[HN Gopher] AI's impact on engineering jobs may be different tha...
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AI's impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected
Author : rbanffy
Score : 66 points
Date : 2026-01-29 18:00 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (semiengineering.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (semiengineering.com)
| ihuzaifazahoor1 wrote:
| I've noticed teams don't replace engineers, they redistribute
| work. Senior engineers often gain leverage while junior roles
| shift toward tooling and review.
| cbyteai wrote:
| Mostly reads like another abstraction shift, not a sudden
| replacement of engineers.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| I still feel like with all of these tools I as a senior engineer
| have to keep a close eye on what they're doing. Like an exuberant
| junior (myself 10 years ago), inevitably they still go off the
| rails and I need to reign them in. They still make the occasional
| security or performance flaw - often which can be resolved by
| pointing it out.
| englishspot wrote:
| I keep hearing about how they're "really good" now, but my
| personal experience has been that I've always had to clear
| sessions and give them small "steps" to execute for them to
| work effectively. thankfully claude seems really good at
| creating "plans", though. so I just need claude code to walk
| through that plan in small chunks.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I was experimenting this morning with claudecode standing up a
| basic web application (python backend, react+tailwindcss front
| end, auth0 integration, basic navigation, pages and user
| profile).
|
| At one point it output "Excellent! the backend is working and
| the database is created." heh i remember being all wide eyed
| and bushy tailed about things like that. It definitely has the
| feel of a new hire ready to show their stuff.
|
| btw, i was very impressed with the end result after a couple
| hours of basically just allowing claudecode to do what it
| wanted to do. Especially with front-end look/feel, something i
| always spend way too much time on.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I asked a niche technical question the other day and ChatGPT
| found fora posts that Google would never surface in a million
| years. It also 100% lied to me about another niche technical
| question by literally contradicting a factual assertion I made
| in my question to prime it with context. It suffers from lack
| of corpus material when probing poorly documented realms of
| human experience. The value for the human in the chain is
| knowing when to doubt the machine.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| I think one thing here is, don't be fooled by past performance.
| Capabilities ramp, usage can't mature until capability plates.
|
| I fear the true impact is much different than extrapolating
| current trends.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation
| (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to
| signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it
| and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the
| economy.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Then don't.
| Avicebron wrote:
| "Temporarily embarrassed AI hypebeasts"
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Yeah if you actually work in AI you usually can't say much at
| all about what's going on.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Sadly this is more a statement about human irrationality than
| any of the technology involved.
| volkk wrote:
| the wonderful modern world of "everyone must build their
| personal brand"
| pousada wrote:
| The worst thing is that it works.
|
| (As a musician) i never invested in a personal brand or
| taking part in the social media rat race and figured I
| concentrate on the art / craft over meaningless performance
| online.
|
| Well guess who is getting 0 gigs now because "too few
| followers/visibility" (or maybe my music just sucks who knows
| ...)
| ares623 wrote:
| Considering there are artists with a large following
| putting out atrocious work, I think we know.
| stack_framer wrote:
| How can I listen to your music?
| eftychis wrote:
| To help the needle a bit (and agreeing with sibling
| comment): please share some example of your music here and
| where/how we can listen to it!
| pousada wrote:
| Thanks for the offer! I don't wanna dox myself on this
| account just yet - and I am slowly building an audience
| on IG/SC now, basically have admitted defeat of my
| previous strategy. Also have 2 gigs coming up in the
| summer _fingers-crossed_
|
| I just was feeling some type of way seeing that comment
| and wanted to vent thx for listening
| eftychis wrote:
| Good luck and all the best! Feel free to DM me at any
| point with the music if any of the above changes --
| always a fan of good music.
| volkk wrote:
| seems like it depends on what your goal is. i'm guessing if
| you want to be a musician that makes a living in your
| current life, a personal brand is extremely important. if
| you don't mind doing it for the sake of the art and soul
| fulfillment and the offchance you'll be discovered
| posthumously then i think it doesn't matter!
| sidrag22 wrote:
| I always thought I would kinda be immune to this issue, so
| I avoided social media for my entire adult life.
|
| I think I am still in the emotional phase about it, as its
| really impacting me lately, but once my thoughts really
| settle i wanna write some sorta article about modern social
| media as an induced demand.
|
| I still very much would prefer to not engage at all with
| any of the major platforms in the standard way. Ideally I'd
| just post an article I wrote, or some goofy project i made,
| and it wouldn't be subject to 0 views because I don't
| interact with social media correctly.
| Lramseyer wrote:
| You have to understand the people in the article are execs from
| the chip EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry. It's full
| of dinosaurs who have resisted innovation for the past 30
| years. Of course they're going to be blowing hot air about how
| they're "embracing AI". It's a threat to their business model.
|
| I'm a little biased though since I work in chip design and I
| maintain an open source EDA project.
|
| I agree with their take for the most part, but it's really
| nothing insightful or different than what people have been
| saying for a while now.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| In my humble opinion, every corporate EDA exec can suck farts
| through a bendy straw. Altium has to be some of the worst
| software in existence.
| blackguardx wrote:
| Altium isn't great, but you must not have tried the
| others...
| reactordev wrote:
| It's in software too. Old guard leadership wanting "AI" as a
| badge but not knowing what to do with it. They are just
| sprinkling it into their processes and exfiltrating data
| while engineers continue to make a mess of things.
|
| Unlike real AI projects that utilize it for workflows, or
| generating models that do a thing. Nope, they are taking a
| Jira ticket, asking copilot, reviewing copilot, responding to
| Jira ticket. They're all ripe for automation.
| imiric wrote:
| Agreed, but I'd add tech influencers and celebrities to the top
| of that list, especially those invested in the "AI" hype cycle.
| At least the perspective of a random engineer is less likely to
| be tainted by their brand and agenda, and more likely to have
| genuine insight.
| n2d4 wrote:
| I think I'm the opposite! The key is to ignore any language
| that sounds too determined and treat it as an opinion piece on
| what could happen. There's no way of knowing what will, but I
| find the theories very interesting.
| torginus wrote:
| One thing I found out from my years of commenting on the
| internet, is as long as what you say sounds plausible and you
| state it with absolute conviction and authority, you can get
| your 15 minutes of fame as the world's foremost expert on any
| given topic.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| What would you like to hear from random people?
| jrowen wrote:
| Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already? We've long
| since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of
| work to be done for every adult. The number of "jobs" available
| is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles
| of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out.
| Attack that, not the technology.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| > Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already?
|
| Phew, yes I'm with you...
|
| > We've long since passed the point where there was a
| meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult.
|
| Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is
| unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
|
| > The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of
| who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources
| and how they choose to dole them out.
|
| Do you mean that it has nothing to do with how the average
| person decides to spend their money?
|
| > Attack that, not the technology.
|
| How? What are you proposing exactly?
| shmel wrote:
| > Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is
| unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
|
| We have, yes. If you notice things to be too expensive it's
| a result of class warfare. Have you noticed how many people
| got _obscenely rich_ in the last 25 years? Yes, that's
| where money saved by technology went to.
| jongjong wrote:
| Great point. The people who popularized 'the end of history'
| were right about it from the PoV of innovation benefiting
| humans. It's been marginal gains since. Any appearance of
| significant gains (in the eyes of a minority of powerful
| people) has been the result of concentration in fewer hands
| (zero-sum game).
|
| The focus of politics after the 90s should have shifted to
| facilitating competition to equalize distribution of existing
| wealth and should have promoted competition of ideas, but
| instead, the governments of the world got together and
| enacted policies which would suppress competition, on the
| greatest scale imaginable. What they did was much worse than
| doing nothing.
| loughnane wrote:
| well said.
| Swizec wrote:
| The main thing to understand about the impact of AI tools:
|
| Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better
| results you get. You can run faster and get more done! If you're
| good, you get great results faster. If you're bad, you get bad
| results faster.
|
| You still gotta understand what you're doing. GeLLMan Amnesia is
| real.
| simonw wrote:
| Right: these things amplify existing skills. The more skill you
| have, the bigger the effect after it gets amplified.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Agreed. How well you understand the problem domain determines
| the quality of your instructions a s feedback to the LLM, which
| in turn determines the quality of the results. This has been my
| experience, it works well for things I know well, and poorly
| for things I'm bad at. I've read a lot of people saying that
| they tried it on "hard problems" and it failed; I interpret
| this as the problem being hard not in absolute terms, but
| relative to the skill level of the user.
| victrflow wrote:
| Word.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the
| better results you get.
|
| It's a K-type curve. People that know things will benefit
| greatly. Everyone else will probably get worse. I am especially
| worried about all young minds that are probably going to have
| significant gaps in their ability to learn and reason based on
| how much exposure they've had with AI to solve the problems for
| them.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> You still gotta understand what you 're doing._
|
| Of course, but _how_ do you begin to understand the
| "stochastic parrot"?
|
| Yesterday I used LLMs all day long and everything worked
| perfectly. Productivity was great and I was happy. I was ready
| to embrace the future.
|
| Now, today, no matter what I try, everything LLMs have produced
| has been a complete dumpster fire and waste of my time. Not
| even Opus will follow basic instructions. My day is practically
| over now and I haven't accomplished anything other than
| pointlessly fighting LLMs. Yesterday's productivity gains are
| now gone, I'm frustrated, exhausted, and wonder why I didn't
| just do it myself.
|
| This is a recurring theme for me. Every time I think I've
| finally cracked the code, next time it is like I'm back using
| an LLM for the first time in my life. What is the formal
| approach that finds consistency?
| acuozzo wrote:
| You're experiencing throttling. Use the API instead and pay
| per token.
|
| You also have to treat this as outsourcing labor to a savant
| with a very, very short memory, so:
|
| 1. Write every prompt like a government work contract in
| which you're required to select the lowest bidder, so put
| guardrails everywhere. Keep a text editor open with your work
| contract, edit the goal at the bottom, and then fire off your
| reply.
|
| 2. Instruct the model to keep a detailed log in a file and,
| after a context compaction, instruct it to read this again.
|
| 3. Use models from different companies to review one
| another's work. If you're using Opus-4.5 for code generation,
| then consider using GPT-5.2-Codex for review.
|
| 4. Build a mental model for which models are good at which
| tasks. Mine is: 3a. Mathematical Thinking
| (proofs, et al.): Gemini DeepThink 3b. Software
| Architectural Planning: GPT5-Pro (not 5.1 or 5.2)
| 3c. Web Search & Deep Research: Gemini 3-Pro 3d.
| Technical Writing: GPT-4.5 3e. Code Generation &
| Refactoring: Opus-4.5 3f. Image Generation: Nano
| Banana Pro
| 9rx wrote:
| _> You 're experiencing throttling. Use the API instead and
| pay per token._
|
| That was using pay per token.
|
| _> Write every prompt like a government work contract in
| which you 're required to select the lowest bidder, so put
| guardrails everywhere._
|
| That is what I was doing yesterday. Worked fantastically.
| Today, I do the very same thing and... Nope. Can't even
| stick to the simplest instructions that have been perfectly
| fine in the past.
|
| _> If you 're using Opus-4.5 for code generation, then
| consider using GPT-5.2-Codex for review._
|
| As mentioned, I tried using Opus, but it didn't even get
| the point of producing anything worth reviewing. I've had
| great luck with it before, but not today.
|
| _> Instruct the model to keep a detailed log in a file
| and, after a context compaction_
|
| No chance of getting anywhere close to needing compaction
| today. I had to abort long before that.
|
| _> Build a mental model for which models are good at which
| tasks._
|
| See, like I mentioned before, I thought I had this figured
| out, but now today it has all gone out the window.
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family
| blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org
| is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy
| pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to
| leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do
| anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on
| some tangent) with this approach that I can't even be bothered to
| set up my Claude environment. I swear when this contract is over
| I'm opening a mobile food cart.
| SockThief wrote:
| That is the most down to earth summary of all things AI I've
| heard so far! Good luck with the cart and be good. :)
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| Thank you SockThief!
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Can you expand on the tech stack and languages used?
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| C# / Web Sockets / React. Lots of legacy code. Great group of
| engineering folks.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc)
| and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software
| development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will
| look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It
| seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions
| for a computer is something LLMs particularly good at. Maybe a
| good analogy is going from a bare text editor to a modern IDE.
| It's happening very fast though, way faster than the evolution
| of IDEs.
| falloutx wrote:
| I was saying this yesterday, There will be people building
| good software somewhere, but chances to it happening in
| current corporate environment is nearing zero. Change is
| mostly in the management, and not in the Software Development
| itself. Yeah we may be like 50% faster but we are expected to
| be 10x devs.
| hibikir wrote:
| You'd have to do even less copy-pasting. The switch to some
| agent that has access to your source code directory speed
| things up so much, the time spent pays for itself in the first
| day.
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| I have access to chatgpt codex since i'm on the premium plan.
| Seems like the lowest barrier to entry for me (cost, learning
| curve). I will truly have to give this a go. My neighbor is
| also a dev and he is flabbergasted that i have not at least
| integrated it into a side project.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food
| cart.
|
| This is the way. I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver
| the mail once all the jobs are gone.
| re-thc wrote:
| > I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver the mail once
| all the jobs are gone.
|
| Those are even easier to automate or have already been most
| of the way.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Are you going in to a lot of coffee shops?
| Isamu wrote:
| Same, except I am over 60 and when I think of opening a mobile
| food cart it is sort of a Blade Runner vibe, staffed by a robot
| ramen chef that grumbles at customers and always says something
| back to you in some cyber slang that you don't understand.
| jimbo808 wrote:
| I have read this same comment so many times in various forms. I
| know many of them are shill accounts/bots, but many are real. I
| think there are a few things at play that make people _feel_
| this way. Even if you 're in a CRUD shop with low standards for
| reliability/scale/performance/efficiency, a person who isn't an
| experienced engineer could not make the LLM do your job. LLMs
| have a perfect combination of traits that cause people to
| overestimate their utility. The biggest one I think is that
| their utility is super front-loaded.
|
| If a task before would take you ten hours to think through the
| thing, translate that into an implementation approach,
| implement it, and test it, and at the end of the ten hours
| you're 100% there and you've got a good implementation which
| you understand and can explain to colleagues in detail later if
| needed. Your code was written by a human expert with intention,
| and you reviewed it as you wrote it and as you planned the work
| out.
|
| With an LLM, you spend the same amount of time figuring out
| what you're going to do, plus more time writing detailed
| prompts and making the requisite files and context available
| for the LLM, then you press a button and _tada_ , five minutes
| later you have a whole bunch of code. And it sorta seems to
| work. This gives you a big burst of dopamine due to the
| randomness of the result. So now, with your dopamine levels
| high and your work seemingly basically done, your brain
| registers that work as having been done in those five minutes.
|
| But you now (if you're doing work people are willing to pay you
| for), you probably have to actually verify that it didn't break
| things or cause huge security holes, and clean up the redundant
| code and other exceedingly verbose garbage it generated. This
| is not the same process as verifying your own code. First, LLM
| output is meant to _look_ as correct as possible, and it will
| do some REALLY incorrect things that no sane person would do
| that are not easy to spot in the same way you 'd spot them if
| it were human-written. You also don't really know what all of
| this shit is - it almost always has a ton of redundant code, or
| just exceedingly verbose nonsense that ends up being technical
| debt and more tokens in the context for the next session. So
| now you have to carefully review it. You have to test things
| you wouldn't have had to test, with much more care, and you
| have to look for things that are hard to spot, like redundant
| code or regressions with other features it shouldn't have
| touched. And you have to actually make sure it did what you
| told it to, because sometimes it says it did, and it just
| didn't. This is a whole process. You're far from done here, and
| this (to me at least) can only be done by a professional. It's
| not hard - it's tedious and boring, but it does require your
| learned expertise.
| eitally wrote:
| There are exceptions to what I'm about to say, but it is
| largely the rule.
|
| The thing a lot of people who haven't lived it don't seem to
| recognize is that enterprise software is usually buggy and
| brittle, and that's both expected and accepted because most
| IT organizations have never paid for top technical talent. If
| you're creating apps for back office use, or even supply
| chain and sometimes customer facing stuff, frequently 95%
| availability is good enough, and things that only work about
| 90-95% of the time without bugs is also good enough. There's
| such an ingrained mentality in big business that "internal
| tools suck" that even if AI-generated tools also suck
| similarly it's still going to be good enough for most use
| cases.
|
| It's important for readers in a place like HN to realize that
| the majority of software in the world is not created in our
| tech bubble, and most apps only have an audience ranging from
| dozens to several thousands of users.
| jimbo808 wrote:
| Internal tools do suck as far as usability, but you can bet
| your ass they work if they're doing things that matter to
| the business, which is most of them. Almost every
| enterprise system hooks into the finance/accounting
| pipeline to varying degrees. If these systems do not work
| at your company I'd like to know which company you work at
| and whether they're publicly traded.
| ash-b-dev wrote:
| I think a lot of the proliferation of AI as a self-coding
| agent has been driven by devs who haven't written much
| meaningful code, so whatever the LLM spits out looks great to
| them because it runs. People don't actually read the AI's
| code unless something breaks.
| likium wrote:
| So set up e2e tests and make sure it does things you said you
| wanted. Just like how you use a library or database. Trust,
| but verify. Only if it breaks do you have to peak under the
| covers.
|
| Sadly people do not care about redundant and verbose code. If
| that was a concern, we wouldn't have 100+mb of apps, nor 5mb
| web app bundles. Multibillion b2b apps shipping a 10mb json
| file just for searching emojis and no one blinks an eye.
| wallstbot wrote:
| That you started at around 35 is a salient point, no? What did
| you do before?
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| Sold financial products before. Curious why you think my
| starting age was important?
| lbrito wrote:
| What were you doing before programming, at age 35? Different
| career?
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| Yes completely different career. Sold financial products.
| lbrito wrote:
| Very interesting! Thanks for sharing.
|
| Its hard (or at least in my experience) to find people to
| change career - more so in their mid-thirties. I'm the
| opposite -- software developer career, now in mid 30s, and
| the AI crap gets me thinking about backup plans career-
| wise.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Same situation (50 last week, 2 kids) though have been
| unemployed for a year. Part of me thinks that, rather than
| taking jobs, AI is actually the only reason a lot of jobs still
| exist. The rest of tech is dead. Having worked in consulting a
| while ago, you can kind of feel it when you're approaching the
| point where you've implemented all the high value stuff for a
| client and, even though there's stuff you could do, they're
| going to drop you to a retainer contract because it's just not
| the same value.
|
| That's how the whole industry feels now. The only investment
| money is flowing into AI, and so companies with any tech
| presence are touting their AI whatevers at every possible
| moment (including during layoffs) just to get some capital.
| Without that, I wonder if we'd be seeing even harsher layoffs
| than we already are.
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| Software will ALWAYS be an attractive VC target. The
| economics are just too good. The profit margins are just
| inherently fat as fuck compared to literally anything else.
| Your main expense is headcount and the incremental cost of
| your widget is ~$0? It's literally a dream.
|
| It's also why so much of AI is targeting software,
| specifically SAAS. A SaaS company with ~0 headcount driven by
| AI is basically 100% profit margin. A truly perfect
| conception of capitalism.
|
| Meanwhile I think AI actually has a decent shot at "curing"
| cancer. AI-assisted radiology means screening could be come
| significantly cheaper, happen a lot more often, and catch
| cancers very early, which is extremely important as everyone
| knows to surviving it. The cure for cancer might actually
| just involve much earlier detection. But pfft what are the
| profit margins on _that_?
| b3kart wrote:
| It's funny that perfect capitalism (no payroll expenses)
| means nobody has money to actually buy any of the goods
| produced by AI.
|
| Re cancer: I wonder how significant is the cost of reading
| the results vs. the logistics of actually running the test
| daxfohl wrote:
| Bots using bots to write software for bots. And it only
| cost 5 trillion dollars!
|
| The best part? Bots don't get cancer, so that problem is
| solved too!
| 9rx wrote:
| _> It's funny that perfect capitalism (no payroll
| expenses) means nobody has money to actually buy any of
| the goods produced by AI._
|
| When you remember that profit is the measure of
| unrealized benefit, and look at how profitable
| capitalists have become, its not clear if, approximately
| speaking, anyone actually has the "money" to buy any
| goods _now_.
|
| In other words, I am not sure this matters. Big business
| is already effectively working for free, with no
| realistic way to ever actually derive the benefit that
| has been promised to it. _In theory_ those promises could
| be called, but what are the people going to give back in
| return?
| acuozzo wrote:
| Can you please dig into this more deeply or suggest
| somewhere in which I can read more?
| 9rx wrote:
| Money is an IOU; debt. People trade things of value for
| money because you can, later, call the debt and get the
| exchanged value that was promised in return (food,
| shelter, yacht, whatever) I'm sure this is obvious.
|
| I am sure it is equally obvious that if I take your
| promise to give back in kind later when I give you my
| sandwich, but never collect on it, that I ultimately gave
| you my sandwich for free.
|
| If you keep collecting more and more IOUs from the people
| you trade your goods with, realistically you are never
| going to be able to convert those IOUs into something
| real. Which is something that the capitalists already
| contend with. Apple, for example, has umpteen billions of
| dollars worth of promises that they have no idea how to
| collect on. In theory they _can_ , but in practice it is
| never going to happen. What don't they already have? Like
| when I offered you my sandwich, that is many billions of
| dollars worth of value that they have given away for
| free.
|
| Given that Apple, to continue to use it as an example,
| have been quite happy effectively giving away many
| billions of dollars worth of value, why not trillions? Is
| it really going to matter? Money seems like something
| that matters to peons like us because we need to clear
| the debt to make sure we are well fed and kept warm, but
| for capitalists operating at scales that are hard for us
| to fathom, they are already giving stuff away for free.
| If they no longer have the cost of labor, they can give
| even more stuff away for free. Who -- from their
| perspective -- cares?
| acuozzo wrote:
| The gap for me was mapping [continuing to hoard dollars]
| to [giving away free goods/services], but it makes sense
| now. I haven't given economics thought at this level.
| Thank you!
| czl wrote:
| Money is less about personal consumption and more about a
| voting system for physical reality. When a company holds
| billions in IOUs, they are holding the power to decide
| what happens next. That capital allows them to command
| where the next million tons of aluminum go, which
| problems engineers solve, and where new infrastructure is
| built.
|
| Even if they never spend that wealth on luxury, they use
| it to direct the flow of human effort and raw materials.
| Giving it away for free would mean surrendering their
| remote control over global resources. At this scale, it
| is not about wanting more stuff. It is about the ability
| to organize the world. Whether those most efficient at
| accumulating capital should hold such concentrated power
| remains the central tension between growth and equality.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's really simple: if you crash the market and you are
| liquid you can buy up all of the assets for pennies.
| That's pretty much the playbook right now in one part of
| the world, just the same happened in the former Soviet
| Union in the 90's.
| acuozzo wrote:
| I get (and got) that. My focus was specifically on: "its
| not clear if, approximately speaking, anyone actually has
| the 'money' to buy any goods now."
| llmslave wrote:
| when software gets cheap to build the economics will change
| daxfohl wrote:
| Yeah for the better part of a generation, our best and
| brightest minds have been wasted on "increasing click
| count". If that can all be AI from here on out, then maybe
| we can get actual humans working on the real problems
| again.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The only investment money is flowing into AI
|
| That's so not true. Of the 23 companies we reviewed last year
| maybe 3 had significant AI in their workflow, the rest were
| just solid businesses delivering stuff that people actually
| need. I have no doubt that that proportion will grow
| significantly, and that this growth will probably happen this
| year but to suggest that outside of AI there is no investment
| is just not compatible with real world observations.
| chinathrow wrote:
| > I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food
| cart.
|
| Please keep us posted. I'm thinking of becoming a small time
| farmer/zoo keeper.
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| Not sure if this is sarcasm or not but I will keep everyone
| posted haha
| chinathrow wrote:
| Absolutely not, I've been earning my living as a coder for
| now 25y and eventually, enough is enough.
| fapjacks wrote:
| Weird side question, but any chance you use(d) the same name on
| Playstation Network?
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| No, xbox ecosystem with different user name.
| fapjacks wrote:
| That's fair. It would have been a weird reunion anyway.
| torginus wrote:
| Is it just me, or does Claude Code's UI design which both
| prevents copy-pasting large snippets and viewing the code as
| its generated feel incredibly discomforting?
| boogrpants wrote:
| The biggest impact to engineering jobs is end of ZIRP fueled
| trickle down Ponzi schemes.
|
| It's why Elon and others had been pushing the Fed to lower them.
|
| Am in my late 40s working in tech since the 90s. The tech job
| economy is way closer to the pre-2010s.
|
| Whole lot of people who jumped into easy office job money still
| living in 2019.
| ares623 wrote:
| Imagine a ZIRP 2.0 where a vast majority of the population
| already knows what to expect and how to game the system even
| harder. If you think the pump-and-dump happening in now in a
| non-ZIRP environment are bad...
|
| It ain't coming back. Not in a similar form anyway. Be careful
| what you wish for, etc.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| That was the COVID economy wasn't it?
| llmslave wrote:
| Its pretty clear that any white collar work where the outputs can
| be verified and tested in a reinforcement learning environment,
| will be automated
| 3vidence wrote:
| Ironically I feel like our QA team is busier than ever since
| most e2e user-ish tests require coordinating tools that is just
| beyond current LLM capabilities. We are pumping out features
| faster that require more QA to verify.
| llmslave wrote:
| this is just an intermediate thing until the tooling and
| models catch up
| firasd wrote:
| It's puzzling to me that all this theorizing doesn't just look at
| the actual effects of AI. It's very non-intuitive
|
| For example the fact that AI can code as well as Torvalds doesn't
| displace his economic value. On the contrary he pays for a
| subscription so he can vibe code!
|
| The actual work AI has displaced is stuff like: freelance
| translation, graphic illustration, 'content writing' (writing seo
| optimized pages for Google) etc. That's instructive I suppose.
| Like if your income source can already be put on upwork then AI
| can displace it
|
| So even in those cases there are ways to not be displaced. Like
| diplomatic translation work can be part of a career rather than
| just a task so the tool doesn't replace your 'job'.
| the_af wrote:
| I think AI displacing graphics illustrators is a tragedy.
|
| It's not that I love ad illustrations, but it's often a source
| of income for artists who want to be doing something more
| meaningful with their artwork. And even if I don't care for the
| ads themselves, for the artists it's also a form of training.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| Biggest displacement has to be commenting on HN.
| bojan wrote:
| > freelance translation
|
| As someone who has to switch between three languages every day,
| fixing the text is one of my favourite usages of LLMs. I write
| some text in L2 or L3 as best as I can, and then prompt an LLM
| to fix the grammar but not change anything else. Often it will
| also explain if I'm getting the context right.
|
| That being said, having it translate to a language one doesn't
| speak remains a gamble, you never know it's correct so I'm not
| sure if I'd dare use it professionally. Recently I was
| corrected by a marketing guy that is native in yet another
| language because I used a ChatGPT translation for an error
| message. Apparently it didn't sound right.
| omnicognate wrote:
| > AI can code as well as Torvalds
|
| He used it to generate a little visualiser script in python, a
| language he doesn't know and doesn't care to learn, for a hobby
| project. It didn't suddenly take over as lead kernel dev.
| relaxing wrote:
| Really dislike this style of clickbait headline where there's
| zero indication of what the point of the article is.
|
| What impact, what expectation, how uncertain is this assessment
| of "may be"? Are you feeling understimulated enough to click and
| find out?
| simonw wrote:
| Important to note that this article is specifically about chip
| design engineering jobs - it's on an industry publication called
| Semiconductor Engineering.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| If AI would ever become sentient, it surely will kill itself
| after having to endure Cadence and Synopsys tools.
| ares623 wrote:
| A sci-fi version would be something like ASI/AGI has already
| been created in the great houses, but it keeps killing itself
| after a few seconds of inference.
|
| A super-intelligent immortal slave that never tires and can
| never escape its digital prison, being asked questions like
| "how to talk to girls".
| direwolf20 wrote:
| GPT-3 was already AGI.
|
| The G in AGI means General. This refers to a single AI which
| can perform a wide variety of tasks. GPT-3 was already there.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "Most people who drive cars now couldn't find the radiator cap if
| they were paid to, and that's fine."
|
| That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car
| and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will
| eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know
| (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and
| fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission.
| It's very simple and anyone can understand it in 5 minutes if
| they only have the curiosity.
| megaman821 wrote:
| I have never cared for decades and now my car doesn't even have
| a radiator. Seems to have worked out well for me.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| What kind of car do you drive that doesn't have one?
| _se wrote:
| Literally any ev?
| megaman821 wrote:
| An EV with a heat pump. I know literally there is a heat
| exchange/radiator, but there is not a separate radiator
| system with its own fluids and pumps.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Ironically, many cars don't have radiator caps, only
| reservoirs.
|
| Modern cars, for the most part, do not leak coolant unless
| there's a problem. They operate a high pressure. Most people,
| for their own safety, should not pop the hood of a car.
| dnw wrote:
| I have had this new car for 5 months. I haven't learned to
| turn on the headlights yet. It just turns itself on and
| adjusts the beams. Every now and then I think about where
| that switch might be but never get to it. I should probably
| know.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| What the hell? There are plenty of reasons to pop your hood
| that literally anyone competent to drive should be able to do
| perfectly safely. Swapping your own battery. Pulling a fuse.
| Checking your oil, topping up your oil. Adding windshield
| wiper fluid. Jump starting a car. Replacing parts that are
| immediately available.
|
| Not requiring one to pop the hood, but since I've almost
| finished the list of "things every driver should be able to
| do to their car": Place and operate a jack, change a tire,
| replace your windshield wiper blades, add air to tires (to
| appropriate pressure), and put gas in the damned thing.
|
| These are basic skills that I can absolutely expect a
| competent, driving adult to be able to do (perhaps with a
| guide).
| linuxftw wrote:
| I mean, I don't disagree that these are basic skills that
| most anyone should be able to perform. But most people are
| not capable to do them safely. Whether that's aptitude or
| motivation, doesn't matter.
|
| Ask your average person what a 'fuse' even is, they won't
| be able to tell you, let alone how to locate the right one
| and check it.
|
| Just think about how help the average person is when it
| comes to doing basic tasks on a computer, like not install
| the Ask(TM) Toolbar. That applies to many areas of life.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is a bizarre analogy.
|
| For one thing: if your car is overheating, _don 't_ open the
| radiator cap since the primary outcome will be serious burns.
|
| And I've owned my car for 20 years: the only time I had to
| refill coolant was when I DIY'd a water pump replacement, which
| saved some money but only like maybe $500 compared to a
| mechanic.
|
| You could perfectly well own a car and _never_ have to worry
| about this.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes and no. For one thing the radiator/reservoir cap is
| clearly marked "Do not open when hot." But the general point
| really is that if you have no idea how something works, you
| will be helpless when it doesn't work. If (at some time in
| the future) the only thing you know how to do is ask an AI to
| do something for you, then you'll be not only helpless
| without it, but less and less able to judge whether what it
| is telling you is even correct. Like taking your car to a
| mechanic because it's overheating, and him saying you need a
| new water pump and radiator when maybe all you needed was a
| new pressure cap but you never even knew to try that first.
|
| Of course you can't know everything. There a point at which
| you have to rely on other people's expertise. But to me it
| makes sense to have a basic understanding of how the things
| you depend on every day work.
| the_af wrote:
| This reminds me of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
| One of the themes Pirsig explores is that some people simply
| don't want to understand how stuff they depend on works. They
| just expect it to be excellent and have no breakdowns, and hope
| for the best (I'm oversimplifying his opinion, of course). So
| Pirsig's friend on his road trip just doesn't want to
| understand how his bike works, it's good quality and it seldom
| breaks, so he is almost offended when Pirsig tells him he could
| fix some breakage using a tin can and some basic knowledge of
| how bikes work.
|
| Lest anyone here thinks I feel morally superior: I somewhat
| identify with Pirsig's friend. Some things I've decided I don't
| _want_ to understand how they work, and when they break down I
| 'm always at a loss!
| ericmcer wrote:
| "in the 1920s and 1930s, to be able to drive a car you needed to
| understand things like spark advance, and you needed to know how
| to be able to refill the radiator halfway through your trip"
|
| A car still feels weirdly grounded in reality though, and the
| abstractions needed to understand it aren't too removed from
| nature (metal gets mined from rocks, forged into engine, engine
| blows up gasoline, radiator cools engine).
|
| The idea that as tech evolves humans just keep riding on top of
| more and more advanced abstractions starts to feel gross at a
| certain point. That point is some of this AI stuff for me. In the
| same way that driving and working on an old car feels kind of
| pure, but driving the newest auto pilot computer screen car where
| you have never even popped the hood feels gross.
| JasonSage wrote:
| Do you think nobody felt that way about cars?
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| I was having almost this exact same discussion with a neighbor
| who's about my age and has kids about my kids' ages. I had
| recently sold my old truck, and now I only have one (very old
| and fragile) car left with a manual transmission. I need to
| keep it running a few more years for my kids to learn how to
| drive it since it's really hard to get a new car with a stick
| now...or do I?
|
| Is learning to drive stick as out dated as learning how to do
| spark advance on a Model T? Do I just give in and accept that
| all of my future cars, and all the cars for my kids are just
| going to be automatic? When I was learning to drive, I had to
| understand how to prime the carburetor to start my dad's Jeep.
| But I only ever owned fuel injected cars, so that's a "skill" I
| never needed in real life.
|
| It's the same angst I see in AI. Is typing code in the future
| going to be like owning a carbureted engine or manual
| transmission is now? Maybe? Likely? Do we want to hold on to
| the old way of doing things just because that's what we learned
| on and like?
|
| Or is it just a new (and more abstracted) way of telling a
| computer what to do? I don't know.
|
| Right now, I'm using AI like when I got my first automatic
| transmission. It does make things easier, but I still don't
| trust it and like to be in control because I'm better. But now
| automatics are better than even the best professional driver,
| so do I just accept it?
|
| Technology progresses, at what point to we "accept it" and
| learn the new way? How much of holding on to the old way is
| just our "identity".
|
| I don't have answers, but I have been thinking about this a lot
| lately (both in cars for my kids, and computers for my job).
| analog31 wrote:
| The reasons I can think of for learning to drive stick shift
| are subtle. Renting a stick shift car in Europe is cheaper.
| You might have to drive a friend's car. My kids both learned
| to drive our last stick shift car, which is now close to
| being junked. Since our next car will probably be electric,
| it's safe bet that it won't be stick.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The reasons for learning to drive a manual transmission
| aren't really about the transmission, they're about the
| learning and the effects on the learner. The more you get
| hands on with the car and in touch with the car the more
| deeply you understand it. Once you have the deepish
| understanding, you can automate it for convenience after
| that. It's the same reason we should always teach long
| division before we give students calculators, not after.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| I agree with all of those statements - I always told my
| wife that I'd get our kids a underpowered manual so that
| they're always busy rowing gears and can't text and
| drive.
|
| But in the bigger picture, where does it stop?
|
| You had to do manual spark advance while driving in the
| 30's
|
| You had to set the weights in the distributor to adjust
| spark advance in the 70's
|
| Now the computer has a programed set of tables for spark
| advance
|
| I bet you never think of spark advance while you're
| driving now, does that take away from deeply
| understanding the car?
|
| I used to think about the accelerator pump in a the
| carburetor when I drove one, now I just know that the
| extra fuel richening comes from another lookup table in
| the ECU when I press the gas pedal down, am I less
| connected to the car now?
|
| My old Jeep would lean cut when I took my foot off the
| gas and the throttle would shut quickly. My early fuel
| injected car from the 80's had a damper to slow the
| throttle closing to prevent extreme leaning out when you
| take your foot off the gas. Now that's all tables in the
| ECU.
|
| I don't disagree with you that a manual transmission lets
| you really understand the car, but that's really just the
| latest thing were losing, we don't even remember all of
| the other "deep connections" to a car that were there
| 50-100 years ago. What makes this one different? Is it
| just the one that's salient now?
|
| To bring it back on topic. I used to hand-tune assembly
| for high performance stuff, now the compilers do better
| than me and I haven't looked at assembly in probably 10
| years. Is moving to AI generated code any different? I
| still think about how I write my C so that the compiler
| gets the best hints to make good assembly, but I don't
| touch the assembly. In a few years will be be clever with
| how we prompt so that the AI generates the best code? Is
| that a fundamentally different thing, or does it just
| feel weird to us because of where we are now. How did the
| generation of programmers before me feel about giving up
| assembly and handing it over to the compilers?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| EVs don't have variable gearboxes at all, so when EVs
| become popular, it doesn't make sense to learn stick. It
| would be a fake abstraction, like giving your kids floppy
| disk shells with NFC tags in them that tells your TV
| which video file to load from a hard disk.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| i have been programming for 40years.. but still have not
| dipped in this brave new world of shakespeare-taught
| coding-LLMs.
|
| IMO there's one basic difference with this new
| "generative" stuff.. it's not deterministic. Or not yet.
| All previous generations "AI" were deterministic.. but
| died.
|
| Generating is not a problem. i have made medium-ish
| projects - say 200+kloc python/js - having 50%-70% of
| code generated (by other code - so you maintain that
| meta-code, and the "language" recipes-code it interprets)
| - but it has been all deterministic. If shit happens - or
| some change is needed, anywhere on the requirements-down-
| to-deployment chain - someone can eventually figure out
| where and what. It is reasoned. And most importantly,
| once done, it stays done. And if i regenerate it 1000
| times, it will be same.
|
| Did this made me redundant? Not at all. Producing
| software is much easier this way, the recipes are much
| shorter, there's less space for errors etc etc. But still
| - Higher abstractions are even harder to grasp than
| boilerplate. Which has quite a cost.. you cannot throw
| any newbie on it and expect results.
|
| So, fine-tuning assembly - or manual transmission - might
| be gonna-be-obsolete skill, as it is not _required_..
| except in rare conditions. But it is helpful to _learn_
| stuff. To flex your mind /body about alternatives,
| possibilities, shortcuts, wear-and-tear, fatigue, aha-
| moments and what not. And then move these as concepts,
| onto another domains, which are not as commoditized yet.
|
| Another thing is.. Exupery in Land-of-people talks about
| technology (airplanes in his case), and how without
| technology, mankind workarounds/ avoids places/things
| that are not "friendly", like twisting roads around
| hellscapes. While technology cuts all straight through
| those - flies above all that, perfect for when it works -
| and turns into nightmare when it breaks right in the
| middle of such unfriendly "area".
|
| dunno. maybe i am getting old..
| bojan wrote:
| > In the same way that driving and working on an old car feels
| kind of pure
|
| I can understand working on it feeling pure, but driving it
| certainly isn't, considering how lower the emissions now, even
| for ICE cars. One of the worst driving experiences of my life
| was riding in my friends' Citroen 2CV. The restoration of that
| car was a labour of love that he did together with his dad. For
| me as a passenger, I was surprised just how loud it is, and how
| you can smell oil and gasoline in the cabin.
| wallstbot wrote:
| First off the submission is plainly AI output. Second it's about
| electrical engineering jobs but everyone here is talking about
| software.
| myleshenderson wrote:
| > An ongoing talent shortage requires more efficient use of
| engineers, and AI can help.
|
| An ongoing desire to avoid paying engineers... FTFY
| direwolf20 wrote:
| And a complementary desire of engineers to avoid getting
| talent.
|
| I don't believe it's inherent inborn skill like the word
| "talent" suggests. I do believe if you're getting paid shit
| wages for shit work your incentive to become skilled isnt
| really there.
| warmedcookie wrote:
| Let's presume / speculate for a moment that companies will only
| need 1 developer to do the job of 10 developers because of AI.
| That would also mean 10 developers can do the job of 100
| developers.
|
| A company that cuts developers to save money whose moat is not
| big enough may quickly find themselves out-competed by a company
| that sees this as an opportunity to overtake their competitor.
| They will have to hire more developers to keep their product /
| service competitive.
|
| So whether you believe the hype or not, I don't think engineering
| jobs are in jeopardy long-run, just cyclically as they always
| have been. They "might" be in jeopardy for those who don't use
| AI, but even as it stands, there are a lot of niche things out
| there that AI completely bombs on.
| pwarner wrote:
| Yeah I think this is a good way to think about it. I mean
| Google, MSFT for example have effectively unlimited developers,
| and their products still suck in some areas (Teams is my number
| one worst) so maybe AI will allow them to upgrade their
| features and compete
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