Yet another Hacker News

Fable Took My Job

150 points jllyhill 2 hours ago 184 comments

echelon 1 hour ago | parent

> The frontier models are not good enough to replace an experienced engineer.

Yeah they are.

Two pizza team = 2 person team + Opus 5.5

Or for the really enterprising, solopreneur scaling to > $2.5 ARR (more than Goog's revenue per employee).

This is a fundamentally different game now.

I don't know why anyone assumes it just stops here.

antupis 1 hour ago | parent

Thing is that you cannot do 24/7 oncall with two person and Opus 5.5 . Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc. There is still reasons why FAANGS are so big.

potatoproduct 1 hour ago | parent

Ok, three persons.

coldtea 1 hour ago | parent

>Thing is that you cannot do 24/7 oncall with two person and Opus 5.5

Almost all 24/7 on call is support theater anyway.

>Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc.

Not if a newcomer can be assisted by the other person or even just by AI in understanding the codebase.

magnusokik 53 minutes ago | parent

depends where you work. on a tiny team the 3am page is usually real and its usually you

coldtea 28 minutes ago | parent

And it's usually not that important in the grand scheme of things, even as far as the business is concerned.

whizzter 1 hour ago | parent

Sure you can, as long as nobody complains too much about problems during night if those 2 people can work overtime every now and then.

You can probably even promise 99% uptime (sounds good enough to most buyers probably?) even if people sleep 8 hours a day as long as the failures comes no earlier than than 15 minutes into their sleep and only happens at most once a month (1% of 30 days is 7,8 hours).

throwawayy6767 1 hour ago | parent

That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?

The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits

robbie-c 1 hour ago | parent

> That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?

That requires having enough good new ideas for everyone to work on, and sadly a lot of companies don't have those

coldtea 1 hour ago | parent

Even if they had, doesn't mean it's a good idea to flood the product with changes, nor it's necessary that the market has the capacity to asborb and expand your sales, or that the existing customer base will appreciate it.

robbie-c 52 minutes ago | parent

Well I did say "good", which excludes things that don't fit in the context of the wider business.

I think startups have an easier time for 2 reasons: They are innovating on the product side already, and probably were already capacity constrained for work on the top ideas. They also have a high proportion of tech debt which never bubbled to the top of effort vs reward (competing against product work) before but would still be valuable to fix. E.g. https://posthog.com/blog/sql-parser was on the HN frontpage a few months ago, and this work would never have happened in the before times

coldtea 50 minutes ago | parent

Even if the idea fits the context of the wider business, there's such a thing as too much change "just because you can", which alienates users and can make the end product an unfocused mess.

If it's easier for startups, it's for the same reason doing a "pivot" is easier: they usually don't have much of a product or revenue or customer base to begin with, they throw things out there and see what sticks.

coldtea 1 hour ago | parent

>That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?

Because they don't need 10x the existing value, nor is the extra value they can actually use and benefit from that expandable.

And despite being quick to call this "dumb", you missed the most obvious reason: by not keeping the whole team they save money. Which makes their expenses lower and their VCs/shareholders happy. Keeping the team and "delivering 10x the existing value" doesn't leverage AI for reducing costs, and is hardly guaranteed to bring in much in the way of returns either.

Usable new value goes through a "pipe" so to speak, which constrains how much you can use or need. And that's the business and market and regulation realities.

If you're making Instagram for example you aren't going to change everything "just because you can", nor is there any reason to make 10x intrusive changes to the backend "to make it faster" or something with the danger of disrupting something, if it goes predictably well enough already.

Your marketing team, your engineering team (what's left of it), your business team, also need to understand and pace any changes, and have a specific vision, not just "anything possible, even 10x the things".

CrimsonRain 14 minutes ago | parent

Because too many people = too many opinions, communication loss, vision conflict.

10 people don't 10x. They barely 3x.

coldtea 1 hour ago | parent

It's a game where you are obsolete, unless you are independently rich, so not much to cheer about

broodbucket 58 minutes ago | parent

If you think AI can replace experienced engineers you're not working on anything complicated. If your product is a web app, sure, maybe. If you're working on actually difficult problems, then people who know what they're doing are irreplaceable. AI can supplement them and make them more productive, sure. AI does not know what NOT to build.

creata 43 minutes ago | parent

Fwiw the guy you're replying to is trying to replicate 1:1 the entire Adobe creative suite (and now Microsoft Office?) with the help of AI.

CrimsonRain 17 minutes ago | parent

> ackchually difficult problems

That's likes rocket science, av, automata and things like that.

Less than 1% engineers work on that and even they are using ai.

For other 99%, one person knowing what to build is enough.

m4tthumphrey 56 minutes ago | parent

Had to Google "two pizza team". On what planet does 2 large pizzas feed 5-10 people? One pizza barely feeds me.

gambiting 1 hour ago | parent

"both of them would lose their job next week with zero notice."

What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change

jackdoe 1 hour ago | parent

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/TerminationOfEmployment.pdf

gambiting 1 hour ago | parent

So, USA is the answer?

jdiff 1 hour ago | parent

My last job I was notified via text message on a Saturday that I didn't need to come back into the office Monday. The USA has basically zero protections for employees.

sdcfgy 1 hour ago | parent

Yep. My company, based in the US, did that to most of our US team. Being somewhere with decent employment regulation meant that they kept us and not the US guys.

swiftcoder 1 hour ago | parent

The good US workplaces will give you a few months of severance, but you can still expect to receive an email late Friday night that says "don't come in on Monday". They typically don't want fired/laid-off employees in the office at all (in theory for "security", but mostly to prevent labour organisation)

gambiting 1 hour ago | parent

That's fine - being paid for your time in lieu of notice is practiced even in countries with very strong employee protections. That's still "notice" as far as I'm concerned.

easyThrowaway 1 hour ago | parent

The most outrageous sentence frankly is

"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"

Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.

mickael-kerjean 11 minutes ago | parent

If you want something outrageous, I was fired as my dad was on his deathbed, he died before my 2 weeks notice finished and that created a lot of heat since I did not send them their laptop in my last day as I was busy preparing his funeral instead. They did not care, it was surreal, and I completly lost faith in humanity as a result

bambax 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah well in the US employees can be fired at will. However in the post it seems the author didn't tell his reports they risked/were about to getting fired. I don't understand that kind of loyalty to your employer, esp. when, as is the case here, the employer has zero obligations towards their staff.

teiferer 56 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, what is often called "zero notice" actually means "you are fired, this is your notice, and for the next N weeks until your employment ends, you don't need to come in anymore as we have already revoked your access, but of course we pay you the salary that you are entitled to." That us just much longer to say and less catchy too.

tonyedgecombe 48 minutes ago | parent

Would it make much difference if you got two weeks or a months notice. Out of the bad things corporations do this seems a long way down the list.

sajithdilshan 47 minutes ago | parent

I think it's pretty normal to have like one/two week notice period in most of the work except for maybe in Europe where the notice period can be 3 months

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

This post is so sad it makes me wonder how many suicide notes Amodei and Altman had on their doormats, or will in the future.

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

It's a price they're willing to pay.

creata 1 hour ago | parent

Or they tell themselves the usual stuff - if they didn't do it then someone else would, technological progress is inevitable, etc.

disiplus 1 hour ago | parent

>> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

xnickb 1 hour ago | parent

Pretty sure they're not the ones paying the price.

password54321 1 hour ago | parent

It is a Shrek meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roNlgIY9QKw

xnickb 58 minutes ago | parent

Thanks. I didn't know this one.

xxs 34 minutes ago | parent

How is that even possible? It's a great movie (ah well watched in the period), done by people who were outcast to work on it - similar to the folks sent to the terrace in "Silicon Valley"

speedgoose 1 hour ago | parent

That's the joke.

guilamu 1 hour ago | parent

It's à joke. Shrek reference: https://youtu.be/hiKuxfcSrEU?si=anKoBVyhRIegW_X4

arcanemachiner 1 hour ago | parent

And they're doing it for your own good!

jacquesm 15 minutes ago | parent

No, for the world! You're thinking way too small, these guys are on a mission to save the planet and in order to do so they are 'just' going to have to tear up the whole stratum that has been built so far. But they have your best interest at heart so you just have to trust them through the slight bit of turbulence that is coming your way.

pera 1 hour ago | parent

"just accept that bad things will happen to you peasant"

sspiff 46 minutes ago | parent

Well, it's the rest of us paying the price, they're reaping the rewards.

To quote the wise Lord Farquaad: "some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."

devcpp 50 minutes ago | parent

Not more than those of farmers who "lost their jobs" to tractors, switchboard operators to switching systems, brokers or postmen (and countless other jobs) to the Internet, etc. And why do we blame the innovators and not the government for not making up useless jobs to keep these people employed? It is just as responsible.

petra 41 minutes ago | parent

It would have happened even without them specifically. There's no shortage of greedy bastards.

small_model 7 minutes ago | parent

This has happened to many times to other careers over the last decades and there wasn't empathy from SWE's then, in fact all you got was "Software is the future, learn to code etc". Now the shoe is on the other foot people are taking suicide, seems a bit self seeking.

brador 1 hour ago | parent

“AI makes features not software.” - MM

pelzatessa 37 minutes ago | parent

>MM

Marylin Monroe? Mickey Mouse? Michael Myers?

CodeCompost 1 hour ago | parent

This post is illegible.

ga_to 38 minutes ago | parent

What makes it so hard to read for you? The contrast is fine, it even has a narrow column layout to limit the distance your eyes have to travel, the writing style reads quite human and clearly laid out. Or are the 5 pictures giving you trouble?

wwind123 1 hour ago | parent

It's sad to see people lose jobs because executives believe AI could replace them. If it's any consolation, at some point most of those executives could be replaced by AI too.

solyin 1 hour ago | parent

> CEO-Bench is an evaluation framework that measures how well AI agents perform executive leadership, long-horizon decision-making, and company management tasks

https://ceobench.com/

thepasch 1 hour ago | parent

Since long-term foresight beyond the next stock buyback doesn't seem to be materially required anymore for that role anyway, I'd wager they could already be replaced by AI, and with less consequence than any other company roles.

nixon_why69 1 hour ago | parent

We have a machine that's really good at consuming text and summarizing it for someone else, with the caveat that it never really owns anything or is accountable for it.

Why do we have middle managers still, while we're replacing programmers? Really says a lot about how decisions are made, we're hierarchical monkeys at the core.

creata 20 minutes ago | parent

> we're hierarchical monkeys at the core

How could you ever think otherwise?

bambax 1 hour ago | parent

Given the level of compensation of US CEOs, it's obvious they should be first in line to be replaced by machines.

AspireOne 1 hour ago | parent

I don't want anybody to be replaced by AI :/

lnsru 1 hour ago | parent

BMW management believes they can get 30% workforce out and replace the jobs with AI. The executives will not be replaced. Peasants like me will.

ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.

I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.

xnickb 55 minutes ago | parent

Good job adjusting quickly.

I used to repair cars. I guess if nothing else works, I can do that until EVs take over that.

haspok 12 minutes ago | parent

My idea is converting to a bicycle mechanic. Very simple and doesn't require a huge amount of very expensive tools as upfront investment, just some experience and practice to do it efficiently.

By the way, my local bike shop has a one month long (!!!) queue for repairs. Just saying.

Where I live many, many older people are now on e-bikes. They are good paying customers, and most don't want to work on their bikes themselves (unlike hobbyists with the pushbikes).

sajithdilshan 45 minutes ago | parent

That's quite ingenious I would say, when life gave you lemons you actually made lemonade.

vektor888 59 minutes ago | parent

Sadly, it's working so far. Most companies only want a product that works. Best practices, algorithmic efficiency, or taste aren't really on their radar.

shaky-carrousel 54 minutes ago | parent

Not only CEOs. Companies themselves can be replaced by AI. What do I need Adobe for, if I can build me a Photoshop application using AI?

pyrale 45 minutes ago | parent

> If it's any consolation, at some point most of those executives could be replaced by AI too.

I'll believe this the day an AI model can golf with an executive, or wine and dine and call hookers in an overnight business meeting. Sure, that's not every exec, but that's common enough that AI isn't going to work there.

cupofjoakim 1 hour ago | parent

i'm tired man. AI this, AI that, here's how we productmaxxed our deliveries, here's how many people we could remove, etc etc. Everyone is going crazy about ai, but no one is remembering the people affected.

Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.

jumpycodes 1 hour ago | parent

To be fair Zero notice terminations are illegal in many Countries. Furthermore I am yet to see solid evidence that replacing humans with AI is beneficial. Actual crazy times.

ReptileMan 1 hour ago | parent

The severance is your notice.

We will lay you off in 3 months - and having for a 3 months dead man walking in the company is probably worse for everyone. Since said employee probably won't break records for productivity during this period - it is easier for everyone just to give the one let go some lump sum.

Anyway I think that in this post the context is that they will be let go during good times - without the informal - we know the company is in trouble and layoffs as coming common knowledge that big companies have.

cupofjoakim 1 hour ago | parent

I'm not just talking about the post though. In many places it IS legal to remove someone zero notice with or without a severance package.

plastic-enjoyer 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t think the blame belongs with corpo culture. It belongs with engineering culture. Engineers have always been at the forefront of technological disruption, and for the most part they’ve been spared its consequences. The people displaced by those efficiency and productivity gains stayed invisible to them, or were written off as a necessary sacrifice for progress. Those people lost the old way of doing things and were told to keep up or get left behind. The irony is that now it’s engineers getting hit hard, facing the threat of being made obsolete in the name of efficiency and productivity. They’re finally going through what so many others went through before them. And they can’t expect any compassion or help from their own kind.

retinaros 1 hour ago | parent

AI is a slopening of everything that makes us humans. If we cant see it that is only because the last 30-40 years have been a constant assault on human intelligence. we became dumb and sloppy as well. peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time. Everything went downhill as technology progressed and people thoughts could be controlled and manipulated in ways where intelligence and curiosity were not seen as relevant skills to acquire and nurture.

Pamar 46 minutes ago | parent

peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time.

This seems a bit arbitrary to me. Why 1969, exactly? Personally I'd go for the "democratization of Internet" as the start of the slope. So perhaps 1989 ("1989: Quantum Computer Services and Apple end their partnership. Quantum Computer Services renames itself America Online. Two years later, America Online for DOS is released, and a year after that, America Online for Windows.")? Or arguably even a bit later...

jacquesm 32 minutes ago | parent

You and the GP are effectively in agreement. It's not so much about when the exact peak was but about whether there was a peak and whether or not it was somewhere around that time.

f311a 1 hour ago | parent

Am I the only one who's having a hard time reading white text on a brown background?

It makes me think about how many people just stop reading because it's not comfortable, and they don't bother turning on reading mode.

arcanemachiner 1 hour ago | parent

Any chance you have astigmatism? Some people's eyes don't respond well to dark mode.

Kelteseth 1 hour ago | parent

Just enable reader view in Firefox. Makes reading half of peoples personal blog post viable, since often they have weird font size choices etc.

ablation 45 minutes ago | parent

The animal cartoons are also incredibly off-putting. I don't get it.

ninjagoo 1 hour ago | parent

For now, those with Capital will probably be ok. Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok. In the US? Who knows. In China, India, LATAM, Africa - who knows?

Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.

Interesting times ahead?

Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?

philipallstar 1 hour ago | parent

Automation kills some jobs and creates more jobs. Nothing about AI (other than the statements of people with lots of shares in AI companies) looks to be any different.

azan_ 58 minutes ago | parent

> Nothing about AI (other than the statements of people with lots of shares in AI companies) looks to be any different.

Everything looks to be a lot different. Once AI is better than humans at knowledge work, why would you even keep human in the loop? (That's assuming AI reaches the level of being better than humans - I'm not arguing for that assumption, but about it's consequences and that in this scenario we won't get much new jobs).

philipallstar 23 minutes ago | parent

You might not always, just as we don't always keep humans in the loop when picking groceries for delivery[0]. Great. But that doesn't mean we can do that en masse.

You can give a workman a power tool and he shouldn't instantly assume that his housebuilding job is under threat, because corporations will build a house-building power tool.

Why won't he think that? Two reasons: 1) any tool that becomes more powerful tends to become more specialised and expensive to operate, so an electric drill doesn't scale to a house-building drill without incredible tradeoffs, and 2) he isn't reading a million breathless class warfare-igniting articles whose writers are paid through attention.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E

m4tthumphrey 1 hour ago | parent

> Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?

In a word, bleak.

tonyedgecombe 58 minutes ago | parent

I do wonder what will happen to the outsourcing industry in India. In the UK at least it seems that most corporate development has been sent to Infosys, Wipro, etc.

ares623 9 minutes ago | parent

Not just India. Millions of young, able bodied, angry people, all of a sudden finding themselves not having anything else better to do. Sharing borders with countries who have their own millions of young, able bodied, angry people.

ReptileMan 57 minutes ago | parent

> Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok.

They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.

cleaner 56 minutes ago | parent

Reminds me of The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin.

serpicourge 46 minutes ago | parent

Energy, land and row materials will be the main limiting factors.

Mega corp will advance technology exponentially, but for the rest of us we will live in a mix of medieval life style assisted by robotic and low tech. People will exode city and go back to the countryside.

For what concern my self, I'm buying arable land, maybe in couple of years home food production will be fully automated.

skew-aberration 32 minutes ago | parent

> Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero

Capital is that fraction of produce set aside for future production. OpenAI is capital but not all wealth is capital. And capital isn't going anywhere - the machines will have gigafactories etc. The value of labor will plumet but present-day capital that is usable by the machines or can be scrapped and repurposed will retain value.

The value of square meter of land + mineral/sunlight rights (not capital) is likely to rise - the amount of wealth that somebody would give you for that asset would probably increase, as more wealth can be generated from it.

Individuals without wealth now will likely end up with a much lower allocation of those things which retain value (land, materials, etc) while having a much higher quantity (relative to now) of those things whose value will drop - AI tokens, electronics, entertainment, etc.

Essentially our current trajectory taken to the limit. Land expensive, food expensive, interest low, smartphone cheap.

> who will be the buyers

Imagine an impoverished and technologically backward country which has been colonized/occupied, and where the most valuable assets are exported well below market price or stolen. The people still trade their own labor for subsistence. They still produce some goods which have value in outside countries, they receive some charity, there is still tourism, their labor has some value (servitude, trafficking). AI would be the same (assuming laws hold up) - e.g. you could rent out your solar panels to OpenAI in exchange for a loaned domestic robot and a token subscription.

petra 27 minutes ago | parent

If the aim of each country is just job creation, leaving aside "comparative advantage", job quality, salary, etc:

1. There are plenty of things being outsourced, They can be done locally.

2. There are plenty of things currently not being done by locals - like elderly care.

3. We can find new things to do.

4. We can work less.

And even if those things raise living standard somewhat, the efficiencies from AI/robots should be more than enough to compensate.

But, in a capitalistic globalized economy this isn't how things work. So we'll see some shift from that. And it will work better in countries with a more democratic socialistic leaning rather than capitalistic.

We're already starting to see that, with the recent EU trade deal with china, limiting the amount of cars china can send to Europe.

ahmetomer 1 hour ago | parent

> The joy of programming is dying. The joy of delivering results lives on.

feverzsj 1 hour ago | parent

Wait until the ceo finds out all his business secrets are sold to his competitors.

simianwords 1 hour ago | parent

If you think AI can't get so good that it is a superset of Human capabilities, there's a good news.

We will expand the job market and create new jobs that weren't possible before.

TheOtherHobbes 26 minutes ago | parent

How?

simianwords 23 minutes ago | parent

Specific mechanism:

1. jobs being automated implies companies can do way more with fewer workers

2. this means they have extra profit that they can push somewhere

3. they will push it again to capital by finding new ventures to scale out

4. for achieving (3) they need labour pool, which is where we come in

Few open questions

- What kind of new ventures? Colonising Mars is an example, but ambition is unlimited

- Will companies choose to scale out or just eat profits? I think they will scale out due to ideology and market dynamics

- Biggest question: can humans still provide value in some dimension where AI can't? I don't know..

A_D_E_P_T 1 hour ago | parent

> These models lack the taste that makes for effective product decision making. It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'

This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".

slopinthebag 1 hour ago | parent

i sympathise with the individual of course, and i wish they did not have the experience they wrote about. it makes me feel quite bad to read it actually.

but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.

TrisEck 1 hour ago | parent

All the while Karpathy talking about how only a fraction of people understand the capability of (frontier) AI models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50047422.

As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.

marsven_422 1 hour ago | parent

They are only capable of Technical reasoning, other perspectives are often beyond them.

KasianFranks 33 minutes ago | parent

It's because they've been in FAANG silos with near zero experience in the pre-SDLC (basic research, practical application phases) through to the post-SDLC (tech transfer, commercialization etc) with most having near zero direct experience inside actual QA teams (with QA being beneath a lot of engs). A true AI pipeline hums when this is real end to end cycle. One of the reasons for that is based on how well it manages many-to-many connections inside vector space. One more thing, most soft devs have near zero comprehension of how language models work so leveraging them to manage complexity is very foreign with most not understanding that language models apply far beyond just human language and into any sequence of data e.g. DNA/RNA or just about anything you can chop up. This kind of scale is also a new concept to most.

Arainach 19 minutes ago | parent

> It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.

What do you expect them to understand?

It amazes me how little people IN software engineering understand what's happening. Go ahead, listen to your bosses and write all your knowledge in AGENTS.md files, you're definitely special and won't be laid off.

Ask anyone in manufacturing how writing things down for your cheaper replacements works out for you.

poisonborz 1 hour ago | parent

> The joy of programming is dying. The joy of delivering results lives on.

This sums it up well and will ring true no matter which side of the argument you're on.

voidifremoved 1 hour ago | parent

Remembering when I lost people to offshoring in the mid 00s. I made the case, with metrics, that the quality was nowhere near as good and the spec overhead was non-trivial.

Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.

xtajv 1 hour ago | parent

Serious question, what sort of FAFO timelines did you see?

(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).

Havoc 48 minutes ago | parent

That’s the thing - the FAFO is significantly dampened by the remaining grey beards nudging things back on track over time.

See this over and over on hn and Reddit - CEOs are stupid and don’t understand how much pain offshore/AI causes. No…they’re taking a calculated risk on the organisations resilience and know the people whining about CEOs being stupid will be the ones patching over the cracks

torben-friis 57 minutes ago | parent

At least offshoring was seemingly stable. Here we're all waiting for the rug pull.

creata 55 minutes ago | parent

Why would there be a rug pull? Open models do seem to be giving companies like OpenAI and Anthropic some decent-ish competition, so if they try to increase prices too much then people can just leave them.

voidifremoved 53 minutes ago | parent

That's not the rug pull.

The rug pull is every software engineer losing their job.

Dead_Lemon 51 minutes ago | parent

All LLM are heavily subsidized by investors. No one is paying the true cost of tokens at the moment. The rug pull is to get as many people defendant on the tool before they have to massively increase prices.

shawabawa3 46 minutes ago | parent

What about people who are running open models on their own GPUs? They are being subsidised too?

That's the point gp was making. If the big labs all increase prices 10x, the cost of running your own open models stays the same

Dead_Lemon 32 minutes ago | parent

Sure, open models will definitely be an alternative once the frontier models hike prices to match costs. But that will be a minority, and people will start to switch, but people use the frontier models for a reason and these AI labs will extort that, once the easy investor money dries up.

ares623 26 minutes ago | parent

How long are those models going to be safe to operate with internet access and tool use without ever being updated? Imagine if "do it for my grandma" is still as effective today because the models haven't changed and that every open-source maintainer upset with AI started polluting their libraries' logs with prompts that have been proven to work with no known reliable fix ever coming in this hypothetical future.

randomgermanguy 44 minutes ago | parent

Evidence ?

Who are these investors subsidizing random inference providers on https://openrouter.ai/ ?

Hamuko 44 minutes ago | parent

I think the crux of the issue is that frontier labs do not make any financial sense. They are spending investor dollars in order to sell tokens at pennies, and then a Chinese lab can build a competing model on those pennies, and the frontier labs can't then start selling the tokens at a price where they'd actually even break even because most of the volume will then shift to those cheaper models.

torben-friis 6 minutes ago | parent

For the same reason that most businesses are on AWS/GCloud rather than having a server room in the office.

Self hosting is a complex investment. Competitors need an stupidly expensive amount of hardware to enter the scene if they're going to serve SaaS. Chinese backed models can be regulated out of competition. Openai and Anthropic will soon be semi exclusive sources of training data as development happens on private conversations.

Success is not guaranteed, but it is crystal clear that the goal is replacing us and then pricing the replacement as the largest possible percentage of our salaries possible.

It's the oldest trick in the book. Place a heavily discounted supermarket in town, wait for all local businesses to close, raise prices.

akoboldfrying 32 minutes ago | parent

Although obviously I wouldn't like it happening to me, if the offshoring quality was as good as the original -- and I'm sure sometimes it was -- I can't find any valid objection to it. It is, after all, just a different bunch of people being paid to do some work. Why must it be "us" who get that work? Why can't it be "them"?

Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.

Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.

voidifremoved 10 minutes ago | parent

The bottleneck in software engineering has always been communication, whether that is engineers communicating amongst themselves or clients communicating what they want, or client's customers communicating to clients who communicate to management who communicate to middle management who communicate to engineers.

Every step introduces misunderstanding and miscommunication, and minds change, and when you go down the wrong path it is hard to alter course or start over while avoiding blame and ill feeling.

Offshoring quality was not as good as the original, because the original was being produced by developers who were close to the clients and steeped in the same assumptions.

With offshoring, all of the weight was borne by the specification - if something was not captured, it did not exist. It doesn't matter how much it was just a basic assumption that something would work that way - if you didn't say precisely what you wanted, you didn't get anything even close.

So someone close to a product could implement something in a week for x money. Management would see that "week" as a fixed unit of work that could be given to someone who would work for less - but that other person would require an order of magnitude more "prompting" in order to produce what you really wanted, because they didn't have the same knowledge and assumptions.

So their calculus was, well, it might actually take 5 weeks to get the same output, but it was still cheaper. But that completely overlooks the local overhead of 5 failed iterations, and the cost to client relations, or the cost to internal staff burning out in frustration at what was once simple becoming multiple needless failures, or the additional cost of documenting the spec to such a degree nothing gets left out. And the latter, you can't do until you've failed enough to know both sides different assumptions and knowledge gaps.

ZephyrBlu 16 minutes ago | parent

It's better to work for companies that understand time/opportunity cost, and so won't penny pinch on something which will make them lots of money.

The "it saves money" mindset is bad for everyone, distorts everything away from valuable work and investments that generate the most revenue.

pylua 16 minutes ago | parent

I could see a republican administration banning this entirely, though they would just find cheaper workers in the U.S.

I wonder when this comes from other white class jobs— process engineering, autocad drafter, electronics design.

Loughla 3 minutes ago | parent

Republicans were, mostly, the ones responsible for encouraging this in the 80's and 90's to manufacturing.

Now that the unbelievable damage is done to families, towns, and cultures of entire regions of the US, they can swoop in and fix it for white collar workers.

Amazing.

jalam 1 hour ago | parent

> It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'

This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.

And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".

closewith 59 minutes ago | parent

However, there's opportunity here. As the cost of building and maintaining software products collapses, taste and carefully choosing what to build becomes a major differentiator.

laylower 1 hour ago | parent

>Do you know how hard it is to sleep when all you can hear is your own heartbeat? Do you know how hard it is to function with four effective hours of sleep when you offer your body ten? It is rough.

This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.

I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.

albatross79 17 minutes ago | parent

This is actually a great idea. It's easy to forget that if AI lives up to its promise, it cuts both ways.

motbus3 1 hour ago | parent

I just had a realization that the people who still have resources will need to invest their money to have any income. But it seems that Investment funds have been quite good in doing wealth transference, which basically means that overtime, any investment you do might have negative.

Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.

What will break first? The people or the system.

sajithdilshan 1 hour ago | parent

This is a lesson I learned a long time ago, no matter how good you are, you could be obsolete and replaceable any day and the companies/corporations don't care. Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.

coldtea 56 minutes ago | parent

>Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.

Good advice regarding psychological investment.

Not so useful advice when the job provides your actual livelihood, and the changes (e.g. outsourcing or AI or some industry change) mean you might soon hold a "will work for food" sign in some street corner.

I mean these days, it's not usually that people made some particular job their whole personality and "center of their life", the reason that they worry about losing it.

It's that their job is what puts food on the table, and the job pools are drying up.

sajithdilshan 50 minutes ago | parent

I understand that aspect but when you treat your work as just a job, you actually live with the mentality that you could get fired tomorrow and that's okay and you're mentally and financially prepared for that.

Also a lot of tech workers earn a higher salary compared to most of other professions, so I'd expect people to put away some buffer for a rainy day.

psychoslave 24 minutes ago | parent

Being mentally prepared, possibly, and even financially as far as being mentally prepared can go, but then not everyone have be fuelled by FANG perks&benefits.

qwertyforce 46 minutes ago | parent

but my job is also my hobby, it is the center of my life i cant pretend i dont care

jckahn 27 minutes ago | parent

I sincerely hope you are a founder of your company.

psychoslave 26 minutes ago | parent

You can continue to be a hobbyist mountain climber even when the job market stop asking for any.

akoboldfrying 15 minutes ago | parent

Hobby woodworkers still build tables themselves, despite the existence of factories, assembly lines, IKEA.

Until the government forbids writing programs by hand, writing programs by hand will remain a satisfying hobby. The only thing that's changing is how much other people appreciate the skill and effort you put into a given program.

thomascountz 58 minutes ago | parent

   We're heading towards the end of the year and I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans. What they have done is convince those with money to spend differently on their fellow humans.

Whether LLMs can successfully replace certain functions is a question of speculation and conjecture. Whether LLMs should replace human roles is both an economic and moral question. When the incentives are what they are, there's little room for objectivity. Both those who stand to—or believe they stand to—benefit most and those who stand to be most harmed by copy-machines replacing humans will be inclined to think of "when it will" happen. Only one of those groups seem to be able to actively participate in asking "whether it should" happen.

throwway262515 54 minutes ago | parent

> Whether LLMs should replace human roles is both an economic and moral question.

It is also a political question, on which many techies have been maneuvered into abdicating. Stripped of agency, agents they are bamboozled to depend on.

bluecalm 53 minutes ago | parent

The world where programmers and frankly most intellectual workers enjoyed privileged position and high salaries is ending. Some will survive most will have to adjust, start new careers, possibly never come close to income levels they enjoyed.

I was part of it in online poker world. You needed 2 functioning braincells to make 6 figures while playing a few hours a day back in 2005/2006. It got more and more difficult from there. First it got guys "living their life" while hustling on the side who thought it's an easy mode forever and didn't even bother to learn new tools. Then it turned previously good players into marginal grinders and then only a small group of winners remained. Many went to different/easier pastures - private games, heavy game selection at (super) high stakes. Most though lost their income and with it years of life that now seemed wasted in front of the computer.

Among my friends I've seen suicides (two), lost families (more than two), despair and poverty (too many to count). There are also positive stories - people who started doing something else, adjusted their expectation and are now living happy life even though their income will never be close to what their experienced in their early twenties.

In online poker - instead of Fable - we had ever developing tools. Databases, HUDs, HUDs connected to databases, auto-seating scripts (where a script looks for "donks" and auto seats you at the table when they seat) and then bots and solvers. I was on the frontier lab side I guess as the author of the most popular solver when they first came out. Now Fable is coming after my edge.

I am still a tech optimist. I think it will be a better and more abundant world at the end of it. There is still a lot of jobs we are not doing now because we don't have enough people. The transition is going to hurt though, especially those who don't have energy to start from scratch.

Gambling for living taught me no income stream is forever. Especially lucrative ones are going to be competed for and will dry out. Live below your means, try to save money, don't compete for status. It was always a good advice but it never hits until it's you who it applies to.

xnickb 53 minutes ago | parent

What's the hmmm-hmmm part about? I didn't get that reference.

qwertyforce 44 minutes ago | parent

maybe it is about staring at thinking traces?

jacquesm 35 minutes ago | parent

llm loop

xnickb 30 minutes ago | parent

TIL.

I guess I'm not using this tech enough :-)

jacquesm 18 minutes ago | parent

Smaller and/or heavily quantized models have a tendency to do this. The reason is because the auto-regressive nature of the llm dictates that its output should be its own input. You effectively purposefully create a feedback loop. That loop will manifest like this once the possible number of output states starts to converge on a smaller subset of the available tokens. A really interesting side effect of using speculative decoding is that you can detect that the llm is going to loop. You'll see this monotonic increase in the efficiency of the predictor and once that cross a certain threshold the loop is either already underway or it becomes inevitable. I've seen such loops range across 10K token and if not for the speculative decoding signal I would have never realized a loop was underway, but once you know it you can write a simple piece of software to detect the loop. The lower the 'temperature' at which you run the LLM the higher the chance of a loop (because you are constraining the number of branches that lead out from every token). The smaller the model the bigger the chance that it will loop. The more quantized a model is the bigger the chance that it will loop.

There are interesting parallels between LLMs and biological structures as well, for instance spontaneous oscillation in nervous systems lacking inputs but with a feedback loop in the topology.

Any kind of feedback system is riding a fine line between amplification/generation and runaway behavior resulting in a loop. Electronics, mechanical control systems, biological systems and LLMs all share the same property: some fraction of the output is coupled back to the input. With LLMs the fraction is 100%. It's a small miracle they don't loop more than they do!

TrackerFF 52 minutes ago | parent

Before I went to college, I worked as an electrician apprentice. One of the guys I worked with was 50+, and had worked many jobs over his life. He told me that from 18 to to his late 20s he worked a factory job. Then, one year, they stared rolling down production. The company had decided to move production to China.

Most were just let go. No severance, or comp packages. Just a good luck with your job search, it was nice while it lasted.

For his next gig, he worked in fisheries. His 10 years of experience at the factory didn't mater, and he started with entry level pay. This lasted some years, until some bigger company bought his employer, and merged. Lots of people had to go, him included.

Then he landed work delivering mail. Worked there for 15 years, until the postal service started downsizing due to ever decreasing volume in mail being delivered.

So his last attempt was to just go to trade school, and try some trade. 50+ years old working on a apprentice salary, once again starting at the bottom rung of the ladder.

My point is, there are many people out there that have lived this life. For every software developer that have made bank for the past 20 years, and are now faced with the reality of being made obsolete, there are probably 10 people who've gone through this multiple times, but gone from one minimum wage job to another. Going back to start every time.

It sucks for everyone. But you just have to adapt. I guess one silver lining is that when the "white collar professional jobs"-apocalypse arrives, that's when we'll finally look at things like UBI.

Time and time again, we've seen that when working class jobs disappear, it is met with some sort of aw-shucks / but-they'll-find-something-else-to-do reaction. Whereas when the middle/professional class is affected, it is seemingly a end of times sign.

jacquesm 43 minutes ago | parent

> But you just have to adapt.

Yes, but this time around there may be nothing left to adapt to.

petra 35 minutes ago | parent

If someone is willing to settle on salary and job comfort levels, there are plenty of jobs, at least currently.

jacquesm 33 minutes ago | parent

Lots of people have their lives set up in a way that an instantaneous significant reduction in income is going to have severe effects.

petra 21 minutes ago | parent

Sure, that's bad.

But that's true for anybody that need to start as a beginner in a new industry.

jacquesm 17 minutes ago | parent

Yes, but then there is a new industry to being in. This time it is different: there won't be any place where just having a brain that works is going to be a source of income.

TrackerFF 33 minutes ago | parent

Certain sectors and jobs will last much longer. Like healthcare.

But, I think the cold hard truth is that if you're a professional worker, with a six figure salary, the idea of going back to school, and working with something completely unrelated to your interest - all while taking a steep pay cut...it is unthinkable for many.

The alternative is of course unemployment.

desterothx 40 minutes ago | parent

Historically I agree with you, but considering how many people reacted negatively to the mathematicians' concerns about development in ai, and people calling them hobbyists, it seems to me someone is trying to create infighting as always. Seems like the reaction may yet again be the mentioned aw-shucks, but they'll find something else to do

TrackerFF 37 minutes ago | parent

I have, too, observed some sense of schadenfreude in the comments on recent headlines about layoffs in the white collar sector.

It is hard to know if it is just bot traffic to sow discord, or if plenty of people are genuinely delighted that office workers are finding themselves unemployed.

jdw64 44 minutes ago | parent

Recently, an agency that used to give me work handed me an app they had built using AI.[1] But even though they had used only the best AI of the time, like Astra and Fable, in reality it had many bugs and many wrong points. If you're not a programmer, there's a lot of room to make mistakes even if you use AI. So honestly, I don't believe the claim that Fable can do everything. It's smart, and it writes code blocks far better than I do, and it writes algorithms far better than I do. But that doesn't mean it has the global consistency a program should have.

[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/fixing-a-vibe-coded-app

danw1979 41 minutes ago | parent

> That first meeting crushed my soul. I heard my ears ring more violently than ever. The color drained from the world. I could barely walk straight.

There was a time that I really cared about my work and about my colleagues livelihoods.

Then I realised, it’s just a job. I’ve lost jobs before. I’ve taken shitty, low paid jobs before. It’s just a job. You turn up, they pay you, then you go home to your actual life, the one that matters.

People take their jobs too seriously.

hackyhacky 38 minutes ago | parent

That's a nice attitude to have when you know you can get another job. That allows you to support your family. Without moving to another city or drastically altering your lifestyle.

Unfortunately not everyone has that luxury, and as AI continues to devalue intellectual labor, fewer will.

danw1979 36 minutes ago | parent

Well, I don’t have that luxury ! I’m old, I do have a family to support, and I’ve been out of work for 6 months at a time recently, under financial pressure.

I still feel the same way.

oshawaconnectio 37 minutes ago | parent

I feel the same as you - but I'm fortunate enough to be young, have a cushion of cash, no mortgage, no mouths to feed. I'm guessing you're similar. We might feel differently without these.

danw1979 33 minutes ago | parent

Nope, I’m old, with family, been jobless recently.

Experience has taught me that investing the OP’s amount of emotional capital into your job leads to unhappiness.

bombcar 4 minutes ago | parent

That's really the key - the situation doesn't change, but you can - and how you look at it.

Either you're a helpless waif buffered by the storms of this world, or you're in charge of at least something - picking the first results in reddit-tier apathy and despair.

The second may not cause much immediate change, but at least you'll feel better about it.

voidmain0001 34 minutes ago | parent

I agree that we take our job/careers too seriously. Especially when it can lead to serious consequences such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takotsubo_cardiomyopathy Broken heart syndrome.

Loss of a job/career shouldn’t define a person. Loss of a human being does. For too long we ask people we meet “what do you do for work?” Perhaps the question that lets us better know a person is “who is your family?”

danw1979 33 minutes ago | parent

I couldn’t agree more !

wg0 17 minutes ago | parent

The author has mix of empathy and fear. They do not necessarily care about the job as a much as much they are probably are not as much stress tolerant and immune to things around them.

fwlr 40 minutes ago | parent

Capital and Labor have always had a tense relationship, each one uneasy about the necessity of depending on the other. Unfortunately, Capital’s acquisition of power in the modern Western world has not been accompanied by a commensurate acquisition of confidence. In fact, as Capital’s power has increased, so has its sense of its precarity, becoming so acute as to tip over into paranoia. The moment AI achieved the barest shred of plausibility in its promise to replace Labor, it became an article of faith that Capital feverishly believes in and aggressively acts on.

All of this is to say that we have a case of “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” on steroids; Capital is going to fight like its life depends on it to stay irrationally convinced in their belief that AI can replace Labor.

roenxi 10 minutes ago | parent

Always interesting when words change their meaning; because in this case the part of Labour that does the actual labour is going to be fine. It'll be the layers of people who do nothing but sit at a desk and press buttons that really feel it.

AI might be the best thing to happen for labour n fact; because they're going to gain a lot more intelligence for the same amount of work.

orsanawwad 40 minutes ago | parent

> The joy of programming is dying.

Ever since LLMs took over everything I'm working or have worked on, I no longer have fun, no longer feel joy, or challenged to solve issues.

My question is, what now? What's the backup skill or job to develop next and still feel joy with it?

Veelox 37 minutes ago | parent

As a counterpoint, I have enjoyed that last several months greatly. I have been able to solve real, long standing, issues quickly and efficiently.

Not sure what to recommend for you though.

Hamuko 37 minutes ago | parent

The best idea I've come up with is quitting my job, living on my savings and indulging in my hobbies until I run out of money and then hanging myself in the woods.

yearesadpeople 23 minutes ago | parent

I would argue that we all know the roles that have been barely justifiable, and now are glaringly obvious came to be as a result of the giddiness of agile and that 'culture'. As I can see now, those who wield a heavy sword are those who are 'allowed' to continue in the LLM-age of product development; I can see managers now developing build projects over teams (which is and can only lead to _less_ productivity and _less_ efficient orgs).

But I think it is important we all emphasise that this LLM-age giddiness sits squarely in those businesses where influence and product have always been their thing. It is unfortunate but, here we are. I don't believe a VP or MD or CXO is ever going to admit they were played by their peers on this one (agentic development).

The positive perhaps is the hardening of personal development, by need or necessity. LLM and agents are terrible at domain expertise still, and only until memory availability becomes abundent again (in end-user equipment), that is not going to change.

My big concern for the industry is when that happens, and anyone can build anything, but with the ability to tune to domain expertise via their own terms; this is the collapse, where no 'moat' exists at all, we are already seeing the collapse of the subscription model, and I believe pay-on-demand / purchase _is_ authentication is a tracking metric to that collapse. I forsee regulation being pushed to ensure the model however and foresee regulation on user equipment.

Larger institutions are perhaps 1-2 years lagging (for regulatory reasons) on uptake and perhaps that is the point in all this giddiness.

user43928 19 minutes ago | parent

> I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans

I do.

You don't need any sort of fancy harness as claimed.

All you need to do is type vague ideas into a text box. Then you need some UX taste to pick good concepts.

The building of the software happens trivially now. You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.

What you need next is someone with time and patience to QA test the software and provide feedback for the AI.

I guess ideally the same person, with the UX taste.

Give it a few weeks and the product is done, without the need for a team of 5-10. All it takes is one competent human.

I know that many here vehemently disagree and raise concerns about the viability and maintainability of the software.

I believe not a single one of them has made that experience, these concerns are based on their imagination of what they think would happen. Usually they tell you that they essentially review every line of code in their projects.

LunicLynx 12 minutes ago | parent

The problem with this is that it is not written by a human. It’s one of the versions of: „Since AI I finished all my spare time projects.“ Etc.

The actual reality is, that it is too early to actually say where this is going to end. Either AI is going to fix what it is causing right now or not.

We are screwed either way. So is the person or prompter behind the message above.

If Ai is universal there is no need for UX, because a real personal assistant, that takes personal care of you is the only UX necessary in the end.

eptcyka 12 minutes ago | parent

I think this lands in the same area as flying jet liners. A computer can do it. But legally it seems easier if there's a human responsible for the operation of the aircraft. I've conjured my ideas into code via LLM, and it is magical. But the quality is also off, and there are nontrivial issues that I'd like to address. The more a software project is vibed, the less one can manually address things.

Often, the agent will fix a problem without assessing if the fix is worth it, optimal or defective. It's fine to merge fixes like this in codebases occasionally - humans have been managing to do this and to work around this for ages. I'd like to see a software project that is purely LLM driven and doesn't devolve into chaos because of this.

xnickb 9 minutes ago | parent

context is important. Depending on what you are doing, you might have to review every line of code two or three or ten times before you sign off on a PR.

glimshe 18 minutes ago | parent

AI is now management's favorite excuse. But how many software engineers are actually losing their jobs due to the rise of AI and not due to the end of zero interest rates?

In other words, would those people have kept their jobs at current interest rates if there was no AI?

I think most wouldn't and leadership would be saying something else.

small_model 13 minutes ago | parent

SWE as a job is over, this should have been obvious at start of the year, its is simple as knowing the capability and watching the progress of the models. Sitting waiting for it to happen and crying about it is a bad coping mechanism, accept it and have a plan B/C/D in the works while you are one of the lucky ones where it company has not made the move yet.

philipodonnell 4 minutes ago | parent

AI did not take your job; a person decided to use the productivity improvement from a new technology to realize increased short term profitability at the cost of losing you. That is not so much of a value judgement on the choice than a plea to the people making the choices to realize how short term that thinking is and to the author to not let them off the hook for making it.