That's a nice attitude to have when you know you can get another job. That allows you to support your family. Without moving to another city or drastically altering your lifestyle.

Unfortunately not everyone has that luxury, and as AI continues to devalue intellectual labor, fewer will.

The author has mix of empathy and fear. They do not necessarily care about the job as a much as much they are probably are not as much stress tolerant and immune to things around them.

I really can't disagree more. You generally work 8-9 hours a day. Some people even more. That takes so much time from your life. Shouldn't you try to profit from it as much as possible and try to find a job that suits you and take pleasure in and you find to some extent at least rewarding? It's like saying that you don't care about 33% of your life, as it's not what really matters and that friends and family matter more. They do, but the job matters also.

Now this is a situation you can't easily get out of, then sure, I think that kind of mindset helps you, at least for a period of time.

I feel the same as you - but I'm fortunate enough to be young, have a cushion of cash, no mortgage, no mouths to feed. I'm guessing you're similar. We might feel differently without these.

I can understand why people take their job seriously if they have a big mortgage and mouths to feed.

Now with AI threatening my job, I've decided to never take a mortgage, and generally live as frugally as possible, preparing for the worst. If I get laid off, I can at least always move back to my parents without being stuck with a house that I can't afford.

I predict AI might be the factor that finally causes a big a drop in real estate market. No need for offices when you replace workers with AI, no demand for housing when young people continue living with their parents and don't have children.

I agree that we take our job/careers too seriously. Especially when it can lead to serious consequences such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takotsubo_cardiomyopathy Broken heart syndrome.

Loss of a job/career shouldn’t define a person. Loss of a human being does. For too long we ask people we meet “what do you do for work?” Perhaps the question that lets us better know a person is “who is your family?”

> People take their jobs too seriously.

This is an easy thing to say when you've got money in the bank and some kind of health insurance that isn't tied to your employer.

[dead]

Always interesting when words change their meaning; because in this case the part of Labour that does the actual labour is going to be fine. It'll be the layers of people who do nothing but sit at a desk and press buttons that really feel it.

AI might be the best thing to happen for labour n fact; because they're going to gain a lot more intelligence for the same amount of work.

Capital(ism) and AI are the same thing.

Humans are just the temporary hosts.

> If you can direct AI and produce more value per $/time spent then a non software engineer directing AI to develop software then you still can produce a lot of value.

Sure, in the same way a skilled photographer can take better photographs on an iPhone than I can. Nevertheless, because any twit can take good enough photos on an iPhone, the need for the specialized skills of an expert photographer are much less than in, say, the 1930s.

That's why AI is dangerous. It's not because it makes human skill useless, it's because it makes non-human skill good enough. When was the last time you hired an expert photographer, or skilled dressmaker, or a master cabinetmaker? Maybe once or twice in your life, because the iPhone camera, fast fashion, and Ikea are good enough.

> If you can direct AI and produce more value per $/time spent then a non software engineer directing AI to develop software then you still can produce a lot of value.

Even if true (which I'm leaning towards that it is), when will companies realize this?

We could be in for a decade long software career recession until the effects of poorly managed and written software trickles down to lost customers and company bankruptcies. Bad decisions in large companies take a very long time to produce clearly visible effects.

> As you develop your skills with AI, you now have the ability to develop your own software products.

I think this is a dead end. We're quickly approaching a state where software is no longer a product that can be sold, but rather a tool used by someone selling a service.

If the market is filled with cheap products and a clone of your product can be easily made, then the survival of the business is in positioning, marketing, packaging the product, distribution, sales...

This makes the technical skills required but not sufficient part of the whole business and there are many businesses (like restaurants) that are bad businesses, because many people are willing to open a restaurant as a life-style choice even though most of them are not a good business. This influx of new competitors, make the current restaurant owners profit to go down, because of the increased competition that isn't purely market driven.

In the software world that means "a small product" won't have any moat & pricing power, and your competitors might be wiling to subsidise it for years as a side project, making the whole market suffer from profit erosion (an economic term) leading to zero profit long-term equilibrium.

For example try charging per message (as previously charged by SMS/MMS) in the era of subsidised messenger apps with free calls and messages.

This makes the unique position of SAAS software with 9$/month subscription highly doubtful in the future.

> the cost of developing software is plummeting

For now, until the frontier models decide to stop losing money and pass the real costs onto the consumers.

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It's better to work for companies that understand time/opportunity cost, and so won't penny pinch on something which will make them lots of money.

The "it saves money" mindset is bad for everyone, distorts everything away from valuable work and investments that generate the most revenue.

At least offshoring was seemingly stable. Here we're all waiting for the rug pull.

Serious question, what sort of FAFO timelines did you see?

(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).

I could see a republican administration banning this entirely, though they would just find cheaper workers in the U.S.

I wonder when this comes from other white class jobs— process engineering, autocad drafter, electronics design.

Agreed, AI is of-shoring at home.

Although obviously I wouldn't like it happening to me, if the offshoring quality was as good as the original -- and I'm sure sometimes it was -- I can't find any valid objection to it. It is, after all, just a different bunch of people being paid to do some work. Why must it be "us" who get that work? Why can't it be "them"?

Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.

Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.

In the end, money always wins. It’s the way the machine works.

but my job is also my hobby, it is the center of my life i cant pretend i dont care

>Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.

Good advice regarding psychological investment.

Not so useful advice when the job provides your actual livelihood, and the changes (e.g. outsourcing or AI or some industry change) mean you might soon hold a "will work for food" sign in some street corner.

I mean these days, it's not usually that people made some particular job their whole personality and "center of their life", the reason that they worry about losing it.

It's that their job is what puts food on the table, and the job pools are drying up.

My flight instructor said it succinctly - "The graveyard is full of people nobody could do without. Don't press the weather!"

That was in regards of not trying to fly when conditions were marginal, but it applies to much more.

It's a price they're willing to pay.

This has happened to many times to other careers over the last decades and there wasn't empathy from SWE's then, in fact all you got was "Software is the future, learn to code etc". Now the shoe is on the other foot people are taking suicide, seems a bit self seeking.

Not more than those of farmers who "lost their jobs" to tractors, switchboard operators to switching systems, brokers or postmen (and countless other jobs) to the Internet, etc. And why do we blame the innovators and not the government for not making up useless jobs to keep these people employed? It is just as responsible.

It would have happened even without them specifically. There's no shortage of greedy bastards.

> Won't someone stop the future, and consider mentally ill strangers who signal boost with suicide!

You are almost 100% right. I’ve been providing my consultancy services to an e-commerce shop for the last few years. It was a team of five people, including a permanent UX designer. I introduced an AI-driven process and gradually automated the entire workflow, and everyone was laid off around March this year. I’m now the only one running the entire site. Apart from 10–15 hours per month from a UX designer, all the developers have been laid off. The entire software development process has been automated.

If I weren’t doing this, another IT consulting firm would. It’s now just a matter of time before most people realize the current state of AI and what can be accomplished with it

I think this lands in the same area as flying jet liners. A computer can do it. But legally it seems easier if there's a human responsible for the operation of the aircraft. I've conjured my ideas into code via LLM, and it is magical. But the quality is also off, and there are nontrivial issues that I'd like to address. The more a software project is vibed, the less one can manually address things.

Often, the agent will fix a problem without assessing if the fix is worth it, optimal or defective. It's fine to merge fixes like this in codebases occasionally - humans have been managing to do this and to work around this for ages. I'd like to see a software project that is purely LLM driven and doesn't devolve into chaos because of this.

Always the same fluffy rhetoric without any actual products to back it up.

If that’s “all it takes” then half the proprietary software on my machine would be swapped with far better vibe-coded versions by now. (Just a few weeks to get up and running, right?)

If anything, vibe-coding is an anti-signal for me now since I expect that the software will be abandoned as soon as the vibe-coder gets mildly bored or tokens go up in price. I’d never knowingly pay for something like that.

(For B2B slopware, sure, maybe this makes sense. But it was never particularly good or novel in the first place.)

>The building of the software happens trivially now. You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.

This part is quite "load-bearing".

I heard from someone who worked at Lovable that what most customers produce with that magical textbox is software that shouldn't go anywhere near production. Apparently the problem of thinking like an engineer is not solved by these AI tools. Most people who are not software engineers by trade are not capable of verifying what they produced, nor would they even consider needing to.

No offence, I think you might be a classic case of "senior who forgot how it feels to be junior", where after a lot work experience deva start taking their software engineering instincts for granted and forget that they are a skill that takes years to master. You can prompt an AI for a solution, you can even prompt it for ideas, but you cannot prompt it to think for you.

The problem with this is that it is not written by a human. It’s one of the versions of: „Since AI I finished all my spare time projects.“ Etc.

The actual reality is, that it is too early to actually say where this is going to end. Either AI is going to fix what it is causing right now or not.

We are screwed either way. So is the person or prompter behind the message above.

If Ai is universal there is no need for UX, because a real personal assistant, that takes personal care of you is the only UX necessary in the end.

context is important. Depending on what you are doing, you might have to review every line of code two or three or ten times before you sign off on a PR.

> The building of the software happens trivially now. You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.

When the generated code is not performant enough, or has bugs or unintended behavior, who is going to correct it? The same AI that made the mistake in the first place? Another AI? A human?

When a bug introduced by the AI creates real damage to you, or your org, or third parties, who is responsible? You or the AI? If it's you, how can you be held responsible for shipping code you never understood in the first place?

> All you need to do is type vague ideas into a text box.

If all you give the machine is a vague idea, then it is unlikely that you will get what you want or need. Pure information theory. Garbage in, garbage out. You could get lucky, but luck based strategies are just frustatingly bad in the long run.

> The building of the software happens trivially now.

The building of bad software does, no doubt. I'd like to use good software and my sincere hope is that AI tech will be used to raise software quality substantially since most of what I see around me and have to use every day is just really bad, compared to what it could be if people cared.

> You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.

For quality you do.

> It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.

What do you expect them to understand?

It amazes me how little people IN software engineering understand what's happening. Go ahead, listen to your bosses and write all your knowledge in AGENTS.md files, you're definitely special and won't be laid off.

Ask anyone in manufacturing how writing things down for your cheaper replacements works out for you.

It's because they've been in FAANG silos with near zero experience in the pre-SDLC (basic research, practical application phases) through to the post-SDLC (tech transfer, commercialization etc) with most having near zero direct experience inside actual QA teams (with QA being beneath a lot of engs). A true AI pipeline hums when this is real end to end cycle. One of the reasons for that is based on how well it manages many-to-many connections inside vector space. One more thing, most soft devs have near zero comprehension of how language models work so leveraging them to manage complexity is very foreign with most not understanding that language models apply far beyond just human language and into any sequence of data e.g. DNA/RNA or just about anything you can chop up. This kind of scale is also a new concept to most.

They are only capable of Technical reasoning, other perspectives are often beyond them.

[dead]

They don't and they do not have to, because the market (as broken as it often is) usually, eventually, selects for taste being visible in the end product.

Higher-ups do not need to concur with that. They just get.. how does on say today.. "left behind".

Exactly. It's not AI that took your job, it's your former boss. But that still doesn't change the fact that your job is gone now. Next time find a better boss.

Completely agree. In my experience we're being more productive than ever but our projects are drowning in on the surface completely valid but on the larger scale meaningless changes. The bugs fixed were real, the features added are in some ways useful, but they really do not move the needle in any particular direction.

BMW management believes they can get 30% workforce out and replace the jobs with AI. The executives will not be replaced. Peasants like me will.

ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.

I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.

Since long-term foresight beyond the next stock buyback doesn't seem to be materially required anymore for that role anyway, I'd wager they could already be replaced by AI, and with less consequence than any other company roles.

> CEO-Bench is an evaluation framework that measures how well AI agents perform executive leadership, long-horizon decision-making, and company management tasks

https://ceobench.com/

Given the level of compensation of US CEOs, it's obvious they should be first in line to be replaced by machines.

> If it's any consolation, at some point most of those executives could be replaced by AI too.

I'll believe this the day an AI model can golf with an executive, or wine and dine and call hookers in an overnight business meeting. Sure, that's not every exec, but that's common enough that AI isn't going to work there.

Sadly, it's working so far. Most companies only want a product that works. Best practices, algorithmic efficiency, or taste aren't really on their radar.

Not only CEOs. Companies themselves can be replaced by AI. What do I need Adobe for, if I can build me a Photoshop application using AI?

I don't want anybody to be replaced by AI :/

As a counterpoint, I have enjoyed that last several months greatly. I have been able to solve real, long standing, issues quickly and efficiently.

Not sure what to recommend for you though.

It might be shocking but there is like a whole world outside of computers and even outside of your job.

The best idea I've come up with is quitting my job, living on my savings and indulging in my hobbies until I run out of money and then hanging myself in the woods.

> My question is, what now?

The answer you're looking for is not on Hacker News.

> Whether LLMs should replace human roles is both an economic and moral question.

It is also a political question, on which many techies have been maneuvered into abdicating. Stripped of agency, agents they are bamboozled to depend on.

However, there's opportunity here. As the cost of building and maintaining software products collapses, taste and carefully choosing what to build becomes a major differentiator.

Historically I agree with you, but considering how many people reacted negatively to the mathematicians' concerns about development in ai, and people calling them hobbyists, it seems to me someone is trying to create infighting as always. Seems like the reaction may yet again be the mentioned aw-shucks, but they'll find something else to do

> But you just have to adapt.

Yes, but this time around there may be nothing left to adapt to.

This is covered in the post.

I bet a lot of people are paying attention to the vibecoded Abode suite. If it's successful that will be a huge signal.

I have to wonder context when I read a statement like this.

Big Tech? Startup? Selling a service? Selling software tools? Something else?

Because (business) success usually involves a big recipe of good ideas, good execution, good networking/marketing/sales.

Proprietary code was once rare and valuable. But code is cheap to create, and plentiful. It might as well be flour, sugar, butter. Can anyone that ever worked at a bakery trivially create a successful rival bakery because of a few recipes and an EZBake Oven? Can a vibe-coded Adobe Creative Suite take down Adobe overnight? I'll believe it when I see it.

That's not to say that if you're an engineer, but you have a passion and confidence in your ideas and salesmanship that you shouldn't give it a try, if you're in a position to do so, or otherwise don't have better options. But thinking that software engineering is more of a factor in rapid business success than it used to be seems like an odd assumption.

> Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero

Capital is that fraction of produce set aside for future production. OpenAI is capital but not all wealth is capital. And capital isn't going anywhere - the machines will have gigafactories etc. The value of labor will plumet but present-day capital that is usable by the machines or can be scrapped and repurposed will retain value.

The value of square meter of land + mineral/sunlight rights (not capital) is likely to rise - the amount of wealth that somebody would give you for that asset would probably increase, as more wealth can be generated from it.

Individuals without wealth now will likely end up with a much lower allocation of those things which retain value (land, materials, etc) while having a much higher quantity (relative to now) of those things whose value will drop - AI tokens, electronics, entertainment, etc.

Essentially our current trajectory taken to the limit. Land expensive, food expensive, interest low, smartphone cheap.

> who will be the buyers

Imagine an impoverished and technologically backward country which has been colonized/occupied, and where the most valuable assets are exported well below market price or stolen. The people still trade their own labor for subsistence. They still produce some goods which have value in outside countries, they receive some charity, there is still tourism, their labor has some value (servitude, trafficking). AI would be the same (assuming laws hold up) - e.g. you could rent out your solar panels to OpenAI in exchange for a loaned domestic robot and a token subscription.

Energy, land and row materials will be the main limiting factors.

Mega corp will advance technology exponentially, but for the rest of us we will live in a mix of medieval life style assisted by robotic and low tech. People will exode city and go back to the countryside.

For what concern my self, I'm buying arable land, maybe in couple of years home food production will be fully automated.

> Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok.

They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.

I do wonder what will happen to the outsourcing industry in India. In the UK at least it seems that most corporate development has been sent to Infosys, Wipro, etc.

Reminds me of The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin.

If the aim of each country is just job creation, leaving aside "comparative advantage", job quality, salary, etc:

1. There are plenty of things being outsourced, They can be done locally.

2. There are plenty of things currently not being done by locals - like elderly care.

3. We can find new things to do.

4. We can work less.

And even if those things raise living standard somewhat, the efficiencies from AI/robots should be more than enough to compensate.

But, in a capitalistic globalized economy this isn't how things work. So we'll see some shift from that. And it will work better in countries with a more democratic socialistic leaning rather than capitalistic.

We're already starting to see that, with the recent EU trade deal with china, limiting the amount of cars china can send to Europe.

> Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?

In a word, bleak.

As said 30 years ago: nothing human makes it out of the near future.

Automation kills some jobs and creates more jobs. Nothing about AI (other than the statements of people with lots of shares in AI companies) looks to be any different.

This is actually a great idea. It's easy to forget that if AI lives up to its promise, it cuts both ways.

maybe it is about staring at thinking traces?

llm loop

Just enable reader view in Firefox. Makes reading half of peoples personal blog post viable, since often they have weird font size choices etc.

The animal cartoons are also incredibly off-putting. I don't get it.

Any chance you have astigmatism? Some people's eyes don't respond well to dark mode.

What makes it so hard to read for you? The contrast is fine, it even has a narrow column layout to limit the distance your eyes have to travel, the writing style reads quite human and clearly laid out. Or are the 5 pictures giving you trouble?

Yeah but 1,2,3 are issues that can be sorted with AGENTS.md, no?

The same billionaires who tell us about "universal high income" and "abundance" are the same ones which go crazy anytime there is talk about a 0.1% tax increase.

To be fair Zero notice terminations are illegal in many Countries. Furthermore I am yet to see solid evidence that replacing humans with AI is beneficial. Actual crazy times.

No one cares about having heart. If negative-notice terminations ("We've noticed you've been a leech and a useless anchor to our company for three months, as the technology sufficient for automating you had existed for that long. Please return your wages and all additional expenses we incurred over this period") were legal, they would be the industry standard.

I don’t think the blame belongs with corpo culture. It belongs with engineering culture. Engineers have always been at the forefront of technological disruption, and for the most part they’ve been spared its consequences. The people displaced by those efficiency and productivity gains stayed invisible to them, or were written off as a necessary sacrifice for progress. Those people lost the old way of doing things and were told to keep up or get left behind. The irony is that now it’s engineers getting hit hard, facing the threat of being made obsolete in the name of efficiency and productivity. They’re finally going through what so many others went through before them. And they can’t expect any compassion or help from their own kind.

The severance is your notice.

We will lay you off in 3 months - and having for a 3 months dead man walking in the company is probably worse for everyone. Since said employee probably won't break records for productivity during this period - it is easier for everyone just to give the one let go some lump sum.

Anyway I think that in this post the context is that they will be let go during good times - without the informal - we know the company is in trouble and layoffs as coming common knowledge that big companies have.

IDK about you, this presentation discredits the content.

How?

It's a game where you are obsolete, unless you are independently rich, so not much to cheer about

Thing is that you cannot do 24/7 oncall with two person and Opus 5.5 . Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc. There is still reasons why FAANGS are so big.

That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?

The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits

If you think AI can replace experienced engineers you're not working on anything complicated. If your product is a web app, sure, maybe. If you're working on actually difficult problems, then people who know what they're doing are irreplaceable. AI can supplement them and make them more productive, sure. AI does not know what NOT to build.

Had to Google "two pizza team". On what planet does 2 large pizzas feed 5-10 people? One pizza barely feeds me.

My last job I was notified via text message on a Saturday that I didn't need to come back into the office Monday. The USA has basically zero protections for employees.

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/TerminationOfEmployment.pdf

The good US workplaces will give you a few months of severance, but you can still expect to receive an email late Friday night that says "don't come in on Monday". They typically don't want fired/laid-off employees in the office at all (in theory for "security", but mostly to prevent labour organisation)

Yeah well in the US employees can be fired at will. However in the post it seems the author didn't tell his reports they risked/were about to getting fired. I don't understand that kind of loyalty to your employer, esp. when, as is the case here, the employer has zero obligations towards their staff.

I think it's pretty normal to have like one/two week notice period in most of the work except for maybe in Europe where the notice period can be 3 months

Would it make much difference if you got two weeks or a months notice. Out of the bad things corporations do this seems a long way down the list.

To be fair, what is often called "zero notice" actually means "you are fired, this is your notice, and for the next N weeks until your employment ends, you don't need to come in anymore as we have already revoked your access, but of course we pay you the salary that you are entitled to." That us just much longer to say and less catchy too.

The most outrageous sentence frankly is

"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"

Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.

peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time.

This seems a bit arbitrary to me. Why 1969, exactly? Personally I'd go for the "democratization of Internet" as the start of the slope. So perhaps 1989 ("1989: Quantum Computer Services and Apple end their partnership. Quantum Computer Services renames itself America Online. Two years later, America Online for DOS is released, and a year after that, America Online for Windows.")? Or arguably even a bit later...

>MM

Marylin Monroe? Mickey Mouse? Michael Myers?