[HN Gopher] AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
        
       Author : benbeingbin
       Score  : 90 points
       Date   : 2026-02-19 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.kasava.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.kasava.dev)
        
       | delichon wrote:
       | If we find an AI that is truly operating as an independent agent
       | in the economy without a human responsible for it, we should kill
       | it. I wonder if I'll live long enough to see an AI terminator
       | profession emerge. We could call them blade runners.
        
         | WolfeReader wrote:
         | It happened not too long ago!
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
        
           | Windchaser wrote:
           | Was it ever verified that this was an independent AI?
        
         | orphea wrote:
         | > an AI that is truly operating as an independent agent in the
         | economy without a human responsible for it
         | 
         | Sounds like the "customer support" in any large company (think
         | Google, for example), to be honest.
        
       | m_ke wrote:
       | It's the new underpaid employee that you're training to replace
       | you.
       | 
       | People need to understand that we have the technology to train
       | models to do anything that you can do on a computer, only thing
       | that's missing is the data.
       | 
       | If you can record a human doing anything on a computer, we'll
       | soon have a way to automate it
        
         | xnx wrote:
         | Exactly. If there's any opportunity around AI it goes to those
         | who have big troves of custom data (Google Workspace, Office
         | 365, Adobe, Salesforce, etc.) or consultants adding data
         | capture/surveillance of workers (especially high paid ones like
         | engineers, doctors, lawyers).
        
         | cesarvarela wrote:
         | LLMs have a large quantity of chess data and still can't play
         | for shit.
        
           | iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
           | Hm.. but do they need it.. at this point, we do have custom
           | tools that beat humans. In a sense, all LLM need is a way to
           | connect to that tool ( and the same is true is for counting
           | and many other aspects ).
        
             | Windchaser wrote:
             | Yeah, but you know that manually telling the LLM to operate
             | other custom tools is not going to be a long-term solution.
             | And if an LLM could design, create, and operate a separate
             | model, and then return/translate its results to you, that
             | would be huge, but it also seems far away.
             | 
             | But I'm ignorant here. Can anyone with a better background
             | of SOTA ML tell me if this is being pursued, and if so, how
             | far away it is? (And if not, what are the arguments against
             | it, or what other approaches might deliver similar
             | capacities?)
        
               | yunyu wrote:
               | This has been happening for the past year on verifiable
               | problems (did the change you made in your codebase work
               | end-to-end, does this mathematical expression validate,
               | did I win this chess match, etc...). The bulk of data, RL
               | environment, and inference spend right now is on coding
               | agents (or broadly speaking, tool use agents that can
               | make their own tools).
               | 
               | Recent advances in mathematical/physics research have all
               | been with coding agents making their own "tools" by
               | writing programs: https://openai.com/index/new-result-
               | theoretical-physics/
        
           | dwohnitmok wrote:
           | Not anymore. This benchmark is for LLM chess ability:
           | https://github.com/lightnesscaster/Chess-LLM-
           | Benchmark?tab=r.... LLMs are graded according to FIDE rules
           | so e.g. two illegal moves in a game leads to an immediate
           | loss.
           | 
           | This benchmark doesn't have the latest models from the last
           | two months, but Gemini 3 (with no tools) is already at 1750 -
           | 1800 FIDE, which is approximately probably around 1900 - 2000
           | USCF (about USCF expert level). This is enough to beat almost
           | everyone at your local chess club.
        
             | deadbabe wrote:
             | Why do we care about this? Chess AI have long been solved
             | problems and LLMs are just an overly brute forced approach.
             | They will never become very efficient chess players.
             | 
             | The correct solution is to have a conventional chess AI as
             | a tool and use the LLM as a front end for humanized output.
             | A software engineer who proposes just doing it all via raw
             | LLM should be fired.
        
               | rodiger wrote:
               | It's a proxy for generalized reasoning.
               | 
               | The point isn't that LLMs are the best AI architecture
               | for chess.
        
               | runarberg wrote:
               | > It's a proxy for generalized reasoning.
               | 
               | And so for I am only convinced that they have only
               | succeeded on appearing to have generalized reasoning.
               | That is, when an LLM plays chess they are performing
               | Searle's Chinese room thought experiment while claiming
               | to pass the Turing test
        
             | cesarvarela wrote:
             | Yeah, but 1800 FIDE players don't make illegal moves, and
             | Gemini does.
        
               | famouswaffles wrote:
               | That benchmark methodology isn't great, but regardless,
               | LLMs can be trained to play Chess with a 99.8% legal move
               | rate.
        
             | runarberg wrote:
             | Wait, I may be missing something here. These benchmarks are
             | gathered by having models play each other, and the second
             | illegal move forfeits the game. This seems like a flawed
             | method as the models who are more prone to illegal moves
             | are going to bump the ratings of the models who are less
             | likely.
             | 
             | Additionally, how do we know the model isn't benchmaxxed to
             | eliminate illegal moves.
             | 
             | For example, here is the list of games by Gemini-3-pro-
             | preview. In 44 games it preformed 3 illegal moves (if I
             | counted correctly) but won 5 because opponent forfeits due
             | to illegal moves.
             | 
             | https://chessbenchllm.onrender.com/games?page=5&model=gemin
             | i...
             | 
             | I suspect the ratings here may be significantly inflated
             | due to a flaw in the methodology.
             | 
             | EDIT: I want to suggest a better methodology here (I am not
             | gonna do it; I really really really don't care about this
             | technology). Have the LLMs play rated engines and rated
             | humans, the first illegal move forfeits the game (same
             | rules apply to humans).
        
               | emp17344 wrote:
               | That's a devastating benchmark design flaw. Sick of these
               | bullshit benchmarks designed solely to hype AI. AI
               | boosters turn around and use them as ammo, despite not
               | understanding them.
        
               | runarberg wrote:
               | I like this game between grok-4.1-fast and maia-1100
               | (engine, not LLM).
               | 
               | https://chessbenchllm.onrender.com/game/37d0d260-d63b-4e4
               | 1-9...
               | 
               | This exact game has been played 60 thousand times on
               | lichess. The peace sacrifice Grok performed on move 6 has
               | been played 5 million times on lichess. Every single move
               | Grok made is also the top played move on lichess.
               | 
               | This reminds me of Stefan Zweig's _The Royal Game_ where
               | the protagonist survived Nazi torture by memorizing every
               | game in a chess book his torturers dropped (excellent
               | book btw. and I am aware I just committed Godwin's law
               | here; also aware of the irony here). The protagonist
               | became "good" at chess, simply by memorizing a lot of
               | games.
        
               | famouswaffles wrote:
               | The LLMs that can play chess, i.e not make an illegal
               | move every game do not play it simply by memorized plays.
        
               | famouswaffles wrote:
               | Relax. Anyone who's genuinely interested in the question
               | will see with a few searches that LLMs can play chess
               | fine, although the post-trained models mostly seem to be
               | regressed. Problem is people are more interested in
               | validating their own assumptions than anything else.
               | 
               | https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15498
               | 
               | https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17186
               | 
               | https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval
        
           | BeetleB wrote:
           | Are you saying an LLM can't produce a chess engine that will
           | easily beat you?
        
             | emp17344 wrote:
             | Plagiarizing Stockfish doesn't make me good at chess. Same
             | principle applies.
        
           | menaerus wrote:
           | Did you already forget about the AlphaZero?
        
         | polotics wrote:
         | How much practice have you got on software development with
         | agentic assistance. Which rough edges, surprising failure
         | modes, unexpected strengths and weaknesses, have you already
         | identified?
         | 
         | How much do you wish someone else had done your favorite SOTA
         | LLM's RLHF?
        
         | xyzzy123 wrote:
         | Sure, but do you want abundance of software, or scarcity?
         | 
         | The price of having "star trek computers" is that people who
         | work with computers have to adapt to the changes. Seems worth
         | it?
        
           | worldsayshi wrote:
           | My only objection here is that technology wont save us unless
           | we also have a voice in how it is used. I don't think
           | personal adaptation is enough for that. We need to adapt our
           | ways to engage with power.
        
           | almostdeadguy wrote:
           | Both abundance and scarcity can be bad. If you can't imagine
           | a world where abundance of software is a very bad thing, I'd
           | suggest you have a limited imagination?
        
         | Gigachad wrote:
         | Data clearly isn't the only issue. LLMs have been trained on
         | orders of magnitude more data than any person has ever seen.
        
         | badgersnake wrote:
         | I think we're past the "if only we had more training data" myth
         | now. There are pretty obviously far more fundamental issues
         | with LLMs than that.
        
         | agumonkey wrote:
         | It's a strange economical morbid dependency. AI companies
         | promises incredible things but AI agents cannot produce it
         | themselves, they need to eat you slowly first.
        
         | mylifeandtimes wrote:
         | > the new underpaid employee that you're training to replace
         | you.
         | 
         | and who is also compiling a detailed log of your every action
         | (and inaction) into a searchable data store -- which will
         | certainly never, NEVER be used against you
        
       | pavlov wrote:
       | _> "The AI handles the scale. The human interprets the meaning."_
       | 
       | Claude is that you? Why haven't you called me?
        
         | ares623 wrote:
         | But the meaning has been scaled massively. So the human still
         | kinda needs to handle the scale.
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | An electric bicycle for the mind.
        
         | ares623 wrote:
         | I prefer mind vibe-rator.
        
         | nancyminusone wrote:
         | An electric chair for the mind?
        
         | clickety_clack wrote:
         | Maybe more of a mobility scooter for the mind.
        
           | xnx wrote:
           | Indeed that may be more apt.
           | 
           | I like the ebike analogy because [on many ebikes] you can
           | press the button to go or pedal to amplify your output.
        
         | oxag3n wrote:
         | Owners intent is more like electric chair (for SWEs), but some
         | people are trying to use it as office chair.
        
       | blibble wrote:
       | an exoskeleten made of cheese
        
       | bGl2YW5j wrote:
       | I like the analogy and will ponder it more. But it didn't take
       | long before the article started spruiking Kasava's amazing
       | solution to the problem they just presented.
        
       | ge96 wrote:
       | It's funny developing AI stuff eg. RAG tools and being against AI
       | at the same time, not drinking the kool aid I mean.
       | 
       | But it's fun, I say "Henceforth you shall be known as Jaundice"
       | and it's like "Alright my lord, I am now referred to as Jaundice"
        
       | functionmouse wrote:
       | blogger who fancies themselves an ai vibe code guru with 12 arms
       | and a 3rd eye yet can't make a homepage that's not totally broken
       | 
       | How typical!
        
       | mikkupikku wrote:
       | Exoskeletons sound cool but somebody please put an LLM into a
       | spider tank.
        
       | lukev wrote:
       | Frankly I'm tired of metaphor-based attempts to explain LLMs.
       | 
       | Stochastic Parrots. Interns. Junior Devs. Thought partners.
       | Bicycles for the mind. Spicy autocomplete. A blurry jpeg of the
       | web. Calculators but for words. Copilot. The term "artificial
       | intelligence" itself.
       | 
       | These may correspond to a greater or lesser degree with what LLMs
       | are capable of, but if we stick to metaphors as our primary tool
       | for reasoning about these machines, we're hamstringing ourselves
       | and making it impossible to reason about the frontier of
       | capabilities, or resolve disagreements about them.
       | 
       | A understanding-without-metaphors isn't easy -- it requires a
       | grasp of math, computer science, linguistics and philosophy.
       | 
       | But if we're going to move forward instead of just finding
       | slightly more useful tropes, we _have_ to do it. Or at least to
       | try.
        
         | gf263 wrote:
         | "The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child
         | will never see that bird again."
        
       | xlerb wrote:
       | Humans don't have an internal notion of "fact" or "truth." They
       | generate statistically plausible text.
       | 
       | Reliability comes from scaffolding: retrieval, tools, validation
       | layers. Without that, fluency can masquerade as authority.
       | 
       | The interesting question isn't whether they're coworkers or
       | exoskeletons. It's whether we're mistaking rhetoric for
       | epistemology.
        
         | kiba wrote:
         | A much more useful tool is a technology that check for our
         | blind spots and bugs.
         | 
         | For example fact checking a news article and making sure what's
         | get reported line up with base reality.
         | 
         | I once fact check a virology lecture and found out that the
         | professor confused two brothers as one individual.
         | 
         | I am sure about the professor having a super solid grasp of how
         | viruses work, but errors like these probably creeps in all the
         | time.
        
         | whyenot wrote:
         | > LLMs aren't built around truth as a first-class primitive.
         | 
         | neither are humans
         | 
         | > They optimize for next-token probability and human approval,
         | not factual verification.
         | 
         | while there are outliers, most humans also tend to tell people
         | what they want to hear and to fit in.
         | 
         | > factuality is emergent and contingent, not enforced by
         | architecture.
         | 
         | like humans; as far as we know, there is no "factuality" gene,
         | and we lie to ourselves, to others, in politics, scientific
         | papers, to our partners, etc.
         | 
         | > If we're going to treat them as coworkers or exoskeletons, we
         | should be clear about that distinction.
         | 
         | I don't see the distinction. Humans exhibit many of the same
         | behaviours.
        
           | 13415 wrote:
           | Strangely, the GP replaced the ChatGPT-generated text you're
           | commenting on by an even worse and more misleading ChatGPT-
           | generated one. Perhaps in order to make a point.
        
         | emp17344 wrote:
         | Ethical realists would disagree with you.
        
       | dwheeler wrote:
       | I prefer the term "assistant". It can do some tasks, but today's
       | AI often needs human guidance for good results.
        
       | yifanl wrote:
       | AI is not an exoskeleton, it's a pretzel: It only tastes good if
       | you douse it in lye.
        
         | rishabhaiover wrote:
         | it's a dry scone
        
         | coffeefirst wrote:
         | Finally an AI take I can get behind.
        
       | hintymad wrote:
       | Or software engineers are not coachmen while AI is diesel engine
       | to horses. Instead, software engineers are mistrels -- they
       | disappear if all they do is moving knowledge from one place to
       | another.
        
       | oxag3n wrote:
       | > We're thinking about AI wrong.
       | 
       | And this write up is not an exception.
       | 
       | Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs
       | openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh
       | interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there's 90% less
       | demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a
       | spectrum."
       | 
       | So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in
       | near future (6-12 months according to Amodei).
        
         | jacquesm wrote:
         | Not without some major breakthrough. What's hilarious is that
         | all these developers building the tools are going to be the
         | first to be without jobs. Their kids will be ecstatic: "Tell me
         | again, dad, so, you had this awesome and well paying easy job
         | and you wrecked it? Shut up kid, and tuck in that flap, there
         | is too much wind in our cardboard box."
        
           | metaltyphoon wrote:
           | I have a feeling they internally say "not me, I won't be
           | replaced" and just keep moving...
        
             | oxag3n wrote:
             | Or they get FY money and fatFIRE.
        
         | Galanwe wrote:
         | I don't think anyone serious believes this. Replacing
         | developers with a less costly alternative is obviously a very
         | market bullish dream, it has existed since as long as I've
         | worked in the field. First it was supposed to be UML generated
         | code by "architects", then it was supposed to be developers
         | from developing countries, then no-code frameworks, etc.
         | 
         | AI will be a tool, no more no less. Most likely a good one, but
         | there will still need to be people driving it, guiding it,
         | fixing for it, etc.
         | 
         | All these discourses from CEO are just that, stock market
         | pumping, because tech is the most profitable sector, and
         | software engineers are costly, so having investors dream about
         | scale + less costs is good for the stock price.
        
           | oxag3n wrote:
           | Ah, don't take me wrong - I don't believe it's possible for
           | LLMs to replace 90% or any number of SWEs with existing
           | technology.
           | 
           | All I'm saying is - why to think what AI is (exoskeleton, co-
           | worker, new life form), when its owners intent is to create
           | SWE replacement?
           | 
           | If your neighbor is building a nuclear reactor in his shed
           | from a pile of smoke detectors, you don't say "think about
           | this as a science experiment" because it's impossible, just
           | call police/NRC because of intent and actions.
        
       | filipeisho wrote:
       | By reading the title, I already know you did not try OpenClaw. AI
       | employees are here.
        
         | BeetleB wrote:
         | Looking into OpenClaw, I really do want to believe all the
         | hype. However, it's frustrating that I can find very few,
         | concrete examples of people showcasing their work with it.
         | 
         | Can you highlight what you've managed to do with it?
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | What are your digital 'employees' doing? Did they replace any
         | humans or was there nobody before?
        
       | givemeethekeys wrote:
       | Closer to a really capable intern. Lots of potential for good and
       | bad; needs to be watched closely.
        
         | badgersnake wrote:
         | I've been playing with qwen3-coder recently and that intern is
         | definitely not getting hired, despite the rave reviews
         | elsewhere.
        
           | icedchai wrote:
           | Have you tried Claude Code with Opus or Sonnet 4.5? I've
           | played around with a ton of open models and they just don't
           | compare in terms of quality.
        
       | finnjohnsen2 wrote:
       | I like this. This is an accurate state of AI at this very moment
       | for me. The LLM is (just) a tool which is making me "amplified"
       | for coding and certain tasks.
       | 
       | I will worry about developers being completely replaced when I
       | see something resembling it. Enough people worry about that (or
       | say it to amp stock prices) -- and they like to tell everyone
       | about this future too. I just don't see it.
        
         | DrewADesign wrote:
         | Amplified means more work done by fewer people. It doesn't need
         | to replace a single entire functional human being to do things
         | like kill the demand for labor in dev, which in turn, will kill
         | salaries.
        
           | finnjohnsen2 wrote:
           | I would disagree. Amplified meens me and you get more s**
           | done.
           | 
           | Unless there a limited amount of software we need to produce
           | per year globally to keep everyone happy, then nobody wants
           | more -- and we happen to be at that point right NOW this
           | second.
           | 
           | I think not. We can make more (in less time) and people will
           | get more. This is the mental "glass half full" approach I
           | think. Why not take this mental route instead? We don't know
           | the future anyway.
        
             | kiba wrote:
             | Jevon's paradox means this is untrue because it means more
             | work not less.
        
             | inglor_cz wrote:
             | Hm. More of what? Functionality, security, performance?
             | 
             | Current software is often buggy because the pressure to
             | ship is just too high. If AI can fix some loose threads
             | within, the overall quality grows.
             | 
             | Personally, I would welcome a massive deployment of AI to
             | root out various zero-days from widespread libraries.
             | 
             | But we may instead get a larger quantity of even more buggy
             | software.
        
           | emp17344 wrote:
           | This is incorrect. It's basic economics - technology that
           | boosts productivity results in higher salaries and more jobs.
        
             | gorjusborg wrote:
             | Well, that depends on whether the technology requires
             | expertise that is rare and/or hard to acquire.
             | 
             | I'd say that using AI tools effectively to create software
             | systems is in that class currently, but it isn't
             | necessarily always going to be the case.
        
         | cogman10 wrote:
         | The more likely outcome is that fewer devs will be hired as
         | fewer devs will be needed to accomplish the same amount of
         | output.
        
           | HPsquared wrote:
           | The old shrinking markets aka lump of labour fallacy. It's a
           | bit like dreaming of that mythical day, when all of the work
           | will be done.
        
             | cogman10 wrote:
             | No it's not that.
             | 
             | Tell me, when was the last time you visited your shoe
             | cobbler? How about your travel agent? Have you chatted with
             | your phone operator recently?
             | 
             | The lump labour fallacy says it's a fallacy that automation
             | reduces the net amount of human labor, importantly, across
             | all industries. It does not say that automation won't
             | eliminate or reduce jobs in specific industries.
             | 
             | It's an argument that jobs lost to automation aren't a big
             | deal because there's always work somewhere else but not
             | necessarily in the job that was automated away.
        
           | slopinthebag wrote:
           | When computers came onto the market and could automate a
           | large percentage of office jobs, what happened to the job
           | market for office jobs?
        
             | cogman10 wrote:
             | They changed, significantly.
             | 
             | We lost the pneumatic tube [1] maintenance crew.
             | Secretarial work nearly went away. A huge number of
             | bookkeepers in the banking industry lost their jobs. The
             | job a typist was eliminated/merged into everyone else's
             | job. The job of a "computer" (someone that does
             | computations) was eliminated.
             | 
             | What we ended up with was primarily a bunch of customer
             | service, marketing, and sales workers.
             | 
             | There was never a "office worker" job. But there were a lot
             | of jobs under the umbrella of "office work" that were
             | fundamentally changed and, crucially, your experience in
             | those fields didn't necessarily translate over to the new
             | jobs created.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qman4N3Waw4
        
               | slopinthebag wrote:
               | I expect something like this will happen to some degree,
               | although not to the extent of what happened with
               | computers.
               | 
               | But the point is that we didn't just lose all of those
               | jobs.
        
               | cogman10 wrote:
               | Right, and my point is that specific jobs, like the job
               | of a dev, were eliminate or significantly curtailed.
               | 
               | New jobs may be waiting for us on the other side of this,
               | but my job, the job of a dev, is specifically under
               | threat with no guarantee that the experience I gained as
               | a dev will translate into a new market.
        
       | sibeliuss wrote:
       | This utterly boring AI writing. Go, please go away...
        
       | acjohnson55 wrote:
       | > Autonomous agents fail because they don't have the context that
       | humans carry around implicitly.
       | 
       | Yet.
       | 
       | This is mostly a matter of data capture and organization. It
       | sounds like Kasava is already doing a lot of this. They just need
       | more sources.
        
         | bwestergard wrote:
         | Self-conscious efforts to formalize and concentrate information
         | in systems controlled by firm management, known as "scientific
         | management" by its proponents and "Taylorism" by many of its
         | detractors, are a century old[1]. It has proven to be a
         | constantly receding horizon.
         | 
         | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
        
       | hintymad wrote:
       | In the latest interview with Claude Code's author:
       | https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product...,
       | Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me
       | to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing
       | to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough
       | to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or
       | is the field of computer science plateaued to the point that most
       | of what we do is linear combination of well established patterns?
        
         | biztos wrote:
         | Or does the field _become_ plateaued because engineers treat
         | "writing code" as a "solved problem?"
         | 
         | We could argue that writing poetry is a solved problem in much
         | the same way, and while I don't think we especially need 50,000
         | people writing poems at Google, we do still need poets.
        
           | hintymad wrote:
           | > we especially need 50,000 people writing poems at Google,
           | we do still need poets.
           | 
           | I'd assume that an implied concern of most engineers is how
           | many software engineers the world will need in the future. If
           | it's the situation like the world needing poets, then the
           | field is only for the lucky few. Most people would be out of
           | job.
        
         | fhub wrote:
         | He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the
         | context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably
         | strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to
         | have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar
         | to his. But in areas where they don't exist, writing code isn't
         | a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be
         | more friendly to agents.
         | 
         | Even with full context, writing CSS in a project where vanilla
         | CSS is scattered around and wasn't well thought out originally
         | is challenging. Coding agents struggle there too, just not as
         | much as humans, even with feedback loops through browser
         | automation.
        
         | therealpygon wrote:
         | I don't believe people who have dedicated their lives to open
         | source will simply want to stop working on it, no matter how
         | much is or is not written by AI. I also have to agree, I find
         | myself more and more lately laughing about just how much
         | resources we waste creating exactly the same things over and
         | over in software. I don't mean generally, like languages, I
         | mean specifically. How many trillions of times has a form with
         | username and password fields been designed, developed, had
         | meetings over, tested, debugged, transmitted, processed, only
         | to ultimately be re-written months later?
         | 
         | I wonder what all we might build instead, if all that time
         | could be saved.
        
           | hintymad wrote:
           | > I don't believe people who have dedicated their lives to
           | open source will simply want to stop working on it, no matter
           | how much is or is not written by AI.
           | 
           | Yeah, hence my question can only be hypothetical.
           | 
           | > I wonder what all we might build instead, if all that time
           | could be saved
           | 
           | If we subscribe to Economics' broken-window theory, then the
           | investment into such repetitive work is not investment but
           | waste. Once we stop such investment, we will have a lot more
           | resources to work on something else, bring out a new chapter
           | of the tech revolution. Or so I hope.
        
       | cranberryturkey wrote:
       | The exoskeleton metaphor is closer than most analogies but it
       | still undersells one thing: exoskeletons augment existing
       | capability along the same axis. AI augments along orthogonal axes
       | too.
       | 
       | Running 17 products as an indie maker, I've found AI is less "do
       | the same thing faster" and more "attempt things you'd never
       | justify the time for." I now write throwaway prototypes to test
       | ideas that would have died as shower thoughts. The bottleneck
       | moved from "can I build this" to "should I build this" -- and
       | that's a judgment call AI makes worse, not better.
       | 
       | The real risk of the exoskeleton framing is that it implies AI
       | makes you better at what you already do. In practice it makes you
       | worse at deciding what to do, because the cost of starting is
       | near zero but the cost of maintaining and shipping is unchanged.
        
       | ottah wrote:
       | Make centaurs, not unicorns. The human is almost always going to
       | be the strongest element in the loop, and the most efficient.
       | Augmenting human skill will always outperform present day SOTA AI
       | systems (assuming a competent human).
        
       | datakazkn wrote:
       | The exoskeleton framing resonates, especially for repetitive data
       | work. Parts where AI consistently delivers: pattern recognition,
       | format normalization, first-draft generation. Parts where human
       | judgment is still irreplaceable: knowing when the data is wrong,
       | deciding what 'correct' even means in context, and knowing when
       | to stop iterating.
       | 
       | The exoskeleton doesn't replace instinct. It just removes
       | friction from execution so more cycles go toward the judgment
       | calls that actually matter.
        
         | Bombthecat wrote:
         | And your muscles degrade, a pretty good analogy
        
       | protocolture wrote:
       | Petition to make "AI is not X, but Y" articles banned or limited
       | in some way.
        
       | TrianguloY wrote:
       | I like this analogy, and in fact in have used it for a totally
       | different reason: why I don't like AI.
       | 
       | Imagine someone going to a local gym and using an exosqueleton to
       | do the exercises without effort. Able to lift more? Yes. Run
       | faster? Sure. Exercising and enjoying the gym? ... No, and
       | probably not.
       | 
       | I like writing code, even if it's boilerplate. It's fun for me,
       | and I want to keep doing it. Using AI to do that part for me is
       | just...not fun.
       | 
       | Someone going to the gym isn't trying to lift more or run faster,
       | but instead improving and enjoying. Not using AI for coding has
       | the same outcome for me.
        
         | gtCameron wrote:
         | We've all been raised in a world where we got to practice the
         | 'art' of programming, and get paid extraordinarily well to do
         | so, because the output of that art was useful for businesses to
         | make more money.
         | 
         | If a programmer with an exoskeleton can produce more output
         | that makes more money for the business, they will continue to
         | be paid well. Those who refuse the exoskeleton because they are
         | in it for the pure art will most likely trend towards earning
         | the types of living that artists and musicians do today. The
         | truly extraordinary will be able to create things that the
         | machines can't and will be in high demand, the other 99% will
         | be pursing an art no one is interested in paying top dollar
         | for.
        
       | random3 wrote:
       | I'll guess we'll se a lot of analogies and have to get used to
       | it, although most will be off.
       | 
       | AI _can_ be an exoskeleton. It can be a co-worker and it can also
       | replace _you_ and your whole team.
       | 
       | The "Office Space"-question is what are _you_ particularly within
       | an organization and concretely when you 'll become the
       | bottleneck, preventing your "exoskeleton" for efficiently doing
       | its job independently.
       | 
       | There's no other question that's relevant for any practical
       | purposes for your employer and your well being as a person that
       | presumably needs to earn a living based on their utility.
        
         | qudat wrote:
         | > It can be a co-worker and it can also replace you and your
         | whole team.
         | 
         | You drank the koolaide m8. It fundamentally cannot replace a
         | single SWE and never will without fundamental changes to the
         | model construction. If there is displacement, it'll be short
         | lived when the hype doesn't match reality.
         | 
         | Go take a gander at openclaws codebase and feel at-ease with
         | your job security.
         | 
         | I have seen zero evidence that the frontier model companies are
         | innovating. All I see is full steam ahead on scaling what
         | exists, but correct me if I'm wrong.
        
       | obsidianbases1 wrote:
       | And markdown is like the data streamed from the brain to the
       | exoskeleton.
       | 
       | Exoskeleton dexterity is like something like coherence in the
       | markdown stream.
        
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