you never worked more before because considering AI-Based coding you're extremely more efficient in every task you accomplish. Everything is solved faster, and that makes more problems to come. It's like an unevitable escalation. Such putting your pedal on full gas without knowing how to leave it from there.
I feel this. Thinking about the domain, typing a bit, maybe having a new idea while I'm eating on a break now feels like a memory of heaven. Today I'm constantly going over painful "grilling" sessions where I have to read mountains of dense prose where each word maps to some "glossary" from previously generated docs and figure out what is overengineered bullshit and what is actually necessary.
No. Actually some things take longer and lead to worse outcomes. AI tools invent problems and find work for themselves while also failing at their stated tasks in opaque ways all the damn time. It's obnoxious and why so many repos are stupidly large for no good reason.
This tracks with my experience. The other bit that contributes here is that upstream inputs using AI also get faster - so you’re basically speeding up the entire machine but you’re still a human.
Unfortunately this means that you always feel the need to keep building or fall behind (picturing Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory) which means you’re pretty much always feeling burnt out and it feels harder to step away than ever before without feeling a certain way about it.
I hate it. It’s the best time ever to build. That excitement lasted about a year - but now it’s a treadmill I can’t escape and companies are not really paying more for the productivity (even factoring in the cost of my AI usage)
They aren’t paying more for productivity because they themselves aren’t earning more for productivity. The elephant in the room is that customers don’t have any more money to spend. Certainly not in this economy.
In manufacturing, an oversupply of finished product quickly leads to overfull warehouses, and the company knows to slow down production until product moves.
In software it’s less visible. Features that nobody is buying don’t physically pile up in the shipping department. Decades of accounting for all programmer time as productivity has left managers with limited ability to recognize time spent building unnecessary bloat as a loss. Maintenance burden isn’t fully recognized as a loss, either. We tend to assume it’s roughly equivalent to profit, the same as all other code the programmers churn out.
And what you are seeing now is that it was always a myth. Not everything you do at work is profitable or productive, and AI is causing that fraction to decrease. So of course they aren’t going to pay you more for it.
While that is true, I find that in a small company / startup environment you are almost always working on something that will contribute to revenue. The list is long. And you don’t have that much time for nonsense if you’re doing it right.
The other factor here is scaling of humans. Without these tools we would need a lot more humans. We don’t need as many but the ones we do have are heavily taxed. That salary savings should be passed on (again, relative productivity to AI spend) but we’ll see!
I once would have said that about startups, but lately I’ve been working at a very small one and I’ve seen with my own eyes how agentic coding rapidly undermined the company’s ability to effectively prioritize. It has basically killed the correlation between initial planning/development cost and ongoing support/maintenance cost. And it had developers implementing things so quickly that the product manager couldn’t keep up, which meant that he was basically just approving everything, including the half baked ideas, just to avoid coming under pressure for stalling the development pipeline.
I’m sure the ship will eventually right itself, but it’s going to take some time for the profession to digest how AI coding has changed things and how to adjust incumbent working norms to account for it.
AI also gives employees much more leverage than before, as they no longer need a large team to compete with BigCos at knowledge work. It's never been cheaper to start a software business.
The coding is hard, unless by coding you mean slapping together CRUD forms. Many businesses are undone or fail to grow properly by neglecting this. This refrain that everything about starting a software business is hard except the coding needs to die.
If the coding was nothing, every good marketing guy could go solo and start large software businesses. It does not happen. You mostly see successful technical founders, or usually a marriage of technical and business cofounders.
Finding a fit between viable business opportunities and the tech to address it is what's hard, and requires several skills: technical, marketing, communication, product design, etc.
I wonder how much companies would pay people to NOT replicate their products. Like, if I'm just hacking around with my LLM, and am approaching a near 100% drop-in replacement for the entire Atlassian suite--how much would they pay me to NOT do that? Is that worth 1 livable wage to them?
Well... I think the converse to this is the companies that WOULD pay you (slightly less than they currently pay Atlassian) TO replicate those products.
I expect some BRUTAL competition for these larger software companies. My company just recently replaced our CRM with an in-house tool. (Of course, the maintenance / buildout of that is costly, but it's eventually going to be less than we are paying for the third-party CRM)
Honestly, I cannot personally decide whether or not this is Jevon's Paradox in action or not. In theory, that software could be entirely hands off (Claude write me a 1:1 implementation of Salesforce CRM and make it never go down) but in reality, someone is going to want it tweaked, modified, changed, and thus we now have an internal CRM that we own that requires some level of expertise. Maybe it's not a software engineer, but a software engineer is probably the most well equipped to take that process over...
The loss is from model training. Serving an open-weight model is profitable and these models are already good enough for many tasks. If Anthorpic/OpenAI will try to recover training investments with higher prices they'll loose the volume (and given infra spending commencements they need the volume). So I don't expect any significant price increase.
The side effect of this is also that the value of software itself has never been lower, so starting a new software business isn't very attractive in today's market.
the cost of developing software has never been lower. That is maybe 10-15% of the value in a software business believe it or not. If you can do the other 85% it's a great time to start a software business.
It cheaper to create one-off products. Creating a sustainable business though? Charging money for the product or service? Actually getting enough income to thrive? I think that also just got a lot harder. Sure, you quit and you undermined BigCo with your open source release, but somebody with even less to lose will now undermine you.
Tech is the least important thing even for a tech company. Unless you are a 10x better than anyone else in the game. This did happen once for a while but you can do it without AI anyway — and probably better for you because it’s a lot more difficult to copy yours. However, hardware oriented companies may be the outliers.
The ability to rent cheap AI capacities, the ability to push to a million consumers, the ability to persuade for large contracts, these are the most important ones.
Honestly I think that is more of a symptom of how slapped together the AI software stacks feel to an outsider.
All my dev friends swear this is the future, all my scientist coworkers just say it's a useful tool.
I have heard the pitch and have people explained how it works... But I have yet been handed a guide on how to set myself up properly to get the most out of AI. Like I have both a corporate openai gui agent as well as cli setup with a monthly allotment of tokens. But there is no clear standard guide on how I should be setting things up, like we do for python in books "here are the building blocks for python"/aka learn python the hard way
:D As a person who can do both ( and keeps logs of various interesting mishaps in our little corner of the universe ), neither is easy to do well, both require skill and, well, current literacy rates don't exactly make me optimistic.
edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that if we would embrace the full spectrum now, we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).
Just remember, it's not how good you are at your job, it's how hungry the person on your way to work is that's willing to split open your head and steal your wallet.
Trust me, the concept of social insurance is not lost on me. Frankly, the fact that we are running into this without considering likely outcomes ( or worse, considering it and plunging without relevant ways to keep people from going crazy ) is.. annoying to me. It shows me our leadership is.. not great.
This precisely - AI takes away your leverage as a software engineer. AI models are very well trained at coding today so I'm not sure what further improvement really looks like. But even if humans stick around to guide the AI, I expect the job itself will get more unpleasant because capital/management have no reason to treat this labor class well anymore.
AI needs humans to fill in the gaps at what it's not good at: acquiring and managing large volumes of new information/context. This requires humans to learn faster than ever before, since their projects grow much more rapidly, and to spend far more time managing and switching context, which people generally find unpleasant.
the amount of work I get done increased exponentially, but so did the number of things I have to keep track of in my head. it's tempting to just YOLO everything to the AI, but "the AI did it" isn't really an excuse when production goes down.
The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
At best all we can do is make knowledge work cheaper right now. But knowledge work was never the bottleneck behind energy prices, food production, transportation, cargo, etc.
It kind of was though? It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which in turn made food as abundant as it is today.
Otherwise most of us would still toil on the fields just to harvest a tiny bit more food than our immediate family needs.
> It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which
Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.
We have our own small boutique software type of business, so we aren't dealing with "employers", but all of us have never worked more, and for less (per hour) pay. Customers simply have higher expectations now, and we have to compete globally with basically an entire planet willing to vibe-code things, along with internal pressure at clients of "we can just do this ourselves".
So that means shipping higher quality, faster, with more features, and for a lower end price.
> and we have to compete globally with basically an entire planet
This is the part missing from many of the hot takes about regulating AI: The type of work that AI can do is the most portable globally. You can try to regulate AI or force companies to pay more for AI-assisted labor, but that only works within your borders. A hundred other companies in other countries will be more than happy to come do the work remotely. You can try to regulate that, too, but then the entire products will be built outside of the country.
You are missing a critical third - people organize and via unions or the polls push back and require less work. There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.
I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.
I don't understand what kind of society we're building right now. Anthropic and other AI labs at $20T valuations, the 1% monopolizing all the wealth and the rest of us out of a job and fighting for the scraps?
There seems to be some sort of magical thinking within the AI crowd at the moment, that it'll all work itself out in the end.
This is my prediction. The extractors will continue to extract until it becomes untenable. Then a lot of people will die and we will find a new balance. This cycle is basically human history in a nutshell.
Do those calling for unionization forget how the railroads dealt with workers trying to unionize? Ever heard of the Pinkertons.
Large companies have been spending millions in propaganda and attacks to ensure that people in the US think that unions are pure communism. By the time we get enough people to make a difference there may be T100's stepping on our bones at this point.
The problem is everyone's financial cliff is different. If I lost my job today, I have enough saved up to last me X months. Yours is Y, someone else's is Z. I'm going to go hungry at the end of X plus whatever. But since you're going to go hungry at Y plus whatever, we aren't forced to agree on what the right time to stop and stand up is. Z over there has rich parents so they've got longer. Nevermind poor W over there who doesn't, and has shorter.
What a convenient little trap we've set for ourselves. If everyone's money was set to run out at the same time, there'd be problems.
> I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.
Honestly, I think the only shot workers have is unionization plus really aggressive political action.
The problem is successful action will require setting aside pretty much all the culture war issues that are used to divide the working class, and I don't really see that happening. If anything culture-war polarization is getting worse. It will also require some formerly-privileged groups like software engineers to jettison their self-deceptive libertarian delusions, and properly understand their true role in society (software engineers should have unionized pre-2022 when we had more economic power, but economic comfort and those delusions prevented it).
The trouble with unionization is that it doesn't really address supply and demand, just bargaining. There are a dozen un-pulled levers available to bring aggregate labor supply and demand in balance. Overtime law, vacation policy, retirement policy, education funding, tax law (this is a big one -- taxes are obscenely lopsided on the labor/consumption economy vs the capital/investment economy), and so on. We need to pull those levers instead.
All those should absolutely be addressed (especially taxes), but organizing labor could be both a powerful way to push for those changes, as well as a force to maintain better labor/capital balance going forward.
> The trouble with unionization is that it doesn't really address supply and demand, just bargaining. There are a dozen un-pulled levers available to bring aggregate labor supply and demand in balance. Overtime law, vacation policy, retirement policy, education funding, tax law (this is a big one -- taxes are obscenely lopsided on the labor/consumption economy vs the capital/investment economy), and so on. We need to pull those levers instead.
All those other levers are political policy levers, correct? Besides bargaining, unions can also do political organization and lobbying.
Major state interventions that altered labor supply or rebalanced wealth (eg such as standardizing the 8-hour workday, establishing public pensions, or funding universal education) were won through waves of union mobilization and working-class political pressure.
It's not one or the other. Unionization is literally (figuratively) the hand that pulls those levers.
There is a reason nobody is willing to capitulate on the “culture war” positions they care about to “unify the working class.” People aren’t fungible economic automatons pursing material gain and they don’t believe policy is self-executing. If people have fundamental differences in how they view the world, what they value, what they think “good” is, they’re not going to capitulate on those in support of paper economic policies that may or may not work anyway.
> There is a reason nobody is willing to capitulate on the “culture war” positions they care about to “unify the working class.” People aren’t fungible economic automatons pursing material gain and they don’t believe policy is self-executing. If people have fundamental differences in how they view the world, what they value, what they think “good” is, they’re not going to capitulate on those in support of paper economic policies that may or may not work anyway.
I'm not saying capitulate, I'm saying set aside, as in table them to focus on more pressing issues.
Preserving some working class power in the face of the kind of automation being imagined now is going to take a large, unified political coalition that can prioritize effectively. Precisely because "nobody is willing to capitulate" on those issues, make them very useful in fracturing that coalition into non-existence or ineffectiveness.
If the "other side" doesn't put aside the culture war issues too, then "our side" will lose on them.
If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.
> If the "other side" doesn't put aside the culture war issues too, then "our side" will lose on them.
You can't have it all. Would you rather burn your energy to make little progress on them and lose on working class economic issues?
Call a truce, aim for a stalemate. Tolerate people from the "other side" to make more progress on other issues. AI has drastically changed the situation, and it's a massive fuck-up to continue to run the same strategy.
> If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.
The normal list: abortion, gun control, LGB and especially T stuff, etc.
> I doubt many on the left would be willing to throw their brothers and sisters under the bus to fight against AI. I wouldn't ask them to.
And IMHO, that mentality is the problem: they want to have it all, on every issue, so they'd rather drive the bus (and everyone in it) off the cliff than tolerate an ally who is not in total agreement.
You can’t “table” cultural issues because people’s view of what’s good and desirable arises out of their culture. That makes it extremely difficult for people with divergent cultural views to cooperate on shared economic goals. Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.
> You can’t “table” cultural issues because people’s view of what’s good and desirable arises out of their culture. That makes it extremely difficult for people with divergent cultural views to cooperate on shared economic goals.
What I'm saying is people need to learn to be grown ups and work with people who are different than them on common issues.
> Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.
It's not a top down effort, but I wouldn't but it past oligarchical economic interests to fan those flames a bit. These issues fracture the working class coalition nonetheless.
And it's not like this is some kind of impossible ask: the Democrats of the 1980s (say) did a far better job of it than the Democrats of the 2020s.
It seemed to me that the Democrats of the 1980s achieved almost nothing to stop or to slow down the biggest threats to working-class economic power of the 1980s, namely low-skilled immigration and offshoring (then called "globalization").
> The Democrats (in the US) of the 1980s did very little to stop or to slow down the big threats to working-class economic power of the 1980s, namely automation and offshoring (then called "globalization").
Wasn't that the 90s? IIRC, globalization was mainly a Republican big-business project, and the Democrats of that era were the biggest source of opposition, and it only got passed because of some defections.
Also globalization was sold as a bill of goods. IIRC, it was claimed (probably by many economists) that it would increase domestic manufacturing, but when that was shown to be a lie, there was no course-correction, and the sales pitch was changed to "but you got cheap stuff." I hope people have learned their lesson from that, to not trust economists.
But that wasn't really my point. My point was they were better able to handle divisive culture war issues, so you had lots of Democratic representatives from "red" states, even with popular Republican presidents. Today, the only way Democrats can hope to win those seats is if they're handed them through abject Republican incompetence.
My recollection is that "globalization" was a buzzword in the early 1980s although there is a possibility I am not accurately assigning my memories to the right range of years.
It was often paired with another term which I cannot confidently recall, maybe "the information economy".
Although Chinese imports didn't become an important factor in the US economy till the 1990s, Deng's rise to power happened in 1978 and his famous "Southern Tour" happened in 1982. Both events committed China to a course of economic modernization, welcoming Western investment and special economic zones designed to boost exports, which the US media did not fail to notice.
Trump was the first president in the modern era to try to stem the flow of factory jobs overseas. Clinton for example was all-in on globalization.
> What I'm saying is people need to learn to be grown ups and work with people who are different than them on common issues
This is like saying “people should grow up and learn to solve their disagreements without war.” I’d argue that view is the one that exhibits a childish utopianism. It overlooks what actually drives the formation of coalitions.
You are 'pro' an abstract, unrealized union, which is not 'pro union' at all.
You have abdicated your obligation to align your actions with your stated beliefs.
Do not give up before trying. Do not believe the hype that your labour power doesn't matter. Even Amazon couldn't stop their most exploited workers from unionizing, is your company bigger that that? Is your position weaker than theirs?
Worse that can happen is that you started talking with your fellow workers and they aren't interested.
Just because SV is run by several millenarian cults doesn't mean you should take their delusions about neo slavery and feudalism (Thiel/Yarvin; your doomerism stems from here) or apotheosis (anthropic, EA) as inevitable. You should assume they believe their own hype, but not assume they understand material reality outside their insular social bubbles.
Thiel's last 3 or 4? attempts at building his techo-utopia collapsed before even starting; They have no motion outside of what they can purchase.
The position is weaker in the sense that an effective SWE union probably has to span national boundaries, and will likely be a short-term loss for SWEs in high-cost geographies.
> I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.
Software devs have been devastating industry after industry for the 30 or so years I've spent in my career. If you want to see the future for software devs look to the past and see what happened to everyone else ( good and bad ).
I don't think unions are the answer, at least not for knowledge workers. The knowledge of the workers is the bargaining power in that case and AI makes the knowledge worth way less than it was before.
Apparently, minute hands were added to clocks so factory owners could extract more work from their employees.
Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
----
As for the title of this post, I can testify to that: As a solo coder, AI has actually increased the amount of work I do - but in a good way!
Even on non vibe-coded stuff, AI reviews keep helping me finding bugs and inconsistencies to fix that would have taken ages to even notice on my own
but more than that, whenever I have the faintest idea about anything, I can immediately put it to practice and explore it further or move on to other ideas.
Even when I'm outdoors away from my computer doing some normal life stuff in meatspace, I often think of stuff and pull out my phone and open the ChatGPT app to remote into my computer's Codex.
> Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
That's a pretty serious misconception unless by "medieval people" you mean the nobility. Common peasants had some hereditary title to the land they worked but the land itself was owned by the lord and the king. They were more like hereditary tenants but much worse off contractually than our modern interpretation of a tenant would suggest since they (and their progeny) were often obligated to remain on their land and work it without the option to go elsewhere. They paid their rent in labor and produce or sometimes money if they had any. They had parcels of land that are large by modern standards because they were farmers and they had to sustain themselves on what they grew on their land as well as give a portion of what they produced to the lord that actually owned the land.
They may have "owned" more of their time in that they weren't employed in the modern sense but they still had to put in as much work as it would take to feed themselves and pay their rent. They absolutely had to perform the work their lord demanded of them which might include additional agricultural labor on other plots of land or threshing grain.
It really wasn't a better system. Agricultural labor is gruelling without modern equipment. It's even worse when your life depends on it. Not being allowed to choose where to live or choose your occupation and having that apply to your children and your children's children is worse.
Imagine if you were permanently contracted with your landlord. You could never move to another apartment and your children were obligated to live in the same apartment. On top of that you had to do the maintenance work for the building whenever the landlord asked you to and you still had to pay him rent on top of that. You'd still be slightly better off than a peasant because you wouldn't have to be a subsistence farmer.
I probably didn't say it right, but watch that video, Monty Python's Terry Jones explains it better than I can, agreeing with the points of other comments here.
I'm pro unions and come from a social county. I'm self employed though, if I start relaxing, my "competitors" outrun me instantly. Bye bye assignments. This seems like primary school level reasoning to me, I also don't understand the premise of the article.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
I started asking for specific example/answers each time a conversation stopped before of the end of the task. I got the sense that frequent checkpointing is baked into Opus 5.5. I then added some language that amounts to “carry this through to completion only stopping if you’re truly blocked” and it really helped lengthen the loop
Both, actually! Nonconformist Christianity was one of several key influences on the labour movement ideologically speaking. At least in the UK the Labour Party is often said to owe more to Methodism than Marx for its original ideological foundations. There's a long history of this, in the aftermath of the English Civil War a group called the Diggers more or less independently invented agrarian socialism out of the New Testament, and a great deal of calls for humane conditions for workers over the centuries were motivated explicitly by Christian teachings. The New Testament is pretty clear in its condemnation of repressing workers, James 5 for example:
> Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
This isn't an exclusive or situation, nonconformist religious influence helped create the ideological environment that allowed unions to exist in the first place.
There were church mandated holidays in the Middle Ages. Lots of them.
The current pope chose his name to signal his continuation of Pope Leo XVIII's teachings on worker's rights, particularly the papal encylical Rerum Novarum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
During the industrial revolution many people treated their workers better because of their religious belief - the Quaker industrialists of Britain are a prominent example.
Only replying to you since everyone else is making the same points.
I follow a religion with similar edicts (not Christian). I also understand the contributions made by Christianity in this area. But the fact of the matter is that religion was ultimately unable to force actual widespread change on the ground, especially not in secularized European states.
At the end of the day, the only true religion that industrialists and capitalists understand is money. Only unions were able to speak their language at a very large scale, and this is the language they ultimately had to listen to :)
Somebody should do a economic analysis of how technology affects unions. I bet the availability of automation has a lot more to do with the downfall of the unions than the political changes that are commonly described to that phenomenon. Similarly, I bet the availability of AI will have a devastating effect on any white collar unions.
Unions do not exist in a vacuum. They have to operate in the same fundamental power structures as everyone else.
If union A is like "work less let AI take the slack" and union B is like "work the same, use AI to achieve more, let AI help us win" I'm joining union B every time.
Unions also require the right structural conditions.
For example waste management generally has very strong unions in the developed world because 1) capital intensity 2) operations immediately seize on labour withdrawal 3) consequences of strikes are in a golden zone of painful but not existential so are tolerated 4) extract a relatively small proportion of local gov funds, so don’t create that much powerful opposition 5) labour force is locally concentrated and highly socialised.
Those pillars of power don’t rely much on any particular legal or political system.
Unfortunately this means that you always feel the need to keep building or fall behind (picturing Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory) which means you’re pretty much always feeling burnt out and it feels harder to step away than ever before without feeling a certain way about it.
I hate it. It’s the best time ever to build. That excitement lasted about a year - but now it’s a treadmill I can’t escape and companies are not really paying more for the productivity (even factoring in the cost of my AI usage)
In manufacturing, an oversupply of finished product quickly leads to overfull warehouses, and the company knows to slow down production until product moves.
In software it’s less visible. Features that nobody is buying don’t physically pile up in the shipping department. Decades of accounting for all programmer time as productivity has left managers with limited ability to recognize time spent building unnecessary bloat as a loss. Maintenance burden isn’t fully recognized as a loss, either. We tend to assume it’s roughly equivalent to profit, the same as all other code the programmers churn out.
And what you are seeing now is that it was always a myth. Not everything you do at work is profitable or productive, and AI is causing that fraction to decrease. So of course they aren’t going to pay you more for it.
The other factor here is scaling of humans. Without these tools we would need a lot more humans. We don’t need as many but the ones we do have are heavily taxed. That salary savings should be passed on (again, relative productivity to AI spend) but we’ll see!
I’m sure the ship will eventually right itself, but it’s going to take some time for the profession to digest how AI coding has changed things and how to adjust incumbent working norms to account for it.
If the coding was nothing, every good marketing guy could go solo and start large software businesses. It does not happen. You mostly see successful technical founders, or usually a marriage of technical and business cofounders.
Finding a fit between viable business opportunities and the tech to address it is what's hard, and requires several skills: technical, marketing, communication, product design, etc.
There's an alternate employment arrangement...
I expect some BRUTAL competition for these larger software companies. My company just recently replaced our CRM with an in-house tool. (Of course, the maintenance / buildout of that is costly, but it's eventually going to be less than we are paying for the third-party CRM)
Honestly, I cannot personally decide whether or not this is Jevon's Paradox in action or not. In theory, that software could be entirely hands off (Claude write me a 1:1 implementation of Salesforce CRM and make it never go down) but in reality, someone is going to want it tweaked, modified, changed, and thus we now have an internal CRM that we own that requires some level of expertise. Maybe it's not a software engineer, but a software engineer is probably the most well equipped to take that process over...
Who knows, though.
99.99% of software business is marketing..lol
For example, skills with sales are far more important than actual software engineering.
Just today I was served a clearly AI-generated Halloween ad for Coca-Cola.
The ability to rent cheap AI capacities, the ability to push to a million consumers, the ability to persuade for large contracts, these are the most important ones.
All my dev friends swear this is the future, all my scientist coworkers just say it's a useful tool.
I have heard the pitch and have people explained how it works... But I have yet been handed a guide on how to set myself up properly to get the most out of AI. Like I have both a corporate openai gui agent as well as cli setup with a monthly allotment of tokens. But there is no clear standard guide on how I should be setting things up, like we do for python in books "here are the building blocks for python"/aka learn python the hard way
LLM and harnesses are changing so fast that if I had a guide from 6 months ago I'm not sure how relevant it would be today.
I'm guessing that when things calm down and the landscape isn't changing as much then we will get the guides.
edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that if we would embrace the full spectrum now, we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).
edit: conditional syntax
frangonf below me brought the receipts too. Unfortunately flagged as [dead]
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/elon-musk-ai-eventual...
https://www.newsweek.com/ceos-predict-shorter-working-week-1...
https://tech.co/news/ceo-predicts-shorter-workweek-ai#:~:tex...
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-05/chatgpt-op...
https://www.businessinsider.com/vinod-khosla-5-year-olds-won...
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-comments-3-day-wo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-ceo-jamie-dimon-ai-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-cohen-4-day-workweek-a...
Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
Otherwise most of us would still toil on the fields just to harvest a tiny bit more food than our immediate family needs.
Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.
So that means shipping higher quality, faster, with more features, and for a lower end price.
This is the part missing from many of the hot takes about regulating AI: The type of work that AI can do is the most portable globally. You can try to regulate AI or force companies to pay more for AI-assisted labor, but that only works within your borders. A hundred other companies in other countries will be more than happy to come do the work remotely. You can try to regulate that, too, but then the entire products will be built outside of the country.
Downside: wear and tear on vehicles, carbon emissions. Expenses are billed to the customer who is happy to pay them.
I don't understand what kind of society we're building right now. Anthropic and other AI labs at $20T valuations, the 1% monopolizing all the wealth and the rest of us out of a job and fighting for the scraps?
There seems to be some sort of magical thinking within the AI crowd at the moment, that it'll all work itself out in the end.
- Build the God Machine
- ??????
- POST-SCARCITY UTOPIA!
Do those calling for unionization forget how the railroads dealt with workers trying to unionize? Ever heard of the Pinkertons.
Large companies have been spending millions in propaganda and attacks to ensure that people in the US think that unions are pure communism. By the time we get enough people to make a difference there may be T100's stepping on our bones at this point.
What a convenient little trap we've set for ourselves. If everyone's money was set to run out at the same time, there'd be problems.
Honestly, I think the only shot workers have is unionization plus really aggressive political action.
The problem is successful action will require setting aside pretty much all the culture war issues that are used to divide the working class, and I don't really see that happening. If anything culture-war polarization is getting worse. It will also require some formerly-privileged groups like software engineers to jettison their self-deceptive libertarian delusions, and properly understand their true role in society (software engineers should have unionized pre-2022 when we had more economic power, but economic comfort and those delusions prevented it).
Edit: fix typo pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50259693
Yep, it's going to be a helluva fight.
All those should absolutely be addressed (especially taxes), but organizing labor could be both a powerful way to push for those changes, as well as a force to maintain better labor/capital balance going forward.
All those other levers are political policy levers, correct? Besides bargaining, unions can also do political organization and lobbying.
It's not one or the other. Unionization is literally (figuratively) the hand that pulls those levers.
I'm not saying capitulate, I'm saying set aside, as in table them to focus on more pressing issues.
Preserving some working class power in the face of the kind of automation being imagined now is going to take a large, unified political coalition that can prioritize effectively. Precisely because "nobody is willing to capitulate" on those issues, make them very useful in fracturing that coalition into non-existence or ineffectiveness.
If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.
You can't have it all. Would you rather burn your energy to make little progress on them and lose on working class economic issues?
Call a truce, aim for a stalemate. Tolerate people from the "other side" to make more progress on other issues. AI has drastically changed the situation, and it's a massive fuck-up to continue to run the same strategy.
> If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.
The normal list: abortion, gun control, LGB and especially T stuff, etc.
Part of the complexity here is pitting current obviously visible specific harms, vs vague future potential harms.
I could be wrong about this, though.
And IMHO, that mentality is the problem: they want to have it all, on every issue, so they'd rather drive the bus (and everyone in it) off the cliff than tolerate an ally who is not in total agreement.
What I'm saying is people need to learn to be grown ups and work with people who are different than them on common issues.
> Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.
It's not a top down effort, but I wouldn't but it past oligarchical economic interests to fan those flames a bit. These issues fracture the working class coalition nonetheless.
And it's not like this is some kind of impossible ask: the Democrats of the 1980s (say) did a far better job of it than the Democrats of the 2020s.
Wasn't that the 90s? IIRC, globalization was mainly a Republican big-business project, and the Democrats of that era were the biggest source of opposition, and it only got passed because of some defections.
Also globalization was sold as a bill of goods. IIRC, it was claimed (probably by many economists) that it would increase domestic manufacturing, but when that was shown to be a lie, there was no course-correction, and the sales pitch was changed to "but you got cheap stuff." I hope people have learned their lesson from that, to not trust economists.
But that wasn't really my point. My point was they were better able to handle divisive culture war issues, so you had lots of Democratic representatives from "red" states, even with popular Republican presidents. Today, the only way Democrats can hope to win those seats is if they're handed them through abject Republican incompetence.
It was often paired with another term which I cannot confidently recall, maybe "the information economy".
Although Chinese imports didn't become an important factor in the US economy till the 1990s, Deng's rise to power happened in 1978 and his famous "Southern Tour" happened in 1982. Both events committed China to a course of economic modernization, welcoming Western investment and special economic zones designed to boost exports, which the US media did not fail to notice.
Trump was the first president in the modern era to try to stem the flow of factory jobs overseas. Clinton for example was all-in on globalization.
This is like saying “people should grow up and learn to solve their disagreements without war.” I’d argue that view is the one that exhibits a childish utopianism. It overlooks what actually drives the formation of coalitions.
You are 'pro' an abstract, unrealized union, which is not 'pro union' at all.
You have abdicated your obligation to align your actions with your stated beliefs.
Do not give up before trying. Do not believe the hype that your labour power doesn't matter. Even Amazon couldn't stop their most exploited workers from unionizing, is your company bigger that that? Is your position weaker than theirs?
Worse that can happen is that you started talking with your fellow workers and they aren't interested.
Just because SV is run by several millenarian cults doesn't mean you should take their delusions about neo slavery and feudalism (Thiel/Yarvin; your doomerism stems from here) or apotheosis (anthropic, EA) as inevitable. You should assume they believe their own hype, but not assume they understand material reality outside their insular social bubbles.
Thiel's last 3 or 4? attempts at building his techo-utopia collapsed before even starting; They have no motion outside of what they can purchase.
Ah, the shut up it’s too late gambit.
I don't think unions are the answer, at least not for knowledge workers. The knowledge of the workers is the bargaining power in that case and AI makes the knowledge worth way less than it was before.
Apparently, minute hands were added to clocks so factory owners could extract more work from their employees.
Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
----
As for the title of this post, I can testify to that: As a solo coder, AI has actually increased the amount of work I do - but in a good way!
Even on non vibe-coded stuff, AI reviews keep helping me finding bugs and inconsistencies to fix that would have taken ages to even notice on my own
but more than that, whenever I have the faintest idea about anything, I can immediately put it to practice and explore it further or move on to other ideas.
Even when I'm outdoors away from my computer doing some normal life stuff in meatspace, I often think of stuff and pull out my phone and open the ChatGPT app to remote into my computer's Codex.
This is actually fun.
That's a pretty serious misconception unless by "medieval people" you mean the nobility. Common peasants had some hereditary title to the land they worked but the land itself was owned by the lord and the king. They were more like hereditary tenants but much worse off contractually than our modern interpretation of a tenant would suggest since they (and their progeny) were often obligated to remain on their land and work it without the option to go elsewhere. They paid their rent in labor and produce or sometimes money if they had any. They had parcels of land that are large by modern standards because they were farmers and they had to sustain themselves on what they grew on their land as well as give a portion of what they produced to the lord that actually owned the land.
They may have "owned" more of their time in that they weren't employed in the modern sense but they still had to put in as much work as it would take to feed themselves and pay their rent. They absolutely had to perform the work their lord demanded of them which might include additional agricultural labor on other plots of land or threshing grain.
It really wasn't a better system. Agricultural labor is gruelling without modern equipment. It's even worse when your life depends on it. Not being allowed to choose where to live or choose your occupation and having that apply to your children and your children's children is worse.
Imagine if you were permanently contracted with your landlord. You could never move to another apartment and your children were obligated to live in the same apartment. On top of that you had to do the maintenance work for the building whenever the landlord asked you to and you still had to pay him rent on top of that. You'd still be slightly better off than a peasant because you wouldn't have to be a subsistence farmer.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
But far away enough that we need to look at this again and get more time back to the workers.
I answered one incorrect statement. Why try to pile the world on a single statement.
> Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
This isn't an exclusive or situation, nonconformist religious influence helped create the ideological environment that allowed unions to exist in the first place.
There were church mandated holidays in the Middle Ages. Lots of them.
The current pope chose his name to signal his continuation of Pope Leo XVIII's teachings on worker's rights, particularly the papal encylical Rerum Novarum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
During the industrial revolution many people treated their workers better because of their religious belief - the Quaker industrialists of Britain are a prominent example.
Just off the top of my head examples.
I follow a religion with similar edicts (not Christian). I also understand the contributions made by Christianity in this area. But the fact of the matter is that religion was ultimately unable to force actual widespread change on the ground, especially not in secularized European states.
At the end of the day, the only true religion that industrialists and capitalists understand is money. Only unions were able to speak their language at a very large scale, and this is the language they ultimately had to listen to :)
If union A is like "work less let AI take the slack" and union B is like "work the same, use AI to achieve more, let AI help us win" I'm joining union B every time.
For example waste management generally has very strong unions in the developed world because 1) capital intensity 2) operations immediately seize on labour withdrawal 3) consequences of strikes are in a golden zone of painful but not existential so are tolerated 4) extract a relatively small proportion of local gov funds, so don’t create that much powerful opposition 5) labour force is locally concentrated and highly socialised.
Those pillars of power don’t rely much on any particular legal or political system.
I am actually pro Union but yikes the left needs to go back and actually read some Marx.