. I really dont understand the hype. Its very confusing.
Every time I have actually engaged in conversations with people making the same claim you do, it turned out they did not really invest time into learning how to work with coding agents: They assumed, given that they’re developers, the know how to code, and thus would knew how to steer a coding agent.
That is a wrong assumption, however. An agent is an entirely new tool in your toolbox, with no similarity to any of those you already have. You will need to learn how to wield it, like a new programming language or technology you’re unfamiliar with. You will need to do some small side projects to learn. You will need to develop a feeling for how it reacts to your inputs, when to reset the session, pass it links to documentation or interrupt it.
None of this comes intuitively. It takes time and effort, and if you’re not ready to consciously invest that, coding agents are not going to work efficiently for you. That doesn’t take away from their utility though.
I am convinced the people who swear by them either have very different work tasks from me, or they have very different ideas about what a job well done looks like.
I feel like everything I apply these things to sends me up a much messier and long winded route to a useable result, when compared to just doing it myself from the jump. Even the things they're ostensibly good at like sorting data comes out so messy it's practically net zero by the time you're done with quality control.
I tend to do the main structural parts myself and tell it to fill in the gaps and add tests, which sort of works 70% of the time. It may not be worth what my company is being charged.
That's my approach as well. When I try to mentally compare the cost of the subscription to the performance, I think it's extremely dubious at best.
I work 40 hours a week at a company I care very little for. Despite that, I still have to make 40 hours. I also have a side-project that I do in my free time. I do not have the energy to sit behind my desk for >40 hrs a week
So I walk, program, sit, get coffee, read a bit, come back and review the code. Most of the time it's fine, sometimes I had forgotten to mention something, and have to correct it, but this step doesn't take more than ~15 mins.
I then have a feature that would've taken me multiple days. Not because I need multiple days, but because I do not have the 8 hours of continuous time to work on it.
People have forgotten that when you start your programming day, you have to get up to speed which takes me longer than others. Let's say this takes ~15 mins. That means that if you spend 2 hours programming, ~12% of that was just getting back into the groove. LLMs do this instantly, it reads context, you can ask it questions, and you're up to speed again in less than a minute.
The point here is not that LLMs provide high quality code, but they do save you a bit of time and energy, which is worth a lot in my opinion.
A lot of inventions haven't been that ground-breaking; only there to save time. You can wash the dishes by hand, but you can also have a machine do it while you go watch TV.
Just out of curiosity, did you actually use claude?
Otherwise have a look here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174
I am getting serious use out of LLMs, and everyone else who does knows that those claiming otherwise are only getting slop because they’re not giving it enough guard rails, likely because they’re uninitiated, likely because they hate AI in the first place.
is a sometimes useful agent, and a sometimes useful slightly smarter search engine.
it can be useful for some automation... but its also dangerously dumb for that.
Meh just another anti AI rant - this time with the cloak of legitimacy taken from a market downturn.
Whether you agree with it or not, the author makes some good points and it goes way beyond just a "rant".