This. Before we worry about how much work there is left, we have to define what work is "to be done." We're already at a point where an incredible amount of work done isn't strictly "necessary." It's not growing food, it's not making clothing, it's not building houses, or providing other basic needs and comforts...

How many man-hours go into various parts of the advertising distribution chain? Though a certain fraction of that energy goes to connecting people with goods and services they might find valuable, most of it goes into shifting numbers around for people that already don't personally have to worry about money.

We don't need to find endless ways for people to spin wheels, but as long as we're worried about "jobs," we will. We just need to find the social structures to provide people with basic needs and reserve "work" for things that are vital to society or truly inspired.

This is a very short-sighted, and exceedingly common, take.

Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive.

This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...

Since you keep being the top comment: I agree with your philosophy, but that is not how Biology often works.

When enough green pastures are around animals usually reproduce till that is no longer the case and they need to move to other pastures. They continue doing this untill all green pastures are occupied. After this they start competing with one another to compete for the green pastures already occupied. Some animals will be so succesfull that they take larger green pastures, letting others starve. If by some miraclelous event (ai?) suddenly a lot of green pastures arise, animals will simply reproduce again till they occupied all green pastures again.

Looking at us? The agraric revolution, neither the Industrial revolution, nor this ai revolution have decreased how much we work on our 'jobs' (finding food indirectly). All it did was increasing the population so that all green pastures became occupied.

Exactly. And taking unpleasant work from humans has always been the ultimate goal of technology as a whole.

But animals and humans are different. Humans are an animal but to suggest a lion, dog, fish etc operate in the same manner seems a little odd to me.

My dog was perfectly happy to snooze most of the day, play with toys occasionally, go for walks and try to hunt rodents. I on the other hand would be incredibly bored with that.

There exists to many complex things in the world and we cannot do it all ourselves. We work so that we have something of value to trade to the people who do the work on the things we want.

We will never automate all work so we with half of humanity doing nothing of value it will be a struggle for the people who do nothing of value to convince people to do work for them.

We can see it now where products dont target the people without money. There is no point because they cant give you any reward so instead you do your work for the people that can give you something in return. We can use the government to stimulate and balance this a bit but at a certain point the number gets to high and things collapse.

Agree on this. Since we have this wonderful system called capitalism there are tendencies for, relatively speaking, a few human beings hoard / control most of the productive capacity and as such wealth.

Some may consider local LLMs to help with that as the power of LLMs would be more distributed. I think local LLMs would help marginally. Companies as an entity would still be better positioned to use these to their advantage vis a vis individuals.

So projecting into the future I still wonder if it won't become more challenging for individuals to make a living on average.

Why are you assuming that the machines or their masters will be benevolent? All actions so far have been contrarian.

> 2)Why we need to work?

It's a status thing, right?

Who owns the machines? Work is what we exchange with capital for food and shelter, at this point I'm not so sure they would give it to us for free under any circumstance. I mean look at all the homelessness and medical debt, its clearly a discipline mechanism

Only if you buy the fairy tale that the machines will be our nursemaids and that the powerful will forget their obsession with controlling and exploiting others.

Just FYI, if you know much about the medical field, nurses tend to do most of the actual work, with highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors. Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors.

Your analogy isn’t necessarily wrong, but it might ignore the extreme importance of nurses. Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.

So lots of jobs for nurses.

I think what's actually happening is that the "threshold" of technical understanding required to be more productive than average is increasing, and other non-technical skills are becoming more important. Those below the threshold are not able to provide value over anyone else, even if they have a lot of technical experience. For example, I think today a strong PM with no technical ability can produce higher quality technical output compared to a mediocre frontend developer with no project management ability.

In such a future where LLMs hypothetically dominate the SDLC, the trade would be much more like pottery than medicine - i.e. a commodity in such obscene abundance that its functional utility would be entirely divorced from its creation.

In such a future there would be a handful of lucky well paid artisans, a healthy community of hobbyists, and the overwhelming population of the planet who would be perfectly content to delegate their entire software diet to generative superplatforms that script themselves to perform any arbitrary software function. The idea of paying for individual bespoke software programs would become an anachronism for an era where software was so difficult to produce that entire teams spent years painstakingly tweaking programs to spec.

Current discussions is like deja vu. One time there was hype around of no code/low code development using PowerApps, Zapier etc.

The sell was - Creating your apps was easier than before. You don't need to know any programming language. You don't need IT. You have a GUI and just drag and drop and visual your apps. Just fill the fields and voila your app is ready.

The criticism of the approach was that low codes apps might not be secure, unsuitable for large scale and critical apps, and lead to increase in unsupported apps by "shadow IT".

The same reasoning exists today for AI coding. Anyone can create apps, its not great for complex and mission critical apps, might not be secure etc. And lots of discussion like your post parsing the future too closely.

Low/no code apps have continue to grow. But many of the low/no code tool users are developers who use it to make their jobs easier.

While some might say - this time it is different. I believe we are currently we are the beginning of the cycle so everyone is excited to use their PowerApps shaped Claude Code/Codex to make their 100th budget tracking app but as time passes and edge cases are figured out the biggest users for AI are going to be software developers (and I believe they currently are the biggest users).

As for software engineering jobs just like before engineers will be expected to output more and faster. This has happened with every innovation from assembly compiler to IDE to low/no code ways of building.

The different levels of expertise exists even today and it will remain so.

Tech work has been organized and divided this way for decades.

That’s a good analogy, but I think the reason we currently need the "nurse" role is the need to interact with the physical world. Most software products don't require this step, so the demand for “nurses” or "doctors" will likely decrease. If robotics technology continues to advance, the number of nurses in real world will also decrease in the foreseeable future.

If LLMs reach a point of sufficiently high competence to the point that they're capable of producing usable software from vague, and sometimes contradictory instructions - the same software engineers have to regularly deal with, then at that point software will simply be an expectation of ability in any job.

So I think it would be more comparable to something like literacy. There was a time when that was a fairly uncommon and highly valued skill. Now the guy flipping burgers or pouring a cup of coffee is also almost certainly fully literate. And in fact many jobs have evolved in a way such that it became mandatory, but only because it was already ubiquitous. I expect to see the same thing with software. The industry of producing software that do fairly simple tasks will probably die, but in its place will be a vast array of heavily customized and oft iterated software for companies and people achieving their own stuff.

The mobile industry is a perfect example of where this will be massive shift. Right now there's a million mobile apps to execute extremely basic functionality on phones, but it's loaded with advertising, begging, and general annoyances. As are the app stores themselves. When you can make software that does that in a few minutes with a single prompt, and people realize this (as we're already practically at this point), then that will be the end of those apps. This is because the one thing LLMs have shown is that natural language interfaces are way less friction than using search, whether on the web or an app store. And so there will be a time when it will be lower friction to simply just quickly build your own app to do [whatever] than dealing with somebody trying to monetize an alarm clock.

Welcome to the current day difference between being an Accredited Engineer and being a Developer. The only thing that's happening is that the Developer side are getting a wake up call.

Bad take. What you're describing already exists.

> Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.

Nursing and being a physician aren't really the same thing at all, and they require different skill sets, it's not just "having more knowledge". Just because someone is an amazing surgeon doesn't mean they would also make a good nurse.

> Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.

I think you just described a staff swe

> The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.

These people already exist. They are the business analysts who know SQL and maybe Python, R, or VBA. Marketing people who work on Wordpress landing pages. People doing systems integration, the IT department, sales engineers, and on, and on, and on.

> At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.

You said it, no code/low-code has existed forever.

This is like the most idealized future.

I think many people will wish it was like this. But when AI becomes so capable that a nobody who doesn't understands computers a well as a "doctor" uses AI to create something BETTER or superior or just as good then employers will think... why am I paying that "doctor" more than that nobody?

See right now everything is fine, because AI is not that good yet. But if it gets better. Well. The future will be one where we trust AI more and more.

> So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.

The medical field is also going to change though. Massively. Because people are going to realize you don’t need to pay someone $400k per year to hand out advice about moderate exercise and which antibiotic is appropriate for a sneeze-cough with yellow mucus.

Regulation isn’t going to prevent this. AI is already way too easily accessible to ever rein it in again. Not to mention that the US now has serious competition from a hostile country, so they can regulate their own AIs all they want without it making a difference in practice.

Why would the government force the technology to plateau when the Chinese won't? Outdoing the Chinese is the Trump admin's biggest hobby.

> phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me

Why? Because it resembles the typical "You're not just implementing a text editor, you're reshaping the text editing landscape"?

I've had this exact feeling about the article. I partly switched off after that paragraph

If it is a common AI pattern, I wonder why the developers haven't taken measures to circumvent tells like that. Unless they keep them there on purpose as like a signature or watermark.

I am starting to seriously consider switching my pi-hole from blacklist to whitelist; block everything except few domains. I am convinced now most of the text I read is either ai generated, or people who wrote it have been influenced by AI so much that they write like it.

I cant read this shit anymore.

"creating cross functional AI evaluation team to keep the company honest"

Fucking garbage.

I have an old book between me and the keyboard, and just read it while the AI is thinking, so I can read non AI words.. otherwise its like reading books by the same author over and over and over again.

I will go touch some grass now.

> Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI

This is true as a sentiment, but my understanding is that the majority of students are overwhelmingly using AI for ~everything. If a thing provides massive utility people will use it.

Do "entering proprietary information into AI tools", "using non-approved AI tools", and "ignoring guidelines and best practices" really count as sabotaging an AI strategy because you are opposed to it? An over-enthusiastic early adopter would do all three.

> The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI.

They say they are, but they have actually been using it so much that they can't even do they homework without AI at this point.

I'm an advocate for these new tools we have, and by that definition I would be included.

Very open definition of sabotage.

Some are; you can't make sweeping generalizations about a nuanced topic.

But I do believe (gut feeling) the novelty's worn off for a lot of people.

> The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI.

Jinxzi has Bernard as friend though

Ironically, I think AI boosters are probably turning into AI's biggest obstacle right now. I see so much "adapt or die!" bullshit here (people literally saying that!), and yet when I talk to other professionals I know in real life everybody is just kind of sick of all this. It's utterly exhausting and the AI industry is looking and acting more and more desperate. They've basically put themselves in a stupid position where it has to replace everyone's job for the investment to even make sense, and it's just not happening. I'm longing for the day when the investment money runs out and the grifters go grift on something else.

The utility of AI is too high for the opposition to be real. It's like money or heroin. Someone who says money is the root of all evil will likely take a billion dollars if offered if for free.

Everybody says they hate heroin but once you try it, you can't get enough of it.

Are they really opposed to AI or are they just opposed to anything that old people do/like, just like every generation? The moment they get their own AI that us dinosaurs don't understand they'll be all over it.

We need to be responsible for the things we write. You write with a certainty of a gloomy scenario, even though you can’t predict the future. Saying hopeless things like that is not only bad for your psyche, but can also inflict mental damage onto others.

In my org, it's grown the level of work. We had a lot of stuff that was never worth the devtime necessary, but now that's opened up that we can do a lot of this stuff in the background

Maybe?

But it's at my day job, and it's because I was able to write a prompt which automates having Copilot review uploaded scanned PDFs of invoices with checks (and the bank line obscured with a pen, so no PII) and then write a batch file which renames the files per a file-naming convention, removing the need to open them in batches of 50, find the Invoice ID, re-save using that filename, then quit and re-launch Adobe Acrobat (if left running, eventually I run into a bug where it stops saving files), then run a .bat file which renames based on Invoice ID as a filename.

Problem of course is I've been running into a limit of number of allowed files per 24 hr. period.

Even if it's not less work, it feels like less effort.

Nope, but recently it does feel like I spend less time coding and more on prep work / requirements gathering. But that's n=1, I'm doing something very specific (building a design system with a small team of designers and developers) and recently my skill in writing requirements and doing research has been recognised.

But I'm trying to figure out if this is a thing in my organization. So far the channels discussing AI have been about how they use AI, how to build agents, and complaining they've run out of tokens - but nobody says anything about how much work they finished, how it impacted the product(s), the user, and the company's bottom line.

I don't know if they just don't know, don't care, don't measure, or they don't actually want to admit they're just burning through tokens with nothing to show for it.

That said, right now I'm using AI to extract some code from our app to create a minimal reproduction for an issue we're having with a 3rd party library, it's a huge time saver there - that is, I wouldn't have bothered making a reproduction because of how time consuming it can be.

So to answer your question, it's not that "I have less to do", it's "I do things I wouldn't have done otherwise because they cost less effort/time". Which is also the promise of e.g. automation - the automated loom didn't just reduce how long it takes to make cloth, it made it so people make a bajillion times more cloth.

I have the opposite, because I'm now getting things clients generated that they want me to implement. It's definitely more work and money for me, but it's concerning somewhat because ultimately it's not good for their business. It takes me longer to implement this kind of stuff than it would for me to code it from scratch. That is in a working way, the AI generated code has far more bells and whistles, but also layers and layers of needless complexity that quite literally add no value as in they aren't even a factor of the finished output.

The problem is they are now paying me more, plus paying for the cost of using the AI, and the needless complexity also slows down the employees. So more costs there as well, any future debugging is going to cost far more and at the end of the day they are getting less quality on the core function but far more presentation data that is essentially meaningless.

Yes, I have seen it happen on enterprise consulting.

For example, all the work like translations that used to be done by humans, now it is a CMS AI feature.

Secondly teams setup.

It used to be we did everything ourselves for development, then cloud, SaaS products and serverless decreased the teams size required for delivery.

Now with AI, there is an even greater push for low code/no code tooling, with agents, leaving the actual programming left for MCP tools that might not yet be available for the project.

Thus you get a team of five doing what used to be about 15 a decade ago.

It depends, but I from what I have seen on multiple projects with different teams/skills, that it amplifies the ability of the person/team.

It pushes the bulk of the work to review. So teams with good practices can account for this.

For junior teams, the time saved is massive, because they aren't doing all the other practices required to prevent technical debt.

I’ve never written so much software

I have more work now, mostly because my title changed to something with "AI" on it =)

But before that I had the same output, but with less of the boring typing stuff.

For a few weeks but now we gotta give AI estimates i.e. smash it out quicker. So things will get miserable again.

I didn't do fewer hours in these weeks but had time to explore and innovate a little.

No, but the point is to work just as much and be more productive. No company will ever expect you to work less, unless they are showing you the door.

Not me. I made this comment, a few days ago[0]:

> It’s funny. I was looking at my GH activity graph. It’s been pretty solid green, for years. I stay busy.

> But since I’ve been using an LLM, it’s been bright green.

> I always check in code manually. I don’t let the LLM do it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843115

No. But I got time to clean some technical debt that I for ages ea wanted to do. I could have chosen not to do anything in that time.

I can now write software quicker in most of the cases, but the rest of the organization moves as slowly as ever.

I have about 10x more to do.

You can if you own the fruit of your labor.

It’s already the case that I’m no longer paid to type source code into a computer, but rather to control agents that do that. There’s still plenty of demand for human expertise and labor. It’s possible that this will change as well. What gives me hope that I won’t be completely useless in the future is Marx’s labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of human labor time invested in it. His reasoning as to why this is the case makes sense to me, even though other economists argue against it. Marx also argues that technological progress, which offers a market advantage here and there in the short term, tends to become widespread in the medium and long term due to competitive pressure, so that in the end, all that remains is human labor time. Seen this way, it doesn’t matter how much better AI becomes. In the end, human labor always floats on top of it like a layer of fat on soup. This does not rule out the possibility that the human labor that remains will be shit, but preventing that is a matter of political action.

I agree that it is not an Either-Or scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma). You are right about that.

I would doubt however that this would be an 'Equals' or 'Implies' scenario. Let go of seeing either of them as binary, and then not even as scalers.

One example would be go to college/graduate school to invest in skills or get a job now to earn wealth over the same time period.

Speak for yourself. Programming was my main hobby and I've diversified into learning aelectronics to have some escape from the blatant current of anti-intellectualism in software. Yes something major is lost when you commission a plagiarism machine and resign to fixing its messes - you.

It's not "coming", it's already here. I barely code anymore, mate. And that happened in a just a few years, imagine in a few more.

I don't think one could have reasonably turned the tide on agriculture, factories, railroads, or electricity - and a smart person would presumably have seen a lot of the benefits years before they materialized. There's plenty of people alive today who saw most of the current landscape coming decades in advance.

Once you've used a BBS or modem, "online banking" is an obvious idea - just a very difficult one to implement until you add on decades of security and improved connectivity.

But also, the article is explicitly arguing against armageddon.

There will never be a state of humanity where everyone will have just “completed everything”.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/3p0b3i/graphic_design...

Noise begins to settle down... "Continual RL is all you need" paper comes out.

Exactly. For solving problems every help is a blessing. It's just clashing with our legacy society system. This system forces us to have jobs. But the real problems humanity is facing, like planetary boundaries or a decent base standard of living for all humans, are completely unimpressed by that human made model.

Okay, but let's say this happens, and in your utopian world everyone feels equally capable, judges their skills accurately, and gets along... what do people do? Assign things and use git? What if you keep wanting to work on any of these things and as soon as you are a week into every last thing you are working on, some random person comes along and says, hey dude (or dudette), I finished that, you were taking too long? What if that random person were an AI or chatbot that got bored?

AI will also make us faster as exploitation, genocide, and weapons manufacturing.

Our technology has long since surpassed our capacity to understand its impact or to morally restrain its use - we've gone from chivalry to "oops, that was a school, oh well"

We will solve problems faster though, but we aren't showing signs that AI is making us better humans, and that is the problem.

We can't do that until we clean up all the tech debt from promotion oriented development.

In some of Asimov's work humanity had forgotten how certain key technologies worked but they were automated and kept working and sustaining civilisations for hundreds of years before collapsing. I think about that sometimes when I realise I forgot about a Kubernetes cluster that just kept running for a year or two.

Why is it guaranteed to be worse? A motivated fan of a game took issue with some part of the game and made their own one that didn't have that issue. They made it better in their eyes. Who are you to judge that it's worse and not better?

> Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding

Depends on what kind of game you are building. I can tell you that even Claude Opus absolutely hates desync bugs and has a rather hard tracing them. Maybe Fable or chatgpt-5.6 are better?

all game stores are flooded with AI slop. good luck competing