[HN Gopher] AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
Author : virgildotcodes
Score : 761 points
Date : 2026-02-18 01:40 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| https://archive.is/L70Ha
| DaedalusII wrote:
| If you include microsoft copilot trials in fortune 500s,
| absolutely. A lot of major listed companies are still oblivious
| to the functionality of AI, their senior management don't even
| use it out of laziness
| jeron wrote:
| it turns out it's really hard to get a man to fish with a pole
| when you don't teach them how to use the reel
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Or give them a stick with twine and a plastic fork as a hook,
| as is the case with Copilot.
| Banditoz wrote:
| If AGI is coming, won't there just be autofishers and no one
| will ever have to fish again, completely devaluing one's
| fishing knowledge and the effort put in to learn it?
| moregrist wrote:
| It's not a great analogy but...
|
| "Autofishers" are large boats with nets that bring in fish
| in vast quantities that you then buy at a wholesale market,
| a supermarket a bit later, or they flash freeze and sell it
| to you over the next 6-9 months.
|
| Yet there's still a thriving industry selling fishing gear.
| Because people like to fish. And because you can rarely buy
| fish as fresh as what you catch yourself.
|
| Again, it's not a great analogy, but I dunno. I doubt AGI,
| if it does come, will end up working the way people think
| it will.
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| > If AGI is coming
|
| spoiler, it's not
| conductr wrote:
| In regards to copilot, they've also been led on a fishing
| expedition to the middle of a desert
| onorton wrote:
| I'm not sure if this was the intention of the analogy, but
| fishing poles don't have reels.
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| 100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right
| now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely
| skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating
| their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot,
| which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI
| system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super
| disappointing to see how few people are benefiting from the
| productive gains of these systems.
| dboreham wrote:
| This isn't my experience. I see many non-software people
| using AI regularly. What you may be seeing is more:
| organizations with no incentive to do things better never did
| anything to do things better. AI is no different. They were
| never doing things better with pencil and paper.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| I think anthropic will succeed immensely here because when
| integrated with Microsoft365 and especially Excel it
| basically does what co-pilot said it would do.
|
| The moment of realisation happen for a lot of normoid
| business people when they see claude make a DCF spreadsheet
| or search emails
|
| claude is also smart because it visually shows the user as it
| resizes the columns, changes colours, etc. Seeing the
| computer do things makes the normoid SEE the AI despite it
| being much slower
| sheeshkebab wrote:
| No one wants a chatbot "integrated" with excel and
| office365 crap, it's clippy 2.0 bullshit.
|
| Replace excel and office stuff with ai model entirely then
| people will pay attention.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| that only works if you can oneshot. but nobody can
| oneshot.
|
| iterating over work in excel and seeing it update
| correctly is exactly what people want. If they get it
| working in MSWord it will pick up even faster.
|
| If the average office worker can get the benefit of AI by
| installing an add-on into the same office software they
| have been using since 2000 (the entire professional
| career of anyone under the age of 45), then they will do
| so. its also really easy to sell to companies because
| they dont have to redesign their teams or software stack,
| or even train people that much. the board can easily
| agree to budget $20 a head for claude pro
|
| the other thing normies like is they can put in huge
| legacy spreadsheets and find all the errors
|
| Microsoft365 has 400 million paid seats
| oblio wrote:
| > normoid
|
| Do you work extra hard to be this arrogant or does it come
| naturally?
| slopinthebag wrote:
| Hilarious lack of self awareness. Calling others "normoids"
| yet you believe you can emphasise with them enough to
| predict how they will adopt AI?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6
| months and I'm still skeptical.
|
| For my team at least, the productivity boost is difficult to
| quantify objectively. Our products and services have still
| tons of issues that AI isn't going to solve magically.
|
| It's pretty clear that AI is allowing to move faster for some
| tasks, but it's also detrimental for other things. We're
| going to learn how to use these tools more efficiently, but
| right now, I'm not convinced about the productivity gain.
| david_shaw wrote:
| _> I 'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the
| last 6 months and I'm still skeptical._
|
| What improvements have you noticed over that time?
|
| It seems like the models coming out in the last several
| weeks are dramatically superior to those mid-last year.
| Does that match your experience?
| nrclark wrote:
| Not the grandparent, but I've used most of the OpenAI
| models that have been released in the last year. Out of
| all of them, o3 was the best at the programming tasks I
| do. I liked it a lot more than I like GPT 5.2
| Thinking/Pro. Overall, I'm not at all convinced that
| models are making forward progress in general.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Yes, it matches my experience. Now I can throw tasks at
| the agent and have it write a full PR, with tests, good
| summary. Or it can review things and make good
| suggestions that a casual reviewer or non-expert would
| have missed. It can also take a bunch of logs as input,
| find the issue, fix the code. I can't deny it's
| impressive and useful.
|
| What I'm still skeptical about is how much more
| productive it makes us. In my case, coding is maybe 50%
| of my job, and I work on complex and novel systems. The
| agent gives me the illusion I don't need to think
| anymore, but it's not the case. Agents slow me down in
| many cases too, I'm not learning and improving as I used
| to.
| techpression wrote:
| In a team of one at work I see clear benefits, but having
| worked in many different team sizes for most of my career I
| can see how it quickly would go down, especially if you
| care about quality. And even with the latest models it's a
| constant battle against legacy training data, which has
| gotten worse over time. "I have to spend 45 minutes
| explaining why a one minute AI generated PR is bad code"
| was how an old colleague summarized it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Is your backlog and/or your velocity increasing,
| decreasing, or the same? That's really the ultimate
| question.
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| IMO Copilot was "we need to give these people rope, but not
| enough for them to hang themselves". A non technical person
| with no patience and access to a real AI agent inside a
| business is a bull in a china shop. Copilot Cowork is the
| closest thing we have to what Copilot should have been and is
| only possible now because models finally got good enough to
| be _less_ supervised.
|
| FWIW Gemini inside Google apps is just as bad.
| bccdee wrote:
| There's a lot of rote work in software development that's well-
| suited to LLM automation, but I think a lot of us overestimate
| the actual usefulness of a chatbot to the average white-collar
| worker. What's the point of making Copilot compose an email
| when your prompt would be longer than the email itself? You can
| tell ChatGPT to make you a slide deck, but slide decks are
| already super simple to make. You can use an LLM as a search
| engine, but we already have search engines. People sometimes
| talk about using a chatbot to brainstorm, but that seems
| redundant when you could simply _think,_ free from the burden
| of explaining yourself to a chatbot.
|
| LLMs are impressive and flexible tools, but people expect them
| to be transformative, and they're only transformative in narrow
| ways. The places they shine are quite low-level: transcription,
| translation, image recognition, search, solving clearly
| specified problems using well-known APIs, etc. There's value in
| these, but I'm not seeing the sort of universal accelerant that
| some people are anticipating.
| bandrami wrote:
| That's probably true for some, but I think a lot of big orgs
| are simply risk-averse and see AI in general as a giant risk
| that isn't even fully baked enough to quantify yet. The
| security and confidentiality issues alone will make Operations
| hesitant, and Legal probably has some questions about IP (both
| the risk of a model outputting patented or otherwise protected
| code, and the huge legal gray area that is the copyrightability
| of the output of an LLM).
|
| Give it a year or two and let things settle down and (assuming
| the music is still playing at that time) you might see more
| dinosaurs start to wander this way.
| tehjoker wrote:
| There is probably a threshold effect above which the technology
| begins to be very useful for production (other than faking school
| assignments, one-off-scripts, spam, language translation, and
| political propaganda), but I guess we're not there yet. I'm not
| counting out the possibility of researchers finding a way to add
| long term memory or stronger reasoning abilities, which would
| change the game in a very disorienting way, but that would likely
| mean a change of architecture or a very capable hybrid tool.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| the greatest step change will be when mainstream business
| realise they can use AI to accurately fill in PDF documents
| with information in any format
|
| filling in pdf documents is effectively the job of millions of
| people around the world
| oblio wrote:
| That would require accurate validation of said documents,
| which is extremely hard now. Pointing 1 million PDF LLM
| machine guns at current validation pipelines will not end
| well, especially since LLMs are inherently unreliable.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| This is lost on people. A 98% accurate automation is useful
| if you can programmatically identify the 2% of cases that
| need human review. If you can't, and it matters, then every
| case needs human review.
|
| So you lose a lot of benefits to the time sync, but since
| people tend to have their eye glaze over when the
| correction rate is low, you may still miss the 2% anyway.
|
| This is going to put a stop to a lot of ideas that sound
| reasonable on paper.
| bubblewand wrote:
| My company's behind the curve, just got nudged today that I
| should make sure my AI use numbers aren't low enough to stand out
| or I may have a bad time. Reckon we're minimum six months from
| "oh whoops that was a waste of money", maybe even a year. (Unless
| the AI market very publicly crashes first)
| mr_toad wrote:
| So management basically have no clue and want you to figure out
| how to use AI?
|
| Do they also make you write your own performance review and set
| your own objectives?
| datenyan wrote:
| > So management basically have no clue and want you to figure
| out how to use AI?
|
| This is basically the same story I have heard both my own
| place of employment and also from a number of friends. There
| is a "need" for AI usage, even if the value proposition is
| undefined (or, as I would expect, non-existent) for most
| businesses.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Look, to make something productive out of it: a job seeker
| who has high level skills using LLM assistance will be _much_
| more valuable than one without the experience. Never mind
| your current company mangement 's policies.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Do they also make you write your own performance review and
| set your own objectives?
|
| Not to get off on a tangent but this has got to be a "tell"
| for how much a company is managed by formula and how much
| it's actually got thinking people running things. Every time
| I've had to write my own review I fill out the form with some
| corporatese bullshit, my supervisor approves it and adds some
| more bullshit, it disappears into HR and I never hear
| anything about it until it's time for the next review, and it
| starts over again. There isn't even reference to any of my
| "objectives" from the last review, because that review has
| simply disappeared.
|
| But I'm sure some HR exec is checking boxes for following
| "best practices" in employee evaluation.
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| That's exactly what we do at the Fortune 500 company where
| I work, and it's surreal.
|
| In my first year I didn't know any better, so I tried to
| set myself some actual objectives (learn to use XYZ,
| improve test coverage by X%, measurable stuff that would
| actually help).
|
| Fortunately my manager showed me how to do it correctly, so
| now my goals are to "differentiate with expertise" and to
| "empower through better solutions".
|
| Every year I open up the self-review, grade myself a 5/5 on
| these absurd, unmeasurable goals, my manager approves it,
| and it disappears off somewhere into the layers and layers
| of ever-higher management where nobody cares to look at it.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Management probably also wants them to figure out how to use
| the laptops, ide and other resources provided to them.
| Getting a tool for your employees that you've been told is
| important but have no idea what to do with is a perfectly
| valid management task.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| My manager mentioned that his manager (an executive) is not
| happy because the org we are in are not using as much tokens as
| other orgs in the company. Pretty wild
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Just have Claude code churn out some Harry Potter fan fiction
| for an hour a day and you'll meet your KPI easily
| hackable_sand wrote:
| It could literally be internal marketing fan fiction on the
| org's intent to meet KPI's with a focus on synergistic
| evolution towards x-functional singularity between
| department hiveminds including a footer on projected
| outcomes for operational efficiency.
|
| I think LinkedIn is in the dataset, right?
| caminante wrote:
| "You haven't hit your spell quota today, Harry. I'm putting
| you on a Wizard Improvement Plan."
| noisy_boy wrote:
| You are in the "not-enough-AI" stage - keep increasing your
| usage but try to keep it very gradual to avoid entering the
| "do-more-AI-within-this-budget" stage too soon. It seems like
| the firing would be in following stages:
|
| 1. too old/expensive
|
| 2. not using AI
|
| 3. using AI but not productive
|
| 4. productive using AI but not within AI budget
|
| 5. reduce AI budget and GOTO 3
| Herring wrote:
| My compsci brain suggests large orgs are a distributed system
| running on faulty hardware (humans) with high network latency
| (communication). The individual people (CPUs) are plenty fast, we
| just waste time in meetings, or waiting for approval, or a lot of
| tasks can't be parallelized, etc. Before upgrading, you need to
| know if you're I/O Bound vs CPU Bound.
| Haven880 wrote:
| I think both. Most organizatuons lack someone like Steve Jobs
| to prime their product lines. Microsoft is a good example where
| you see their products over the years are mostly meh. Then
| meetings are pervasive and even more so in most companies due
| to msteam convenience. But currently they faced reduced demands
| due softer market as compare 2-3 years ago. If you observed
| that no effect while they layoff many and revenue still hold or
| at least no negative growth, I would surmise that AI is
| helping. But in corporate, it only counta if directly
| contributed sales numbers.
| amrocha wrote:
| Then where are all the amazing open source programs written by
| individuals by themselves? Where are all the small businesses
| supposedly assisted by AI?
| Herring wrote:
| _> 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude
| Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that
| Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of
| 2026._
|
| https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-
| inf...
| amrocha wrote:
| There's lots of slop out there, that doesn't mean it's
| actually good or useful code.
| simonw wrote:
| Keep moving those goal posts.
| amrocha wrote:
| I deliberately asked for amazing open source projects.
| I've yet to see a single AI coded project i would use.
|
| Keep licking those boots.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| You could have easily made the same point and just not
| included the last sentence. Guidelines an all that
| entrox wrote:
| I feel different: the last line is very important in this
| context, since it communicates the underlying thoughts
| and values of the poster.
|
| Asking for "amazing" open source projects in this case is
| not asking out of genuine curiosity or want for debate,
| it is a rhetorical question asked out of frustration at
| the general trajectory of AI and who profits off of it --
| namely the boot-wearers.
| simonw wrote:
| Here are a few of mine from the past month - for all of
| them 90%+ of the code written by Claude Code:
|
| - https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-json
|
| - https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-ast
|
| - https://github.com/simonw/showboat - 292 stars
|
| - https://github.com/simonw/datasette-showboat
|
| - https://github.com/simonw/rodney - 290 stars and 4
| contributors who aren't me or Claude
|
| - https://github.com/simonw/chartroom
|
| Noting the star counts here because they are a very loose
| indication that someone other than me has found them
| useful.
| LunaSea wrote:
| I quickly read through the `sqlite-history-json` project
| and it's only a few hundred lines of code and the code
| doesn't use transactions which means that it can fail and
| leave the state of the code and database in an
| inconsistent state.
| simonw wrote:
| Being only a few hundred lines of code is a pro, not a
| con (it's 2,800 including tests: https://tools.simonwilli
| son.net/sloccount?repo=https%3A%2F%2... - lines counted
| by my vibe-coded port of the classic Perl SLOCCount tool
| to run in a browser using Perl-in-WebAssembly.)
|
| It does use transactions in the form of savepoints which
| means they can be nested:
| https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-
| json/blob/53e66b279...
|
| Transactions are tested here:
| https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-
| json/blob/53e66b279...
|
| I lead with sqlite-history-json because I think it's the
| most impressive of the bunch - it solves a difficult
| problem in an elegant way with code I would have been
| proud to write by hand.
| techpression wrote:
| They didn't, amazing open source was asked for,
| meaningless stats were given. Not that GitHub public
| repositories were amazing before AI, but nothing has
| changed since, except AI slop being a new category.
| jdlshore wrote:
| Doesn't look like goal-post moving to me. GP argued that
| AI isn't making a difference, because if it was, we'd see
| amazing AI-generated open source projects. (Edit: taking
| a second look, that's not exactly what GP said, but
| that's what I took away from it. Obviously individuals
| create open source projects all the time.)
|
| You rebutted by claiming 4% of open source contributions
| are AI generated.
|
| GP countered (somewhat indirectly) by arguing that
| contributions don't indicate quality, and thus wasn't
| sufficient to qualify as "amazing AI-generated open
| source projects."
|
| Personally, I agree. The presence of AI contributions is
| not sufficient to demonstrate "amazing AI-generated open-
| source projects." To demonstrate that, you'd need to
| point to specific projects that were largely generated by
| AI.
|
| The only big AI-generated projects I've heard of are
| Steve Yegge's GasTown and Beads, and by all accounts
| those are complete slop, to the point that Beads has a
| community dedicated to teaching people how to uninstall
| it. (Just hearsay. I haven't looked into them myself.)
|
| So at this point, I'd say the burden of proof is on you,
| as the original goalposts have not been met.
|
| Edit: Or, at least, I don't think 4% is enough to
| demonstrate the level of productivity GP was asking for.
| beart wrote:
| It has been argued for a very long time, lines of code is
| largely meaningless as a metric. But now that AI is
| writing those lines... it seems to be meaningful again? I
| continue to be optimistically skeptical.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| It's not a great ask. Who's going to quantify what is
| 'amazing open source work'?
|
| 4% for a single tool used in a particular way (many are
| out there using AI tools in a way that doesn't make it
| clear the code was AI authored) is an incredible amount.
| Don't see how you can look at that and see 'not enough'.
|
| The vast majority of people using these tools aren't
| announcing it to the world. Why would they ? They use it,
| it works and that's that.
| sensanaty wrote:
| So we're suddenly going back into measuring lines of code
| as a useful metric?
|
| Just because people are shitting out endless slop code
| that they never bothered to throw a 2nd glance at doesn't
| mean it's _good_ or that it 's leading to better projects
| or tools, it literally just means people are pushing code
| out haphazardly . If I made a python script that everyone
| started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a
| README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing
| billions of lines of code added! But none of it is useful
| in any way.
|
| Same with AI, sure we're generating endless piles of
| code, but how much of it is actually leading to better
| software?
| famouswaffles wrote:
| It's not the be all end all and there are obviously
| issues with using it alone, but it's rather silly going
| the other extreme and pretending it isn't a major factor.
|
| >If I made a python script that everyone started using
| and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and
| push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing
|
| 1. Well you can't do that
|
| 2. Something like that won't register as Claude Code (or
| any other AI tool) usage anyway
|
| 3. Something like that won't come anywhere near 4%
| sensanaty wrote:
| > Well you or anyone else can't do that...
|
| But that's what these tools are doing, in a large number
| of cases? At least the end result is basically the same,
| like that Clawdbot or whatever name they've decided to
| try ride the coattails of guy who has 70k commits in the
| last few months that I saw being touted as an impressive
| feat on HN the other day. How much broken, unusable code
| exists within those 70k commits that ultimately would've
| had the same effect as if he had just pushed a `--allow-
| empty` commit thousands of times?
|
| Now whatever, if it's people pushing slop into their own
| codebase that they own, more power to them, my issue
| stems from OSS projects being inundated with endless spam
| MR/PRs from AI hypesters. It's just making maintainer's
| lives more difficult, and the most annoying part of it
| all is that they have to put up with people who don't see
| the effort disparity between them prompting their chatbot
| to write up some broken bullshit vs the effort required
| for maintainers to keep up with the spam. It hurts the
| maintainers, it hurts genuine beginners who would like to
| learn and contribute to projects, it hurts the projects
| themselves since they have to waste what precious little
| time and resources they already have digging through
| crap, it hurts quite literally _everyone_ who has to deal
| with it other than the selfish AI-using morons who just
| take a huge dump over everyone and spouts shit like
| "Well 4% of all code on Github is now AI-generated!" as
| if _more of that_ is somehow a good thing.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| >But that's what these tools are doing, in a large number
| of cases?
|
| I mean No not really. I'm not sure why you think that.
|
| >How much broken, unusable code exists within those 70k
| commits that ultimately would've had the same effect as
| if he had just pushed a `--allow-empty` commit thousands
| of times?
|
| How much stable usable code exists within those 70k
| commits ?
|
| This is pretty much exactly why I said the original
| question was not a great ask. You have your biases. Show
| an example and the default response for some almost like
| a stochastic parrot is, 'Must be slop!". How do you know
| ? Did you examine it? No, you didn't. That's just what
| you want to believe so it must be true. It makes for a
| very frustrating conversation.
| thesmtsolver2 wrote:
| > where are all the amazing open source programs
|
| > amazing
|
| Nobody moved the goal posts.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Even if this was goalpost moving, is it really an
| unreasonable ask to not have slop everywhere?
| simiones wrote:
| > Honestly, AI slop PRs are becoming increasingly draining
| and demoralizing for #Godot maintainers.
|
| > If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more
| maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we
| do already) is the only viable solution I can think of
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/open-source-
| game-...
| lelanthran wrote:
| > If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more
| maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything
| we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of
|
| This is _exactly_ the wrong approach! Funnel even more
| money away from productive tasks and into AI? Madness![1]
|
| The _only_ viable solution is being quick with a
| banhammer - maybe someone should start up a spamhaus type
| list of every github user who submitted AI slop.
|
| Force them to burn these accounts on the very first spam.
|
| ------------
|
| [1] Imagine if we chose this approach to deal with spam -
| we ask people for more money to hire a warm body to
| individually verify each email. Do you think spam would
| be the solved problem it is today?
| com2kid wrote:
| Seemingly every day on Show HN?
|
| Also small businesses aren't going to publish blog posts
| saying "we saved $500 on graphic design this week!"
| amrocha wrote:
| Is saving 500$ by generating some shitty AI art the bar? I
| thought this supposed to replace entire departments
| afavour wrote:
| Someone asked "where are all the small businesses", this
| was a reply to that. Small businesses don't have entire
| art departments.
| amrocha wrote:
| Gotcha, so the impact of AI is small businesses get to
| save a couple hundred dollars and the cost is only 2% of
| your countries GDP. That's good.
| com2kid wrote:
| Prior to industrialization if you wanted to paint
| something you had to know how to mix your own paints.
|
| And make your own brushes.
|
| Before the printing presses came along, putting up flyers
| was not even imaginable.
|
| Signs for businesses used to hand carved.
|
| Then printed. A store sign was still produced by a team
| of professionals, but small businesses coils reasonably
| afford to print a sign. Not often updated, but it
| existed.
|
| Then desktop publishing took off. Now lone graphic
| designers could design and send work off to a print shop.
| Small businesses could now afford regularly updated
| menus, signage, and even adverts and flyers.
|
| Now small businesses can make their own creatives. AI can
| change stylesheets, write ad copy, and generate
| promotional photos.
|
| Does any of this have the artistry of hand carved signs
| from 600 years ago? Of course not.
|
| But the point is technology gives individuals control.
| habinero wrote:
| None of this is even slightly correct lol
|
| People have been painting with red and yellow ochre and
| soot for at least 50K years for sure, and probably
| several hundred thousand years in truth. You don't need a
| brush, you have fingers or a twig.
|
| The walls on the streets of Pompeii are full of
| advertising -- they had an election going on and people
| just scribbled slogans and such on walls. You don't need
| flyers lol.
|
| The idea that signs or advertising was "artistry" is
| deeply ahistorical. The reason old stuff looks real fancy
| is because labor was extremely cheap and materials were
| expensive.
| com2kid wrote:
| > People have been painting with red and yellow ochre and
| soot for at least 50K years for sure,
|
| Compare those to the pigments used (mixed up!) by
| professional painters, and then to what printers could
| make.
|
| If you wanted to paint fine art in the 1400s you were
| possibly making your own canvases, your own paint
| brushes, and your own paints.
|
| And on top of that you had to be a skilled painter!
|
| > The walls on the streets of Pompeii are full of
| advertising -- they had an election going on and people
| just scribbled slogans and such on walls. You don't need
| flyers lol.
|
| The American revolution included a lot of propaganda
| courtesy of printing presses and some very rich financers
| who had a vested interest in a revolution occuring.
|
| Pamphlets everywhere. It is one thing to scribble on a
| wall, it is another to produce messages at a mass scale.
|
| That sense of scale has been multiplied yet again by AI.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Couple hundred dollars
|
| ..a month
|
| ..multiplied by how many small businesses globally?
| altmanaltman wrote:
| No, that's just the impact that you're not going to hear
| in the news ("Small business saves a couple of hundred
| dollars" is not a good headline). But that's not the only
| "impact of AI". The bigger impacts are reflected in the
| news and the stock market almost on a daily basis over
| the last two years.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| But they could have saved that $500 by paying... a human
| 8note wrote:
| operationally, i think new startups have a big advantage on
| setting up to be agent-first, and they might not be as good as
| the old human first stuff, but theyll be much cheaper and
| nimble for model improvements
| kamaal wrote:
| Start ups mostly move fast skipping the necessary ceremony
| which large corps have to do mandatorily to prevent a billion
| dollar product from melting. Its possible for start ups
| because they don't have a billion dollar to start with.
|
| Once you do have a billion dollar product protecting it
| requires spending time, money and people to keep running.
| Because building a new one is a lot more effort than
| protecting existing one from melting.
| etothepii wrote:
| This.
|
| Once you have revenue you have downside to protect. Pre-
| revenue the worst that can happen is that you have to start
| again knowing more than you did.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Maybe experienced people are the L2 cache? And the challenge is
| to keep the cache fresh and not too deep. You want
| institutional memory available quickly (cache hit) to help with
| whatever your CPU people need at that instant. If you don't
| have a cache, you can still solve the problem, but oof, is it
| gonna take you a long time. OTOH, if you get bad data in the
| cache, that is not good, as everyone is going be picking that
| out of the cache instead of really figuring out what to do.
| canyp wrote:
| L2? I'm hot L1 material, dude.
|
| But I like your and OP's analogy. Also, the productivity
| claims are coming from the guys in main memory or even disk,
| far removed from where the crunching is taking place. At
| those latency magnitudes, even riding a turtle would appear
| like a huge productivity gain.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| Interesting analogy to explore a Distributed System as compared
| to Organizational Dynamics.
| al_borland wrote:
| When my company first started pushing for devs to use AI, the
| most senior guy on my team was pretty vocal about coding not
| being the bottleneck that slowed down work. It was an I/O
| issue, and maybe a caching issue as well from too many projects
| going at the same time with no focus... which also makes the
| I/O issues worse.
| noosphr wrote:
| Ironically using Ai on records of meetings across an org is
| amazing. If you can find out what everyone is talking about
| you can talk to them.
|
| Privacy is non existent, every word said and message sent at
| the office is recorded but the benefits we saw were amazing.
| beAbU wrote:
| Yep. Previous org I was at had the fancy copilot integrated
| into teams. All meetings were auto transcribed and you
| could chat with copilot about the meeting directly in the
| chat. It was absolutely magical at extracting action
| points, decisions and other salient points. It was like
| having a secretary for each and every meeting.
| koiueo wrote:
| So how is it going for him? Was he able to prove his point?
| al_borland wrote:
| He was laid off... unrelated to these opinions.
|
| He was correct though. For example, I've been waiting over
| a month for another team to set me up so I can test
| something they wanted me to develop. I've followed up
| multiple times. AI coding tools aren't going to solve my
| blocker.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| In my opinion, you're very wrong. There is typically lots of
| good communication -- one way. The stuff that doesn't get
| communicated down to worker bees is intentional. "CPUs" aren't
| all that fast either, unless you make them by providing
| incentives. if you're a well paid worker who likes their job, i
| can see why you would think that, but most people aren't that.
|
| Meetings are work, as much as IPC and network calls are work.
| Just because they're not fun, or what you like to do, it
| doesn't mean they're any less of a work.
|
| I think you're analyzing things from a tactical perspective,
| without considering strategic considerations. For example, have
| you considered that it might not be desirable for CPUs to be
| just fast, or fast at all? is CISC faster than RISC? different
| architectural considerations based on different strategic goals
| right?
|
| If you're an order picker at an amazon warehouse, raw speed is
| important. being able to execute a simpler and more fixed set
| of instructions (RISC), and at greater speed is more desirable.
| if you're an IT worker, less so. IT is generally a cost-center,
| except for companies that sell IT services or software. if
| you're in a cost center, then you exist for non-profit-related
| strategic reasons, such as to help the rest of the company work
| efficiently, be resilient, compete, be secure. Some people
| exist in case they're needed some day, others are needed
| critically but not frequently, yet others are needed frequently
| but not critically. being able to execute complex and critical
| tasks reliably and in short order is more desirable for some
| workers. Being fast in a human context also means being easily
| bored, or it could mean lots of bullshit work needs to be
| invented to keep the person busy and happy.
|
| I'd suggest taking that compsci approach but considering not
| just the varying tasks and workloads, but also the diversity of
| goals and user cases of users (decision makers/managers in
| companies). There are deeper topics with regards or strategy
| and decision making surrounding the state machines of
| incentives and punishments, and decision maker organization
| (hierarchical, flat, hub-and-spoke,full-mesh,etc..).
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Meetings can be work, but often they are a waste of time.
| Often they are only done, because the company has not found a
| better way to structure itself, which is also accepted by the
| management lawyer, who often has a profound fear of loss of
| control and likes to micromanage. If you can zone out for
| most of the meeting, and not experience negative effects from
| that, then the meeting was a waste of your time.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| it's not a waste of your time if you're getting paid for
| it, that's why you are there. You're not there to be
| otherwise "productive" you're there to do what the company
| wants you to do. you might say they're inefficient, but are
| things like company outings efficient? b.s. townhall calls?
| half the time it's just managers trying to hear their own
| voice in front of everyone. You're not there to write code
| or fix things, you're there to make those pay-check signers
| happy. placate to their ego if that's what they want.
|
| That said, often, meetings are much more efficient means of
| syncing information than slack/chat or emails. call it
| "real-time active communication with rich context" if it
| sounds more technical. you can communicate in voice tones,
| body language, timing,etc.. what you can't using other
| means. and communicate doesn't mean just talk or listen for
| the sake of it, it can me brainstorm, understand
| requirements and expectations better, prevent
| misunderstandings and other wasted effort.
|
| In my experience, things that exist as patterns like this
| in systems are always important, but it's also important to
| use them as intended, and not abuse them excessively.
|
| Simply extracting the most value out of individual
| contributors isn't typically the goal of white collar
| management. as in my earlier example, you won't see order
| pickers at amazon warehouses attend meetings all day. their
| time at work is valued differently than a white collar
| workers'.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| None of this fits
| TimByte wrote:
| In some cases it might even make the mismatch worse. If one
| person can produce drafts, specs, or code much faster, you just
| create more work for reviewers, approvers, and downstream
| dependencies, which increases queueing
| sebmellen wrote:
| The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the
| thinking/talking is often the majority of the work... unlike
| coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller
| percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is
| essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to
| take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from
| thought to completion.
|
| Other white collar business/bullshit job (ala Graeber) work is
| meeting with people, "aligning expectations", getting consensus,
| making slides/decks to communicate those thoughts, thinking about
| market positioning, etc.
|
| Maybe tools like Cowork can help to find files, identify tickets,
| pull in information, write Excel formulas, etc.
|
| What's different about coding is no one actually cares about code
| as output from a business standpoint. The code is the end
| destination for decided business processes. I think, for that
| reason, that code is uniquely well adapted to LLM takeover.
|
| But I'm not so sure about other white-collar jobs. If anything,
| AI tooling just makes everyone move faster. But an LLM automating
| a new feature release and drafting a press release and hopping on
| a sales call to sell the product is (IMO) further off than
| turning a detailed prompt into a fully functional codebase
| autonomously.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| when the work involves navigating a bunch of rules with very
| ambiguous syntax, AI will automate them to the point computers
| automated rules based systems with very precise syntax in the
| 1990s
|
| https://hazel.ai/tax-planning
|
| this software (which i am not related to or promoting) is
| better at investment planning and tax planning than over 90% of
| RIAs in the US. It will automate RIA to the point that trading
| software automated stock broking. This will reduce the average
| RIA fee from 1% per year to 0.20% or even 0.10% per year just
| like mutual fund fees dropped in the early 00s
| arctic-true wrote:
| You could have beaten the returns of most financial
| professionals over the last several years by just parking
| your money in the S&P 500, and yet plenty of people are still
| making a lucrative career out of underperforming it. In some
| fields, "being better and cheaper" does not always spell
| victory.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| you are right on beating money managers. when I said
| investment planning, I meant planning the size and tax
| structures for investments. this software automates all of
| the technical work that goes on inside financial planning
| firms, which is done by tens of thousands of white collar
| professionals in US/UK/EU, et c. it will then lead to price
| competitiveness.
|
| more expensive silly companies will exist, but the cheap
| ones get the scale. SP500 index funds have over 1 trillion
| in the top 3 providers. cathy wood has like 6-7 billion.
|
| BNYMellon is the custodian of $50 trillion of investment
| assets. robinhood has $324bn.
|
| silly companies get the headlines though
| lich_king wrote:
| > making slides/decks to communicate those thoughts,
|
| That use case is definitely delegated to LLMs by many people.
| That said, I don't think it translates into linear productivity
| gains. Most white collar work isn't so fast-paced that if you
| save an hour making slides, you're going to reap some big
| productivity benefit. What are you going to do, make five more
| decks about the same thing? Respond to every email twice? Or
| just pat yourself on the back and browse Reddit for a while?
|
| It doesn't help that these LLM-generated slides probably
| contain inaccuracies or other weirdness that someone else will
| need to fix down the line, so your gains are another person's
| loss.
| sebmellen wrote:
| Yeah, but this is self-correcting. Eventually it will get to
| a point where the data that you use to prompt the LLM will
| have more signal than the LLM output.
|
| But if you get deep into an enterprise, you'll find there are
| so many irreducible complexities (as Stephen Wolfram might
| coin them), that you really need a fully agentically
| empowered worker -- meaning a human -- to make progress. AI
| is not there yet.
| LPisGood wrote:
| I'm confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that
| don't involve meeting with people, "aligning expectations",
| getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that,
| thinking about market positioning, etc?
|
| If you weren't doing much of that before, I struggled to think
| of how you were doing much engineering at all, save some more
| niche extremely technical roles where many of those questions
| were already answered, but even still, I should expect you're
| having those kinds of discussions, just more efficiently and
| with other engineers.
| sebmellen wrote:
| Well that's why AI will not replace the software engineer!
| tayo42 wrote:
| Ime a team or project lead does that and the rest of the
| engineers maybe do that on a smaller scale but mostly
| implement.
| danans wrote:
| > I'm confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are
| that don't involve meeting with people, "aligning
| expectations", getting consensus, making slides/decks to
| communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?
|
| I'd suspect the kind that's going away.
| LPisGood wrote:
| That kind was already reserved for junior roles,
| contractors, and off shoring.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| I'm not sure everyone would agree with that statement. As
| a more senior engineer at a big tech company, our execs
| still believe more code output is expected by level. Hell
| they even measure and rate you on lines of code deltas.
|
| I don't agree with it or believe it's smart but it's the
| world we live in
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It seems that to some number of folks, "engineering" means
| "writing code."
| ragall wrote:
| > I'm confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are
| that don't involve meeting with people, "aligning
| expectations", getting consensus, making slides/decks to
| communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?
|
| The vast majority of software engineers in the world. The
| most widespread management culture is that where a team's
| manager is the interface towards the rest of the organization
| and the engineers themselves don't do any
| alignment/consensus/business thinking, which is the manager's
| exclusive job.
|
| I used to work like that and I loved it. My managers were
| decent and they allowed me to focus on my technical skills.
| Then, due to those technical skills I'd acquired, I somehow
| got hired at Google, stayed there nearly a decade but hated
| all the OKR crap, perf and the continuous self-promotion I
| was obliged to do.
| pmontra wrote:
| In my case
|
| * meeting with people, yes, on calls, on chats, sometimes
| even on phone
|
| * "aligning expectations", yes, because of the next point
|
| * getting consensus, yes, inevitably or how else do we decide
| what to do and how to do it?
|
| * making slides/decks to communicate that, not anymore, but
| this is a specific tool of the job, like programming in Java
| vs in Python.
|
| * thinking about market positioning, no, but this is what
| only a few people in an organization have agency on.
|
| * etc? Yes, for example don't piss off other people, help
| custumers using the product, identify new functionalities
| that could help us deliver a better product, prioritize them
| and then back to getting consensus.
| bandrami wrote:
| In a lot of larger organizations there is a whole stable of
| people whose job is to keep stakeholders and programmers from
| ever having to talk to each other. This was considered a best
| practice a quarter-century ago ("Office Space" makes fun of
| it), and in retrospect I concede it sometimes had a point.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >If you weren't doing much of that before, I struggled to
| think of how you were doing much engineering at all
|
| Isn't like half of our industry just churning out JS file
| after JS file to yet again change how facebook looks?
| 8note wrote:
| > unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent)
| a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the
| software, which is essentially working through how to implement
| the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the
| overall time consumed from thought to completion.
|
| huh? maybe im in the minority, but the thinking:coding has
| always been 80:20 spend a ton of time thinking and drawing,
| then write once and debug a bit, and it works
|
| this hasnt really changed with Llm coding either, except that
| for the same amount of thinking, you get more code output
| sebmellen wrote:
| Yeah, ratios vary depending on how productive you are with
| code. For me it was 50:50 and is now 80:20, but only because
| I was a relatively unproductive coder (struggled with
| language feature memorization, etc.) and a much more
| productive thinker/architect.
| overgard wrote:
| "Struggling with language feature memorization" is what we
| call "unemployed", not "relatively unproductive".
| sebmellen wrote:
| No. You can be a very productive developer and have the
| syntax be more of a blocker than application design, and
| the same in reverse.
|
| I interview a lot of people, and I've seen people who are
| astoundingly good at micro-systems, very complex regexes,
| etc. white struggling massively with system design. And
| vice versa. People have different talents.
|
| But, in my experience, AI will vastly improve the success
| of the developer who's better at orchestration,
| architecture, and system design than the developer who's
| very good at tiny micro-system type of work. Yes, there
| is still a need for someone who can read and understand
| regexes... but is there anywhere near as much of a need
| as before? Not at all.
|
| Now. there are very many dual threats, and most truly
| senior engineers are both. These people now have an even
| bigger leg up, because they have an understanding of
| system mechanics + the superpower of Claude Code/etc.
| They don't have to waste as much time on boilerplate and
| raw implementation, and yet they can check the output of
| their input to the AI. They are also probably better
| equipped to build testing harnesses, etc., that adapt
| well to agentic use.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Thinking is always the hardest part and the bottleneck for me.
|
| It doesn't capture everyone's experience when you say thinking
| is the smaller part of programming.
|
| I don't even believe a regular person is capable of producing
| good quality code without thinking 2x the amount they are
| coding
| jama211 wrote:
| Most people (and most businesses) aren't making good quality
| code though. Most tools we use have horrible codebases.
| Therefore now the code can often be a similar quality to
| before, just done far faster.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Agree. I remember in school in the 1980s reading that a good
| programmer can write about 10 lines of code a day (citing
| _The Mythical Man-Month_ ) and I thought "that's ridiculous,
| I can write hundreds of lines a day" but didn't understand
| that's including all the time understanding requirements,
| thinking about design, testing, debugging, etc. Writing the
| code is a small portion of what a software engineer does.
| pmontra wrote:
| Also remember that programs were much smaller, code had to
| be typed in full and read accurately because compilers were
| slow and you didn't want to waste time for a syntax error.
| Anyway it's common even today to work half a day thinking,
| debugging, testing and eventually git diff shows only two
| changed lines.
| sebmellen wrote:
| As I wrote in a separate comment to someone who responded to
| me, there is a difference between: (a)
| thinking about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and
| (b) the thinking that is required during implementation.
|
| _{type (a)}_ was always the majority of my time, but _{type
| (b)}_ consumed a lot of effort, especially for languages or
| syntaxes I wasn 't very familiar with. _{type (b)}_ consumes
| very little of my time now.
| overgard wrote:
| > The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the
| thinking/talking is often the majority of the work... unlike
| coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller
| percentage of the time consumed.
|
| WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP. No coder I've ever met has
| thought that thinking was anything other than the BIGGEST
| allocation of time when coding. Nobody is putting their typing
| words-per-minute on their resume because typing has never been
| the problem.
|
| I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires
| some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less cognitively
| intense than sending emails and making slide decks.
|
| I honestly think a project managers job is actually a lot
| easier to automate, if you're going to go there (not that I'm
| hoping for anyone's job to be automated away). It's a lot
| easier for an engineer to learn the industry and business than
| it is for a project manager to learn how to keep their vibe
| code from spilling private keys all over the internet.
| Kiro wrote:
| Our job is not the intellectual exercise you think it is.
| We're not smarter than anyone else and software development
| is not automatically more thought-intensive than other jobs.
| The fact that programming is the first job task to be fully
| automated says it all.
| whaleidk wrote:
| It's weird that you equate time spent thinking with
| intelligence and egotism. Plenty of "normal people" jobs
| require lots of time spent thinking like art, writing,
| product and ad design. The only one implying taking time to
| think equals big brain master race is you
| Kiro wrote:
| "Normal people"? "Big brain master race"? The only one
| implying weird things here is you.
| overgard wrote:
| When coders need a break from intense coding, what do they
| do with the remaining hours of the day? Usually,
| administrative stuff -- sending emails, attending meetings
| (if they can organize when their meetings are), filing
| expense reports, etc. IE, the stuff that's easy. Also while
| I wasn't attempting to suggest that thinking more = higher
| iq (just that it requires a lot of careful thought),
| average IQ's per job score are quite a bit higher in
| software engineering fields.
| sebmellen wrote:
| > I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires
| some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less
| cognitively intense than sending emails and making slide
| decks.
|
| OK, to quote you: WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP!
|
| You've made a lot of assumptions.
|
| I'm not saying that coding is not thinking. What I'm saying
| is this:
|
| There is a difference between: (a) thinking
| about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and (b)
| the thinking that is required during implementation.
|
| In my experience, coding is at least 50/50 (even for the best
| developer) in the sense that figuring out how to structure
| and fix your code _{type (b)}_ used to require very deep
| thinking. But then the other thinking time was spent on your
| system design /architecture _{type (a)}_ , and not debugging
| type errors, etc.
|
| AI has already changed that split. If you have a good test
| harness and problem definition, you can throw Codex at a
| really massive task and have it do quite well at the finer
| details of implementation.
|
| Other white-collar office work, as stupid as it may be, will
| be a lot harder to automate because it is primarily the
| "thinking about what will be done" _{type (a)}_ kind of work
| and not the "thinking that is done during implementation"
| _{type (b)}_ kind of work.
|
| If you haven't seen what I mean by "enterprise office work"
| it may be hard to grasp what I'm talking about... But
| thinking that people are just doodling around making slide
| decks or writing shitty emails is the wrong mental model for
| the breadth of non-technical work available in a large
| company.
| maininformer wrote:
| Thousand of companies to be replaced by leaner counterparts that
| learned to use AI towards greater employment and productivity
| LunaSea wrote:
| Where are my LLM-crafted Google and Instagram?
| SilverElfin wrote:
| These surveys don't make sense. Ask the forward thinking
| companies and they'll say the opposite. The flood of anti AI
| productivity articles almost feel like they're meant to lull the
| population into not seeing what's about to happen to employment.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Eh, try using Microsoft Copilot in Word or PowerPoint. It is
| worthless. If your experience with AI was a Microsoft product,
| you would think it was a scam too.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Yeah Microsoft has consistently been bragging about how so
| much code is written by AI, yet their products are worse than
| ever. Seems to indicate "using AI" is not enough. You have to
| be smart about when and where.
| conductr wrote:
| It's not just that though. You find when going through AI
| projects in an organization that many times the process is
| manual for a reason. This isn't the first wave of
| "automation" that's came through. Most things that can be
| fully automated already have been long ago and they manual
| parts get sold as we can make AI do it, until you see the
| specs and noodle around on the problem some then you realize
| it's probably just going to remain manual as the amount of
| model training requires as much time and effort as just doing
| it by hand.
| sebmellen wrote:
| I have a dystopian future vision where humans are cheaper
| machines than robots, so we become the disposable task
| force for grunt work that robots aren't cheap enough for.
| To some degree this is already happening.
| transcriptase wrote:
| It's comical that Microsoft inserted Copilot buttons
| throughout all of their productivity suite, and none of them
| are able to do the bare minimum that you would hope for.
|
| "Oh cool, copilot is in excel! I'm going to ask it a question
| about the data in the spreadsheet that it's literally
| appearing beside natively in-app, or for help with a
| formula!"
|
| "Wait what, it's saying it can't see anything or read from
| the currently displayed worksheet? Why is it inside the
| application then? Why would I want an outdated version of
| ChatGPT with no useful context or ability to read/do anything
| inside all my Office applications?"
| bandrami wrote:
| Meta's AI can't search posts on Meta's properties (or at
| least couldn't a few months ago). I'm not really sure what
| it's point is unless it's meant as a kind of help desk for
| the site (which they already also have).
| slopinthebag wrote:
| > Ask the forward thinking companies and they'll say the
| opposite.
|
| Which ones? OpenAI? Microsoft? Anthropic?
| pram wrote:
| It's funny because at work we have paid Codex and Claude but I
| rarely find a use for it, yet I pay for the $200 Max plan for
| personal stuff and will use it for hours!
|
| So I'm not even in the "it's useless" camp, but it's frankly only
| situationally useful outside of new greenfield stuff. Maybe that
| is the problem?
| fourthark wrote:
| Why do you find it useless for legacy code? I find I have to
| give it plenty of context but it does pretty well on legacy
| code.
|
| And Ask DeepWiki is a great shortcut for finding the right
| context... Granted this is open source and DW is free.
|
| Is it the specific nature of your work?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the
| contrary, it's presenting it as _expected_ , thanks to Solow's
| productivity paradox [1].
|
| Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly
| shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's
| or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the
| mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to
| show clear benefit to the economy overall.
|
| The reason is that investing in IT was very expensive, there were
| lots of wasted efforts, and it took a long time for the benefits
| to outweigh the costs across the entire economy.
|
| And so we should expect AI to look the same -- it's helping lots
| of people, but it's also costing an extraordinary amount of
| money, and the few people it's helping is currently at least
| outweighed by the people wasting time with it and its expense.
| But, we should recognize that it's very early days, and that
| productivity will rise with time, and costs will come down, as we
| learn to integrate it with best practices.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
| kamaal wrote:
| One part of the system moving fast doesn't change the speed of
| the system all that much.
|
| The thing to note is, verifying if something got done is harder
| and takes time in the same ballpark as doing the work.
|
| If people are serious about AI productivity, lets start by
| addressing how we can verify program correctness quickly.
| Everything else is just a Ferrari between two traffic red
| lights.
| hawaiianbrah wrote:
| Really? I disagree that verifying is as hard as doing the
| work yourself. It's like P != NP.
| kace91 wrote:
| The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost.
|
| A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal
| accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from
| common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude
| or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970's
| manual office worker to use an early computer.
|
| Larger implementations like automating customer service might
| be more costly, but I think there are enough short term
| supposed benefits that something should be showing there.
| meager_wikis wrote:
| If anything, the 'scariness' of an old computer probably
| protected the company in many ways. AI's approachability to
| the average office worker, specifically how it makes it seem
| like it easy to deploy/run/triage enterprise software, will
| continue to pwn.
| gruez wrote:
| How viable are the $20/month subscriptions for actual work
| and are they loss making for Anthropic? I've heard both of
| people needing to get higher tiers to get anything done in
| Claude Code and also that the subscriptions are (heavily?)
| subsidized by Anthropic, so the "just another $20 SaaS"
| argument doesn't sound too good.
| 8note wrote:
| id guess the 200 subscription sufficient per person.
|
| but at that point you could go for a bugger one and split
| amongst headcount
| simonw wrote:
| I am confident that Anthropic make revenue from that $20
| than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that
| customer.
|
| Claude Code has rate limits for a reason: I expect they are
| carefully designed to ensure that the average user doesn't
| end up losing Anthropic money, and that even extreme heavy
| users don't cause big enough losses for it to be a problem.
|
| Everything I've heard makes me believe the margins on
| inference are quite high. The AI labs lose money because of
| the R&D and training costs, not because they're giving
| electricity and server operational costs away for free.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| I always assumed that with inference being so cheap, my
| subscription fees were paying for training costs, not
| inference.
| smashed wrote:
| Doubtful
| simonw wrote:
| Anthropic and OpenAI are both well documented as losing
| billions of dollars a year because their revenue doesn't
| cover their R&D and training costs, but that doesn't mean
| their revenue doesn't cover their inference costs.
| overgard wrote:
| Does it matter if they can't ever _stop_ training though?
| Like, this argument usually seems to imply that training
| is a one-off, not an ongoing process. I could save a lot
| of money if I stopped eating, but it 'd be a short lived
| experiment.
|
| I'll be convinced they're actually making money when they
| stop asking for $30 billion funding rounds. None of that
| money is free! Whoever is giving them that money wants a
| return on their investment, somehow.
| simonw wrote:
| It matters because as long as they are selling inference
| for less than it costs to serve they have a potential
| path to profitability.
|
| Training costs are fixed at whatever billions of dollars
| per year.
|
| If inference is profitable they might conceivably make a
| profit if they can build a model that's good enough to
| sign up vast numbers of paying customers.
|
| If they lose even _more_ money on each new customer they
| don 't have any path to profitability at all.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| > If they lose even more money on each new customer they
| don't have any path to profitability at all.
|
| In theory they can increase prices once the customers
| will be hocked up. That's how many startups works.
| bildung wrote:
| But only if you ignore all the other market participants,
| right? How can we ever reach a point where all the i.e.
| smaller Chinese competitors perpetually trailing behind
| SOTA with a ~9 month lag but at a tiny fraction of the
| cost stop existing?
|
| I mean we just have to look at old discussions about Uber
| for the exact same arguments. Uber, after all these
| years, still is at a negative 10 % lifetime ROI , and
| that company doesn't even have to meaningfully invest in
| hardware.
|
| IMO this will probably develop like the railroad boom in
| the first half of the 19th century: All the AI-only first
| movers like OpenAI and Anthropic will go bust, just like
| most railroad companies who laid the tracks, because they
| can't escape the training treadmill. But the tech itself
| will stay, and even become a meaningful productivity
| booster over the next decades.
| viking123 wrote:
| I am also thinking long term where is the moat if it will
| inevitably lead to price competition? Like it's not a
| Microsoft product suite that your whole company is tied
| in multiple ways. LLMs can be quite easily swapped to
| another.
| overgard wrote:
| I'm curious just because you're well known in this space
| -- have you read Ed Zitron's work on the bubble, and if
| so what did you think of it? I'm somewhat in agreement
| with him that the financials of this just can't be
| reconciled, at least for OpenAI and Anthropic. But I also
| know that's not my field. I find his arguments a lot more
| convincing than the people just saying "ahh it'll work
| itself out" though.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| There's an argument to be made that a "return on
| investment by way of eliminating all workers" is a
| reasonable result for the capitalists.
| generic92034 wrote:
| At least until they are running out of customers. And/or
| societies with mass-unemployment destabilize to a degree
| that is not conducive for capitalists' operations.
| ben_w wrote:
| That's a problem above most CEOs' pay grade.
| vidarh wrote:
| At some point the players will need to reach
| profitability. Even if they're subsidising it with other
| revenue - they'll only be willing to do that as long as
| it drives rising inference revenue.
|
| Once that happens, whomever is left standing can dial
| back the training investment to whatever their share of
| inference can bear.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Once that happens, whomever is left standing can dial
| back the training investment to whatever their share of
| inference can bear.
|
| Or, if there's two people left standing, they may compete
| with each other on price rather than performance and each
| end up with cloud compute's margins.
| vidarh wrote:
| Sure, but they will still need to dial it back to a point
| where they can fund it out of inference _at some point_.
| The point is that the fact they can 't do that now is
| irrelevant - it's a game of chicken at the moment, and
| that might kill some of them, but the game won't last
| forever.
| vrighter wrote:
| Models are fixed. They do not learn post training.
|
| Which means that training needs to be ongoing. So the
| revenue covers the inference? So what? All that means is
| that it doesn't cover your costs and you're operating at
| a loss. Because it doesn't cover the training that you
| can't stop doing either.
| simonw wrote:
| Training costs are fixed. Inference costs are variable.
| The difference matters.
| vrighter wrote:
| No they are not. They are exponentially increasing. Due
| to the exponential scaling needed for linear gain.
| Otherwise they'd fall behind their competition.
| simonw wrote:
| Fixed cost here means that the training costs stay the
| same no matter how many customers you have - unlike
| serving costs which have to increase to serve more
| people.
| beAbU wrote:
| Is inference really that cheap? Why can't I do it at home
| with a reasonable amount of money?
| mcosta wrote:
| Capex vs opex?
| beAbU wrote:
| Well, both? I need money for the equipment, and I need
| money for electricity.
|
| Capex is probably the biggest hurdle, but I can see how
| electricity cost might become a factor under heavy use.
| tverbeure wrote:
| Nobody questions that Anthropic makes _revenue_ from a
| $20 subscription. The opposite would be very strange.
| brandensilva wrote:
| Yeah it's the caching that's doing the work for them
| though honestly. So many cached queries saving the GPUs
| from hard hits.
| xienze wrote:
| How is caching implemented in this scenario? I find it
| unlikely that two developers are going to ask the same
| exact question, so at a minimum some work has to be done
| to figure out "someone's asked this before, fetch the
| response out of the cache." But then the problem is that
| most questions are peppered with specific context that
| has to be represented in the response, so there's really
| no way to cache that.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| From my understanding (which is poor at best), the cache
| is about the separate parts of the input context. Once
| the LLM read a file the content of that file is cached
| (i.e. some representation that the LLM creates for that
| specific file, but I really have no idea how that works).
| So the next time you bring either directly or indirectly
| that file into the context the LLM doesn't have to do a
| full pass, but pull its understanding/representation from
| the cache and uses that to answer your question/perform
| the task.
| simonw wrote:
| A lot of people believe that Anthropic lose money selling
| tokens to customers because they are subsidizing it for
| growth.
| Drakim wrote:
| But that has zero effect on revenue, it only affects
| profit.
| o3dd wrote:
| I wrote awhile ago on here that he should stick to his
| domain.
|
| I was downvoted big time. Ah, I love it when people
| provide an example so it can finally be exposed without
| me having to say anything.
|
| Unfortunately this is a huge problem on here - many
| people step outside of their domains, even if on the
| surface it seems simple, but post gibberish and
| completely mangled stuff. How does this benefit people
| who get exposed to crap?
| kakacik wrote:
| If you don't know you are wrong but have an itch to
| polish your ego a bit then what's stopping you (them),
| right.
|
| People form very strong opinions on topic they barely
| understand. I'd say since they know little the opinions
| come mostly from emotions, which is hardly a good path
| for objective and deeper knowledge.
| what wrote:
| >make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and
| server costs needed to serve that customer
|
| Seems like a pretty dumb take. It's like saying it only
| takes $X in electricity and raw materials to produce a
| widget that I sell for $Y. Since $Y is bigger than $X,
| I'm making money! Just ignore that I have to pay people
| to work the lines. Ignore that I had to pay huge amounts
| to build the factory. Ignore every other cost.
|
| They can't just fire everyone and stop training new
| models.
| simonw wrote:
| See comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47057874
| ben_w wrote:
| As I understand it:
|
| Gross profit = revenues - cost of goods sold
|
| Operating profit = Gross profit - operating expenses
| including depreciation & amortisation
|
| Net profit = Operating profit - net interest expense -
| taxes
| _jss wrote:
| Merely for the viability part: I use the $20/mo plan now,
| but only as a part-time independent dev. I will hit rate-
| limits with Opus on any moderately complex app.
|
| If I am on a roll, I will flip on Extra Usage. I prototyped
| a fully functional and useful niche app in ~6 total hours
| and $20 of extra usage, and it's solid enough and proved
| enough value to continue investing in and eventually ship
| to the App store.
|
| Without Claude I likely wouldn't have gotten to the
| finished prototype version to use in the real world.
|
| For Indy dev, I think LLMs are a new source of solutions.
| This app is too niche to justify building and marketing
| without LLM assistance. It likely won't earn more than
| $25k/year but good enough!
| Aurornis wrote:
| I don't think the assumption that Anthropic is losing money
| on subscriptions holds up. I think each additional customer
| provides more revenue than the cost to run their inference,
| on average.
|
| For people doing work with LLMs as an assistant for
| codebase searching, reviews, double checks, and things like
| that the $20/month plan is more than fine. The closer you
| get to vibecoding and trying to get the LLM to do all the
| work, the more you need the $100 and $200 plans.
|
| On the ChatGPT side, the $20/month subscription plan for
| GPT Codex feels extremely generous right now. I tried
| getting to the end of my window usage limit one day and
| could not.
|
| > so the "just another $20 SaaS" argument doesn't sound too
| good
|
| Having seen several company's SaaS bills, even $100/month
| or $200/month for developers would barely change anything.
| lokar wrote:
| Why do you think that? Lots of people on this thread
| saying that, but zero citations.
| latchkey wrote:
| Like Uber/Airbnb in early days, this is heavily subsidized.
| abraxas wrote:
| What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's
| productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable
| economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's
| Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these
| jobs that are surely bullshit but won't identify them
| concretely.
|
| Not recognizing the essential role of sales seemed to be a
| common mistake.
| bubblewand wrote:
| What counts as "concretely"? And I don't recall it
| calling sales bullshit.
|
| It identified _advertising_ as part of the category that
| it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being
| zero-sum--your competitor spends more, so you spent more
| to avoid falling behind, standard red queen's race.
| (Another in this category was the military, which is
| kinda the classic case of this--see also, the Missile
| Gap, the dreadnought arms race, et c.) But not sales,
| IIRC.
| thesmtsolver2 wrote:
| How does that make advertising a bullshit job? The only
| way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when
| humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition.
| bubblewand wrote:
| The parts that are only done to maintain status quo with
| a competitor aren't productive, and that's quite a bit of
| it. Two (or more) sides spend money, nothing changes. No
| good is produced. The whole exercise is basically an
| accident.
|
| Like when a competing country builds their tenth
| battleship, so you commission another one to match them.
| The world would have been _better_ if neither had been
| build. Money changed hands (one supposes) but the aim of
| the whole exercise had no effect. It was similar to
| paying people to dig holes a fill them back in again, to
| the tune of serious money. This was so utterly stupid and
| wasteful that there was a whole treaty about it, to try
| to prevent so many bullshit jobs from being created
| again.
|
| Or when Pepsi increases their ad spending in Brazil, so
| Coca Cola counters, and much of the money ends up
| accomplishing little except keeping things just how they
| were. That component or quality of the ad industry, the
| book claims, is bullshit, on account of not doing any
| good.
|
| The book treats of several ways in which a job might be
| bullshit, and just kinda mentions this one as an aside:
| the zero-sum activity. It mostly covers other sorts, but
| this is the closest I can recall it coming to declaring
| sales "bullshit" (the book rarely, bordering on never,
| paints even most of an entire industry or field as
| bullshit, and advertising isn't sales, but it's as close
| as it got, as I recall)
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| You're describing redundant effort from competition as
| waste. Is it a waste of effort when both people try to
| get the same job and only one succeeds?
|
| Is it a waste of effort when two companies try to make
| the best electric car?
|
| If it is wasteful what does aw orld look like where
| nobody ever spends resources on a goal which overlaps
| with someone else?
| bubblewand wrote:
| I think you've misunderstood what I've written here.
| Graeber's book might make it clearer for you, he probably
| did a better job of explaining it than I do. It's about
| spendy Red Queen's races, not just trying to make
| something better or trying to compete in general. The
| application of the idea to military spending is pretty
| much standard and uncontroversial stuff (hell, it was
| 100-plus years ago) while his observation of a similar
| effect in some notable component of ad spending is novel
| (at least, I'd not seen that connection made before).
| wiseowise wrote:
| Best product should be picked according to requirements
| by LLM without bullshit advertising.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| See what I mean? What you see as a bullshit job is just
| completely misunderstanding how human beings work.
|
| - Which products get included in the candidate list?
| Every product in existence which claims use? - how many
| results can it return? And in what order? - which
| attributes or description of the product is provided to
| the llm? Who provides it? - how are the claims in those
| descriptions verified? - what if my business believes the
| claims or description of our product is false? - how will
| the llm change its relative valuations based on demand?
| wiseowise wrote:
| I was replying to:
|
| > The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed
| is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all
| competition.
|
| I don't need advertisement to pick the best product for
| myself. I have a list of requirements that I need
| fulfilled - why do I need advertisement for it?
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| You just don't know what advertising is. How did you
| determine which products were available? How did you
| determine their attributes?
| simiones wrote:
| Countries can just ban advertising, and hopefully we will
| slowly move towards this. There are already quite a few
| specific bans - tobacco advertising is banned, gambling
| and sex product advertising is only allowed in certain
| specific situations, billboards and other forms of
| advertising on public spaces are often banned in large
| European cities, and so on.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| > Countries can just ban advertising
|
| No. They can ban particular modes. They can't stop people
| from using power and money to spread ideas.
|
| In the US hedge funds are banned from advertising and all
| they did is change their forms of presentation to things
| like presenting at conferences or on podcasts.
|
| If there was a socialist fantasy of a government review
| board for which all products were submitted before being
| listed in a government catalog. Then advertising would be
| lobbying and jockeying that review board to view your
| product in a particular way. Or merely to go through the
| process and ensure correct information was kept.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| > And I don't recall it calling sales bullshit.
|
| It says stuff like why can't a customer just order from
| an online form? The employee who helps them doesn't do
| anything except make them feel better. Must be a bullshit
| job. It talks specifically about my employees filling
| internal roles like this.
|
| > advertising
|
| I understand the arms race argument, but it's really hard
| to see what an alternative looks like. People can spend
| money to make you more aware of something. You can limit
| some modes, but that kind of just exists.
|
| I don't see how they aren't performing an important
| function.
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's an important function in a capitalist economy.
| Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life".
| That said, some advertising can be useful to inform
| consumers that a good exists, but convincing them they
| need it by synthesizing desires or fighting off
| competitors? Useless and socially detrimental.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life".
|
| There's nothing inherent to socialism that would preclude
| advertising. It's an economic system where the means of
| production (capital) is owned by the workers or the
| state. In market socialism you still have worker
| cooperatives competing on the market.
| Wilder7977 wrote:
| Plus, a core part of what qualifies as a bullshit job is
| that the person doing it feels that it's a bullshit job.
| The book is a half-serious anthropological essay, not an
| economic treaty.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| Yeah, guy states that in multiple places, and yet here we
| are, with an impression that most people referencing the
| book apparently didn't read it.
| bubblewand wrote:
| An odd tendency I've noticed about Graeber is that the
| more someone apparently dislikes his work, the more it
| will seem like they're talking about totally different
| books from the ones I read.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Because he uses private framings of concepts that are
| well understood. So if your first encounter is through
| Graeber you're going to have friction with every other
| understanding. If you've read much else you will say
| "hold on a minute, what's about ..."
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > If you've read much else
|
| If you've read much else you should be able to engage
| with text properly, and construct charitable
| interpretations of author's claims or arguments.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Please read my comments here engaging with the ideas in
| the text and specifically your concern that bullshit jobs
| are just jobs that don't feel important.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| You have written bunch of comments regarding advertising,
| single comment criticizing Graeber for using concepts in
| uncommon way, and one reply to my comment that doesn't
| really connect with the content of that comment.
|
| Did I miss something?
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| > And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these
| jobs that are surely bullshit but won't identify them
| concretely.
|
| See what I mean? We push on where these fake jobs are and
| you fallback to a subjective internal definition we can't
| inspect.
|
| And now let me remind you of the context. If the real
| definition of bullshit isn't economic slack, but internal
| dissatisfaction then this comment would be false:
|
| > What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's
| productivity but the work itself simply has no
| discernable economic value? This is argued at length in
| Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life"."
|
| Ever actually lived in anything approaching one? Yeah, if
| the stores are empty, it does not make sense to produce
| ads for stuff that isn't there ...
|
| ... but we still had ads on TV, surprisingly, even for
| stuff that was in shortage (= almost everything). Why?
| Because the Plan said so, and disrespecting the Plan too
| openly would stray dangerously close to the crime of
| sabotage.
|
| You have no idea.
| dns_snek wrote:
| None of that is inherent to socialism. There can be good
| and bad management, freedom and authoritarianism in any
| economic system.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Socialist economies larger than kibbutzes could only be
| created and sustained by totalitarian states. Socialism
| means _collective ownership of means of production_.
|
| And people won't give up their shops and fields and other
| means of production to the government voluntarily, at
| least not en masse. Thus they have to be forced at a
| gunpoint, and they always were.
|
| All the subsequent horror is downstream from that. This
| is what is inherent to building a socialist economy: mass
| expropriation of the former "exploitative class". The bad
| management of the stolen assets is just a consequence,
| because ideologically brainwashed partisans are usually
| bad at managing anything including themselves.
| dns_snek wrote:
| This is exactly what I meant, a centrally-planned economy
| where the state owns everything and people are forced to
| give everything up is just one terrible (Soviet) model,
| not some defining feature of socialism.
|
| Yugoslavia was extremely successful, with economic growth
| that matched or exceeded most capitalist European
| economies post-WW2. In some ways it wasn't as free as
| western societies are today but it definitely wasn't
| totalitarian, and in many ways it was more free - there's
| a philosophical question in there about what freedom
| really is. For example Yugoslavia made abortion a
| constitutionally protected right _in the 70s_.
|
| I don't want to debate the nuances of what's better now
| and what was better then as that's beside the point,
| which is that the idiosyncrasies of the terrible Soviet
| economy are not inherent to "socialism", just like the
| idiosyncrasies of the US economy aren't inherent to
| capitalism.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "just one terrible (Soviet) model"
|
| It is _the_ model, introduced basically everywhere where
| socialism was taken seriously. It is like saying that
| cars with four wheels are just one terrible model,
| because there were a few cars with three wheels.
|
| Yugoslavia was a mixed economy with a lot of economic
| power remaining in private hands. You cannot point at it
| and say "hey, successful socialism". Tito was a mortal
| enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced _neither-East-nor-
| West, but fairly friendly to the West_ policy already in
| 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of
| what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands.
|
| You also shouldn't discount the effect of sending young
| Yugoslavs to work in West Germany on the total balance
| sheet. A massive influx of remittances in Deutsche Mark
| was an important factor in Yugoslavia getting richer, and
| there was nothing socialist about it, it was an overflow
| of quick economic growth in a capitalist country.
| dns_snek wrote:
| You've created a tautology: Socialism is bad because bad
| models are socialism and better models are not-socialism.
|
| > You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful
| socialism"
|
| Yes I can because ideological purity doesn't exist in the
| real world. All of our countries are a mix of capitalist
| and socialist ideas yet we call them "capitalist" because
| that's the current predominant organization.
|
| > Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced
| neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West
| policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts
| were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine
| demands.
|
| You're making my point for me, Yugoslavia was completely
| different from USSR _yet still socialist_. Socialism is
| not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It 's a
| fairly simple core idea that has an infinite number of
| possible implementations, one of them being market
| socialism with worker cooperatives.
|
| Aside from that short period post-WW2, no socialist or
| communist nation has been allowed to exist without
| interference from the US through oppressive economic
| sanctions that would cripple and destroy any economy
| regardless of its economic system, but people love
| nothing more than to draw conclusions from these
| obviously-invalid "experiments".
|
| "You" (and I mean the collective you) are essentially
| hijacking the word "socialism" to simply mean "everything
| that was bad about the USSR". The system has been
| teaching and conditioning people to do that for decades,
| but we should really be more conscious and stop doing
| that.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| " no socialist or communist nation has been allowed to
| exist without interference from the US through oppressive
| economic sanctions that would cripple and destroy any
| economy regardless of its economic system"
|
| That is what COMECON was supposed to solve, but if you
| aggregate a heap of losers, you won't create a winning
| team.
|
| "Socialism is not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist
| doctrine. It's a fairly simple core idea that has an
| infinite number of possible implementations, one of them
| being market socialism with worker cooperatives."
|
| Of that infinite number, the violent Soviet-like version
| became the most widespread because it was the only one
| that was somewhat stable when implemented on a
| countrywide scale. That stability was bought by blood, of
| course.
|
| No one is sabotaging worker cooperatives in Europe and
| lefty parties used to given them extra support, but they
| just don't seem to be able to grow well. The largest one
| is located in Basque Country and it is debatable if its
| size is partly caused by Basque nationalism, which is not
| a very socialist idea. Aside from that one, worker
| cooperatives of more than 1000 people are rare birds.
|
| "The system has been teaching and conditioning people to
| do that for decades, but we should really be more
| conscious and stop doing that."
|
| No one in the former socialist bloc will experiment with
| that quagmire again. For some reason, socialism is a
| catnip of intellectuals who continue to defend it, but
| real-world workers dislike it and defect from various
| attempts to build it at every opportunity.
|
| We should stop trying to ride dead horses. Collective
| ownership of means of production on a macro scale is
| every bit as dead as divine right of kings to rule. There
| are still Curtis Yarvin types of intellectual who
| subscribe to the latter idea, but it is pining for the
| fjords. So is socialism.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > That is what COMECON was supposed to solve, but if you
| aggregate a heap of losers, you won't create a winning
| team.
|
| What kind of disingenuous argument is that? Existence of
| COMECON doesn't neutralize the enormous disadvantage and
| economic pressure of having sanctioned imposed on you.
|
| > Of that infinite number
|
| I'm glad we agree that Soviet communism is not synonymous
| with "socialism".
|
| > Aside from that one, worker cooperatives of more than
| 1000 people are rare birds.
|
| You're applying pointless capitalist metrics to non-
| capitalist organizations and moralizing about how they
| don't live up to them.
|
| > No one in the former socialist bloc will experiment
| with that quagmire again.
|
| You're experimenting with socialist policies and values
| right now, you just don't want to call it by that name
| because of your weird fixation. Do public healthcare,
| transport, education, social security benefits ring any
| bells?
|
| If you talked to people from ex-Yugoslavia, you'd know
| that many would be happy to return to that time.
|
| > We should stop trying to ride dead horses.
|
| We should stop declaring horses extinct when it's just
| your own horse that has died.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Have you participated in academia before?
| emp17344 wrote:
| The thesis of Bullshit Jobs is almost universally rejected
| by economists, FYI. There's not much of value to obtain
| from the book.
| gzread wrote:
| Why should I believe "economists" over "David Grabber"?
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| Not surprising, because thesis is not about economy.
|
| > There's not much of value to obtain from the book.
|
| Anthropological insight has much more value than anything
| economists may produce on economy.
| simonask wrote:
| As a layman, I have to say the collective credibility of
| economists does not inspire confidence.
| topocite wrote:
| I love economics but it is a field of study that we don't
| have the proper tools to properly study the subject yet.
|
| Modern economics is literally a bullshit job generating
| process or complex system.
| imtringued wrote:
| What's particularly ironic is that economists are
| redundant from a mainstream economics perspective. They'd
| be the first job to cut.
| bubblewand wrote:
| ... what's the thesis?
| hattmall wrote:
| I find that highly unlikely, coding is the AIs best value
| use case by far. Right now office workers see marginal
| benefits but it's not like it's an order of magnitude
| difference. AI drafts an email, you have to check and edit
| it, then send it. In many cases it's a toss up if that
| actually saved time, and then if it did, it's not like the
| pace of work is break neck anyway, so the benefit is some
| office workers have a bit more idle time at the desk
| because you always tap some wall that's out of your
| control. Maybe AI saves you a Google search or a doc lookup
| here and there. You still need to check everything and it
| can cause mistakes that take longer too. Here's an example
| from today.
|
| Assistant is dispatching a courier to get medical records.
| AI auto completes to include the address. Normally they
| wouldn't put the address, the courier knows who we work
| with, but AI added it so why not. Except it's the wrong
| address because it's for a different doctor with the same
| name. At least they knew to verify it, but still mistakes
| like this happening at scale is making the other time
| savings pretty close to a wash.
| nradov wrote:
| LLMs might not save _time_ but they certainly increase
| _quality_ for at least some office work. I frequently use
| it to check my work before sending to colleagues or
| customers and it occasionally catches gaps or errors in
| my writing.
| toraway wrote:
| But that idealized example could also be offset by
| another employee who doubles their own output by churning
| out lower-quality unreviewed workslop all day without
| checking anything, while wasting other people's time.
| sunrunner wrote:
| Something I call the 'Generate First, Review Never'
| approach, seemingly favoured by my colleagues, and which
| has the magical quality of increasing the overall amount
| of work done through an increased amount of time taken by
| N receivers of low-quality document having to review,
| understand and fact check said document.
|
| See also: AI-Generated "Workslop" Is Destroying
| Productivity [1]
|
| [1] https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-
| destroying-...
| bartread wrote:
| Yeah, but that's no different from any other aspect of
| office work, and more conventional forms of automation.
| Gains by one person are often offset to some extent by
| the laziness, inattentiveness, or ineptitude of others.
|
| What AI has done is accelerate and magnify both the
| positives and the negatives.
| sanex wrote:
| Not all code generates economic value. See slacks, jiras,
| etc constant ui updates.
| fakedang wrote:
| That makes it a perfect use case for AI, since now you
| don't need a dev for that. Any devs doing that would,
| imo, be effectively performing one of David Graeber's
| bullshit jobs.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| High quality code that does exactly what it needs to do
| and well and that makes various actors and organizations
| far more efficient at their jobs... but their jobs are of
| negative economic value overall.
| majormajor wrote:
| Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it has
| to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite, it
| has to meet the user's requests.
|
| There are a lot of white-collar tasks that have far lower
| quality and correctness bars. "Researching" by plugging
| things into google. Writing reports summarizing how a
| trend that an exec saw a report on can be applied to the
| company. Generating new values to share at a company all-
| hands.
|
| Tons of these that never touch the "real world." Your
| assistant story is like a coding task - maybe someone ran
| some tests, maybe they didn't, but it was verifiable. No
| shortage of "the tests passed, but they weren't the right
| test, this broke some customers and had to be fixed by
| hand" coding stories out there like it. There are pages
| and pages of _unverifiable_ bullshit that people are
| sleepwalking through, too, though.
|
| Nobody already knows if those things helped or hurt, so
| nobody will ever even notice a hallucination.
|
| But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying
| really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's
| special and AI won't work well for them. The "management
| says do more, workers figure out ways to be lazier" see-
| saw is ancient, but this could skew far towards
| "management demands more from fewer people" spectrum for
| a while.
| t43562 wrote:
| Code may have to compile but that's a lowish bar and
| since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that
| they're going to pass.
|
| In all areas where there's less easy ways to judge output
| there is going to be correspondingly more value to
| getting "good" people. Some AI that can produce readable
| reports isn't "good" - what matters is the quality of the
| work and the insight put into it which can only be
| ensured by looking at the workers reputation and past
| history.
| naasking wrote:
| > since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that
| they're going to pass
|
| That's not obvious at all if the AI writing the tests is
| different than the AI writing the code being tested. Put
| into an adversarial and critical mode, the same model
| outputs very different results.
| disiplus wrote:
| Even if its a different session it can be enough. But
| that said i had times where it rewrote tests "because my
| implementation was now different so the tests needed to
| be updated" so you have to prompt even that to tell it to
| not touch the tests.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| and then verify that it obeyed the prompt!
|
| Someone needs to build an agentic tool that does strict,
| enforced TDD.
| t43562 wrote:
| IMO the reason neither of them can really write entirely
| trustworthy tests is that they don't have domain
| knowledge so they write the test based on what the code
| does plus what they extract from some prompts rather than
| based on some abstract understanding of what it should do
| given that it's being used e.g. in a nuclear power
| station or for promoting cat videos or in a hospital or
| whatever.
|
| Obviously this is only partially true but it's true
| enough.
|
| It takes humans quite a long time to learn the external
| context that lets them write good tests IMO. We have
| trouble feeding enough context into AIs to give them
| equal ability. One is often talking about companies where
| nobody bothers to write down more than 1/20th of what is
| needed to be an effective developer. So you go to some
| place and 5 years later you might be lucky to know 80% of
| the context in your limited area after 100s of meetings
| and talking to people and handling customer complaints
| etc.
| naasking wrote:
| Yes, some kind of spec is always needed, and if the human
| programmer only has the spec in their head, then that's
| going to be a problem, but it's a problem for teams of
| humans as well.
| nthj wrote:
| We've had the sycophant problem for as long as people
| have held power over other people, and the answer has
| always been "put 3-5 workers in a room and make them
| compete for the illusion of favor."
|
| I have been doing this with coding agents across LLM
| providers for a while now, with very successful results.
| Grok seems particularly happy to tell Anthropic where
| it's cutting corners, but I get great insights from O3
| and Gemini too.
| pydry wrote:
| >Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it
| has to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite,
| it has to meet the user's requests.
|
| Except the test suite isnt just something that appears
| and the bugs dont necessarily get covered by the test
| suite.
|
| The bugginess of a lot of the software i use has spiked
| in a very noticeable way, probably due to this.
|
| >But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying
| really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's
| special and AI won't work well for them.
|
| No, not everyone. Half of them are trying to lean in to
| the changing social reality.
|
| The gaslighting from the executive side, on the other
| hand, is nearly constant.
| vrighter wrote:
| Code is much much harder to check for errors than an
| email.
|
| Consider, for example, the following python code:
| x = (5)
|
| vs x = (5,)
|
| One is a literal 5, and the other is a single element
| tuple containing the number 5. But more importantly, both
| are valid code.
|
| Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma among
| the 20kloc of code one so proudly claims AI helped them
| "write", especially if it's in a cold path. You won't see
| it.
| lock1 wrote:
| > Code is much much harder to check for errors than an
| email.
|
| Disagree.
|
| Even though performing checks on dynamic PLs is much
| harder than on static ones, PLs are designed to be non-
| ambiguous. There should be exactly 1 interpretation for
| any syntactically valid expression. Your example will
| unambiguously resolve to an error in a standard-
| conforming Python interpreter.
|
| On the other hand, natural languages are not restricted
| by ambiguity. That's why something like Poe's law exists.
| There's simply no way to resolve the ambiguity by just
| staring at the words themselves, you need additional
| information to know the author's intent.
|
| In other words, an "English interpreter" cannot exist.
| Remove the ambiguities, you get "interpreter" and you'll
| end up with non-ambiguous, Python-COBOL-like languages.
|
| With that said, I agree with your point that blindly
| accepting 20kloc is certainly not a good idea.
| vrighter wrote:
| Tell me you've never written any python without telling
| me you've never written any python...
|
| Those are both syntactically valid lines of code. (it's
| actually one of python's many warts). They are not
| ambiguous in any way. one is a number, the other is a
| tuple. They return something of a completely different
| type.
|
| My example will unambiguously NOT give an error because
| they _are_ standard conforming. Which you would have
| noticed had you actually took 5 seconds to try typing
| them in the repl.
| lock1 wrote:
| > Those are both syntactically valid lines of code. (it's
| actually one of python's many warts). They are not
| ambiguous in any way. one is a number, the other is a
| tuple. They return something of a completely different
| type.
|
| You just demonstrated how hard it is to "check" an email
| or text message by missing the point of my reply.
| > "Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma
| among the 20kloc of code"
|
| I assume your previous comment tries to bring up Python's
| dynamic typing & late binding nature and use it as an
| example of how it can be problematic when someone tries
| to blindly merge 20kloc LLM-generated Python code.
|
| My reply, "Your example will unambiguously resolve to an
| error in a standard-conforming Python interpreter." tried
| to respond to the possibility of such an issue. Even
| though it's probably not the program behavior you want,
| Python, being a programming language, will be 100%
| guaranteed to interpret it unambiguously.
|
| I admit, I should have phrased it a bit more
| unambiguously than leaving it like that.
|
| Even if it's hard, you can try running a type checker to
| statically catch such problems. Even if it's not possible
| in cases of heavy usage of Python's dynamic typing
| feature, you can just run it and check the behavior at
| runtime. It might be hard to check, but not impossible.
|
| On the other hand, it's impossible to perform a perfectly
| consistent "check" on this reply or an email written in a
| natural language, the person reading it might interpret
| the message in a completely different way.
| bartread wrote:
| In my experience the example you give here is exactly the
| kind of problem that AI powered code reviews are really
| good at spotting, and especially amongst codebases with
| tens of thousands of lines of code in them where a human
| being might well get scrolling blindness when quickly
| moving around them to work.
| vrighter wrote:
| The AI is the one which made the mistake in the first
| place. Why would you assume it's guaranteed to find it?
|
| The few times I've tried giving LLMs a shot I've had them
| warning me of not putting some validations in, when that
| exact validation was exactly 1 line below where they
| stopped looking.
|
| And even if it did pass an AI code review, that's
| meaningless anyway. It still needs to be reviewed by an
| actual human before putting it into production. And that
| person would still get scrolling blindness whether or not
| the ai "reviewer" actually detected the error or not.
| bartread wrote:
| > The AI is the one which made the mistake in the first
| place. Why would you assume it's guaranteed to find it?
|
| I _didn 't_ say they were guaranteed to find it: I said
| they were really good at finding these sorts of errors.
| Not perfect: just really good. I also _didn 't_ make any
| assumption: I said _in my experience_ , by which I mean
| the code you shared is similar to a portion of the errors
| that I've seen LLMs find.
|
| Which LLMs have you used for code generation?
|
| I mostly use claude-opus-4-6 at the moment for
| development, and have had mostly good experiences. This
| is not to say it never gets anything wrong, but I'm
| definitely more productive with it than without it. On
| GitHub I've been using Copilot for more limited tasks as
| an agent: I find it's decent at code review, but more
| variable at fixing problems it finds, and so I quite
| often opt for manual fixes.
|
| And then the other question is, how do you use them? I
| tend to keep them on quite a short leash, so I don't give
| them huge tasks, and on those occasions where I am doing
| something larger or more complex, I tend to write out
| quite a detailed and prescriptive prompt (which might
| take 15 minutes to do, but then it'll go and spend 10
| minutes to generate code that might have taken me several
| hours to write "the old way").
| protocolture wrote:
| Would hardly drag Graeber into this, theres a laundry list
| of issues with his research.
|
| Most "Bullshit Jobs" can already be automated, but can isnt
| always should or will. Graeber is a capex thinker in an
| opex world.
| jama211 wrote:
| I think it's more likely that the same amount of work is
| getting done, just it's far less taxing. And that averages
| are funny things, for developers it's undeniably a huge
| boost, but for others it's creating friction.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but the work itself simply has no discernable economic
| value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs
| essay and book.
|
| That book was very different than what I expected from all
| of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was
| really thin and did't actually support the idea that the
| jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a
| hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized,
| everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly
| ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs
| that only exist to counter other imperfect things in
| society.
|
| He couldn't even keep that straight, though. There's a part
| where he argues that open source work is valuable but
| corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't
| socially productive because they're connecting disparate
| things together with glue code? It didn't make sense and
| you could see that he didn't really understand software,
| other than how he imagined it fitting into his idealized
| world where everything anarchist and open source is good
| and everything corporate and capitalist is bad. Once you
| see how little he understands about a topic you're familiar
| with, it's hard to unsee it in his discussions of
| everything else.
|
| That said, he still wasn't arguing that the work didn't
| generate economic value. Jobs that don't provide value for
| a company are cut, eventually. They exist because the
| company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it
| costs to employ those people. The "bullshit jobs" idea was
| more about feelings and notions of societal impact than
| economic value.
| ccortes wrote:
| > It was comparing to a hypothetical world where
| everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly
| behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore
| we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to
| counter other imperfect things in society.
|
| > Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut,
| eventually.
|
| Uhm, seems like Greaber is not the only one drawing
| conclusions from a hypothetical perfect world
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Greaber's best book is his ethnography "Lost People" and
| it's one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never
| intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Honestly this is how every critique of Graeber goes in my
| experience: As soon as his works are discussed beyond
| surface level, the goalposts start zooming around so fast
| that nothing productive can be discussed.
|
| I tried to respond to the specific conversation about
| Bullshit Jobs above. In my experience, the way this book
| is brought up so frequently in online conversations is
| used as a prop for whatever the commenter wants it to
| mean, not what the book actually says.
|
| I think Graeber did a fantastic job of picking "bullshit
| jobs" as a topic because it sounds like something that
| everyone implicitly understands, but how it's used in
| conversation and how Graeber actually wrote about the
| topic are basically two different things
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Well said - thanks for the reply.
| mikem170 wrote:
| Hmmm, I got something different. I thought that Bullshit
| Jobs was based on people who self reported that their
| jobs were pointless. He detailed these types of jobs, the
| negative psychological impact this can have on employees,
| and the kicker was that these jobs don't make sense
| economically, the bureaucratization of the health care
| and education sectors for example, in contrast so many
| other professions that actually are useful. Other
| examples were status-symbol employees, sycophants, duct-
| tapers, etc.
|
| I thought he made a case for both societal and economic
| impact.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > They exist because the company gets more benefit out of
| the job existing than it costs to employ those people.
|
| Not necessarily, I've seen a lot of jobs that were just
| flying under the radar. Sort of like a cockroach that
| skitters when light is on but roams freely in the dark.
| WJW wrote:
| It's just a self-built UBI.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > There's a part where he argues that open source work is
| valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit
| work that isn't socially productive because they're
| connecting disparate things together with glue code?
|
| I don't know if maybe he wasn't explaining it well
| enough, but that kind of reasoning makes some sense.
|
| A lot of code is written because you want the output from
| Foo to be the input to Bar and then you need some glue to
| put them together. This is pretty common when Foo and Bar
| are made by different people. With open source, someone
| writes the glue code, publishes it, and then nobody else
| has to write it because they just use what's published.
|
| In corporate bureaucracies, Company A writes the glue
| code but then doesn't publish it, so Company B which has
| the same problem has to write it again, but they don't
| publish it either. A hundred companies are then doing the
| work that only really needed to be done once, which makes
| for 100 times as much work, a 1% efficiency rate and 99
| bullshit jobs.
| EliRivers wrote:
| "They exist because the company gets more benefit out of
| the job existing than it costs to employ those people."
|
| Sure, but there's no such thing as "the company." That's
| shorthand - a convenient metaphor for a particular bunch
| of people doing some things. So those jobs can exist if
| some people - even one person - gets more benefit out of
| the job existing than it costs that person to employ
| them. For example, a senior manager padding his
| department with non-jobs to increase headcount, because
| it gives him increased prestige and power, and the cost
| to him of employing that person is zero. Will those jobs
| get cut "eventually"? Maybe, but I've seen them go on for
| decades.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and
| notions of societal impact than economic value.
|
| But he states that expressis verbis, so your discovery is
| not that spectacular.
|
| Although he gives examples of jobs, or some aspects of
| jobs, that _don 't help to deliver what specific
| institutions aim to deliver_. Example would be
| bureaucratization of academia.
| nradov wrote:
| Bullshit Jobs is one of those "just so" stories that seems
| truthy but doesn't stand up to any critical evaluation.
| Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off
| unproductive workers. While in large enterprises there is
| some level of empire building where managers hire more
| workers than necessary just to inflate their own
| importance, in the long run those businesses fall to leaner
| competitors.
| ccortes wrote:
| > in the long run those businesses fall to leaner
| competitors
|
| This is not true at all. You can find plenty of examples
| going either way but it's far from truth from being a
| universal reality
| busterarm wrote:
| It's only after decades of experience and hindsight that
| you realize that a lot of the important work we spend our
| time on has extremely limited long-term value.
|
| Maybe you're lucky enough to be doing cutting edge
| research or do something that really seriously impacts
| human beings, but I've done plenty of "mission critical
| right fucking now" work that a week from now (or even
| hours from now, when I worked for a content marketing
| business) is beyond irrelevant. It's an amazing thing
| watching marketing types set money on fire burning super
| expensive developer time (but salaried, so they discount
| the cost to zero) just to make their campaigns like 2-3%
| more efficient.
|
| I've intentionally sat on plenty of projects that
| somebody was pushing really hard for because they thought
| it was the absolute right necessary thing at the time and
| the stakeholder realized was pointless/worthless after a
| good long shit and shower. This one move has saved
| literally man years of work to be done and IMO is the #1
| most important skill people need to learn ("when to just
| do nothing").
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off
| unproductive workers.
|
| Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off anyone,
| especially for cost saving. It is interesting how you
| think that people are laid off because they're
| unproductive.
| fdefitte wrote:
| This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster
| at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved
| nothing. The real gains from AI show up when it changes
| what work gets done, not just how fast existing work
| happens. Most companies are still in the "do the same stuff
| but with AI" phase.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Not a phase, I'd argue that 90% of modern jobs are
| bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Your claim and the claims that all white collar jobs are
| going to disappear in 12-18 months cannot both be true. I
| guess we will see.
| beeflet wrote:
| I think they can both be true. Perhaps the innovation of
| AI is not that it automates important work, but because
| it forces people to question if the work has already been
| automated or is even necessary.
| onion2k wrote:
| It's possible to automate the pointless stuff without
| realising it's pointless.
| therein wrote:
| Made me think of this.
|
| https://imgur.com/T4DAGG8
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Imgur is banned on UK.
|
| I recommend using https://catbox.moe/ which can even use
| remote-links so pasting the imgur link in it can also
| work.
|
| https://files.catbox.moe/4dhvok.jpeg
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > Imgur is banned on UK.
|
| It's the other way round, Imgur banned UK access so that
| they wouldn't have to worry about the UK's stupid,
| authoritarian Online "Safety" Act.
| snickerer wrote:
| The question is: did the fake numbers make any
| difference? Were the management decisions based on them
| better or worse?
| zzrrt wrote:
| Well, if a lot of it is bullshit that can also be done
| more efficiently with AI, then 99% of white collar roles
| could be eliminated by the 1% using AI, and essentially
| both were very close to true.
| Retric wrote:
| Jobs you don't notice or understand often look pointless.
| HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you'd notice if
| the company stopped having health insurance or sending
| your taxes to the IRS etc etc.
|
| In the end when jobs are done right they seem to
| disappear. We notice crappy software or a poorly done
| HVAC system not clean carpets.
| jdasdf wrote:
| > HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you'd notice
| if the company stopped having health insurance or sending
| your taxes to the IRS etc etc.
|
| Interesting on how the very example you give for "oh this
| job isn't really bullshit" ultimately ends up being
| useless for the business itself, and exists only as a
| result of regulation.
|
| No, health insurance being provided by employers, or tax
| withholding aren't useful things for anyone, except for
| the state who now offloads its costs onto private
| businesses.
| samultio wrote:
| Only result of regulation, that statement invalidates
| probably a majority of modern work, and like every legal
| professional.
| jdasdf wrote:
| i agree.
| nkrisc wrote:
| This just highlights the absurdity of having your
| employer responsible for your health insurance and
| managing your taxes for you.
|
| These should be handled by the government, equally for
| all.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > These should be handled by the government, equally for
| all.
|
| This is certainly possible, but it's called communism.
| nkrisc wrote:
| No. Private insurance could still be an option.
| Retric wrote:
| Moving some function to the government doesn't eliminate
| the need for it. Something would still need to tell the
| government what you're paid unless you're advocating for
| anarchy or communism.
|
| Also, part of that etc is doing payroll so there's some
| reason for you to show up at work every day.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you'd notice
| if the company stopped having health insurance or sending
| your taxes to the IRS etc etc.
|
| That's not why companies have HR; sure, it's a nice
| _side-effect_ , but it's not the reason for HR.
|
| HR exists primarily to protect the company from the
| employees.
| fastasucan wrote:
| I emailed HR and asked what to do to best ask for leave
| in case of a future event (serious illness with a family
| member, I just wanted to be one step ahead and make sure
| I did everything right even in the state of grief).
|
| HR wouldn't tell me what would be the best and most
| correct course of action, the only thing that they said
| was that it was my responsibility as an employee to find
| out. Well, what did they think I was doing.
| Retric wrote:
| Side effect seems like an odd way to describe what's
| going on when these functions are required for a company
| to operate.
|
| Companies don't survive if nobody is paid to show up
| every day or if they keep paying every single ex employee
| that ever worked for the company. It's harder to attract
| new employees if you don't offer competitive salaries or
| benefits. HR is a tiny part of most companies, but
| without that work being done the company would absolutely
| fail.
|
| Similarly a specific ratio of flight attendants to
| passengers are required by the FAA in case of an
| emergency. Airlines use them for other stuff but they
| wouldn't have nearly as many if the job was just passing
| out food.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Not a phase, I'd argue that 90% of modern jobs are
| bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.
|
| Cattle? You actually think that about other people?
| wao0uuno wrote:
| I think what he meant was that the top 1% ruling class is
| keeping those bullshit jobs around to keep the poor
| people (their cattle) occupied so they won't have time
| and energy to think and revolt.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or for everyone in chain of command to have people to
| rule over. A common want for many in leadership
| positions. At least two ways, you want to control people.
| And your value to your peers is the amount of people or
| resources you control.
| watwut wrote:
| It is bullshit argunent. The 1% is seeking to fire as
| many people as possible and with pleasure.
|
| We dont matter to them, one was or the other. They dont
| see us as a threat, just as bugs.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| It seems more like they're implying it's those at the top
| think that about other people.
| brazzy wrote:
| Nope, the entire statement betrays a combination of
| ignorance and arrogance that is best explained by them
| seeing most everyone else as beneath them.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Hard miss. GP is right, and your assumptions say more
| about you than about me. :^)
| brazzy wrote:
| My observation is about what your assumptions say about
| you, and that's not a miss.
|
| Nobody really understands a job they haven't done
| themselves, and "arguing" that 90% of them are "bullshit"
| has no other possible explanation than a combination of
| ignorance (you don't understand the jobs well enough to
| judge whether they are useful) and arrogance (you think
| you can make that judgement better than the 90% of people
| doing those jobs).
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Nobody really understands a job they haven't done
| themselves, and "arguing" that 90% of them are "bullshit"
| has no other possible explanation than a combination of
| ignorance (you don't understand the jobs well enough to
| judge whether they are useful) and arrogance (you think
| you can make that judgement better than the 90% of people
| doing those jobs).
|
| That's fine if you disagree, I'm not aiming to be the
| authority on bullshit jobs.
|
| This doesn't change the fact that you and I are cattle
| for corpo/neo-feudals.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Hard miss. GP is right, and your assumptions say more
| about you than about me. :^)
|
| No. If that's the case, your statement was unclear: since
| you didn't specify _who else_ thinks those people were
| cattle, the implication is that _you_ think it.
| _Especially_ since you prefaced your statement with "I'd
| argue."
|
| And the interpretation...
|
| > It seems more like they're implying it's those at the
| top think that about other people.
|
| ...beggars belief. What indication has "the top" given to
| show they have that kind of foresight and control? The
| closest is the AI-bros advocacy of UBI, which (for the
| record) has gone nowhere.
|
| I was half a mind to point that out in my original
| comment, but didn't get around to it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > No. If that's the case, your statement was unclear:
| since you didn't specify who else thinks those people
| were cattle, the implication is that you think it.
| Especially since you prefaced your statement with "I'd
| argue."
|
| I never said it was clear? Two commenters got it right,
| two wrong, so it wasn't THAT unobvious.
|
| > What indication has "the top" given to show they have
| that kind of foresight and control? The closest is the
| AI-bros advocacy of UBI, which (for the record) has gone
| nowhere.
|
| Tech bros selling "no more software engineers" to cost
| optimizers, dictatorships in US, Russia, China pressing
| with their heels on our freedoms, Europe cracking down on
| encryption, Dutch trying to tax unrealized (!) gains, do
| I really need to continue?
| palmotea wrote:
| >> What indication has "the top" given to show they have
| that kind of foresight and control? The closest is the
| AI-bros advocacy of UBI, which (for the record) has gone
| nowhere.
|
| > Tech bros selling "no more software engineers" to cost
| optimizers, dictatorships in US, Russia, China pressing
| with their heels on our freedoms, Europe cracking down on
| encryption, Dutch trying to tax unrealized (!) gains, do
| I really need to continue?
|
| All those things are non sequiturs, though, some
| _directly contradicting the statement I was responding
| to, as you claim it should be interpreted_. If "90% of
| modern jobs are bullshit _to keep cattle occupied_ " that
| implies "the top" deliberately engineered (or at least
| maintains) an economy where 90% jobs are bullshit
| (unnecessary). But that's obviously not the case, as the
| priority of "the top" is to gather more money to
| themselves in the short to medium term, and they very
| frequently cut jobs to accomplish that. "Tech bros
| selling "no more software engineers" to cost optimizers,"
| is a new iteration of that. If "the top" was really
| trying "to keep cattle occupied" they wouldn't be cutting
| jobs left and right.
|
| We don't live in a command economy, there's no group of
| people with an incentive to create "bullshit" jobs "to
| keep cattle occupied."
| nkrisc wrote:
| You know, that would almost be fine if everyone could
| afford a home and food and some pleasures.
| injidup wrote:
| Maybe the take is that those reports that people took a
| day to write were read by nobody in the first place and
| now those reports are being written faster and more of
| them are being produced but still nobody reads them. Thus
| productivity doesn't change. The solution is to get rid
| of all the people who write and process reports and
| empower the people who actually produce stuff to do it
| better.
| beAbU wrote:
| The managerial class are like cats and closed doors.
|
| Ofcourse they don't read the reports, who has time to
| read it? But don't even think about not sending the
| report, they like to have the _option_ of reading it if
| they choose to do so.
|
| A closed door removes agency from a cat, an absent report
| removes agency from a manager.
| laserlight wrote:
| > Thus productivity doesn't change.
|
| Indeed, productivity has decreased, because now there's
| more output that is waste and you are paying to generate
| that excess waste.
| patrickk wrote:
| > The solution is to get rid of all the people who write
| and process reports and empower the people who actually
| produce stuff to do it better.
|
| That's the solution if you're the business owner.
|
| That's _definitely_ not the solution if you're a manager
| in charge of this useless activity, in fact, you should
| increase the amount of reports being written as much as
| humanly possible. The more underlings under you= more
| power and prestige.
|
| This is the principal-agent problem writ large. As the
| comment mentioned above, also see Graeber's Bullshit Jobs
| essay and book.
| Stromgren wrote:
| And if you make someone 3x faster at producing a report
| that 100 people has to read, but it now takes 10% longer
| to read and understand, you've lost overall value.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| You are forgetting that they are now going to use AI to
| summarize it back.
| kombookcha wrote:
| This is one of my major concerns about people trying to
| use these tools for 'efficiency'. The only plausible
| value in somebody writing a huge report and somebody else
| reading it is information transfer. LLM's are notoriously
| bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably
| high, and you will be worse off reading the summary than
| if you skimmed the first and last pages. In fact, you
| will be worse off than if you did nothing at all.
|
| Using AI to output noise and learn nothing at breakneck
| speeds is worse than simply looking out the window,
| because you now have a false sense of security about your
| understanding of the material.
|
| Relatedly, I think people get the sense that 'getting
| better at prompting' is purely a one-way issue of
| training the robot to give better outputs. But you are
| also training yourself to only ask the sorts of questions
| that it can answer well. Those questions that it will no
| longer occur to you to ask (not just of the robot, but of
| yourself) might be the most pertinent ones!
| birdsongs wrote:
| > LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal
| ratio is unacceptably high
|
| I could go either way on the future of this, but if you
| take the argument that we're still early days, this may
| not hold. They're notoriously bad at this _so far_.
|
| We could still be in the PC DOS 3.X era in this timeline.
| Wait until we hit the Windows 3.1, or 95 equivalent.
| Personally, I have seen shocking improvements in the past
| 3 months with the latest models.
| mcny wrote:
| I would like to see the day when the context size is in
| gigabytes or tens of billions of tokens, not RAG or
| whatever, actual context.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I would like to see the day when the context size is in
| gigabytes or tens of billions of tokens, not RAG or
| whatever, actual context.
|
| Might not make a difference. I believe we are already at
| the point of negative returns - doubling context from
| 800k tokens to 1600k tokens loses a larger percentage of
| context than halving it from 800k tokens to 400k tokens.
| riskable wrote:
| Context size helps _some_ things but generally speaking,
| it just slows everything down. Instead of huge contexts,
| what we need is _actual reasoning_.
|
| I predict that in the next two to five years we're going
| to see a breakthrough in AI that _doesn 't_ involve LLMs
| but makes them 10x more effective at reasoning and
| completely eliminates the hallucination problem.
|
| We currently have "high thinking" models that double and
| triple-check their own output and we call that
| "reasoning" but that's not really what it's doing. It's
| just passing its own output through itself a few times
| and hoping that it catches mistakes. It _kind of_ works,
| but it 's very slow and takes a lot more resources.
|
| What we need instead is a _reasoning model_ that can be
| called upon to perform logic-based tests on LLM output or
| even better, _before_ the output is generated (if that 's
| even possible--not sure if it is).
|
| My guess is that it'll end up something like a "logic-
| trained" model instead of a "shitloads of raw data
| trained" model. Imagine a couple terabytes of truth
| statements like, "rabbits are mammals" and "mammals have
| mammary glands." Then, whenever the LLM wants to generate
| output suggesting someone put rocks on pizza, it fails
| the internal truth check, "rocks are not edible by
| humans" or even better, "rocks are not suitable as a
| pizza topping" which it had placed into the training data
| set as a result of regression testing.
|
| Over time, such a "logic model" would grow and grow--just
| like a human mind--until it did a pretty good job at
| reasoning.
| 2snakes wrote:
| Wasn't this idea the basic premise of coq? Why didn't it
| work?
| kombookcha wrote:
| Personally I strongly doubt it. Since the nature of LLM's
| does not allow them semantic content or context, I
| believe it is inherently a tool unsuited for this task.
| As far as I can tell, it's a limitation of the technology
| itself, not of the amount of power behind it.
|
| Either way, being able to generate or compress loads of
| text very quickly with no understanding of the contents
| simply is not the bottleneck of information transfer
| between human beings.
| birdsongs wrote:
| Yeah, definitely more skeptical for communication
| pipelines.
|
| But for coding, the latest models are able to read my
| codebase for context, understand my question, and
| implement a solution with nuance, using existing
| structures and paradigms. It hasn't missed since January.
|
| One of them even said: "As an embedded engineer, you will
| appreciate that ...". I had never told it that was my
| title, it is nowhere in my soul.md or codebase. It just
| inferred that _I_ , the user, was one. Based on the arm
| toolchain and code.
|
| It was a bit creepy, tbh. They can definitely infer
| context to some degree.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > We could still be in the PC DOS 3.X era in this
| timeline. Wait until we hit the Windows 3.1, or 95
| equivalent. Personally, I have seen shocking improvements
| in the past 3 months with the latest models.
|
| While we're speculating, here's mine: we're in the
| Windows 7 phase of AI.
|
| IOW, everything from this point on might be better tech,
| but is going to be worse in practice.
| butlike wrote:
| First impressions are everything. It's going to be hard
| to claw back good will without a complete branding
| change. But... where do you go from 'AI'???
| kykeonaut wrote:
| > Those questions that it will no longer occur to you to
| ask (not just of the robot, but of yourself) might be the
| most pertinent ones!
|
| That is true, but then again also with google. You could
| see why some people want to go back to the "read the
| book" era where you didn't have google to query anything
| and had to make the real questions.
| notahacker wrote:
| Yep. The other way it can have net no impact is if it
| saves thousand of hours of report drafting and reading
| but misses the one salient fact buried in the
| observations that could actually save the company money.
| Whilst completely nailing the fluff.
| crabmusket wrote:
| It reminds me of that Apple ad where a guy just rocks up
| to a meeting completely unprepared and spits out an AI
| summary to all his coworkers. Great job Apple, thanks for
| proving Graeber right all along.
| micik wrote:
| > Using AI to output noise and learn nothing at breakneck
| speeds is worse than simply looking out the window,
| because you now have a false sense of security about your
| understanding of the material.
|
| i may put this into my email signature with your
| permission, this is a whip-smart sentence.
|
| and it is true. i used AI to "curate information" for me
| when i was heads-down deep in learning mode, about sound
| and music.
|
| there was enough all-important info being omitted, i soon
| realized i was developing a textbook case of superficial,
| incomplete knowledge.
|
| i stopped using AI and did it all over again through
| books and learning by doing. in retrospect, i'm glad to
| have had that experience because it taught me something
| about knowledge and learning.
|
| mostly that something boils down to RTFM. a good manual
| or technical book written by an expert doesn't have a lot
| of fluff. what exactly are you expecting the AI to do?
| zip the rar file? it will do something, it might look
| great, lossless compression it will be not.
|
| P.S. not a prompt skill issue. i was up to date on
| cutting edge prompting techniques and using multiple
| frontier models. i was developing an app using local
| models and audio analysis AI-powered libraries. in other
| words i was up to my neck immersed in AI.
|
| after i grokked as much as i could, given my limited math
| knowledge, of the underlying tech from reading the
| theory, i realized the skill issue invectives don't hold
| water. if things break exactly in the way they're
| expected to break as per their design, it's a little too
| much on the nose. even appealing to your impostor
| syndrome won't work.
|
| P.P.S. it's interesting how a lot of the slogans of the
| AI party are weaponizing trauma triggers or appealing to
| character weaknesses.
|
| "hop on the train, commit fully, or you'll be left
| behind" > fear of abandonment trigger
|
| "pah, skill issue. my prompts on the other hand...i'm
| afraid i can't share them as this IP is making me
| millions of passive income as we speak (i know you won't
| probe further cause asking a person about their finances
| is impolite)" > imposter syndrome inducer par excellence,
| also FOMO -- thinking to yourself "how long can the gold
| rush last? this person is raking it in!! what am i doing?
| the miserable sod i am"
|
| 1. outlandish claims (Claude writes ALL the code) noone
| can seem to reproduce, and indeed everyone non-affiliated
| is having a very different experience
|
| 2. some of the darkest patterns you've seen in marketing
| are the key tenets of the gospel
|
| 3. it's probably a duck.
|
| i've been 100% clear on the grift since October '25.
| Steve Eisman of the "Big Short" was just hopping onto the
| hype train back then. i thought...oh. how much analysis
| does this guru of analysts really make? now Steve sings
| of AI panic and blood in the streets.
|
| these things really make you think, about what an economy
| even _is_. it sure doesn 't seem to have a lot to do with
| supply and demand, products and services, and all those
| archaisms.
| Dan_- wrote:
| > LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal
| ratio is unacceptably high...
|
| I keep seeing this statement in threads about AI, and
| maybe it's just from you, but high SNR is a good thing.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio
|
| I think the rest of your post is very valid. It's the
| mental equivalent of this article
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049088
| kombookcha wrote:
| Hah, you got me there! I'll try to keep the ratio flipped
| correctly next time ;)
|
| I read that article recently, so the similarities might
| not be entirely coincidental. 'JPEG of thought' is gonna
| stay in my vocabulary for a while.
| tremon wrote:
| Except they didn't say signal-to-noise, they said noise-
| to-signal. And if the NSR is unacceptably high, that
| means the SNR is unacceptably low.
|
| Two inverses do make a right, it seems.
| jorvi wrote:
| Hehe, yeah there's some terms that just are
| linguistically unintuitive.
|
| "Skill floor" is another one. People generally interpret
| that one as "must be at least this tall to ride", but it
| actually means "amount of effort that translates to
| result". Something that has a high skill floor (if you
| write "high floor of skill" it makes more sense) means
| that with very little input you can gain a lot of result.
| Whereas a low skill floor means something behaves more
| linearly, where very little input only gains very little
| result.
|
| Even though its just the antonym, "skill ceiling" is much
| more intuitive in that regard.
| Gracana wrote:
| Are you sure about skill floor? I've only ever heard it
| used to describe the skill required to get into
| something, and skill ceiling describes the highest level
| of mastery. I've never heard your interpretation, and it
| doesn't make sense to me.
| bavell wrote:
| I've also never heard that use of "skill floor" before.
| The "floor/ceiling" descriptors imply min/max
| constraints.
| JimboOmega wrote:
| One thing AI should eliminate is the "proof of work"
| reports. Sometimes the long report is not meant to be
| read, but used as proof somebody has thoroughly thought
| through various things (captured by, for instance,
| required sections).
|
| When AI is doing that, it loses all value as a proof of
| work (just as it does for a school report).
|
| My AI writes for your AI to read is low value. But there
| is probably still some value in "My AI takes these notes
| and makes them into a concise readable doc".
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| So what we now have is a very expensive and energy-
| intensive method for inflating data in a lossy manner.
| Incredible.
| amoss wrote:
| Remarkably it has only cost a few trillion dollars to get
| here!
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| don't forget the insane costs to stay here
| prmoustache wrote:
| This reminds me of that "telephone" kids game.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game
| mold_aid wrote:
| So a circular economy in which you _add_ mistakes
| harshreality wrote:
| An economy of the LLMs, by the LLMs, for the LLMs, shall
| not perish from the Earth.
| salawat wrote:
| Rather poignant actually. By replacing people with LLM's,
| you've just made the economy as a whole something which
| can be owned.
| forinti wrote:
| For all the technology we develop, we rarely invest in
| processes. Once in a blue moon some country decides to
| revamp its bureaucracy, when it should really be a
| continuous effort (in the private sector too).
|
| OTOH, what happens continuously is that technology is
| used to automate bureaucracy and even allows it to grow
| some complexity.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| See, this is an opportunity. Company provides AI tool,
| monitors for cases where AI output is being fed as AI
| input. In such cases, flag the entire process for
| elimination.
| seanhunter wrote:
| What happens if (and I suspect this to be increasingly
| the case now) you make someone 3x faster at producing a
| report that nobody reads _and_ those people now use LLMs
| to not read the report whereas they were not reading it
| in person before?
|
| Then everyone saves time, which they can spend producing
| more things which other people will not read and/or not
| reading the things that other people produce (using
| llms)?
|
| Productivity through the roof.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Now you know why GDP is higher than ever and people are
| poorer than ever.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Mmm I can't wait to get home and grill up some
| Productivity for dinner. We'll have so much Productivity
| and no jobs. Hopefully our billionaire overlords deign to
| feed us.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > Hopefully our billionaire overlords deign to feed us.
|
| Eat the Rich
| Lerc wrote:
| What a load of nonsense, they won't be producing a report
| in a third of the time only to have no-one read it.
| They'll spend the same amount of time and produce a
| report three times the length, which will then go unread.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And the fact that you can make it 3x faster substantially
| increases the chances that nobody will read it in the
| first place.
| amelius wrote:
| > The real gains from AI show up when it changes what
| work gets done, not just how fast existing work happens.
|
| Sadly AI is only capable of doing work that has already
| been done, thousands of times.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| Not necessarily. You could have 100 FTE on reports
| instead of 300 FTE in a large company like a bank. That
| means 200 people who'd normally go into reporting jobs
| over the next decade, will go into something else,
| producing something else ontop of the reports that
| continue to be produced. The sum of this is more
| production.
|
| Looking at job numbers that seems to be happening. A lot
| less employment needed, freeing up people to do other
| things.
| b40d-48b2-979e wrote:
| Looking at job numbers
|
| That is a wild take given the recession we're basically
| in from bad US policy like tariffs.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| Actually job numbers are depressed (hiring recession) and
| GDP numbers are still way up, both precisely due to the
| AI investment. More output with fewer people.
|
| Wild take to cite a recession when last quarter growth
| was 4.4%.
| b40d-48b2-979e wrote:
| "The economy" is not GDP.
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| I'm not in favor of these tariffs. At all. However, it
| seems that they haven't had such an impact yet on the
| economy, at least regarding consumer prices. You'd expect
| much larger inflation given the tariffs IIUC.
|
| My current understanding of the general consensus is that
| many companies have been eating the tariffs with the hope
| SCOTUS will strike them. If they are upheld, prices will
| likely rise significantly
| weatherlite wrote:
| > This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x
| faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've
| improved nothing
|
| In the private market are there really so many companies
| delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management
| keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now
| sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the
| private sector but surely not that much - whatever the
| companies are doing - someone is buying it from them,
| otherwise they fail. That's capitalism. Yes there is
| perhaps 20% of employees who don't pull their weight but
| its not the majority.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >In the private market are there really so many companies
| delivering reports no one reads ?
|
| Just this month the hospital in my municipality submitted
| an application to put in a new concrete pad for a new
| generator beside the old one that they, per the
| application, intend to retire/remove and replace with a
| storage shed on it's pad once the new one is operational.
|
| Full page intro about how the hospital is saving the
| world, such a great thing for the community and all
| manner of vapid buzzword bullshit. dozens of pages of re-
| hashing bullshit about the environmental conditions,
| water flows down hill, etc, etc, (i.e. basically
| reiterating stuff from when they built the facility),
| etc, etc.
|
| God knows how many people and hours it took to compile it
| (we'll ignore the labor wasted in the public sector
| circulating and reading it).
|
| All for a project that 50yr ago wouldn't have required
| 1/100th of the labor expenditure just to be kicked off.
| All that labor, squandered on nothing that makes anyone
| any richer. No goods made. No services rendered.
| b40d-48b2-979e wrote:
| Why should hospitals be for-profit organizations? Sounds
| like all the wrong incentives.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >Why should hospitals be for-profit organizations? Sounds
| like all the wrong incentives.
|
| You're conflating private ownership with the
| organizations nominal financial structure. It has nothing
| to do with the structure model of the organization and
| everything to do with resources wasted on TPS reports.
| This waste has to come from somewhere. Something is
| necessarily being forgone whether that's profit,
| reinvestment in the organization or competitive edge that
| benefits the customer (e.g. lower cost or higher quality
| for same cost). The same is true for a for profit
| company, or any other organization.
|
| FWIW the hospital is technically nonprofit as is typical
| for hospitals. And I assure you, they still have all the
| wrong incentives despite this.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| The cost is it taking America a billion dollars to build
| what China can for 50 million. That's ultimately where
| the waste accumulates.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Best description of America's biggest long term problem
| I've read. This shit is exactly the reason we can't build
| anything in America anymore.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The implication is that companies in a private market
| can't possibly be hugely inefficient for irrational
| reasons that can ultimately be self-harming.
|
| An interesting take.
| weatherlite wrote:
| I used the term "private market" when I actually meant
| the private sector. I just mean all labor that isn't
| government owned - public companies, private companies
| etc. So yes - in a reasonably functioning capitalist
| market (which the U.S still is in my eyes) I expect gross
| inefficiencies to not be prevalent.
| generic92034 wrote:
| > So yes - in a reasonably functioning capitalist market
| (which the U.S still is in my eyes) I expect gross
| inefficiencies to not be prevalent.
|
| I am not sure that is true, though. Assume for a moment
| that Google would waste 50% of their profits. Truly, a
| huge inefficiency. However, would that make it likely
| some other corp could take their search/ad market share
| from them? I doubt it, given the abyss of a moat.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| True. Therefore, what?
|
| One could say: True, _therefore search is not a
| reasonably functioning capitalist market._
|
| Yeah, I know, this can turn into "no true capitalist
| market". Still, it seems reasonable to say that many
| markets work in a certain kind of way (with lots of
| competition), and search is not one of those markets.
| watwut wrote:
| They can be irrational and ineffective. Nevertheless, if
| LLM are useful, they would still earn more then before.
|
| Regardless of their effectivity, it means LLMs are not
| useful for them.
| nananana9 wrote:
| I don't know what to tell you aside from "just go and
| work at a large private company and see".
|
| I'm not smart enough to understand the macro-economics or
| incentive structures that lead to this happening, but
| I've seen many 100+ man teams that output whose output is
| something you could reasonably expect from a 5 man team.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Many of these companies are fairly close to the
| mechanisms of credit creation. That distortion can make a
| market work very counterintuitively.
| weatherlite wrote:
| Sorry I meant to say the private sector, not sure if it
| changes the argument though since you seem to believe
| inefficiencies are all over the place - in public
| companies, private etc. I've worked in tech all my life
| and in general if you were grossly inefficient you'd get
| fired. Now tech may be a high efficiency / low bullshit
| industry but I'm assuming in general if you are truly
| shit at your job you'd get fired no matter the industry.
| fastasucan wrote:
| The goal might be to maximize profits, but that only
| means that managers want to make sure everyone further
| down the chain are doing whatever they identify to be the
| best way to accomplish that. How do you do that? Reports.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| > In the private market are there really so many
| companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would
| management keep at it then ?
|
| In finance, you have to produce truly astounding amounts
| of regulatory reports that won't be read... until there
| is a crash, or a lawsuit, or an investigation etc. And
| then they better have been right!
| weatherlite wrote:
| Got it that's a fair point - you're saying many companies
| deal with heaps of regulations and expediting that isn't
| really adding to productivity. I agree with you here. But
| even if 50% of what a company does is shit no one cares
| about - surely there's the other 50% that actually
| matters - no? Otherwise how does the company survive
| financially.
| finghin wrote:
| This is the natural result when the value of businesses
| is not strongly related to their actual output.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| The most hyped use cases for AI/LLM make me wonder, "why
| are we doing this activity to begin with? We could just
| not."
| sevensor wrote:
| And like the article says, early computerization produced
| way more output than anybody could handle. In my opinion,
| we realized the true benefits of IT when ordinary users
| were able to produce for themselves exactly the
| computations they needed. That is, when spreadsheets
| became widespread. LLMs haven't had their spreadsheet
| moment yet; their outputs are largely directed outward,
| as if more noise meant more productivity.
| zcw100 wrote:
| I suspect that we are going to see managers say, "Hey,
| this request is BS. I'm just going to get ChatGPT to do
| it" while employees say, "Hey, this response is BS, I'm
| just going to get ChatGPT to do it" and then we'll just
| have ChatGPT talking to itself. Eventually someone will
| notice and fire them both.
|
| "What would you say you do here?" --Office Space
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Stewart Butterfield calls these ""Hyper-realistic work
| like activities"
| overgard wrote:
| I think this is extremely common and nobody wants to admit
| to it!
| lolive wrote:
| We made an under-the-radar optimization in a data flow in
| my company. A given task is now much more freshData-
| assisted that it used to.
|
| Was a LLM used during that optimization? Yes.
|
| Who will correlate the sudden productivity improvement with
| our optimization of the data flow with the availability of
| a LLM to do such optimizations fast enough that no
| project+consultants+management is needed ?
|
| No one.
|
| Just like no one is evaluating the value of a hammer or a
| ladder when you build a house.
| camgunz wrote:
| But you would see more houses, or housing build
| costs/bids fall.
|
| This is where the whole "show me what you built with AI"
| meme comes from, and currently there's no substitute for
| SWEs. Maybe next year or next next year, but mostly the
| usage is generating boring stuff like internal tool
| frontends, tests, etc. That's not nothing, but because
| actually writing the code was at best 20% of the time
| cost anyway, the gains aren't huge, and won't be until AI
| gets into the other parts of the SDLC (or the SDLC
| changes).
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Is there a productivity improvement resulting tangible
| economic results coming from that optimization?
|
| It's easy to convince yourself that it is, and anyone can
| massage some internal metric enough to prove their
| desired outcome.
| fragmede wrote:
| CONEXPO, World of Concrete, and NAHB IBS is where vendors
| go to show off their new ladders and the attendees
| totally evaluate the value of those ladders vs their
| competitors.
| jen729w wrote:
| Have had job. Can confirm.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's
| productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable
| economic value?
|
| I think broadly that's a paradoxical statement; improving
| office productivity should translate to higher gdp;
| whatever it is you're doing in some office - even if you're
| selling paper or making bombs, if you're more productive it
| means you're selling more (or using less resources to sell
| the same amount); that should translate to higher gdp (at
| least higher gdp per worker, there's the issue of what
| happens to gdp when many workers get fired).
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Exactly. Even if they're doing bullshit it's a "bullshit
| make number go up" situation.
|
| Society as a whole is no better off since no value or
| wealth was generated, but the number did go up.
|
| A whole bunch of our economy is broken windows like this
| to varying degrees.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| David Graeber is the correct
| spelling.https://davidgraeber.org/books/
| ksec wrote:
| This is what I have been saying for sometime. Working
| inside different Goverment department you see this
| happening every day. Email and report bouncing back and
| forth with no actual added value while feeling extremely
| productive. That is why private sector and public sector
| generally don't mix well. It is also one reason why I said
| in some of my previous post LLM could replace up to 70% of
| Goverment's job.
|
| Edit: If anyone haven't watched Yes Minster, you should go
| and watch it, it is a documentary on UK Government that is
| still true today as it was 40-50 years ago.
| t43562 wrote:
| That would be a way to get "the right answer."
|
| i.e. it's not the LLM, it's that they're not being used
| properly.
|
| I get accused of the no true Scotsman argument because I
| think agile can be done right, for example. Is work
| bullshit because an LLM doesn't help it?
| mguerville wrote:
| And in the type of work where AI arguably yields
| productivity gains the workers have high agency and may pay
| for their own tooling without telling their employers. Case
| in point, me, I have access to CoPilot via my employer but
| don't use it because I prefer my self-paid ChatGPT
| subscription. If Ai-lift in productivity is measured on the
| condition that I use Copilot then the resulting metric
| misses my AI usage entirely and my productivity improvement
| are not attributed to their real cause.
| blitzar wrote:
| > the work itself simply has no discernable economic value
|
| i'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on sunday
| epiccoleman wrote:
| At least in my experience, there's another mechanism at
| play: people aren't making it visible if AI is speeding
| them up. If AI means a bugfix card that would have taken a
| day takes 15 minutes, well, that's the work day sorted. Why
| pull another card instead of doing... something that isn't
| work?
| butlike wrote:
| But they're not optimizing the average worker's
| productivity. That's a silicon valley talking point. The
| average worker, IF they use AI, ends up proofreading the
| text for the same amount of time as it would take to write
| the text themselves.
|
| And it is of this lowly commenter's opinion that
| proofreading for accuracy and clarity is harder than
| writing it yourself and defending it later.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| And the reason the position and the busy work exist is to
| have someone who is knowledgeable on the
| topic/relationship/requirements/whatever for the edge cases
| that come up (you don't pay me to push the button, you pay
| me to know when to push the button). AI could be
| technically filling a roll while its defeating the whole
| point (familiarity, background knowledge) for a lot of
| these roles.
| 46493168 wrote:
| >I think there are enough short term supposed benefits that
| something should be showing there.
|
| As measured by whom? The same managers who demanded we all
| return to the office 5 days a week because the only way they
| can measure productivity is butts in seats?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Productivity is the ratio of outputs to inputs, both
| measured in dollars.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Productivity is the ratio of real GDP to total hours
| worked.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| That's labor productivity, a different measure. But the
| original article references labor productivity, so your
| definition is more relevant.
| 46493168 wrote:
| What is the definition of input, what is the definition
| of output, and who is responsible for measuring them?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The answer is different depending on your target -- are
| you measuring the productivity of a firm, a country or
| some other sort of entity?
| azuanrb wrote:
| $20 is not useable, need $100 plan at least for development
| purposes. That is a lot of money for some countries. In my
| country, that can be 1/10 of their monthly salary. Hard to
| get approval on it. It is still too expensive right now.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Yeah it's not obvious at first but a big project will cause
| usage to skyrocket bc of how much context it will stuff
| with reading files. I can use my $20 subscription's 5 hour
| limit in mere seconds.
| vessenes wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| We do have a way to see the financial impact - just add up
| Anthropic and oAI's reported revenues -> something like $30b
| in annual run rate. Given growth rates, (stratospheric), it
| seems reasonable to conclude informed buyers see economic
| and/or strategic benefit in excess of their spend. I
| certainly do!
|
| That puts the benefits to the economy at just around where
| Mastercard's benefits are, on a dollar basis. But with a lot
| more growth. Add something in there for MS and GOOG, and
| we're probably at least another $5b up. There are only like
| 30 US companies with > $100bn in revenues; at current growth
| rates, we'll see combined revenues in this range in a year.
|
| All this is sort of peanuts though against 29 trillion GDP,
| 0.3%. Well not peanuts, it's boosting the US GDP by 10% of
| its historical growth rate, but the bull case from
| singularity folks is like 10%+ GDP growth; if we start seeing
| that, we'll know it.
|
| All that said, there is real value being added to the economy
| today by these companies. And no doubt a lot of time and
| effort spent figuring out what the hell to do with it as
| well.
| mikem170 wrote:
| Investors are optimistic, but what will this new tech be
| used for? Advertising? Propaganda? Surveillance? Drone
| strikes?
|
| Does profitable always equal useful? Might other cultures
| justifiably think differently, like the Amish?
| vessenes wrote:
| The Amish are skilled at getting cash from the "English"
| as they call non-Amish. I imagine they also think that
| the money they receive is roughly tied to value they
| create. I wasn't talking valuations, just revenue - money
| that CFOs and individuals spent so far, and are planning
| on spending.
|
| I also didn't talk profitable. Upshot, though, I don't
| think it's just a US thing to say that when money
| exchanges hands, generally both parties feel they are
| better off, and therefore there is value implied in a
| transaction.
|
| As to what it will be used for: yes.
| mikem170 wrote:
| You did specify revenue. The original comment mentioned
| benefits. I was thinking that the two are different.
| vessenes wrote:
| They are, but I was proposing they're closely correlated.
| overgard wrote:
| I've never looked at enterprise licensing, but regular
| license wise, a Claude subscription is actually $200 a month.
| I don't count the $20 or $100 tiers because they're too
| limited to be useful (especially professionally!)
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| And nobody talks that the "20 bucks per worker" it's selling
| it at loss. I'm waiting to see when they put a price that
| expects to generate some net income...
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 20 bucks per worker could easily be profitable, depending
| on how much the workers actually use it..
| dahcryn wrote:
| not true at all, onboarding is complex too. E.g. you cant
| just connect claude to your outlook, or have it automate
| stuff in your CRM. As a office drone, you don't have the
| admin permissions to setup those connections at all.
|
| And that's the point here: value is handicapped by the web
| interface, and we are stuck there for the foreseeable future
| until the tech teams get their priorities straight and build
| decent data integration layers, and workflow management
| platforms.
| y42 wrote:
| Problem is, that just having a Claude subscription doesn't
| make you productive. Most of those talks happen in a
| "tech'ish" environments. Not every business is about coding.
|
| Real life example: A client came to me asking how to compare
| orders against order confirmation from the vendor. They come
| as PDF files. Which made me wonder: Wait, you don't have any
| kind of API or at least structured data that the vendor gives
| you?
|
| Nope.
|
| And here you are. I am not talking about a niche business. I
| assume that's a broader problem. Tech can probably automate
| everything and this since 30 years. Still business lack of
| "proper" IT processes, because at the end every company is
| unique and requires particular measures to be "fully"
| onboarded to IT based improvements like that.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Thing is, unless the order confirmations number high in the
| thousands, most businesses could just hire an old lady with
| secretary experience to crunch through that work manually
| for a fraction of what it would cost them to get the whole
| system automated.
|
| I've seen this play out with time sheets. Every day factory
| floor workers write up every job they do on time sheets,
| paper and pencil, but management wants excel spreadsheets
| with pretty plots. Solution? One old typist who can type up
| all the time sheets every day. No OCR trouble, no expensive
| developer time, if she encounters illegible numbers she
| just cross references against the job fliers to figure it
| out instead of throwing errors the first time a 0 looks
| like a 6.
| delaminator wrote:
| You still need to teach a 2020s employee how to use Claude.
|
| - protect yourself from data loss / secret leaks - what it
| can and can't do - trust issues & hallucinations - Can't just
| enable Claude for Excel and expect people to become Excel
| wizards.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I see no reason to believe that just handing a Claude
| subscription to everyone in a company simply creates economic
| benefit. I don't think it's easier than "automating customer
| service". It's actually very strange.
|
| I think it could definitely already create economic benefit,
| after someone instructed clearly how to use it and how to
| integrate it in your work. Most people are really not good at
| figuring that out on their own, in a busy workday, when left
| to their own devices and companies are just finding out where
| the ball is moving and what to organize around too.
|
| So I can totally see a lot of failed experiments and people
| slowly figuring stuff out, and all of that not translating to
| measurable surpluses in a corp, in a setup similar to what OP
| laid out.
| viking123 wrote:
| I wish people in my company even used their Claude code or
| Cursor properly rather than asking me non-sense questions
| all the time that the model can easily answer with the
| connected data sources. And these people are developers.
|
| This shit will take like 10 years to adopt properly, at
| least in most boomer companies.
|
| I use these all the time nowadays and they are great tools
| when utilized properly but I have hard time seeing it
| replace functions completely due to humans having limited
| cognitive capacity to multitask and still needing to review
| stuff and build infra to actually utilize all this..
| TimByte wrote:
| I think the subscription price is only the visible tip of the
| iceberg
| geraneum wrote:
| > A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker
|
| Talking about macro economics, I don't think that number is
| correct.
| vidarh wrote:
| A $20 Claude subscription lets you scratch the surface. A $20
| Claude subscription without training means you have a lot of
| people spending time figuring out how to use it, and then
| maybe getting a bit of payback, but earning back that
| training is going to take time.
|
| Getting people to figure out how to enter questions is easy.
| Getting people to a point where they don't burn up all the
| savings by getting into unproductive conversations with the
| agent when it gets something wrong, is not so easy.
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| I think crazygringo mispresents Solow paradox. None of the
| main explanations say it's the cost that removed the
| productivity.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker
|
| Only until the loans come due. We're still in the "uber
| undercutting medalian cabs" part of the game.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| A computer lets you save a fortune in storage rooms, admin
| staff, delivery fees etc. It lets you reinvent how everything
| runs.
|
| ChatGPT just lets you generate slop, that may be helpful. For
| the vast majority of industries it doesn't actually offer
| much. Your meme departments like HR might be able to push out
| their slop quicker, but that doesn't improve profitability.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "if using personal accounts"
|
| InfoSec and Legal would like a word with you...
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm not sure about the comparison either, but the cost of
| operating the LLM should include the worker's wages.
|
| I read an article yesterday about people working insane hours
| at companies that have bet heavily on AI. My interpretation
| is that a worker runs out of juice after a few hours, but the
| AI has no limit and can work its human tender to death.
| nurettin wrote:
| > A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker
|
| I mean, sure. If you want to use it for 20 minutes and wait
| for two hours at a time.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I keep seeing this argument thrown around, but API usage on
| business plans is token spend based and can be orders of
| magnitude more than this $20/head per month.
|
| My company is spending 20-50x that much per head easily from
| the firmwide cost numbers being reported.
|
| They had to set circuit breakers because some users hit
| $200/day.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > it's helping lots of people, but it's also costing an
| extraordinary amount of money
|
| Is it fair to say that wall street is betting America's
| collective pensions on AI...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Very few people have pensions anymore. People now direct
| their own retirement funds.
| noddingham wrote:
| That's what he was saying. Wall Street (the stock market)
| are people's "pensions" now because everyone has a 401k or
| equivalent so their retirement is tied to the market. Thus,
| these companies are betting America's collective retirement
| on AI...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I thought he was talking about actual pension funds,
| which still exist and invest large sums of money in Wall
| Street. But make sure your 401k doesn't include AI funds
| then. You should have a choice over what part of the
| market to invest in.
| autoexec wrote:
| They're betting a lot more than that, but since all their
| chips are externalities they don't care.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| For more on this exact topic and an answer to Solow's Paradox,
| see, the excellent, _The Dynamo and the Computer_ by Paul David
| [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/03...
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| Stanford prof rebutts David's idea[0] that it's difficult to
| extract productivity from the data
|
| https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25148/w251.
| ..
|
| I don't agree that real GDP measures what he thinks it
| measures, but he opines
|
| > _Data released this week offers a striking corrective to
| the narrative that AI has yet to have an impact on the US
| economy as a whole. While initial reports suggested a year of
| steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal
| that total payroll growth was revised downward by
| approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision
| occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per
| cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling --
| maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input
| -- is the hallmark of productivity growth._
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419.
| ..
|
| [0] on the basis that IT and AI are not general technologies
| in the mold of the dynamo, keyword "intangibles", see section
| 4 p21, _A method to measure intangibles_
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| GDP growth measurements have a big bias due to tariffs on,
| tariffs off, tariffs on again policies wrecking imports and
| exports numbers. Consumer spending is up, too, so I too
| fail to see that gdp growth while jobs are not as up as
| expected is due to AI making us more productive and not
| just people spending more after months of increased savings
| due to tariffs.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| I don't think LLMs are similar to computers in terms of
| productivity boost
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| Fwiw _fortune_ had another article this week saying this
| J-curve of "General Technology" is showing up in the latest
| BLS data
|
| https://fortune.com/2026/02/15/ai-productivity-liftoff-doubl...
|
| Source of the Stanford-approved opinion:
| https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...
|
| https://www.apolloacademy.com/waiting-for-the-ai-j-curve/
| joering2 wrote:
| > And so we should expect AI to look the same
|
| Is that somewhat substantiated assumption? I recall learning on
| University in 2001 the history of AI and that initial
| frameworks were written in 70's and that prediction was we will
| reach human-like intelligence by 2000. Just because Sama came
| up with this somewhat breakthrough of an AI, it doesn't mean
| that equal improvement leaps will be done on a monthly/annual
| basis going forward. We may as well not make another huge leaps
| or reach what some say human intelligence level in 10 years or
| so.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| productivity may rise with time, and costs may come down. The
| money is already spent
| johnnienaked wrote:
| Some of the money is spent. What happens when better models,
| more efficient cooling techniques, and other technologies
| hit? Seems like the best strategy at this point isn't dumping
| your entire FCF into datacenters, but wait and see if there's
| even a viable business efficiency improvement first.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information
| technology finally started to show clear benefit to the economy
| overall.
|
| The 1990s boom was in large part due to _connectivity_ --
| millions[1] of computers joined _the Internet_.
|
| [1] _ In the 1990s. Today, there are _billions_ of devices
| connected, most of them Android devices.
| ericfr11 wrote:
| Android in the 90s Not really
| whynotminot wrote:
| It's also pretty wild to me how people still don't really even
| know how to use it.
|
| On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people
| thinking modern AI models can't generate working code.
|
| The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine
| about ChatGPT. They didn't know you needed to turn on
| "thinking" to get higher quality results. This is a technical
| person who has worked at Amazon.
|
| You can't expect revolutionary impact while people are still
| learning how to even use the thing. We're so early.
| politelemon wrote:
| You are assuming that we all work on the same tasks and
| should have exactly the same experience with it, which is it
| course far from the truth. It's probably best to start with
| that base assumption and work on the implications from there.
|
| As for the last example, for all the money being spent on
| this area, if someone is expected to perform a workflow based
| on the kind of question they're supposed to ask, that's a
| failure in the packaging and discoverability aspect of the
| product, the leaky abstraction only helps some of us who know
| why it's there.
| harrall wrote:
| I've been helping normal people at work use AI and there's
| two groups that are really struggling:
|
| 1. People who only think of using AI in very specific
| scenarios. They don't know when you use it outside of the
| obvious "to write code" situations and they don't really use
| AI effectively and get deflated when AI outputs the
| occasional garbage. They think "isn't AI supposed to be good
| at writing code?"
|
| 2. People who let AI do all the thinking. Sometimes they'll
| use AI to do everything and you have to tell them to throw it
| all away because it makes no sense. These people also tend to
| dump analyses straight from AI into Slack because they lack
| the tools to verify if a given analysis is correct.
|
| To be honest, I help them by teaching them fairly rigid
| workflows like "you can use AI if you are in this specific
| situation." I think most people will only pick up tools
| effectively if there is a clear template. It's basically on-
| the-job training.
| tstrimple wrote:
| > On hacker news, a very tech literate place
|
| I think this is the prior you should investigate. That may be
| what HN used to be. But it's been a long time since it has
| been an active reality. You can still see actual expert
| opinions on HN, but they are the minority more and more.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I think one longtime HN user (Karrot_Kream I think)
| pinpointed the change in HN discourse to sometime in mid
| 2022 to early 2023 when the rate of new users spiked to 40k
| per month and remained at that elevated rate.
|
| From personal experience, I've also noticed that some of
| the most toxic discourse and responses I've received on
| this platform are overwhelmingly from post-2022 users.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| HN got a write-up in a highly political, non-technical
| magazine around that time.
| mrtksn wrote:
| In a WhatsApp group full of doctors, managers, journalist and
| engineers (including software) in age of 30-60 I asked if
| anyone heard of openclaw and only 3 people heard of it from
| influencers, none used it.
|
| But from my social feed the impression was that it is taking
| over the world:)
|
| I asked it because I am building something similar since some
| tome and I thought its over they were faster than me but as
| it appears there's no real adoption yet. Maybe there will be
| some once they release it as part of ChatGPT but even then it
| looks like too early as actually few people are using the
| more advanced tools.
|
| It's definitely in very early stage. It appears that so far
| the mainstream success in AI is limited to slop generation
| and even that is actually small number of people generating
| huge amounts of slop.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I asked it because I am building something similar since
| some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me
|
| If you have been working on a usecase similar to OpenClaw
| for sometime now I'd actually say you are in a great
| position to start raising _now_.
|
| Being first to market is not a significant moat in most
| cases. Few people want to invest in the first company in a
| category - it's too risky. If there are a couple of other
| early players then the risk profile has been reduced.
|
| That said, you _NEED_ to concentrate on GTM - technology is
| commodified, distribution is not.
|
| > It appears that so far the mainstream success in AI is
| limited to slop generation and even that is actually small
| number of people generating huge amounts of slop
|
| The growth of AI slop has been exponential, but the
| application of agents for domain specific usecases has been
| decently successful.
|
| The biggest reason you don't hear about it on HN is because
| domain-specific applications are not well known on HN, and
| most enterprises are not publicizing the fact that they are
| using these tools internally.
|
| Furthermore, almost anyone who is shipping something with
| actual enterprise usage is under fairly onerous NDAs right
| now and every company has someone monitoring HN like a
| hawk.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Do you think that it is a good idea to release it first
| on iOS, announce on HN and Producthunt? How would you do?
|
| On my app the tech is based on running agent generated
| code on JavaScriptCore to do things like OpenClaw, I'm
| wrapping the JS engine with the missing functionality
| like networking, file access and database access so I
| believe I will not have a problem with releasing it on
| Apple AppStore as I use their native stack. Then since
| this stack is also OS, I'm making a version that will run
| on Linux, the idea being users develops their solution on
| their device(iOS&Mac currently) see it working and and
| then deploys on a server with a tap of a button, so it
| keeps running.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Who's your persona? How are you pricing and packaging?
| Who is your buyer? Are you D2C? Consumer? Replacing EAs?
| Replacing Project Managers? ...
|
| You need to answer these questions in order to decide
| whether a Show HN makes sense versus a much more targeted
| launch.
|
| If you do not know how to answer these questions you
| _need_ to find a cofounder asap. Technology is
| commodified. GTM, sales, and packaging is what turns
| technology into products. Building and selling and
| fundraising as 1 person is a one-way ticket to burnout,
| which only makes you and your product less attractive.
|
| I also highly recommend chatting with your network to
| understand common types of problems. Once you've
| identified a couple classes of problems and personas for
| whom your story resonates, then you can decide what
| approach to take.
|
| Best of luck!
| mrtksn wrote:
| The persona is, someone who knows what are they doing but
| need someone to actually automate their work routine.
| I.e. maybe it's a crypto trader that makes decisions on
| signals interpretation so they can create a trading bot
| that executes on their method. Maybe its a compliance who
| needs automate some routine like checking details further
| when some conditions arise. Or maybe a social media
| manager that needs to moderate their channels.Maybe
| someone who needs a tool for monitoring HN that specific
| way?
|
| Thanks for the advice! I'm at a stage where I want to
| have such tool and see who else wants it. Not sure yet
| about it's viability as a business and what is the exact
| market. Maybe I will find out by putting it into the wild
| and that's why I consider to release it as a mobile app
| first.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That persona still sounds too generic, too unfocused.
|
| But even with that persona, it should already answer your
| question whether posting on HN and producthunt should be
| a core part of your strategy. Not a lot of social media
| managers or compliance people around here. And even for
| crypto traders there are better places to pitch products
| to them
| alephnerd wrote:
| That's too broad. You aren't going to get any nibbles.
|
| You need to narrow it down to a _single_ and _specific_
| persona and business domain.
|
| This is because it takes years to fully flesh out and
| productionize a workflow from scratch, so concentrating
| on a business domain you know intimately well helps you
| build that muscle, which you can then repeat if you are
| able to hit revenue metrics for a Series A/B.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> every company has someone monitoring HN like a hawk._
|
| Monitoring specific user accounts or keywords? Is this
| typically done by a social media reputation management
| service?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I asked if anyone heard of twitter vaporware and only 3
| people heard of it from influencers, none used it.
|
| Shocking results, I say!
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| No, these people ("managers, engineers" etc.) do just not
| work in tech & IT but in other fields and they do not
| read tech news in your country etc.
|
| Most people are just "not that deep in there" as most
| people on HN.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > "Tech news"
|
| A guy attached Claude to his socials, groundbreaking
| tech.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Once I was working for a consulting & development
| company; they were trying to enter sector ABC by stuffing
| up a team of people, so I was told, who had interest in
| sector ABC stuff and want to do some projects there.
|
| While they were deep in software development in general,
| no body of them read any of the essential/required daily
| industrial news (also not that one related to doing
| software development in sector ABC)
|
| :-)
|
| So no, even people somehow attached to a topic are not
| necessarily somehow deeper involved.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| I spend between 1 and 2h a day on hn and I barely know
| what openclaw is. I've seen it mentioned once or twice
| and checked their website but that's all.
|
| If one lets AI FOMO since the release of chatgpt drive
| them they'd be glued to their screen 24/7.
| o3dd wrote:
| What is happening is nonsensical.
|
| OAI wants to keep the hype train going. That is all.
| OpenClaw is just a project that attracted the interests
| of people messing about with LLMs. Which as a proportion
| of economically active people is.... tiny.
|
| They brought him (Pete) over as he seems to have some way
| of thinking about LLMs in the form of a product. Will he
| have repeatable success on a large scale? Who knows. I
| doubt it personally.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| > I see people thinking modern AI models can't generate
| working code.
|
| Really? Can you show any examples of someone claiming AI
| models cannot generate working code? I haven't seen anyone
| make that claim in years, even from the most skeptical
| critics.
| dangus wrote:
| And really the problem isn't that it can't make working
| code, the problem is that it'll never get the kind of
| context that is in your brain.
|
| I started working today on a project I hadn't touched in a
| while but I now needed to as it was involved in an incident
| where I needed to address some shortcomings. I knew the fix
| I needed to do but I went about my usual AI assisted
| workflow because of course I'm lazy the last thing I want
| to do is interrupt my normal work to fix this stupid
| problem.
|
| The AI doesn't know anything about the full scope of all
| the things in my head about my company's environment and
| the information I need to convey to it. I can give it a lot
| of instructions but it's impossible to write out everything
| in my head across multiple systems.
|
| The AI did write working code, but despite writing the code
| way faster than me, it made small but critical mistakes
| that I wouldn't have made on my first draft.
|
| For example, it just added in a command flag that I knew
| that it didn't need, and it actually probably should have
| known it, too. Basically it changed a line of code that it
| didn't need to touch.
|
| It also didn't realize that the curled URL was going to
| redirect so we needed an -L flag. Maybe it should have but
| my brain knew it already.
|
| It also misinterpreted some changes in direction that a
| human never would have. It confused my local repository for
| the remote one because I originally thought I was going to
| set a mirror, but I changed plans and used a manual package
| upload to curl from. So it out the remote URL in some
| places where the local one should have been.
|
| Finally, it seems to have just created some strange text
| gore while editing the readme where it deleted existing
| content for seemingly no reason other than some kind of
| readline snafu.
|
| So yes it produced very fast great code that would have
| taken me way longer to do, but I had to go back and consume
| a very similar amount of time to fix so many things that I
| might as well have just done it manually.
|
| But hey I'm glad my company is paying $XX/month for my lazy
| workday machine.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| >>The AI doesn't know anything about the full scope of
| all the things in my head about my company's environment
| and the information I need to convey to it.<<
|
| This is your problem: How should it know if you do not
| provide it?
|
| Use Claude - in the pro version you can submit files for
| each project which are setting the context: This can be
| files, source code, SQL scripts, screenshots whatever -
| then the output will be based on your context given by
| providing these files.
| dangus wrote:
| Is this process of brain dumping faster than me just
| writing the code?
|
| If I was truly going to automate this one-time task I
| would have to give the AI access to my browser or an API
| token for the repository provider, so I'm either giving
| it dangerous modification capability via browser
| automation or I'm spending even more time setting up API
| access and trusting that it actually knows how to
| interact with the service via API calls.
|
| My company doesn't provide Claude, they give me GitHub
| Copilot Pro or whatever it's called, and when I provided
| the website it needed to get the RPM files I was working
| with it didn't actually do anything with it. It just
| wrote a readme file that told me what to do. Like I
| mention it also just eventually mistook the remote
| repository as my local internal repository.
|
| And one of the specific commands it screwed up was in my
| existing script and was already correct, it just decided
| to change it for no discernible reason. I didn't ask it
| to do anything related to that particular line.
|
| With such a high error rate, I would be hesitant to
| actually integrate AI to other systems to try to achieve
| a more fully automated workflow.
| fastasucan wrote:
| And your problem is that you didnt understood the point
| of their post. The full context was so complex and would
| be so time consuming to relay that they might as well
| code themselves.
| autoexec wrote:
| I've seen it said plenty of the times that the code might
| work eventually (after several cycles of prompting and
| testing), but even then the code you get might not be
| something you'd want to maintain, and it might contain bugs
| and security issues that don't (at least initially) seem to
| impact its ability to do whatever it was written to do but
| which could cause problems later.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| Yeah but that's a completely different thing.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Scroll up a few comments where someone said Claude is
| generating errors over and over again and that Claude cant
| work according to code guidelines etc :-))
| fastasucan wrote:
| That not the same.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Depends what they mean. Generate working code all the time
| or after going a few iterations of trying and promoting? It
| can very easily happen, that an LLM generates something
| that is a straight error, because it hallucinates some
| keyword argument or something like that, which doesn't
| actually exist. Only happened to me yesterday. So going
| from that, no, they are still not able to generate working
| code all the time. Especially, when the basis is a shoddy-
| made library itself, that is simply missing something
| required.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I'll claim it. They can't generate working code _for the
| things I am working on_. They seem to be too complex or in
| languages that are too niche.
|
| They can do a tolerable job with super popular /simple
| things like web dev and Python. It really depends on what
| you're doing.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| 10 days ago someone was making this claim about copilot on
| legacy code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932609
|
| > Github Copilot has been great in getting that code
| coverage up marginally but ass otherwise.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| That's a completely different claim. Or do you think an
| AI can always, without fail, produce working code in
| every situation? That's trivially false.
| overgard wrote:
| I don't think "results don't match promises" is the same as
| "not knowing how to use it". I've been using Claude and
| OpenAI's latest models for the past two weeks now (probably
| moving at about 1000 lines of code a day, which is what I can
| comfortably review), and it makes subtle hard-to-find
| mistakes all over the place. Or it just misunderstands well
| known design patterns, or does something bone headed. I'm
| fine with this! But that's because I'm asking it to write
| code that I could write myself, and I'm actually reading it.
| This whole "it can build a whole company for me and I don't
| even look at it!" is overhype.
| scoopdewoop wrote:
| Prompting LLMs for code simply takes more than a couple of
| weeks to learn.
|
| It takes time to get an intuition for the kinds of problems
| they've seen in pre-training, what environments it faced in
| RL, and what kind of bizarre biases and blindspots it has.
| Learning to google was hard, learning to use other peoples
| libraries was hard, and its on par with those skills at
| least.
|
| If there is a well known design pattern you know, thats a
| great thing to shout out. Knowing what to add to the
| context takes time and taste. If you are asking for pieces
| so large that you can't trust them, ask for smaller pieces
| and their composition. Its a force multiplier, and your
| taste for abstractions as a programmer is one of the
| factors.
|
| In early usenet/forum days, the XY problem described users
| asking for implementation details of their X solution to Y
| problem, rather than asking how to solve Y. In llm
| prompting, people fall into the opposite. They have an X
| implementation they want to see, and rather than ask for
| it, they describe the Y problem and expect the LLM to
| arrive at the same X solution. Just ask for the
| implementation you want.
|
| Asking bots to ask bots seems to be another skill as well.
| overgard wrote:
| Let me clarify, I've been using the latest models for the
| last two weeks, but I've been using AI for about a year
| now. I know how to prompt. I don't know why people think
| it's an amazing skill, it's not much different from
| writing a good ticket.
| vidarh wrote:
| Do you use an agent harness to have it review code for you
| before you do?
|
| If not, you don't know how to use it _efficiently_.
|
| A large part of using AI efficiently is to significantly
| lower that review burden by having it do far more of the
| verification and cleanup itself before you even look at it.
| docmars wrote:
| This is correct, but part of the issue is that it
| significantly increases token usage costs. Some companies
| are doing:
|
| - PRD and spec fulfillment review
|
| - code review + correction loops
|
| - security review + corrections
|
| - addl. test coverage and tidying
|
| - addl. type checks and tidying
|
| - addl. lint checks and tidying
|
| - maybe more I haven't listed
|
| And these are run after each commit, so you can only
| imagine the costs per engineer doing this 10, 20, 50+
| times per day depending on how much work they're knocking
| out.
| vidarh wrote:
| Sure, it adds tokens. I've burnt 200 million tokens
| _today_ on a single project.
|
| The question is what your time is worth for the company,
| and which tasks costs less to have an agent automate than
| having you do.
| docmars wrote:
| I think if you were to scale that kind of usage across a
| reasonable team size, costs would start to add up fast --
| and possibly beyond the cost of paying another engineer
| every year, especially if a lot of your teammates are new
| to AI, or aren't using it efficiently. Of course, it all
| depends on the appetite of the company.
|
| The other constraint is, for those who are being laid off
| (maybe because of cost reduction to support an AI budget
| for a smaller team to use), engineers wanting to expand
| their skill set and practice these levels of usage +
| efficiency are effectively unable to with their own
| funding, making it more difficult to find employment as
| expectations heighten.
|
| Prior to AI entering the fray, software development was
| largely free for everyone, allowing anyone with enough
| time and motivation to build the skills towards gainful
| employment. As AI becomes more prevalent and expectations
| around _how it 's used_ become higher, fewer and fewer
| applicants will be able to claim they have the experience
| necessary because it was out of reach due to costs.
| riskable wrote:
| > Do you use an agent harness to have it review code for
| you before you do?
|
| Right now you need to be Uncle Moneybags to do this in
| your personal life.
|
| If you're lucky, your employer is footing the bill but
| otherwise... Ugh. It's like converting your app running
| perfectly fine on a cheap VPS to AWS Lambda. _In theory_
| , it's fine but in reality the next bill you get could
| make you faint.
| vidarh wrote:
| It's down to how much you value your time. If your value
| your time low enough, it doesn't pay to make AI take
| over. If you value it high enough, it does.
| overgard wrote:
| I have it run tests and every few days I ask it to do a
| code quality analysis check on the codebase.
|
| I'm unconvinced AI reviewing AI is the answer here,
| because all LLMs have the same flaws. To me, the
| harness/guard rails for AI should be different
| technologies that work differently and in a more formal
| sense. IE, static code analysis, linters, tests, etc.
|
| (Linting has actually been, by far, the BEST code quality
| enforcers for the agents I've run so far, and it's a lot
| cheaper and more configurable than running more agents.)
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| If you know good architecture and you are testing as you
| go, I would say, it is probably pretty damn close to being
| able to build a company without looking at the code. Not
| without "risk" but definitely doable and plausible.
|
| My current project that I started this weekend is a rust
| client server game with the client compiled into web
| assembly.
|
| I do these projects without reading the code at all as a
| way to gauge what I can possibly do with AI without reading
| code, purely operating as a PM with technical intuition and
| architectural opinions.
|
| So far Opus 4.6 has been capable of building it all out. I
| have to catch issues and I have asked it for refactoring
| analysis to see if it could optimize the file
| structure/components, but I haven't read the code at all.
|
| At work I certainly read all the code. But would recommend
| people try to build something non trivial without looking
| at the code. It does take skill though, so maybe start
| small and build up the intuition on how they have issues,
| etc. I think you'll be surprised how much your technical
| intuition can scale even when you are not looking at the
| code.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Security auditor and criminals have a bright future ahead
| of them.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| For a few years maybe, but I see little reason to think
| this stuff won't be coming for their jobs as well.
| docmars wrote:
| True, but you'd be surprised how much you can tighten up
| a codebase by asking a heftier model to do a security
| review and suggest fixes.
| fastasucan wrote:
| At what point do people really know if it has been
| tightened up if they never look at the code?
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| How does a PM know that the code has been tighten up by
| the offshore team?
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| That is why I said "risk". Though the models are pretty
| good "if" you ask for security audits. Notice I didn't
| say you could do it without technical knowledge right
| now, so you need to know to ask for security review.
|
| I have friends in security on major platforms who are
| impressed by the security review of the SOT models.
| Certainly better than the average bootstrapped founder.
| danbolt wrote:
| What's the game? Genuinely curious!
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Simultaneous turn based top down car combat where you
| design the cars first. Inspired by Car Wars, but taking
| advantage of computers, so spline based path planing and
| much more complicated way of calculating armor
| penetration and damage.
|
| I'm building to play with my friends online.
| fastasucan wrote:
| Why is there a point of not reading the code? Even with
| very competent humans we have put in place systems for
| reviewing the code.
| docmars wrote:
| And yet, this is exactly what my last job's engineering &
| product leadership did with their CEO at the helm, before
| they laid me off.
|
| They vibe-coded a complete rewrite of their products in a
| few months without any human review. Hundreds of thousands
| LOC. I feel sorry for the remaining engineers having to
| learn everything they just generated, and are now having
| customers use.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| And it will get worse once the UX people get ahold of it.
| scrubs wrote:
| You got that right . .. imagine AI making more keyboard
| shortcuts, "helping" wayland move off X more so, new window
| transistions, overhauling htmx ... it'll be hell+ on earth.
| alternatex wrote:
| We can indeed only imagine. For now, AI has been a curse
| for open source projects.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| A neighbour of me has a PhD and is working in research at a
| hospital. He is super smart.
|
| Last time he said: "yes yes I know about ChatGPT, but I do
| not use it at work or home."
|
| Therefore, most people wont even know about Gemini, Grok or
| even Claude.
| Guillaume86 wrote:
| He said he know about it and your conclusion is that he
| doesnt know about the other ones...
| illiac786 wrote:
| > On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people
| thinking modern AI models can't generate working code.
|
| I am completely flooded with comments and stories about how
| great LLMs are at coding. I am curious to see how you get a
| different picture than this? Can you point me to a thread or
| a story that supports your view? At the moment, individuals
| thinking AI cannot generate working code seem almost
| inexistent to me.
| riskable wrote:
| It's a real thing, but usually tied to IT folks that tried
| ChatGPT ~2 years ago (in a web browser) and had to "fix"
| whatever it output. That situation solidified their
| "understanding of AI" and they haven't updated their
| knowledge on the current situation (because... No pressing
| need).
|
| Folks like this have never used AI inside of an IDE or one
| of the CLI AI tools. Without that perspective, AI seems
| mostly like a gimmick.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Wow I didn't realize that. But I always thought it. I was
| bewildered that anyone got any real value out of any of that
| pre-VisiCalc (or even VisiCalc) computer tech for business. It
| all looked kinda clumsy.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| (pre) VisiCalc: You have to understand that the primary users
| (accountants etc.) do not care about how a thing looks in
| their working process: If a tool helps them, they will use it
| even if its ugly according to aesthetical frontend questions
| :-)
|
| (Think about this old black/white or green mainframe screens
| - horrible looking but it gets their job done)
| overgard wrote:
| The coding tools are not hard to pick up. Agent chat and
| autocomplete in IDE's are braindead simple, and even TUI's like
| Claude are extremely easy to pickup (I think it took me a day?)
| And despite what the vibers like to pretend, learning to prompt
| them isn't that hard either. Or, let me clarify, if you know
| how to code, and you know how you want something coded,
| prompting them isn't that hard. I can't imagine it'll take that
| long for an impact to be seen, if there is a major impact to be
| seen.
|
| I think it's more likely that people "feel" more productive,
| and/or we're measuring bad things (lines of code is an awful
| way to measure productivity -- especially considering that
| these agents duplicate code all the time so bloat is a given
| unless you actively work to recombine things and create new
| abstractions)
| kylebyte wrote:
| It reminds me a lot of adderall's effect on people without
| ADHD. A pretty universal feeling that it's making you
| smarter, paired with no measurable increase in test scores.
| overgard wrote:
| That's a good analogy. I've never done stimulants, but from
| what I've heard about them they make people very _active_
| but that isn 't the same as _productive_.
| masteruvpuppetz wrote:
| An old office colleague used to tell us there was a time when
| he'd print a report prepared with Lotus123 (Ancient Excel) and
| their boss would verify the calculations on a calculator saying
| computers are not reliable. :o
| __jf__ wrote:
| Paul Strassmann wrote a book in 1990 called "Business Value of
| Computers" that showed that it matters where money on computers
| is spent. Only firms that spent it on their core business
| processes showed increased revenues whereas the ones that spent
| it on peripheral business processes didn't.
| Underqualified wrote:
| This is my feeling about both IT and AI. It enables companies
| to do a lot of things which don't really bring value. One of
| the biggest use case for AI in the company I work for now is
| powerBI report generation. Fine, but a couple of years ago we
| didn't even have all these graphs and reports. I'm not sure
| they bring actual value, since I see decisions still being
| made mostly on intuition.
| globular-toast wrote:
| If things like computer-aided design and improved supply chain
| management, for example, make manufactured goods last longer
| and cause less waste, I would expect IT to cause productivity
| to go down. I drive a 15 year old car and use a 12 year old PC.
| It's a good thing that productivity goes down, or stays the
| same.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Only it's much more exponential
| unkulunkulu wrote:
| Ok, this article inspired some positivity in my view. Here
| comes, of course a disclaimer that this is just "wishful
| thinking", but still.
|
| So we are in the process of "adapting a technology". Welcome,
| keep calm, observe, don't be ashamed to feel emotions like
| fear, excitement, anger and all else.
|
| While adapting, we learn how to use it better and better. At
| first, we try "do all the work for me", then "ok, that was bad,
| plan what you would do, good, adjust, ok do it like this" etc
| etc.
|
| A couple of years into the future this knowledge is just
| "passed on". If productivity grew and we "figured out how to
| get more out of the universe", then no jobs had to be lost,
| just readapted. And "investors" get happy not by "replacing
| workers", but by "reaping win-win rewards" from the universe at
| large.
|
| There are dangers of course, like "maybe this is truly a huge
| win-win, but some loses can be hidden, like ecology", but "I
| hope there are people really addressing these problems and this
| win-win will help them be more productive as well".
| matsemann wrote:
| Is this like the hotels first jumping on the wifi bandwagon?
| Spent lots of money up front for expensive tech. Years later,
| anyone could buy a cheap router and set up, so every hotel had
| wifi. But the original high-end hotels that were first out with
| wifi and paid much for it, has the worst and old wifi and
| charge users for it, still trying to recoup the costs.
| TimByte wrote:
| Yet with IT, the bottleneck was largely technical and capital-
| related, whereas with AI it feels more organizational and
| cognitive
| pragmatic wrote:
| You're missing the true value, the network.
|
| Wide spread internet access turned expensive toys (PCs) into
| useful assets.
| JMKH42 wrote:
| >And so we should expect AI to look the same -
|
| Maybe! Or it might never pan out, or it may pan out way better.
| Complicated things like this rarely turn out the way people
| expect, no matter how smart.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I'm thinking survivorship bias here. "Information Technology"
| is such a wide term, and we immediately think of the IT we
| currently use. Many of us can't even remember all the blind
| alleys we wasted resources on in the '80s, especially those
| of us who weren't there. I count myself among that group
| because I was a kid and didn't pay much attention to
| business.
|
| But I can say that, judging by historical artifacts, a lot of
| it was along the same broad lines as AI. And we maybe don't
| realize how serious people were about it back then. The
| technology that actually changed the world was so
| comparatively boring and pragmatic that the stuff that was
| being hyped back then seems comically overwrought. It's easy
| to assume it must have been a joke all along.
| bitgeist wrote:
| I like your username.
| nz wrote:
| I mean the productivity paradox was only temporarily remedied.
| Around 2005 we entered a second version of the paradox and it
| persists to this day. I'll note that 2005 was when the internet
| became dominated by walled-gardens and social-media, _and_ it
| was the last year that people got to use the internet without
| smartphones (in 2006 LG released a smartphone, with Apple
| releasing iPhone in 2007).
|
| The combination of attention-draining social media walled
| gardens, and the high performance pocket-computers (which are
| really designed for consumption instead of productivity),
| created a positive feedback loop that helped destroy the
| productivity that we won by defeating the paradox in the 1990s.
| And we have been struggling against this new paradox for twenty
| years, since. AI seems like it should defeat the paradox
| because it is a kind of hands-free system, perfect for mobile
| phones -- but this is really just a very expensive solution to
| a problem that we have created and allowed to fester. We could
| just shun the walled gardens, and demand to be paid for our
| attention and data.
|
| The new productivity paradox (which I do not think AI in its
| current form can fix[1][2]), is the price that we pay for a
| prosperous and valuable advertising industry. And as long as
| the web is seen as an ad-channel, and as long as the web is
| always vibrating in your pocket, we will keep paying this
| price. We will eventually end up (metaphorically) lobotomizing
| our children, and families, and communities, so that the grand-
| children of ad-executives and tech-bros and frat-bros can grow
| up healthy, psychologically stable, educated, and comfortably
| wealthy. (Brain drain: now available literally everywhere).
|
| [1]: It is telling that most LLMs are centralized, and are most
| useful as search-engines/information-retrieval-systems. The
| centralization makes them _spyware_, and their ability to
| directly answer any question, encourages users to actually ask
| direct questions, instead of stringing search-terms together.
| This makes the prompts high-signal advertising data (i.e.
| instead inferring what you are looking for from the search-
| string, these companies can see _exactly_ what you are looking
| for and why -- and with LLMs, they can probably turn these
| promps into joint-probability-tables or whatever other kind of
| serialization they need to figure out which products to sell
| you (either on the web or directly in the response to your
| prompt)).
|
| [2]: As far as copyright infringement goes, LLM outputs may
| require mass clean-room rewrites (so your productivity, as
| pathetic as it already is, now gets _halved_ long term) of
| text, prose, code, and anything else that is produced with
| them, because of how copyright law works. In legal arts this is
| called _the fruit of the poison tree_, and any short-term
| productivity gains, may become long term liabilities that need
| to be replaced due to _legal mandate_ -- so even if LLMs can
| eventually produce perfect and faultless outputs, the copyright
| laws _in all 200+ countries_ would have to be torn down and
| rebuilt (and this will certainly come at great expense).
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! we've swapped the baity title with that phrase above.
| istillcantcode wrote:
| Anyone read the goal lately?
| cmiles8 wrote:
| I like AI and use it daily, but this bubble can't pop soon enough
| so we can all return to normally scheduled programming.
|
| CEOs are now on the downside of the hype curve.
|
| They went from "Get me some of that AI!" after first hearing
| about it, to "Why are we not seeing any savings? Shut this
| boondoggle down!" now that we're a few years into bubble, the
| business math isn't working, and they only see burning piles of
| cash.
| boxedemp wrote:
| I consume a lot of different content on a lot of different
| places. Every site or app has its vibe and communal beliefs.
| They rarely if ever agree on anything, but they all agree we're
| in a massive bubble.
|
| I don't have a point, just that it's an unlikely unity.
| sowbug wrote:
| "return to normally scheduled programming" is probably not the
| exact phrasing you want to use. :)
| topocite wrote:
| This is the standard stupidity here based on emotion and
| denial. This is the narrative that people want to hear.
|
| Of course, trying to automate with chatGPT 4o was stupid.
| Trying to automate with Sonnet 4.6 will work better. Trying to
| automate with the models a year from now will work all the
| better.
|
| To believe we are going to stop and go back to 2019 at this
| stage is seriously delusional.
|
| I wish it were true. I would love to go back to 2019 but we
| obviously are not. We never go backwards.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| "Regularly scheduled programming" includes progress, not
| stasis. It just means the AI hype firehouse runs out of money
| and we rerun to normal sane progress and productivity
| enhancements without all the overpricing and under delivering
| of the last few years.
| n_u wrote:
| Original paper
| https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34836/w348...
|
| Figure A6 on page 45: Current and expected AI adoption by
| industry
|
| Figure A11 on page 51: Realised and expected impacts of AI on
| employment by industry
|
| Figure A12 on page 52: Realised and expected impacts of AI on
| productivity by industry
|
| These seem to roughly line up with my expectations that the more
| customer facing or physical product your industry is, the lower
| the usage and impact of AI. (construction, retail)
|
| A little bit surprising is "Accom & Food" being 4th highest for
| productivity impact in A12. I wonder how they are using it.
| CSSer wrote:
| Figure right after A6 is pretty striking. Ask people if they
| expect to use AI and a vast majority say yes. Ask if they
| expect to use AI for specific applications and no more than a
| third say yes in any industry. That should be telling imo. What
| we have is a tool that looks impressive to any non-SME for a
| _lot_ of applications. I would caution against the idea that
| benefits are obvious.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| It's not just technology, it's very hard to detect the effect of
| inventions in general on productivity. There was a paper pointing
| out that the invention of the steam engine was basically
| invisible in the productivity statistics:
|
| https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/crafts.pdf
| robinwhg wrote:
| The first steam engine was invented by a Turk and he used it
| solely to make kebab spin. Never thought about using it for
| anything else.
| beloch wrote:
| The article suggests that AI-related productivity gains could
| follow a J-curve. An initial decline, as initially happened with
| IT, followed by an exponential surge. They admit this is heavily
| dependent on the real value AI provides.
|
| However, there's another factor. The J-curve for IT happened in a
| different era. No matter when you jumped on the bandwagon, things
| just kept getting faster, easier, and cheaper. Moore's law was
| relentless. The exponential growth phase of the J-curve for AI,
| if there is one, is going to be _heavily_ damped by the
| enshitification phase of the winning AI companies. They are
| currently incurring _massive_ debt in order to gain an edge on
| their competition. Whatever companies are left standing in a
| couple of years are going to have to raise the funds to service
| and pay back that debt. The investment required to compete in AI
| is so massive that cheaper competition may not arise, and a small
| number of (or single) winner could put anyone dependent on AI
| into a financial bind. Will growth really be exponential if this
| happens and the benefits aren 't clearly worth it?
|
| The best possible outcome may be for the bubble to pop, the
| current batch of AI companies to go bankrupt, and for AI
| capability to be built back better and cheaper as computation
| becomes cheaper.
| robinwhg wrote:
| But there already is cheaper competition? Open models may be
| behind, but only ~6 months for every new generation.
| rr808 wrote:
| BTW the study was from September 2024 to 2025, so its the very
| earliest of adopters.
| hydrox24 wrote:
| This article is mostly based on NBER working paper 34836, which
| was published this month, and the data was collected from
| September 2025 to January 2026[0]
|
| [0]: See page 2:
| https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34836/w348...
| pengaru wrote:
| At $dayjob GenAI has been shoved into every workflow and it's a
| constant source of noise and irritation, slop galore. I'm so
| close to walking away from the industry to resume being a
| mechanic, what a complete shit show.
| bitwize wrote:
| Meanwhile in some auto shop,
|
| "Perfect! Let's delve into the problem with the engine. Based
| on the symptoms you describe, the likely cause is a blown head
| gasket..."
| deadbabe wrote:
| The people who will be most productive with AI will be the
| entreprompteurs who whip up entire products and go to market
| faster than ever before, iterating at dangerous speeds. Lean
| Startup methodology on pure steroids basically.
|
| Unfortunately I think most of the stuff they make will be shit,
| but they will build it very productively.
| boxedemp wrote:
| Software doesn't need to be good to be successful; it only
| needs to solve a problem and be better than the competition.
|
| I predict a golden age for experienced developers! There will
| be an uncountable number of poorly designed apps with scaling
| issues. And many of them will be funded.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Meh, no. In a future where any app could be prompted, the
| only thing you'd get funding for is if you had managed to go
| viral and secure some large audience.
|
| This is not good. When all that matters is how viral your app
| is, people no longer compete on features and quality of life.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| It's simple calculus for business leaders: admit they're laying
| off workers because the fundamentals are bad and spook investors,
| admit they're laying off workers because the economy is bad and
| anger the administration, or just say it's AI making roles
| unnecessary and hope for the best.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| It's weird being on here and seeing so much naysaying, because I
| see a radical change already happening in software development.
| The future is here, it's just not equally distributed.
|
| In the past 6 months, I've gone from Copilot to Cursor to
| Conductor. It's really the shift to Conductor that convinced me
| that I crossed into a new reality of software work. It is now
| possible to code at a scale dramatically higher than before.
|
| This has not yet translated into shipping at far higher
| magnitude. There are still big friction points and bottlenecks.
| Some will need to be resolved with technology, others will need
| organizational solutions.
|
| But this is crystal clear to me: there is a clear path to
| companies getting software value to the end customer much more
| rapidly.
|
| I would compare the ongoing revolution to the advent of the Web
| for software delivery. When features didn't have to be scheduled
| for release in physical shipments, it unlocked radically
| different approaches to product development, most clearly
| illustrated in The Agile Manifesto. You could also do real-time
| experiments to optimize product outcomes.
|
| I'm not here to say that this is all going to be OK. It won't be
| for a lot of people. Some companies are going to make tremendous
| mistakes and generate tremendous waste. Many of the concerns
| around GenAI are deadly,serious.
|
| But I also have zero doubt that the companies that most
| effectively embrace the new possibilities are going to run
| circles around their competition.
|
| It's a weird feeling when people argue against me in this,
| because I've seen too much. It's like arguing with flat-earthers.
| I've never personally circumnavigated Antarctica, but me being
| wrong would invalidate so many facts my frame of reality depends
| on.
|
| To me, the question isn't about the capabilities of the
| technology. It's whether we actually want the future it unlocks.
| That's the discussion I wish we were having. Even if it's hard
| for me to see what choice there is. Capitalism and geopolitical
| competition are incredible forces to reckon with, and AI is being
| driven hard by both.
| azuanrb wrote:
| Curious why you like Conductor. I'm trying it out, but since I
| primarily live in the CLI, I might not see much value in it.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Fair point. What it really does for me is give me a better UX
| for having a bunch of parallel workstreams. I could achieve a
| similar effect thing with scripting, and maybe some clever
| ways of getting something like the sidebar for seeing the
| status of everything on a single pane. But Conductor packaged
| it up in a way that I found much improved over multiple
| Cursor or VSCode windows.
| nowittyusername wrote:
| As we approach the singularity things will be more noisy and
| things will make less and less sense as rapid change can look
| like chaos from inside the system. I recommend folks just take a
| deep breath, and just take a look around you. Regardless on your
| stance if the singularity is real, if AI will revolutionize
| everything or not, just forget all that noise. just look around
| you and ask yourself if things are seeming more or less chaotic,
| are you able to predict better or worse on what is going to
| happen? how far can your predictions land you now versus lets say
| 10 or 20 years ago? Conflicting signals is exactly how all of
| this looks. one account is saying its the end of the world
| another is saying nothing ever changes and everything is the same
| as it always was....
| 1broseidon wrote:
| I think the 'AI productivity gap' is mostly a state management
| problem. Even with great models, you burn so much time just
| manually syncing context between different agents or chat
| sessions.
|
| Until the handoff tax is lower than the cost of just doing it
| yourself, the ROI isn't going to be there for most engineering
| workflows.
| ahepp wrote:
| I read an article in FT just a couple days ago claiming that
| increased productivity was becoming visible in economic data
|
| > My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of
| roughly 2.7 per cent for 2025. This is a near doubling from the
| sluggish 1.4 per cent annual average that characterised the past
| decade.
|
| good for 3 clicks:
| https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/97861f...
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| The slow part as a senior engineer has never been actually
| writing the code. It has been:
|
| - reviews for code
|
| - asking stakeholders opinions
|
| - SDLC latency (things taking forever to test)
|
| - tickets
|
| - documentations/diagrams
|
| - presentations
|
| Many of these require review. The review hell doesn't magically
| stop at Open source projects. These things happen internally too.
| AngryData wrote:
| I think the biggest problem is calling it AI to start with. It
| gives people a huge misrepresentation of what it is actually
| capable of. It is an impressive tool with many uses, but it is
| not AGI.
| jurschreuder wrote:
| Workers may see the LLM as a productivity boost because they can
| basically cheat a their homework.
|
| As a CEO I see it as a massive clog up of vast amounts of content
| that somebody will need to check. A DDoS of any text-based
| system.
|
| The other day I got a document of 155 pages in Whatsapp. Thanx.
| Same with pull requests. Who will check all this?
| beart wrote:
| > Who will check all this?
|
| The answer to that, for some, is more AI.
|
| I had a peer explain that the PRs created by AI are now too
| large and difficult to understand. They were concerned that
| bugs would crop up after merging the code. Their solution, was
| to use another AI to review the code... However, this did not
| solve the problem of not knowing what the code does. They had a
| solution for that as well... ask AI to prepare a quiz and then
| deliver it to the engineer to check their understanding of the
| code.
|
| The question was asked - does using AI mean best-practices
| should no longer be followed? There were some in the
| conversation who answered, "probably yes".
|
| > Who will check all this?
|
| So yeah, I think the real answer to that is... no one.
| thisoneisreal wrote:
| Just yesterday one of my junior devs got an 800-line code
| review from an AI agent. It wasn't all bad, but is this kid
| literally going to have to read an essay every time he submits
| code?
| franktankbank wrote:
| Who gave you the 155 page doc? How quickly were they fired?
| yalogin wrote:
| Every technology, whether it improved existing systems and
| productivity or not, created new wealth by creating new services
| and experiences. So that is what needs to happen with this wave
| as well.
| autoexec wrote:
| If nothing else AI is making great strides in surveillance. It
| makes mistakes, but that only matters when there's
| accountability, and now it can make them at scales that were
| unthinkable before. Most of us are not going to enjoy the new
| experiences AI brings us, but a small number of people are
| already making a lot of money selling new services to
| government and law enforcement.
| an-allen wrote:
| Yep just a risk amplifier. We are having a global warming level
| event in computing and blindly walling into it.
| matt3210 wrote:
| I'm not sure about this. I've been 100% ai since jan/1 and I'm
| way more productive at producing code.
|
| The non code parts (about 90% of the work) is taking the same
| amount of time though.
| lqstuart wrote:
| I was in the "AI is grossly overhyped" camp because I work on
| large distributed deep learning training jobs and AI is indeed
| worthless for those, and will likely always be worthless since
| the APIs change constantly and the iteration loop is too
| cumbersome to constantly resubmit broken jobs to a training
| cluster.
|
| Then I started working on some basic grpc/fullstack crap that I
| absolutely do not care about, at all, but needs to be done and
| uses internal frameworks that are not well documented, and now
| Claude is my best friend at work.
|
| The best part is everyone else's AI code still sucks, because
| they ask it to do stupid crap and don't apply any critical
| thinking skills to it, so I just tell AI to re-do it but don't
| fuck up the error handling and use constants instead of
| hardcoding strings like a middle schooler, and now I'm a 100x
| developer fearlessly leading the charge to usher in the AI era as
| I play the new No Man's Sky update on my other PC and wait for
| whatever agent to finish crap.
| g-mork wrote:
| this weirdly skirts my own experience yet somehow still read
| like sarcasm hehe. I think if we just return to calling it
| intelligent autocomplete expectations for productivity gain
| would be better established.
|
| trying to hacksmash Claude into outputting something it simply
| can't just produces endless mess. or getting into a fight
| pointing out issues with what it's doing and it just piles on
| extra layer upon layer of gunk. but meanwhile if you ask it to
| boilerplate an entire SaaS around the hard part, it's done in
| about 15 seconds.
|
| of course this says nothing about the costs of long term
| maintainability, and I think everyone by now recognises what
| that's going to look like
| lqstuart wrote:
| We just haven't figured out how to use it. You wouldn't try
| to create an entire project out of IDE templates, but how
| many "low code" attempts were there to do just that at some
| point?
|
| I think there are phases in a project's lifecycle where it's
| more appropriate, at the very beginning and very late. I do
| not think junior developers should be using it, because it is
| much much harder to learn and it kills productivity having
| senior developers review 3000 lines of slop. Just stuff like
| that needs to be figured out.
| g-mork wrote:
| I've had some luck with this idea of keeping the "Clauded"
| bits separate where possible. Do you really care if it
| crates a spaghetti mess if the result is some visually
| beautiful low trust site that lives in its own repo
| entirely? vs. letting it run in autoapprove mode inside a
| module where critical hand-written crypto code exists
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Ah I see what my goal for this year is then. I have a large
| Steam backlog to work through. Unfortunately we currently code
| in short bursts and mostly are trying to figure out how these
| integrations are supposed to happen and why the different teams
| tell us different things
| johnnienaked wrote:
| The issue with framing this as a resurrection of the productivity
| paradox is that AI had never even theoretically increased
| productivity.
|
| I think in retrospect it's going to look very silly.
| casey2 wrote:
| Of course AI is bullshit. If you couldn't just use it yourself
| and figure that out then ask yourself why people like Bezos or
| Altman are perfectly happy "investing" other people's money but
| not their own. If they actually believed their own bullshit they
| would personally be investing all of their money AND taking on
| personal debt. Instead Bezos, a guy worth ~200B, sells 5B worth
| of stock to invest in "AI-adjacent" (power generation) industry,
| while making amazon invest 200B in data centers. Talk about
| conflict of interest! WTF!
| transcriptase wrote:
| Mentioning AI in an earnings call means fuck all when what
| they're actually referring to is toggling on the permissions for
| borderline useless copilot features across their enterprise 365
| deployments or being convinced to buy some tool that's actually
| just a wrapper around API calls to a cheap/outdated OpenAI model
| with a hidden system prompt.
|
| Yeah, if your Fortune 500 workplace is claiming to be leveraging
| AI because it has a few dozen relatively tech illiterate
| employees using it to write their em dash/emoji riddled emails
| about wellness sessions and teams invites for trivia events...
| there's not going to be a noticeable uptick in productivity.
|
| The real productivity comes from tooling that no sufficiently
| risk adverse pubco IS department is going to let their employees
| use, because when all of their incentives point to saying no to
| installing anything ever, the idea of giving the permissions
| required for agentic AI to do anything useful is a non-starter.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| There was a recent post where someone said AI allows them to
| start and finish projects. And I find that exactly true. AI
| agents are helpful for starting proof of concepts. And for doing
| finishing fixes to an established codebase. For a lot of the work
| in the middle, I can be still useful, but the developer is more
| important there.
| tabs_or_spaces wrote:
| My experience has been
|
| * If I don't know how to do something, llms can get me started
| really fast. Basically it distills the time taken to research
| something to a small amount.
|
| * if I know something well, I find myself trying to guide the llm
| to make the best decisions. I haven't reached the state of
| completely letting go and trusting the llm yet, because the llm
| doesn't make good long term decisions
|
| * when working alone, I see the biggest productivity boost in ai
| and where I can get things done.
|
| * when working in a team, llms are not useful at all and can
| sometimes be a bottleneck. Not everyone uses llms the same,
| sharing context as a team is way harder than it should be. People
| don't want to collaborate. People can't communicate properly.
|
| * so for me, solo engineers or really small teams benefit the
| most from llms. Larger teams and organizations will struggle
| because there's simply too much human overheads to overcome. This
| is currently matching what I'm seeing in posts these days
| aurareturn wrote:
| The future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI
| assistants.
|
| I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be
| more companies.
|
| Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each
|
| What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10
| engineers each
|
| What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1
| engineer each
|
| Same number of engineers.
|
| We are about to enter an era of explosive software production,
| not from big tech but from small companies. I don't think this
| will only apply to the software industry. I expect this to
| apply to every industry.
| itake wrote:
| yeah, I agree.
|
| When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising,
| they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and
| increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers,
| giving them even more leverage.
| aurareturn wrote:
| In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was
| not replaced. We are doing more than ever.
|
| Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more
| customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed.
| We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our
| customers better too with higher retention rates. When we
| onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have
| meetings about the ROI. Now we just build the custom
| demands in the time we took to meet to discuss whether we
| should even do it.
|
| Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business
| without even knowing the programming language they are
| written in. The original developers left the company. All I
| know is what is suppose to go into the service and what is
| suppose to come out. When there is a bug, I ask the AI why.
| The AI almost always finds it. When I need to change
| something, I double and triple check the logic and I know
| how to test the changes.
|
| No, a normal person without a background in software
| engineering can't do this. That's why I still have a job.
| But how I spend my time as a software engineer has changed
| drastically and so has my productivity.
|
| When a software dev say AI doesn't increase their
| productivity, it truly does feel like they're using it
| wrong or don't know how to use it.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business
| without even knowing the programming language they are
| written in. _[...]_ No, a normal person without a
| background in software engineering can 't do this.
|
| Of course they can - if you don't know any of the tech-
| stack details (i.e. a "normal" user), why can't someone
| else who also doesn't know the tech-stackc details
| replace you?
|
| What magic sauce do you possess other than tech-stack
| chops?
| aurareturn wrote:
| In the future, they might be able to. Not yet though. I
| still have a job.
|
| When a non software engineer can build a production app
| as well as I can, I know I won't be working as a software
| engineer anymore. In that world, having great ideas,
| data, compute, and energy will be king.
|
| I don't think we will get there within the next 3-4
| years. Beyond that, who knows.
| akkanzn wrote:
| Could you provide some details on your company, code
| base, etc? These are wild claims and don't match the
| reality I'm seeing everywhere else.
|
| How big is your team? How many customers? What's your
| product? Can we see the code? How do you track defects?
| Etc.
|
| Part of the reason I'm struggling with this is because
| we'd be seeing OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. plastering these
| case studies everywhere if they existed. Instead, I'm
| stuck using CC and all its poorly implemented warts.
| alternatex wrote:
| Now if only companies knew how to correctly assess actual
| impact and not perceived impact.
| itake wrote:
| I don't think this is an AI problem. Even before AI,
| FANGA companies famously optimize promotions on perceived
| impact.
|
| During the promo review, people will look how many
| projects were done and the impact of those projects.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Acquisition rate, retention rate, revenue, profit margin?
| alternatex wrote:
| By those metrics, Microsoft lost 20% of it's value due to
| hopping on the AI coding assistance train.
|
| I'm not saying it is the case, just making it apparent
| how unreliable it is to measure productivity by comparing
| what's happening at the lowest level in a company to its
| financials.
| lnsru wrote:
| That means the system will collapse in the future. Now from
| bunch of people some good programmers are made. Rest go into
| marketing, sales, agile or other not really technical roles.
| When the initial crowd will be gone there will be no
| experienced users of AI. Crappy inexperienced developer will
| make more crap without prior experience and ability to judge
| the design decisions. Basically no seniors without juniors.
| aurareturn wrote:
| This implies that writing code by hand will remain the best
| way to create software.
|
| The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing
| code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow,
| who got to senior status using AI tools.
|
| Maybe people will become more of generalists rather than
| specialists.
| xienze wrote:
| > The seniors today who have got to senior status by
| writing code manually will be different than seniors of
| tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools.
|
| That's putting it mildly. I think it's going to be
| interesting to see what happens when an entire generation
| of software developers who've only ever known "just ask
| the LLM to do it" are unleashed on the world. I think
| these people will have close to no understanding of how
| computing works on a fundamental level. Sort of like the
| difference between Gen-X/millenial (and earlier)
| developers who grew up having to interact with computers
| primarily through CLIs (e.g., DOS), having to at least
| have some understanding of memory management, low-level
| programming, etc. versus the Gen-Z developers who've only
| ever known computers through extremely high level
| interfaces like iPads.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I barely know how assembly, CPUs, GPUs, compilers,
| networking work. Yet, software that I've designed and
| written have been used by hundreds of millions of people.
|
| Sure, maybe you would have caught the bug if you wrote
| assembly instead of C. But the C programmer still
| released much better software than you faster. By the
| time you shipped v1 in assembly, the C program has
| already iterated 100 times and found product market fit.
| gzread wrote:
| Casey Muratori says that every programmer should
| understand how computers work and if you don't understand
| how computers work you can't be a good programmer.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I might not be a good programmer but I've been a very
| productive one.
|
| Someone who is good at writing code isn't always good at
| making money.
| gzread wrote:
| AI slop books made more money than JK Rowling, too.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Maybe in the future, yea. Most likely not because
| creating books is much easier now but total reading time
| can't increase nearly as fast. More books chasing the
| same amount of reading time.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| To be fair, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they were
| better than barfs onto a page. She's not exactly Tolkien
| toldnotmywrath wrote:
| Problem with much of this talk is receipts are always
| nowhere to be found.
| aurareturn wrote:
| But I don't see any receipts from the opposite side
| either.
| lnsru wrote:
| Generalist is not automatically bad. I design digital
| high speed hardware and write (probably crappy) Qt code.
| The thing is that I have experience to judge my work.
| Greenhorns can't and this will lead to crapification of
| the whole industry. I often ask AI tools for an advice.
| Sometimes it's very useful, sometimes it's complete
| hallucination. On average it definitely makes me better
| developer. Having rather abstract answer I can derive
| exact solution. But that comes from my previous
| experience. Without experience it's a macabre guessing
| game.
| matwood wrote:
| > smaller companies
|
| And large companies. The first half of my career was spent
| writing internal software for large companies. I believe it's
| still the case that the majority of software written is for
| internal software. AI will be a boon for these use cases as
| it will make it easier for every company big and small to
| have custom software for its exact use case(s).
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > AI will be a boon for these use cases as it will make it
| easier for every company big and small to have custom
| software
|
| Big cos often have the problem of defining the internal
| problems they're trying to solve. Once identified they have
| to create organizational permission structures to allow the
| solutions. Then they need to stay on tasks long enough to
| build and use the software to solve the problem.
|
| Only one of these steps is easily improved with AI.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| And thenb potentially suffer from integration hell.
|
| The benefit of using off the shelf software is that many of
| the integration problems get solved by other people. Heck
| you may not even know you have a problem and they may
| already have a solution.
|
| Custom software on the other hand could just breed more
| demand for custom software. We gotta be careful how much
| custom stuff we do lest it get completely out of hand
| vjk800 wrote:
| > I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will
| be more companies.
|
| This would be strange, because all other technology
| development in history has taken things the exact opposite
| direction; larger companies that can do things on scale and
| outcompete smaller ones.
| aurareturn wrote:
| This would be strange, because all other technology
| development in history has taken things the exact opposite
| direction; larger companies that can do things on scale and
| outcompete smaller ones.
|
| I don't think this has always been true.
|
| Youtube allowed many more small media production companies
| - sometimes just one person in their garage.
|
| Shopify allowed many more small retailers.
|
| Steam & cheap game engines allowed many more indie game
| developers instead of just a few big studios.
|
| It likely depends on the stage of the tech development. I
| can see Youtube channels consolidating into a few very
| large channels. But today, there are far more media
| production companies than 30 years ago.
| trollbridge wrote:
| That's an argument for giant companies at scale like
| Google/YouTube.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I don't think so. Are there more media production
| entities now or in the 2000s?
| mirsadm wrote:
| This seems like a bot comment.
| aurareturn wrote:
| So is yours.
| storus wrote:
| It will lead to hollowing out of the substance everywhere.
| The constant march to more abstraction and simplicity will
| inevitably end up with AI doing all the work and nobody
| understanding what is going on underneath, turning technology
| into magic again. We have seen people losing touch with how
| things work with every single move towards abstraction,
| machine code -> C -> Java -> JavaScript -> async/await -> ...
| -> LLM code generation, producing generations of devs that
| are more and more detached from the metal and living in a
| vastly simplified landscape not understanding trade-offs of
| the abstractions they are using, which leads to some
| unsolvable problems in production that inevitably arise due
| to the choices made for them by the abstractions.
| csa wrote:
| > nobody understanding what is going on underneath
|
| I think many developers, especially ones who come from EE
| backgrounds, grossly overestimate the number of people
| needed who understand what is going on underneath.
|
| "Going on underneath" is a lot of interesting and hard
| problems, ones that true hackers are attracted to, but I
| personally don't think that it's a good use of talented
| people to have 10s or 100s of thousands of people working
| on those problems.
|
| Let the tech geniuses do genius work.
|
| Meanwhile, there is a massive need for many millions of
| people who can solve business problems with tech
| abstractions. As an economy (national or global), supply is
| nowhere close to meeting demand in this category.
| storus wrote:
| The point is that LLMs can only replicate what existed
| somewhere, they aren't able to invent new things. Once
| humans lose their edge, there won't be any AI-driven
| progress, just a remix of existing stuff. That was the
| hollowing out I mentioned. Obviously, even these days
| there is tech that looks like magic (EUV lito etc.) but
| there are at least some people that understand how it all
| works.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I think we were headed that way before LLMs came on to hunt
| scene.
|
| LLMs just accelerated this trend.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| By and large "AI assistant" is not a real thing. Everyone
| talks about it but no one can point you to one, because it
| doesn't exist (at least not in a form that any fair non-
| disingenuous reading of that term would imply). It's one big
| collective hallucination.
| Wilder7977 wrote:
| And those companies will do what? Produce products in uber-
| saturated markets?
|
| Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created,
| all of them successful?
| rkomorn wrote:
| I don't understand the people who think more companies with
| fewer employees is a good thing.
|
| I already feel spammed to death by desperate requests for
| my consumption as is.
| graybeardhacker wrote:
| Because: 1. One person companies are better at giving the
| wealth to the worker. 2. With thousands of companies the
| products can be more targeted and each product can serve
| fewer people and still be profitable
|
| Then companies won't need to spam you to convince you
| that you need something you don't. Or that their product
| will help you in ways it can't.
|
| Once person companies will not have a 100 person
| marketing team trying to inject ads into ever corner of
| your life.
| rkomorn wrote:
| > Once person companies will not have a 100 person
| marketing team trying to inject ads into ever corner of
| your life.
|
| Because these one person companies will scale up
| everything with AI except marketing/advertising? Consider
| me skeptical.
| toldnotmywrath wrote:
| > One person companies will not have a 100 person
| marketing team to inject ads into every corner of your
| life.
|
| But they could have a thousand-agent swarm connected via
| MCP to everything within our field of vision to bury us
| with ads.
|
| It's been a long time since I read "The Third Wave" and
| up until 2026, not much has reminded me about its "Small
| is beautiful", and "rise of the prosumer" themes besides
| the content creator economy which is arguably the worst
| thing to ever happen to humanity's information
| environment, and LLM agent discussions.
| rkomorn wrote:
| > the content creator economy
|
| This is exactly one of the things I find maddening at the
| moment. "Everyone" (except my actual friends) on social
| media is trying to sell me something.
|
| Eg: I like dogs. It's becoming increasingly hard to
| follow dog accounts without someone trying to sell me
| their sponsor's stuff.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Go back to a time at the start of Youtube.
|
| Now answer these questions:
|
| And what will those people who make videos on Youtube do?
| Produce videos in uber-saturated categories?
|
| Or magically 9900 more media channels will be created, all
| of them successful?
| aurareturn wrote:
| To follow this up, one of my favorite channels on Youtube
| is Outdoor Boys. It's just a father who made videos once
| a week doing outdoor things like camping with his family.
| He has amassed billions of views on his channel.
| Literally a one-man operation. He does all the filming,
| editing himself. No marketing. His channel got so popular
| that he had to quit to protect his family from fame.
|
| Many large production companies in the 2000s would have
| been extremely happy with that many views. They would
| have laughed you out of the building if you told them a
| single person could ever produce compelling enough video
| content and get at many viewers.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Serious question: but aren't there thousands of other
| guys doing almost the same thing and getting almost no
| views? Even if there are lots of new channels, there
| aren't going to be lots of winners
| aurareturn wrote:
| But there are many Youtubers making a decent living doing
| it as a one person shop or a small team. In the past, you
| needed to a large team with a large budget and buy in
| from TV/DVDs/VHS to get an audience.
| csa wrote:
| > And those companies will do what? Produce products in
| uber-saturated markets?
|
| > Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be
| created, all of them successful?
|
| Yes. Products will become more tailored/bespoke rather than
| a lot of the one size fits all approach that is pervasive
| now.
| TimByte wrote:
| I suspect the real breakthrough for teams won't be better raw
| models, but better ways to make the "AI-assisted thinking"
| legible and shareable across the group, instead of trapped in
| personal prompt histories
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| This seems like a problem simply stated but not simply
| solved. I think Grokipedia or whatever it was called was a
| real exercise in "no one cares about cached LLM output". The
| ephemeral nature of LLM output is somehow a core property of
| its utility. Kind of like I never share a Google search with
| a coworker, I share the link I found.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I sort of have this indirectly solved with a project I'm
| working on inspired by Beads. One thing I added is as you
| have the LLM work on tasks, you can sync them directly to
| GitHub, I would love to add other ticketing / task backends
| to it, but I mostly just use GitHub. You can also create them
| on GitHub and sync them down and claim a task (the tool will
| post a comment on GitHub that you've claimed the work). I can
| see people using it to collaborate easier, but for the time
| being it's just me using it for myself. ;)
|
| These tasks become your prompt once refined. I basically
| braindump to Claude, have it make tasks from my brain dump.
| Then I tell Claude to ask me clarifying questions, it updates
| the tasks and then I have Claude do market research for some
| or all tasks to see what the most common path is to solve a
| given problem and then update the tasks.
|
| https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails
| stephenr wrote:
| > llms can get me started really fast. Basically it distills
| the time taken to research something
|
| > the llm doesn't make good long term decisions
|
| What could possibly go wrong, using something you know makes
| bad decisions, as the basis of your learning something new.
|
| It's like if a dietician instructed a client to go watch
| McDonald's staff, when they ask how to cook the type of meals
| that have been recommended.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| I'm bearish on AI, but I still think this is disingenuous. My
| grade school math teachers were probably not well-versed in
| Calculus and Real Analysis, but they helped me learn my time
| tables just as well.
|
| AI is great at exposing you to what you don't even know you
| don't know: your personal unknown unknowns, the complexity
| you're completely unaware of.
| stephenr wrote:
| > My grade school math teachers were probably not well-
| versed in Calculus and Real Analysis, but they helped me
| learn my time tables just as well.
|
| Are you somehow equating basic multiplication to a "bad
| long term decision"?
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| No, I was focusing on this quote:
|
| > llms can get me started really fast. Basically it
| distills the time taken to research
|
| I was saying that it speeds up research by exposing you
| to the things you don't know that you don't know.
| stephenr wrote:
| > exposing you to the things you don't know that you
| don't know
|
| Or the things that it has hallucinated, or just
| referenced incorrectly.
|
| That's my point. You're talking about learning basic
| maths from a school teacher who isn't a Calculus expert,
| but the thread is talking about learning maths from a kid
| with ADHD who completes the homework before the teacher
| has finished describing what needs to be done, but
| sometimes returns homework in an invented language with
| references to Cthulhu throughout it.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| To me the biggest benefit of LLMs has always been as a learning
| tol, be it for general queries or "build this so I can get an
| idea of how it works and get started quickly". There are so
| many little things that you need to know when trying anything
| new.
| trappist wrote:
| "Admitted" as the verb in a statement like this is blatant
| editorialization. Did they just finally "admit" what they had
| been reluctant to reveal? No doubt with their heads hung in
| shame?
|
| Maybe this bothers me more than it should.
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| "What had promised to be a boom to workplace productivity.."
|
| No. BOON. A BOON to workplace productivity.
|
| And then the writer doubles down on the error by proving it was
| not a typo, ending the sentence with "...was for several years a
| bust."
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I think the article is very premature. Lots of companies are slow
| to adapt. And while there are a lot of early adopters, there are
| way more people still not really adapting what they do.
|
| There are some real changes in day to day software development.
| Programmers seem to be spending a lot of time prompting LLMs
| these days. Some more than others. But the trend is pretty hard
| to deny at this point. That snowballed in just 6-7 months from
| mostly working in IDEs to mostly working in Agentic coding tools.
| Codex was barely usable before the summer (I'm biased to that
| since that is what I use but it wasn't that far behind Claude
| Code). Their cli tool got a lot more usable in autumn and by
| Christmas I was using it more and more. The Desktop app release
| and the new model releases only three weeks ago really spiked my
| usage. Claude Code was a bit earlier but saw a similar massive
| increase in utility and usability.
|
| It is still early days. This report cannot possibly take into
| account these massive improvements that hav been playing out over
| essentially just the last few months. This time last year,
| Agentic coding was barely usable. You had isolated early adopters
| of Claude Code, Cursor, and similar tools. Compare to what we
| have now, these tools weren't very good.
|
| In the business world things are delayed much more. We
| programmers have the advantage that many/most of our tools are
| highly scriptable (by design) and easy to figure out for LLMs. As
| soon as AI coders figured out how to patch tool calling into LLMs
| there was this massive leap in utility as LLMs suddenly gained
| feedback loops based on existing tools that it could suddenly
| just use.
|
| This has not happened yet for the vast majority of business
| tools. There are lots of permission and security issues.
| Proprietary tools that are hard to integrate with. Even things
| like wordprocessors, spreadsheets, presentation tools, and
| email/calendar tools remain poorly integrated. You can really see
| Apple, MS, and Google struggle with this. They are all taking
| baby steps here but the state of the art is still "copy this blob
| of text in your tool". Forget about it respecting your document
| theme, or structure. Agentic tool usage is not widely spread
| outside the software engineering community yet.
|
| The net result is that the business world still has a lot of
| drudgery in the form of people manually copying data around
| between UIs that are mostly not accessible to agentic tools yet.
| Also many users aren't that tool savvy to begin with. It's
| unreasonable to expect people like that to be impacted a lot by
| AI this early in the game. There's a lot of this stuff that is in
| scope for automating with agentic tools. Most of it is a lot less
| hard than the type of stuff programmers already deal with in
| their lives.
|
| Most of the effects this will have on the industry will play out
| over the next few years. We've seen nothing yet. Especially
| bigger companies will do so very conservatively. They are mostly
| incapable of rapid change. Just look at how slow the big trillion
| dollar companies are themselves with eating their own dog food.
| And they literally invented and bootstrapped most of this stuff.
| The rest of the industry is worse at this.
|
| The good news is that the main challenges at this point are non
| technical: organizational lag, security practices, low level
| API/UI plumbing to facilitate agentic tool usage, etc. None of
| this stuff requires further leaps in AI model quality. But doing
| the actual work to make this happen is not a fast process. From
| proof of concept to reality is a slow process. Five years would
| be exceptionally fast. That might actually happen given the
| massive impact this stuff might have.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| This study spans 3 years, so it goes back to ChatGPT 3.5 era. Not
| sure how valid it is, considering the breakneck speed at which
| everything moves.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I'm saying it over and over, AI is not killing dev jobs,
| offshoring is. The AI hype happens to fall into the end of the
| pandemic, and lots of companies went to work-from-home and are
| now hiring cheaper devs around the world.
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| Large firms are extremely bureaucratic organizations largely
| isolated from the market by their monopolistic positions.
| Internal pressures rule over external ones, and thus,
| inefficiency abounds. AI undeniably is a productive tool, but
| large companies aren't really primarily concerned with
| productivity.
| vjk800 wrote:
| Indeed. Most large companies don't need AI to increase
| productivity - they just need to stop wasting time on stupid
| bullshit. However, figuring out what is stupid bullshit and
| what is not seems to be an impossible task, and I don't think
| AI is going to help here at all.
| psychoslave wrote:
| What are you talking about, if there is one thing on which
| LLM shine, it's generating vast amount of bullshit. That's
| extreme productivity gains.
|
| Also flame-wars can be autofed ad nauseam now, so there's
| going to be less and less interest in engaging into them. In
| an act of desperation, idle trolls will turn to tasks tracked
| by KPIs.
| d--b wrote:
| CEOs have no clue what's going on at the IC level.
|
| I bet many CEO PA are using AI for many tasks. It's typically a
| role where AI is very useful. Answering emails, moving meetings
| around, booking and buying a bunch of crap.
| bandrami wrote:
| I ask this as a genuine question: who needs help "answering
| emails" and what part of it do they need help with?
| d--b wrote:
| A lot of people obsess over phrasing.
|
| Like for instance you want to tell a coworker his work is
| shit, but don't know how to put it in a way that's not going
| hurt them or make you look like an asshole.
|
| I know people who'd potentially spend hours on a single email
| like this.
| vjk800 wrote:
| My experience has been that AI is much more useful on my own
| systems than on company systems. For AI to (currently) be useful,
| I need to choose my own tooling and LLM models to support AI
| centered workflow. At work, I have to use whatever (usually
| Microsoft) tools my company has chosen to purchase and approve
| for my corporate computer, and usually nothing works as well as
| on my own machine where I get to set it up as I want.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| What you are describing is a failure to integrate AI into said
| company systems. I have seen quite a few companies now that buy
| MS AI products with great hopes only to be severely
| disappointed, because they may as well have just used vanilla
| ChatGPT (in fact then they would at least get newer models
| faster). But there are counter examples too. If you can pull
| all your company documentation into a vector db and build a RAG
| based assistant, you can potentially save countless hours
| across your workforce and possibly customers too. But this is
| not easy and also requires some level of UI interactivity that
| noone really offers right now. In fact they can't offer it,
| because you usually need to integrate ancient, arcane sources
| into your system. So you do have to write a lot of integration
| code yourself at every step. Not many companies are willing to
| spend that kind of money and effort, because managers just want
| to buy a MS product and be done with improving efficiency by
| next quarter.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I have been using vector based RAG for about two years now, I
| am not knocking the tech, but last year I started
| experimenting with going way back in time and also in
| parallel trying BM25 search (or hybrid BM25 and vector). So:
| not even a very good example use case of LLMs, the tech is
| not always applicable.
|
| EDIT: I am on a mobile device and don't have a reference
| handy but there have been good papers on RAG scaling issues -
| basically the embedding space gets saturated (too many
| document chunks cluster in small areas of the embedding
| space), if my memory is correct.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Depends on your use case. A system that can do full text
| and semantic search across a vast archive, open files based
| on that search to retrieve detail and generate an answer
| after sifting through hundreds of pages is pretty powerful.
| Especially if you mange to pair it with document link
| generation and page citation.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I agree with you, but then I am retired so my opinion is not
| that relevant.
|
| I have a sweet spot for using just Emacs, no other IDEs except
| very occasional use of AntiGravity. For a particular fun
| project or researching how to use generative models in
| applications, I like to start low: see if a small local model
| with appropriate tool use or agentic library will get the job
| done, if not move up to using something cheap like
| gemini-3-flash, and only if none of these approaches work, then
| use an expensive model.
|
| I was advising a friend's company last month on their
| application that effectively uses LLM models, but I was blown
| away by their zeal to spend lots of money on tokens.
| hestefisk wrote:
| I am in strategy consulting and I can tell you the productivity
| gains are real in terms of research, model building, and
| summarising work. The result is price pressure from our clients.
| EastLondonCoder wrote:
| I think the deluge on projects on show HN points to something
| real, its possible today to ship projects as a one man shop that
| looks like something that just a year or so would have required a
| team.
|
| Personally I have noticed strange effects, where I previously
| would have reached for a software package to make something or
| solve an issue, its now often faster for me to write a specific
| program just for my use case. Just this weekend I needed a reel
| with a specific look to post on instagram but instead of trying
| to use something like after effects, i could quickly cobble
| together a program that was using css transforms that outputted a
| series of images I could tie together with ffmpeg.
|
| About a month ago I was unhappy with the commercial ticketing
| systems, they were both expensive and opaque so I made my own.
| Obviously for a case like that you need discipline and testing
| when you take peoples money, so there was a lot of focus on end
| to end testing.
|
| I have a few more examples like this, but to make this work you
| need to approach using LLMs with a certain amount of rigour. The
| hardest part is to prevent drift in the model. There are a
| certain number things you can do to make the model grounded in
| reality.
|
| When the tool doesn't have a reproducer, it'll happily invent a
| story and you'll debug the story. If you ground the root cause in
| for example a test, the model can get context enough to actually
| solve the problem.
|
| Another issue is that you need to read and understand code
| quickly, but its no real difference from working with other
| developers. When tests are passing I usually do a PR to myself
| and then review as I usually would do.
|
| A prerequisite is that you need tight specs, but those can also
| be generated if you are experienced enough. You need enough
| domain intuition to know what 'done' means and what to measure.
|
| Personally I think the bottleneck will go from trying to get into
| a flow state to write solutions to analyze the problem space and
| verification.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I think the deluge on projects on show HN points to something
| real, its possible today to ship projects as a one man shop
| that looks like something that just a year or so would have
| required a team.
|
| Lots of these project have a lifespan of a week and will never
| ever be maintained. When you pour blood and sweat in a projet
| you get attached to it, when you vibe code it in an afternoon
| and it's not and instant hit you move on to the next one.
| Havoc wrote:
| I find this difficult to reconcile with things like for example
| freelance translation being basically wiped out wholesale
|
| Or even the simple utility of having a chatbot. They're not
| popular because they're useless
|
| Which to me says it's more likely that people under estimate
| corporate inertia
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I think the best point made in this conversation is that AI is
| often enough used to do things quickly that have little value, or
| just waste people's time.
|
| I am glad to see articles like this that evaluate impact, but I
| wish the following would get more public interest:
|
| With LLMs we are chasing sort-of linear growth in capability at
| exponential cost increases for power and compute.
|
| Were you mad when the government bailed out mis-managed banks?
| The mother of all government bailouts might be using the US
| taxpayer to fund idiot companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that
| are spending $1000 in costs to earn $100.
|
| I am starting to feel like the entire industry is lazy: we need
| fundamental new research in energy and compute efficient AI. I do
| love seeing non-LLM research efforts and more being done with
| much smaller task-focused models, but the overall approach we are
| taking in the USA is f$cking crazy. I fear we are going to lose
| big-time on this one.
| vagrantstreet wrote:
| Perhaps something went wrong along the career path of a
| developer? Personally during my education there is a severe lack
| of actual coding done mid lectures, especially any sort of
| showcase of tools that are available. We didn't even get taught
| how to use debuggers, I see late year students still struggle how
| to do basic navigation in a terminal.
|
| And the biggest irony is that the "scariest" projects we had at
| our university ended up being maybe 500-1000 lines of code,
| things really must go back to hands on programming with real time
| feedback from a teacher. LLM's only output what you ask and won't
| really suggest concepts used by professionals unless you go out
| of your way to ask for it, it all seems like a vicious cycle even
| though meaningful code blocks can range along 5 to 100 lines
| which. When I use LLM's I just get information burn out trying to
| dig through all that info or code
| amelius wrote:
| In other words, everybody is benefiting from AI, except CEOs.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Many people are using AI as a slot machine, rerolling repeatedly
| until they get the result they want..
|
| Once the tools help the AI to get feedback on what its first
| attempt got right and wrong, then we will see the benefits.
|
| And the models people use en masse - eg. free tier ChatGPT - need
| to get to some threshold of capability where they're able to do
| really well on the tasks they don't do well enough on today.
|
| There's a tipping point there where models don't create more work
| after they're used for a task, but we aren't there yet.
| TimByte wrote:
| General-purpose technologies tend to have long and uneven
| diffusion curves. The hype cycle moves faster than organizational
| change
| concats wrote:
| If we assume people are somewhat rational (big ask I know), and
| the Efficient-market hypothesis, then we can estimate the value
| created by AI to be roughly equal to the revenue of these AI
| companies. That is: A professional who pays 20EUR/month likely
| believes that the AI product provides them with roughly 20EUR
| each month in productivity gains, or else they wouldn't be
| paying, and similarly they would pay more for a bigger
| subscription if they thought there was more low hanging fruit
| available to grab.
|
| Of course this doesn't take into account people who just pay to
| play around and learn, non professional use cases, or a few other
| things, but it's a rough ballpark estimate.
|
| Assuming the above, current AI models would only increase the
| productivity for most workplaces by a relatively small amount,
| around 10-200 EUR per employee per month perhaps. Almost
| indistinguishable compared to salaries and other business
| expenses.
| Ukv wrote:
| > A professional who pays 20EUR/month likely believes that the
| AI product provides them with roughly 20EUR each month in
| productivity gains, or else [...] they would pay more for a
| bigger subscription
|
| Unless I'm misunderstanding, shouldn't someone rational want to
| pay where (value - cost) is highest, opposed to increasing cost
| to the point where it _equals_ value (which has diminishing
| returns)?
|
| A $40 subscription creating $1000 worth of value would be
| preferred over a $200 subscription creating $1100 of value, for
| instance, and both preferred over a $1200 subscription creating
| $1200 of value.
| concats wrote:
| True! (value - cost) would be better.
|
| I was more so limiting myself to the simpler heuristic where
| people only pay roughly what they personally think something
| is worth, and not significantly more/less regardless of the
| options. But of course, as you've pointed out, in real life
| the options available really do matter, and someone might
| decline a 200:1200 trade if there are even more lopsided
| options available. It does complicate the though experiment
| somewhat if you try to take this into account.
| NVHacker wrote:
| Isn't it a bit early to draw such conclusions ? We are just
| getting started with AI use, especially in tech / engineering
| teams, and have only scratched the surface with regards to what
| is possible.
| flurdy wrote:
| It's the same reason why I have, for more than a decade, been so
| frustrated with people refusing to consider proper pair
| programming and even mob programming, as they view the need to
| keep people busy churning lines of code individually as the most
| important part of the company.
|
| That multiple AI agents can now churn out those lines relatively
| nearly instantly, and yet project velocity does not go much
| faster, should start to make people aware that code generation is
| not actually the crucial cost in time taken to deliver software
| and projects.
|
| I ranted recently that small mob teams with AI agents may be my
| view of ideal team setup: https://blog.flurdy.com/2026/02/mob-
| together-when-ai-joins-t...
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| > ... and yet project velocity does not go much faster
|
| 1) The models like us have finite context windows and
| intelligence, even with good engineering practices system
| complexity will eventually slow them down.
|
| 2) At the moment at least, the code still needs to be reviewed
| and signed off by us and reading someone else's code is usually
| harder than writing it.
| flurdy wrote:
| Are people still reading PRs in detail manually?
|
| I am after the automated PR agents have all passed a PR I
| tend to let Claude Code and Codex give me a summary, with an
| MCP skill to read the requirement story. I trust their
| ability to catch edge cases and typos more than me. I just
| check the general structure of the PR
| flurdy wrote:
| I may use my own skill to automate this...
| https://github.com/flurdy/agent-
| skills/blob/main/skills/revi...
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| Anthropic, OpenAI, Google et. al. have EULAs and the best
| lawyers money can buy ready to argue that any damage done
| by publicly releasing bad or malicious code produced or
| reviewed with their systems is the developers
| responsibility for not checking properly.
|
| > I trust their ability to catch edge cases and typos more
| than me.
|
| Given the vendors EULAs etc, if poop really hits the fan
| with released code, then how is that likely to sound if the
| lawyers get involved?
|
| > Are people still reading PRs in detail manually?
|
| Ultimately it all depends on circumstance and appetite for
| risk, but yes many/most places still manually checking
| releases.
| spants wrote:
| Maybe the CEOs do not realise that their workers are achieving
| great productivity, completing their tasks in 1 hour instead of
| 8, and spending time on the beach, rather than at their desks?
| ssantoshp wrote:
| most likely scenario
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I accept that AI-mediated productivity might not be what we
| expect to be.
|
| But really, are CEO's the best people to assess productivity?
| What do they _actually_ use to measure it? Annual reviews? GTFO.
| Perhaps more importantly, it's not like anything a C-level says
| can ever be taken at face value when it involved their own
| business.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| The latest company I worked in had your typical fee-earners and
| fee-burners categories of employees.
|
| The fee-earners had KPIs tied to the sales pipeline, from leads
| to contracts to work completed on fixed contracts or hours
| billed on variable-rate contracts. It's relatively easy to
| measure improvements here. Though it's harder to distill the
| causes of that and tie it to LLMs.
|
| The fee-burners like in IT, legal, compliance, marketing,
| finance, typically had KPIs tied to the department objectives.
| This stuff is a LOT more subjective and a lot more prone to
| manipulation (goodhart's law). But if you spend 60 hours a week
| on work in such a department, you tend to have a pretty good
| idea if things are speeding up or not at all. In a department I
| was involved in there was a lot of KYC that involved reviewing
| 300+ pages per case, we tracked case workload per person per
| day, as well as success rates (percentage of case reviews
| completed correctly), and could see meaningful changes one
| could attribute to LLM use.
|
| Agreed though that I'm more interested in a few case studies in
| detail to understand how they actually measured productivity.
| gjk3 wrote:
| Most CEOs of large firms arent all that involved in the
| details, so theres no way they can have a true and proper view
| of the day-to-day operations on the ground level.
|
| Steve Jobs is the only CEO of a large firm that I can re-call
| that always remained intimately involved.
| squeefers wrote:
| thank goodness! our jobs are safe lads!!
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| https://archive.is/t5Wxz
| metalman wrote:
| As a small bespoke manufactuter of things made out of metal, I
| have recently begun implimenting a policy of abandoning most
| online services, including banking, well almost as customers can
| still send me money online, but I have to go to a branch to see
| or get funds, except for monthly reports. It is awsome, the web
| brings me customers via 2 web sites, and searches useing AI, but
| the whole thing is asymetrical, as it has been more than a year
| since my last online purchase or filling out a form, aplication
| etc, all done on paper, in person, or I live without whatever it
| is. The result is a work environment that is focused on customers
| and production, and external obligations, requirements are
| litteral, as they must be managed efficiently in person and in
| such a way as to be finnished or stable, none of the death by
| 1000 emails brain rot. The mental state of haveing zero knowledge
| of what is happening on a millisecond by millisecond basis and
| letting everything go, and lo the world grinds on just fine
| without me, and I get a few things done. Mr Solow called it long
| ago, and my intuition has always been that the busy work was
| shit, and have now proven that in my one specific circumstance.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I think we are entering the phase where corporate is expecting
| more ROI than they are getting, but want to remain in the arms
| race.
|
| The firmwide AI guru at my shop who sends out weekly usage
| metrics and release notes started mentioning cost only in the
| last few weeks. At first it was just about engaging with
| individual business heads on setting budgets / rules and slowing
| the cost growth rate.
|
| A few weeks later and he is mentioning automated cost reporting,
| model downgrading and circuit breaking at a per-user level. The
| daily spend where you immediately get locked within 24 hours is
| pretty low.
| dranudin wrote:
| I noticed something similar at my work. The CEO is hyping AI,
| but at the same time free access to the big models was taken
| away and rate limits seem to be much tighter..
| rsynnott wrote:
| Look, that's hardly the point, now, is it, CEOs? AI, or at least
| saying "AI" a lot, makes number go up.
| izucken wrote:
| At my current job I am in deep net LOC negative despite all new
| features... Somebody is getting fired and sued for stealing all
| these LOCs from the company...
| DivingForGold wrote:
| Mirror:
|
| https://archive.ph/tAUFb
| nivcmo wrote:
| The Solow paradox is real, but there's another factor: most
| current AI tools are glorified autocomplete. You still have to
| prompt them, check their work, and integrate their output into
| your workflow.
|
| The real productivity gains will come when AI runs autonomously -
| handling tasks without constant supervision. Think email triage
| that just happens, schedules that self-maintain, follow-ups that
| occur automatically.
|
| Right now we're in the "AI as fancy search" phase. The jump to
| "AI as autonomous assistant" is where the productivity numbers
| will start showing up.
| seyz wrote:
| Including 999 using Copilot.
| RegW wrote:
| Productivity is a moveable feast and tricky to compare with the
| past. The productivity business talk about is the ratio of cost
| to profit.
|
| As tech become available to help reduce your costs and drive up
| your profit, the same tech also reduces your competitor's costs
| and perhaps lets more competitors into the market. This drives
| down your product prices and reduces your profit.
|
| So you invest but see no increase in productivity, but if you
| don't do it - you're toast.
| saezbaldo wrote:
| One underexplored reason: companies can't give AI agents real
| authority. The moment an agent needs to do anything beyond
| summarizing text -- update a CRM, transfer funds, modify
| infrastructure -- the security question kills it. No one wants an
| agent that can take irreversible actions with no approval chain.
| Until the trust architecture problem is solved, AI stays in read-
| only mode for most enterprises.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| This is the biggest bottleneck. To realize the "replacement of
| white collar workers" fever dream, (which is, I still believe,
| technically feasible), you need the agent that replaces them to
| have all of the context they had. All of the emails, all of the
| Slacks, all of the meeting minutes, access to private corporate
| systems and files, etc. I can't think of a single company that
| would want to turn all of that over to OpenAI.
| bdangubic wrote:
| > I can't think of a single company that would want to turn
| all of that over to OpenAI
|
| you'd be surprised... the largest IP in the majority of cases
| is the codebase itself. once that hurdle was crossed the rest
| is easy decision
| K0balt wrote:
| This is because the vast majority of white collar activity in a
| large corporation produces no direct economic value.
|
| Making it easier/better just means more/higher quality
| "worthless" work is performed. The incentives in the not-directly
| -productive parts of organizations are to keep busy and maintain
| a stream of signals of productivity. For this , AI just raises
| the bar. The 25% of the work that -is- important to producing
| economic value just gets reduced to 15%.
|
| The workforce in large orgs that is most AI adjacent is already
| idling along in terms of production of direct economic value.
| Making them 10x more productive in nonproductive work will not
| impact critical metrics in a short timeframe.
|
| It's worth noting that these "not directly productive" activities
| actually can (and often do) produce value, eventually. Things
| like brand identity, culture, and meta-innovation, vision
| (search-space) are intangibles that present as cost centers but
| can prove invaluable in longer timescales if done right.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| There are a lot of people who sit with their laptop open while
| streaming something, sleeping or messing with their phone while
| periodically waking up to join a new meeting or fiddle with
| something to make it look like they are active.
|
| These are the people "shocked" when they are displaced.
| gjk3 wrote:
| There are many reasons why such people might be employed.
| E.g. preventing a competitor from hoarding talent, so you
| decide to do it too.
|
| Whats taught in economics textbooks doesnt always reflect
| reality - ha.
| gjk3 wrote:
| Principal-agent problem.
|
| The manager wants a large team. The shareholder who ultimately
| employs the manager but does not control operations does not
| want that of course.
|
| Hmm.
| cowpig wrote:
| NVIDIA is doing circular finance deals with all of the top labs
| to pump up demand for its products and charging a monopoly rate
| on those products. Everything in computing is costing more.
|
| Access to capital for everyone else is dropping. And the US
| economy is being managed by chaos monkeys, causing all kinds of
| supply chain disruptions. Oligopolies in almost every market are
| increasingly jacking up prices above market equilibrium rates as
| they are emboldened by a corrupted FTC.
|
| Despite what Peter Thiel may have led you to believe, Monopolies
| are not healthy for an economy in aggregate.
|
| Of course the economy is slowing.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm not sure how you even measure productivity going up or down,
| for many of us LLMs have allowed us to trim down the amount of
| effort required to scour through google search results.
| Ithildin wrote:
| If I do something faster by pairing with AI, why should my
| employer reap the benefit? Why would I pass the savings on to my
| employer?
|
| Could it be that employers are not seeing the difference because
| most employees are doing something else with the time they've
| saved by using AI?
|
| There's been massive wage stagnation, benefits are crap, they
| play games with PTO. Most people I talk to who use AI as a part
| of their workflow are taking advantage of something nice that has
| come their way for a change.
| JanickSpielmann wrote:
| I hope that RAM prices will drop soon as a result. Companies
| cease to exist; therefore, datacenters are unnecessary.
| des429 wrote:
| This title is so click bait-y and misleading compared to what the
| actual article is about it's tough not to feel disappointed this
| is on the front page. @dang
| dang wrote:
| Belatedly fixed. Thanks!
|
| p.s. @dang doesn't work reliably - hn@ycombinator.com is the
| way to get a message delivered
| DonnyV wrote:
| I think the reason tech didn't help productivity until the late
| 90s is pretty obvious. The internet was missing. Computers needed
| the internet to make them useful to everyone. So the question
| should be.
|
| What is Ai missing that will make it useful to everyone?
| rybosworld wrote:
| Companies over a certain size (say more than 25+ employees), are
| universally bad at:
|
| - measuring productivity
|
| - adapting to change
|
| This article just reinforces that. Past a certain headcount,
| executives have little to no understanding of what IC day-to-day
| is like.
|
| AI tooling doesn't fix the bureaucracy the c-suite helped to
| create.
| zubiaur wrote:
| And there are incentives to miss-report.
|
| My team has gained a reputation of being some sort of
| firefighting crew.
|
| We are being called by PMs when projects are failing, usually
| engineering-data and engineering-adjacent stuff.
| (Mechanical/Electrical).
|
| We automate the heck out the processes, using a mix of AI
| processing, RAGs, and AI assisted coding.
|
| We rescue the projects. Finish ahead of schedule. Make fewer
| mistakes. We gain additional scope. We win new projects. We
| bring new clients.
|
| But when higher ups ask the people we helped about productivity
| gains, the most generous will say stuff like "it takes as long
| to review as it takes to do things manually", "They really
| helped on {inconsequential part of the deliverable}"
|
| If the that is the takeaway these people were taking, they
| would incredibly misled. Luckily for me, I have people who deal
| with the politics, while my team can focus on delivery.
|
| Our reputation keeps growing, and we keep delivering faster.
| The heads of the departments we work with love us, the middle
| rank who were doing the laborious crap, maybe not so much.
| SKILNER wrote:
| If you've ever undertaken the task of documenting entire
| workflows, then you know that you quickly put up the white flag
| at the word "entire".
|
| When you actually talk to people about what they do there are
| often many, many nuances, micro-events, micro-decisions and
| micro-actions in their work. This is why it can take
| days/weeks/months to completely train a new person for a job.
|
| This level of detail is barely documented - anywhere. There is a
| huge amount of information buried in workflows that AI has barely
| had access to for training. A lot of this is more in the realm of
| world models, rather than LLMs.
|
| So imagine trying to use AI to improve these workflows it knows
| so little about. Then imagine AI trying to reinvent them across
| an organization.
|
| We find these use cases where AI provides great value - totally
| true - but these barely scratch the surface of what goes on.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Q: fortune (and a other sites) seem to be posted regularly but
| they're inevitably paywalled; is this common for others or just
| me? If it's common why are they posted here?
| yubblegum wrote:
| I've sat in a room with a too big to tail banker's VP happily
| telling me and my boss that "we're getting rid of this whole
| floor".
|
| Dateline ~2010. Location: NYC Why:Indian outsourced shops.
|
| Now the zinger, dear hn, is this: He actually said to us (we ran
| a more boutique consulting firm) that "everything has to be done
| 3 times" and "their work is crap". But "we're getting rid of this
| floor".
|
| That, imho, was due to geopolitical machinations of inducing
| India to become part of the West. The immediate equation of
| "money for quality work" wasn't working but the 'our higher ups'
| had more grand plans and sacrificing and gutting the IT industry
| in US was not a problem.
|
| So, given the incentives these days, do not remotely pin your
| hopes on what these CEOs are saying. It means nothing whatsoever.
| franktankbank wrote:
| And India buys russian oil so what exactly is the goal there.
| bob1029 wrote:
| The analogy that an LLM is simply an amplifier is apt for most
| general business.
|
| If you've already got a very effective team with clear
| vision/goals, this technology will almost certainly help to some
| degree.
|
| If you've got a sinking ship of a business, this technology will
| likely drag you down faster.
|
| You always have to work backward from the customer into the
| technology. AI will never change that. I've found myself waffling
| on advice to some clients regarding AI because whether or not
| they can effectively leverage it depends more on what the people
| in the business are willing to do than what the technology can
| do.
| mulmen wrote:
| How do they define productivity? How is it measured?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Erik Brynjolfsson: Productivity is 'Much Higher' Due to AI
|
| https://www.wsj.com/video/erik-brynjolfsson-productivity-is-...
| kevincloudsec wrote:
| most of these companies deployed microsoft copilot, watched it
| hallucinate meeting summaries for six months, and called that an
| AI strategy. source: current situation
| h0ek wrote:
| Yeah, maybe the CEO doesn't see any impact on productivity -- but
| mine definitely changed. I actually have more time for my own
| stuff now, because AI quietly handles part of the work for me. Of
| course, if productivity is measured by how many PowerPoint slides
| get presented to the board, then sure -- nothing changed.
| Especially when HR reports say "everything looks the same" --
| because no one is tracking how much work is silently being
| offloaded to AI. And just to avoid overworking myself, I even
| asked AI to write this comment so I could focus on something else
| in the meantime.
| qgin wrote:
| This may mean the centaur era will be shorter than expected. If
| we take as a given that:
|
| * AI is doing real work
|
| * Humans using AI don't seem to get more done with AI than
| without
|
| There is a huge economic pressure to remove humans and just let
| the AI do the work without them as soon as possible.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| I suspect this may be the case. There's inherent inefficiency
| in having a human forced to translate everything into context
| for the LLM. You don't get the full benefit until you allow it
| to be fully plugged in.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It's not that AI is ineffective, but it will take time to create
| solutions that are actually highly useful in real-world business
| scenarios.
|
| Quickly slapping "AI features" on a bunch of existing products --
| like almost every SW company seems to have done in an effort to
| appear "on the cutting edge" -- accomplishes almost nothing.
| placebo_effect wrote:
| https://archive.ph/tAUFb
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