Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence (opens in new tab)

I think a lot of people will not like to hear this but we use AI almost for everything internally. The noob way to go about this is just give it a couple of tasks and just give it complete root access to your life. That's always going to end up in disappointment. Instead, I realised, AI always needs an architect. Opinionated. Strategic. Authoritative.

It is quite good at following most orders. Hence why you must ALWAYS be in the loop. AI can augment, but not replace. Maybe some day it might. But it's not now, even with the latest SOTA models.

I let AI write my emails for me. But never the ability to hit send. I let AI access to my data to make informed decisions, but never let it make the final decision.

You may think I'm being paranoid, but I'm a very cautious person. I don't jump into new technology fresh out of the oven and this has served me well for the last 15 years. (I learned my lesson courtesy of MongoDb).

With AI, I am taking the same approach. Experiment, understand the limits and only then implement. Working really well so far and have managed to automate tons of tedious tasks from emails to sales to even meetings.

I don't use Clawdbot, not any library. I wrote my own wrappers for everything using Elixir. I used Instructor and Ash framework with Phoenix and a bunch of generators to automate tedious tasks. I control the endpoints the models are loaded from (Open router) and use a multi-model flow so no one company has enough data about me. Only bits and pieces of random user IDs.

Privacy is the real challenge with AI.

having been an early employee and founder of a few startups and then working at a few larger companies, most people who only ever worked at FAANG have no idea how much more productive tiny teams with ownership are.

I agree with your categories. The majority of the usage for me is (1) and (3).

(1) LLMs are basically Stack Overflow on steroids. No need to go look up examples or read the documentation in most cases, spit out a mostly working starting point.

(3) Learning. Ramping up on an unfamiliar project by asking Antigravity questions is really useful.

I do think it makes devs faster, in that it takes less time to do these two things. But you're running into the 80% of the job that does not involve writing code, especially at a larger company.

In theory, this should allow a company to do more with fewer devs, but in reality it just means that these two activities become easier, and the 80% is still the bottleneck.

Yes, throughput is determined by the bottleneck and above a certain organization size, the bottleneck often is coordination costs.

Interesting.

Are you generating revenue or, otherwise, what productivity are you measuring?

Without generating revenue (which to be clear is a very good proxy to measure impact) everyone can be indeed very prolific in their hobbies. But labor market is about making money for a living and unless you can directly impact your day-to-day needs from your work, it can't be called productive.

Can mostly second this.

Working on a side project, and it's truly incredible how good AI has been for MOST of it.

Also, bewildering how truly awful it was at some seemingly random things - like writing not terribly difficult Assembly that mostly exists already to do Go-style hot splitting (to even get it to understand what older versions of Go did).

I suspect it'll still be 3 years before AI is as good at the FAANGs as it is outside, just due to the ungodly huge context and the amount of proprietary stuff it would need to learn to use effectively, plus getting all the access to it, etc.

But, even when it does all that, that's maybe 33% of the job.

I just don't see mass layoffs at the really big tech companies, unless it's more focused on just cutting and cutting than actually because people have been made redundant.

Even at the management level, I'm not sure we're going to see managers managing teams of 30 instead of teams of 10.

At the end of the day, a manager needs to know what you're doing and if you're any good at it, and there's only so many people a person can do that effectively with.

Maybe low-level managers go away, and it's just TLMs, but someone still needs to do your 1-on-1s and babysit those that need babysat.

2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration)

I have a game written in XNA

100% of the code is there, including all the physics that I hand-wrote.

All the assets are there.

I tried to get Gemini and Claude to do it numerous times, always with utter failure of epic proportions with anything that's actually detailed. 1 - my transition from the lobby screen into gameplay? 0% replicated on all attempts 2 - the actual physics in gameplay? 0% replicated none of it works 3 - the lobby screen itself? non-functional

Okay so what did it even do? Well it put together sort of a boilerplate main menu and barebones options with weird looking text that isn't what I provided (given that I provided a font file), a lobby that I had to manually adjust numerous times before it could get into gameplay, and then nonfunctional gameplay that only handles directional movement and nothing else with sort of half-working fish traveling behavior.

I've tried this a dozen times since 2023 with AI and as late as late last year.

ALL of the source code is there every single thing that could be translated to be a functional game in another language is there. It NEVER once works or even comes remotely close.

The entire codebase is about 20,000 lines, with maybe 3,000 of it being really important stuff.

So yeah I don't really think AI is "really good" at anything complex. I haven't really been proven wrong in my 4 years of using it now.

This is a bot comment.

The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make life better for people. What a crazy fucking concept right?

I find LLMs are good at essentially boilerplate code. It's clear what to do and it needs to be typed in. Or areas where I really have no idea where to start, because I'm not familiar with the codebase.

I find anything else, I spend more time coaxing them into doing 85% of what I need that I'm better off doing it myself.

So they're not useless but there's only so many times in a week that I need a function to pretty-print a table in some fashion. And the code they write on anything more complex than a snippet is usually written poorly enough that it's a write-once-never-touch-again situation. If the code needs to be solid, maintainable, testable, correct (and these are kind of minimal requirements in my book) then LLMs make little impact on my productivity.

They're still an improvement on Google and Stack exchange, but again - only gets you so far.

YMMV

I have an app which is fairly popular. This release cycle I used Claude Code and codex to implement all the changes / features. It definitely let me move much quicker than before.

However now that it's in the beta stage the amount of issues and bugs is insane. I reviewed a lot of the code that went in as well. I suspect the bug fixing stage is going to take longer than the initial implementation. There are so many issues and my mental model of the codebase has severely degraded.

It was an interesting experiment but I don't think I would do it again this way.

The last time I tried AI, I tested it with a stopwatch.

The group used feature flags...

    if (a) {
       // new code
    } else {
       // old code
    }

    void testOff() {
       disableFlag(a);
       // test it still works
    }
    
    void testOn() {
        enableFlag(a);
        // test it still works
    }

However, as with any cleanup, it doesn't happen. We have thousands of these things lying around taking up space. I thought "I can give this to the AI, it won't get bored or complain."

I can do one flag in ~3minutes. Code edit, pr prepped and sent.

The AI can do one in 10mins, but I couldn't look away. It kept trying to use find/grep to search through a huge repo to find symbols (instead of the MCP service).

Then it ignored instructions and didn't clean up one or the other test, left unused fields or parameters and generally made a mess.

Finally, I needed to review and fix the results, taking another 3-5 minutes, with no guarantee that it compiled.

At that point, a task that takes me 3 minutes has taken me 15.

Sure, it made code changes, and felt "cool", but it cost the company 5x the cost of not using the AI (before considering the token cost).

Even worse, the CI/CD system couldn't keep up the my individual velocity of cleaning these up, using an automated tool? Yeah, not going to be pleasant.

However, I need to try again, everyone's saying there was a step change in December.

Because its failure rate is too high. Beyond boilerplate code and CRUD apps, if I let AI run freely on the projects I maintain, I spend more time fixing its changes than if I just did it myself. It hallucinates functionally, it designs itself into corners, it does not follow my instructions, it writes too much code for simple features.

It’s fine at replacing what stack overflow did nearly a decade ago, but that isn’t really an improvement from my baseline.

AI dramatically increases velocity. But is velocity productivity? Productivity relative to which scope: you, the team, the department, the company?

The question is really, velocity _of what_?

I got this from a HN comment. It really hit for me because the default mentality for engineers is to build. The more you build the better. That's not "wrong" but in a business setting it is very much necessary but not sufficient. And so whenever we think about productivity, impact, velocity, whatever measure of output, the real question is _of what_? More code? More product surface area? That was never really the problem. In fact it makes life worse majority of the time.

Something I've been thinking about lately is if there is value in understanding the systems we produce and if we expected to?

If I can just vibe and shrug when someone asks why production is down globally then I'm sure the amount of features I can push out increases, but if I am still expected to understand and fix the systems I generate, I'm not convinced it's actually faster to vibe and then try to understand what's going on rather than thinking and writing.

In my experience the more I delegate to AI, the less I understand the results. The "slowness and thinking" might just be a feature not a bug, at times I feel that AI was simply the final straw that finally gave the nudge to lower standards.

> People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing?

At review time.

There are simply too many software industries that can't delegate both authorship _and_ review to non-humans because the maintenance/use of such software, especially in libraries and backwards-compat-concerning environments, cannot justify an "ends justifies the means" approach (yet).

I work as an ML engineer/researcher. When I implement a change in an experiment it usually takes at least an hour to get the results. I can use this time to implement a different experiment. Doesn't matter if I do it by hand or if I let an agent do it for me, I have enough time. Code isn't the bottleneck.

I also heard an opinion that since writing code is cheap, people implement things that have no economic value without really thinking it through.

I work in commercials.

We can now make 1$ million dollar commercials with 100,000$ or less. So a 90% reduction in costs - if we use AI.

The issue is they don’t look great. AI isn’t that great at some key details.

But the agencies are really trying to push for it.

They think this is the way back to the big flashy commercials of old. Budgets are lower than ever, and shrinking.

Big issue here is really the misunderstanding of cause - budgets are lower, because advertising has changed in general (TV is less and less important ) and a lot of studies showed that advertising is actually not all that effective.

So they are grabbing onto a lifeboat. But I’m worried there’s no land.

I’ve planned my exit.

It's failing when there is no data in the training set, and there are no patterns to replicate in the existing code base.

I can give you many, many examples of where it failed for me:

1. Efficient implementation of Union-Find: complete garbage result 2. Spark pipelines: mostly garbage 3. Fuzzer for testing something: half success, non-replicateable ("creative") part was garbage. 4. Confidential Computing (niche): complete garbage if starting from scratch, good at extracting existing abstractions and replicating existing code.

Where it succeeds: 1. SQL queries 2. Following more precise descriptions of what to do 3. Replicating existing code patterns

The pattern is very clear. Novel things, things that require deeper domain knowledge, coming up with the to-be-replicated patterns themselves, problems with little data don't work. Everything else works.

I believe the reason why there is a big split in the reception is because senior engineers work on problems that don't have existing solutions - LLMs are terrible at those. What they are missing is that the software and the methodology must be modified in order to make the LLM work. There are methodical ways to do this, but this shift in the industry is still in baby shoes, and we don't yet have a shared understanding of what this methodology is.

Personally I have very strong opinions on how this should be done. But I'm urging everyone to start thinking about it, perhaps even going as far as quitting if this isn't something people can pursue at their current job. The carnage is coming:/

I don’t think the objections are not necessarily in terms of lack of productivity although my personal experience is not that of massive productivity increases. The fact that you are producing code much faster is likely just to push the bottleneck somewhere else. Software value cycles are long and complicated. What if you run into an issue in 5 years the LLM fails to diagnose or fix due to complex system interactions? How often would that happen? Would it be feasible to just generate the whole thing anew matching functionality precisely? Are you making the right architecture choices from the perspective of what the preferred modus operandi of an llm is in 5 years? We don’t know. The more experienced folks tend to be conservative as they have experienced how badly things can age. Maybe this time it’ll be different?

"it works" is a very low standard when it comes to software engineering. Why are we not holding AI generated code to the same standards as we hold our peers during code reviews?

I have never heard anyone say "it works" as a positive thing when reviewing code..

Yes, there is a productivity boost but you can't tell me there is no decrease in quality

> I have stopped writing code, occasionally I jump into the changes proposed by LLM and make manual edits if it is feasible, otherwise I revert changes and ask it to generate again but based on my learnings from the past rejected output

Isn't it a very inefficient way to learn things? Like, normally, you would learn how things work and then write the code, refining your knowledge while you are writing. Now you don't learn anything in advance, and only do so reluctantly when things break? In the end there is a codebase that no one knows how it works.

I asked opus 4.6 how to administer an A/B test when data is sparse. My options are to look at conversion rate, look at revenue per customer, or something else. I will get about 10-20k samples, less than that will add to cart, less than that will begin checkout, and even less than that will convert. Opus says I should look at revenue per customers. I don't know the right answer, but I know it is not to look at revenue per customers -- that will have high variance due to outlier customers who put in a large order. To be fair, I do use opus frequently, and it often gives good enough answers. But you do have to be suspicious of its responses for important decisions.

Edit: Ha, and the report claims it's relatively good at business and finance...

Edit 2: After discussion in this thread, I went back to opus and asked it to link to articles about how to handle non-normally distributed data, and it actually did link to some useful articles, and an online calculator that I believe works for my data. So I'll eat some humble pie and say my initial take was at least partially wrong here. At the same time, it was important to know the correct question to ask, and honestly if it wasn't for this thread I'm not sure I would have gotten there.

Basically it tricks you into making the code less maintainable, so while it seems to boost productivity, it's just delaying huge failures.

I don't want to generalize from my specific situation too much, but I want to offer an anecdote from my neck of the woods. On my personal sub, I agree it is kinda crazy the kind of projects I can get into now with little to no prior knowledge.

On the other hand, our corporate AI is.. not great atm. It was briefly kinda decent and then suddenly it kinda degraded. Worst case is, no one is communicating with us so we don't know what was changed. It is possible companies are already trying to 'optimize'.

I know it is not exactly what you are asking. You are saying capability is there, but I am personally starting to see a crack in corporate willingness to spend.

When it comes to novel work, LLMs become "fast typers" for me and little more. They accelerate testing phases but that's it. The bar for novelty isn't very high either - "make this specific system scale in a way that others won't" isn't a thing an LLM can ever do on its own, though it can be an aid.

LLMs also are quite bad for security. They can find simple bugs, but they don't find the really interesting ones that leverage "gap between mental model and implementation" or "combination of features and bugs" etc, which is where most of the interesting security work is imo.

Sometimes I’m scared.

Sometimes I realise that this particular task has been slower than if I’d done it myself when I take in to account full wall clock time.

I can’t tell what type of task is going to work ahead of time yet.

Same. Whenever an article like this one pops up the comments seem to be filled with confirmation bias. People who don't see a productivity boost agree with the article.

I work at tech company just outside of big tech and I feel fairly confident that we won't have a need for the amount of developers we currently have within 3-4 years.

The bottleneck right now is reviewing and I think it's just a matter of time before our leadership removes the requirement for human code reviews (I am already seeing signs of this ("Maybe for code behind feature flags we don't need code reviews?").

Whenever there's an incident, there is a pagerduty trigger to an agent looking at the metrics, logs, software component graphs, and gives you an hypothesis on what the incident is due to. When I push a branch with test failures, I get one-click buttons in my PR to append commits fixing those tests failures (i.e. an agent analyses the code, the jira ticket, the tests, etc. and suggests a fix for the tests failing). We have a Slack agent we can ping in trivial feature requests (or bugs) in our support channels.

The agents are being integrated at every step. And it's not like the agents will stop improving. The difference between GPT3.5 and Opus 4.6 is so massive. So what will the models look like in 5 years from now?

We're cooked and the easiest way to tell someone works at a company who hasn't come very far in their AI journey is that they're not worried.

I feel like this might be heavily dependent on both your task and the AI you're using? What language do you code in and what AI do you use? And are your tasks pretty typical/boilerplate-y with prior art to go off of, or novel/at-the-edge-of-tech?

It’s been my experience as of recently. I point it at an issue tracker and ask it to investigate, write a test to reproduce the problem and plan a fix together. There’s lots of hand holding from me but it saves me a lot of work and I’ve been surprised by its comfort with legacy code bases. For now I feel empowered, and I’m actually working more intensively, but I was wondering to myself if I’m going run out of work this year. Interestingly, our metrics show that output is slowed by increased workload on reviewers.

Terrifying doesn't quite say it. The situation we're in is either we achieve a post-scarcity society or we'll all die.

  People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing?

Believe it or not, I still know many devs who do not use any agents. They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste.

I'm going to guess that many people on HN are also on the "free ChatGPT isn't that good at programming" train.

I'm with you. The project I'm working on is moving at phenomenal velocity. I'm basically spending my time writing specs and performing code reviews. As long as my code review comments and design docs are clear I get a secure, scalable, and resilient system.

Tests were always important, but now they are the gatekeepers to velocity.

I think you can more stuff done earlier but the quality is not good or it doesn't work as expected if you tinker with it enough. Fixing the issues from the generated code usually doesn't work at all

Outside of coding/non-physical areas, the impact can be quite muted. I haven't seen much impact on surgical procedures, for example (but maybe others have?).

I’m currently working across like 5 projects (was 4 last week but you know how it is). I now do more in days than others might in a week.

Yesterday a colleague didn’t quite manage to implement a loading container with a Vue directive instead of DOM hacks, it was easier for me to just throw AI at the problem and produced a working and tested solution and developer docs than to have a similarly long meeting and have them iterate for hours.

Then I got back to training a CNN to recognize crops from space (ploughing and mowing will need to be estimated alongside inference, since no markers in training data but can look at BSI changes for example), deployed a new version of an Ollama/OpenAI/Anthropic proxy that can work with AWS Bedrock and updated the docs site instructions, deployed a new app that will have a standup bot and on-demand AI code review (LiteLLM and Django) and am working on codegen to migrate some Oracle forms that have been stagnating otherwise.

It’s not funny how overworked I am and sure I still have to babysit parallel Claude Code sessions and sometimes test things manually and write out changes, but this is a completely different work compared to two or three years ago.

Maybe the problem spaces I’m dealing with are nothing novel, but I assume most devs are like that - and I’d be surprised at people’s productivity not increasing.

When people nag in meetings about needing to change something in a codebase, or not knowing how to implement something and its value add, I’ll often have something working shortly after the meeting is over (due to starting during it).

Instead of sending adding Vitest to the backlog graveyard, I had it integrated and running in one or two evenings with about 1200 tests (and fixed some bugs). Instead of talking about hypothetical Oxlint and Oxfmt performance improvements, I had both benchmarked against ESLint and Prettier within the hour.

Same for making server config changes with Ansible that I previously didn’t due to additional friction - it is mostly just gone (as long as I allow some free time planned in case things vet fucked up and I need to fix them).

Edit: oh and in my free time I built a Whisper + VLM + LLM pipeline based on OpenVINO so that I can feed it hours long stream VODs and get an EDL cut to desired length that I can then import in DaVinci Resolve and work on video editing after the first basic editing prepass is done (also PyScene detect and some audio alignment to prevent bad cuts). And then I integrated it with subscription Claude Code, not just LiteLLM and cloud providers with per-token costs for the actual cuts making part (scene description and audio transcriptions stay local since those don't need a complex LLM, but can use cloud for cuts).

Oh and I'm moving from my Contabo VPSes to running stuff inside of a Hetzner Server Auction server that now has Proxmox and VMs in that, except this time around I'm moving over to Ansible for managing it instead of manual scripts as well, and also I'm migrating over from Docker Swarm to regular Docker Compose + Tailscale networks (maybe Headscale later) and also using more upstream containers where needed instead of trying to build all of mine myself, since storage isn't a problem and consistency isn't that important. At the same time I also migrated from Drone CI to Woodpecker CI and from Nexus to Gitea Packages, since I'm already using Gitea and since Nexus is a maintenance burden.

If this becomes the new “normal” in regards to everyone’s productivity though, there will be an insane amount of burnout and devaluation of work.

> my job is easier now, I do less. > I am terrified about what's coming.

God I hope I never ever have to work with you

A terminology tangent because it's an econ publication: Notice that the article doesn't talk about productivity.

Productivity is a term of art in economics and means you generate more units of output (for example per person, per input, per wages paid) but doesn't take quality or otherwise desireability into account. It's best suited for commodities and industrial outputs (and maybe slop?).

I see an individual productivity boost, but not necessarily a collective one.

I don't think features per hour is really what is holding back most established businesses.

My experiences suggest that we still have some time before the people that understand the plumbing of the business _and_ AI bubble up to positions of authority through wielding it practically and successfully at increasingly greater scale.

Meanwhile gemini tells me my go code doesn't compile (it does)

Gaslight me by telling me I must be a time traveler because I use go 1.26 but the latest version actually is 1.24

And tell me I can't use wg.Go() because this function does not exist (it does)

You were probably deficient in RESEARCH skills before. No offense to you, since I was also like this once. LLMs research and put the results on the plate. Yes, for people who were deficient in research skills, I can see 2-3x improvements.

Note1: I have "expert" level research skills. But LLMs still help me in research, but the boost is probably 1.2x max. But

Note2: By research, I mean googling, github search, forum search, etc. And quickly testing using jsfiddle/codepen, etc.

I can only explain it by people not having used Agentic tools and or only having tried it 9 months ago for a day before giving up or having such strict coding style preferences they burn time adjusting generated code to their preferences and blaming the AI even though they’re non-functional changes and they didn’t bother to encode them into rules.

The productivity gains are blatantly obvious at this point. Even in large distributed code bases. From jr to senior engineer.

> I am terrified about what's coming

Why? This is great. AI fixing up huge legacy codebases is just taking the jobs humans would never want to do.

Yep. All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago, where I could search for something and find actually relevant and helpful info quickly.

I've seen lots of people say AI can basically code a project for them. Maybe it can, but that seems to heavily depend on the field. Other than boilerplate code or very generic projects, it's a step above useless imo when it comes to gamedev. It's about as useful as a guy who read some documentation for an engine a couple years ago and kind of remembers it but not quite and makes lots of mistakes. The best it can do is point me in the general direction I need to go, but it'll hallucinate basic functions and mess up any sort of logic.

Same here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI.

I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist.

Like you said, there has been other tech that has changed my job over time more than AI has. The move to the cloud, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, etc. have all had far more of an impact on my job. I see literally zero change in the output of others, both internally and externally.

So either this is a massively overblown bubble, or I'm just missing something.

This is a classic case of Productivity Paradox when personal computers were first introduced into workplaces in the 80s.

A famous economist once said, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

My employer is pretty advanced in its use of these tools for development and it’s absolutely accelerated everything we do to the point we are exhausting roadmaps for six months in a few weeks. However I think very few companies are operating like this yet. It takes time for tools and techniques to make it out and Claude code alone isn’t enough. They are basically planning to let go of most of the product managers and Eng managers, and I expect they’re measuring who is using the AI tools most effectively and everyone else will be let go, likely before years end. Unlike prior iterations I saw at Salesforce this time I am convinced they’re actually going to do it and pull it off. This is the biggest change I’ve seen in my 35 year career, and I have to say I’m pretty excited to be going through it even though the collateral damage will be immense to peoples lives. I plan to retire after this as well, I think this part is sort of interesting but I can see clearly what comes next is not.

The dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.

In my org I get far more done than ever, but I also find it more exhausting.

Because I can get so much done, I've lost my sense for what's enough. And if I can squeeze out a bit more relatively easily, why wouldn't I? When do I hit the brakes?

There are some tasks where LLMs are not all that helpful, and I find myself kind of savoring those tasks.

I'm surprised you don't notice a difference. Where I work it has been transformative. Perhaps it's because we're relatively small and scrappy, so the change in pace is easier with less organizational inertia. We've dramatically changed processes and increased outputs without a loss in quality. For less experienced programmers who are more interested in simple scripts for processing data, their outputs are actually far better, and they're learning faster because the Claude Code UI exposes them to so many techniques in the shell. I now see people using bash pipes for basic operations who wouldn't have known a thing about bash a couple years ago. The other day a couple less-technical people came to me to learn about what tests are. They never would have been motivated to learn this before. It's really cool.

It doesn't reduce work at all, though. We're an under-funded NGO with high ambition. These changes allow us to do more with the same funding. Hopefully it allows us to get more funding, too. I can't see it leading to anyone being let go; we need every brain we can get.

A tool with a mediocre level of skill in everything looks mediocre when the backdrop is our own area of expertise and game changing when the backdrop is an unfamiliar one. But I suspect the real game changer will be that everyone is suddenly a polymath.

I don't doubt your sincerity. But this represents an absolutely bonkers disparity compared to the reality I'm experiencing.

I'm not sure what to say. It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility. There are a lot of logical reasons to be against the mass adoption of automobiles, but "lack of effectiveness as a form of personal mobility" is not one of them.

Hearing things like this does give me a little hope though, as I think it means the total collapse of the software engineering industry is probably still a few years away, if so many companies are still so far behind the curve.

> so far AI has had almost no impact on my job.

Are you hiring?

I've taken to calling LLMs processors. A "Hello World" in assembly is about 20 lines and on par with most unskilled prompting. It took a while to get from there to Rust, or Firefox, or 1T parameter transformers running on powerful vector processors. We're a notch past Hello World with this processor.

The specific way it applies to your specific situation, if it exists, either hasn't been found or hasn't made its way to you. It really is early days.

I feel that it differs a lot between companies. It seems like corporate are having less an impact for now, as external innovation needs tailoring to adapt to its needs (e.g a security solution that needs 3 month projects to be tailored to the company tech stack), whereas startups and smaller firms see the most of the impact so far.

Build a new feature. If you aren't bogged down in bureaucracy it will happen much faster.

This is not a good thing. If you’re not being exposed and skilling up already, you’re likely to be in the camp that is washed away.

If you can’t be exposed to it in your day job, start using Claude opus in the evening so you know what’s coming.

I will personally say right now... its not gonna change lol.

People who actually know how to think can see it a mile away.

There's a famous quote by a cyclist, "It never gets easier, you just go faster"

It is not going to reduce your workload. It is going to remove one of your co-workers.

This - I can't think of any place I've ever worked where development ever outpaced backlog and tech debt.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

That’s the economy in general. Labor saving innovations increase productivity but do not usually reduce work very much, though they can shift it around pretty dramatically. There are game theoretic reasons for this, as well as phenomena like the hedonic treadmill.

The goal has always and will always be to complete as much as possible in the time allotted.

At the risk of being the person who says, "it's capitalism," (I know I know).... When making profit is the dominant intent of a company, a worker doing something faster doesn't lead to the worker doing less. It leads to the worker producing more in the same time. If doing more yields too much of the thing produced for the market to handle, the company either A. creates more need for the more produced (fabricate necessity), or B. creates a new need for a new thing, and a new thing for you to produce. There's no getting off the wheel for the worker in capitalism.

>> I no longer review every line, but I also have not yet gotten to the point, where I can just "trust" the LLM.

Same here. This is also why I haven't been able to switch to Claude Code, despite trying to multiple times. I feel like its mode of operation is much more "just trust to generated code" than Cursor, which let's you review and accept/reject diffs with a very obvious and easy to use UX.

> However, I can't imagine vibe-coders actually shipping anything.

I'm a vibe-coder, and I've shipped lots! The key is to vibe-code apps that has a single user (me). Haven't coded anything for 15 years prior to January too.

Is there a reason you don’t use a hook to make all code pass your linters before you look at it?

Work is freezing hiring and upping spending on tokens for everyone.

Don't know if this is effective and I don't think management knows either, but it's what they're doing

If everyone was 10x productive then we would have had native Claude Code app for each platform.

Instead they are using Electron and calling it a day. Very ironic isn't it? If AI is so good then why don't we get native software from Anthropic?

I'd be curious to see the shift in numbers since December, 2025.

I also thought it was hilarious that they invented a brand new metric that (surprise) makes their product’s long term projection look really good (financially).

... and eyeing an IPO.

The problem it's not intended for plebs.

It just becomes a source of truth for media and corporate decision machines.

It's not his company that will train using his prompts. It's the personal account, unless it is fully paid and he's opted out of training on his prompts.

Doesn't make sense to stop hiring juniors.

If AI increases productivity, and juniors are cheaper to hire, but is just as able to hand off tasks to ai as a senior, then it makes more sense to hire more juniors to get them working with an AI as soon as possible. This produces output faster, for which more revenue could be derived.

So the only limiting factor is the possibility of not deriving more revenue - which is not related to the AI issue, but broader, macroeconomic issue(s).

Art should be done foremost because it's a passion for the artist. If you give up art just because you can no longer sell it, because you're being out competed by computer generated furry porn, then the world hasn't really lost anything of value.

This is what in praise of idleness is about.

I mean, if that's true, then the governments around the world better damn well be prepared.

There's a ton of millennials (myself included) turning 40, that have been in this field since 2005 or earlier. It's all we know, and at this point we're getting too old to just "go do physical labor for minimum wage so AI can write code instead." I'm certainly too old to go back to school and try to pass the bar example to be a lawyer at 50+, and I have zero interest in any kind of people management whatsoever.

IMO Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc. should all be helping governments work toward a plan and lobbying for regulation on it instead of just charging full steam ahead "damn the consequences, those are someone else's problem."

It's going to obliterate what little is left of the middle class and leave a massive amount of unemployed middle aged tech workers with no where to go. What then? We either get ahead of the problem now (Outlook not so good), or we collapse into massive civil unrest and chaos.

What’s your reasoning for labeling lawyers as low-exposure?

Finally someone that says it. I think it’s a multi-variable problem as it handles languages differently. Also working in legacy code can be worse more often than not.

C++ dev here. It’s helping me just fine. Not as much as frontend folks but not far behind either.

It’s not quite at the place where LLMs can take over 100% coding, but give it a few more months.

Between 2004 and 2008 I did many things in computing as a company that offered my services, one of these was information gathering automation. It almost never immediately lead to decreases in employment. The systems had a to be in place for a while, people had to get used to them, people had to stop making common mistakes with them.

Then the 2008 crash happened and those people were gone in a blink of an eye and never replaced. The companies grew in staff after that, but it was in things like sales and marketing.

Or worse. I’ve heard stories from friends where leadership expects huge boosts in productivity due to LLMs, and perceive anything but an order of magnitude boost as incompetence or a refusal to adapt.

PMs can now also ship their half-baked requirements documents even faster thanks to the help of AI.

I don't really get this TBH.

Shipping speed never/is was the issue. Most companies are terrible at figuring out what exactly they should be allocating resources behind.

Speeding up does not solve the problem that most humans who are at the top of the hierarchy are poor thinkers. In fact it compounds it. More noise, nice.

I think this is the happiest path for any coding agent. React + vite is in their blood quite literally.

Data point of 1: Having hired juniors as a startup founder, I need more generalists than AI/ML specialists. AI application work right now is basically standard software engineering - you’re finding clever ways to supply the right context to a model within certain constraints.

No one knows what’s going to happen in the future. Yes there already are fewer SWE jobs than before because of AI, and yes the days of companies hiring new grads in droves at $300k+ packages are likely over. IMO all you can really do is study what you’re interested in, learn it deeply, and do good work with cool people. If unsure, it’s possible to go back to what you were doing before if the new path doesn’t work out.

I'm sure they're collecting all kinds of insights from the prompts.

and they blamed the engineer because insurance doesn't pay for AI failures

> My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle.

Gemini 3 and Opus 4.6 were the "woah, they're actually useful now!" moment for me.

I keep saying to colleagues that it's like a rising tide. Initially the AIs were lapping around our ankles, now the level of capability is at waist height.

Many people have commented that 50% of developers think AI-generated code is "Great!" and 50% think its trash. That's a sign that AI code quality is that of the median developer. This will likely improve to 60%-40%, then 70%-30%, etc...

Can you give an example of how such a redesigned process might look like?

It is a bubble. It also works. Remember the Dotcom bubble, the internet did work but that doesn't mean there wasn't also a real bubble.

> OpenAI's concept of "capability overhang"

note that this concept was not invented by OpenAI

Except this is the company that's been saying "We will cause cancer, please regulate us!"