1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value.
  
  2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the overall software development process. Even if all my code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it written, I still have a full-time job.

I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt itself to new tasks as well as humans can, and something that can reason symbolically about novel domains as well as we can. I've seen about enough from LLMs, and I agree with the critique that som type of breakthrough neuro-symbolic reasoning architecture will be needed. The article is right about one thing: in that moment AI will overtake us suddenly! But I doubt we will make linear progress toward that goal. It could happen in one year, five, ten, fifty, or never. In 2023 I was deeply concerned about being made obsolete by AI, but now I sleep pretty soundly knowing the status quo will more or less continue until Judgment Day, which I can't influence anyway.

The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and balances of power shift rapidly.

If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate the downsides and spread the upsides.

It's really changing cultural expectations. Don't ping a human when an LLM can answer the question probably better and faster. Do ping a human for meaningful questions related to product directions / historical context.

What LLMs are killing is:

- noisy Slacks with junior folks questions. Those are now your Gemini / chat gpt sessions.

- tedious implementation sessions.

The vast majority of the work is still human led from what I can tell.

In times past, the only people on earth who had their standard of living raised to a level that allowed them to cast there gaze upon the stars were the Kings and there courts, vassals, and noblemen. As time passed we have learned to make technologies that provide enough energy slaves to the common man that everyone lives a life that a king would have envied in times past.

So the question arises as to whether AI or the pursuit of AGI provides more or less energy slaves to the common man?

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

The way the average dev structures their code requires like 10x the number of lines as I do and at least 10x the amount of time to maintain... The interest on technical debt compounds like interest on normal debt.

Whenever I join a new project, within 6 months, I control/maintain all the core modules of the system and everything ends up hooked up to my config files, running according to the architecture I designed. Happened at multiple companies. The code looks for the shortest path to production and creates a moat around engineers who can make their team members' jobs easier.

IMO, it's not so different to how entrepreneurship works. But with code and processes instead of money and people as your moat. I think once AI can replace top software engineers, it will be able to replace top entrepreneurs. Scary combination. We'll probably have different things to worry about then.

But would you rather be a horse in 1920 or 2020? Wouldn't you rather have modern medicine, better animal welfare laws, less exposure to accidents, and so on?

The only way horses conceivably have it worse is that there are fewer of them (a kind of "repugnant conclusion")...but what does that matter to an individual horse? No human regards it as a tragedy that there are only 9 billion of us instead of 90 billion. We care more about the welfare of the 9 billion.

> Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us.

What getting high on your own supply actually looks like. These are not the types of questions most people have or need answered. It's unique to the hiring process and the nascent status of the technology. It seems insane to stretch this logic to literally any other arena.

On top of that horses were initially replaced with _stationary_ gasoline engines. Horses:Cars is an invalid view into the historical scenario.

And that really is the entire question at this point: Which domains will AI win in by a sufficient margin to be worth it?

And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.

I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did."

I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term. My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid that the short term destruction will not be something that can be recovered from even over the longer term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

AI is like that, but instead with dudes in slim fitting vests blogging about alignment

> Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us.

> … Six months later, 80% of the questions I'd been being asked had disappeared.

Interesting implications for how to train juniors in a remote company, or in general:

> We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near colleagues.

https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...

1. we aren’t good at building cars yet,

2. they break down so often that using horses often still ends up faster,

3. we have dirt tracks and feed stations for horses but have few paved roads and are not producing enough gasoline.

1. The release of Claude Code in February

2. The release of Opus 4.5 two weeks ago

In both of these cases, it felt like no big new unlocks were made. These releases aren’t like OpenAI’s o1, where they introduced reasoning models with entirely new capabilities, or their Pro offerings, which still feel like the smartest chatbots in the world to me.

Instead, these releases just brought a new user interface, and improved reliability. And yet these two releases mark the biggest increases in my AI usage. These releases caused the utility of AI for my work to pass thresholds where Claude Code became my default way to get LLMs to read my code, and then Opus 4.5 became my default way to make code changes.

Is it really possible to make this claim given the vast sums of money that have gone in to AI/LLM training?

AI, faster please!

I don't think applies for general human intelligence - yet.

What exactly does specifically engine efficiency have to do with horse usage? Cars like the Ford Model T entered mass production somewhere around 1908. Oh, and would you look at the horse usage graph around that date! sigh

The chess ranking graph seems to be just a linear relationship?

> This pink line, back in 2024, was a large part of my job. Answer technical questions for new hires.

>

> Claude, meanwhile, was now answering 30,000 questions a month; eight times as many questions as me & mine ever did.

So more == better. sigh. Ran any, you know, studies to see the quality of those answers? I too can consult /dev/random for answers at a rate of gigabytes per second!

> I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic.

Yeah. I can tell. Somebody's high on their own supply here.

plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encountered one at a place where it is cheaper than its main rival and is directly attributable to (by the company or otherwise) to lower prices?? in my view all it did was remove some jobs. that's the preview. that's it. you will lose jobs and you will pay more. congrats.

even with year 2020 tech you could automate most work that needs to be done, if our industry wouldn't endlessly keep disrupting itself and have a little bit of discipline.

so once ai destroys desk jobs and the creative jobs, then what? chill out? too bad anyone who has a house won't let more be built.

- Radical massive multimodality. We perceive the world through many wide-band high-def channels of information. Computer perception is nowhere near. Same for ability to "mutate" the physical world, not just "read" it.

- Being able to be fine-tuned constantly (learn things, remember things) without "collapsing". Generally having a smooth transition between the context window and the weights, rather than fundamental irreconcilable difference.

These are very difficult problems. But I agree with the author that the engine is in the works and the horses should stay vigilant.

I really doubt horses would be ambivalent about this, let alone about anything. Or maybe I'm wrong, they were in two minds: oh dear I'm at risk of being put to sleep, or maybe it could lead to a nice long retirement out on a grassy meadow. But they're in all likelihood blissfully unaware.

I am not an AI sceptic.. I use it for coding. But this article is not compelling.

Glad I noticed that footnote.

Article reeks of false equivalences and incorrect transitive dependencies.

The big thing this AI boom has showed us that we can all be thankful to have seen is what a human in a box will eventually look like. The first generation of humans to be able to see that is a super lucky experience to have.

Maybe it's one massive breakthrough away or maybe it's dozens away. But there is no way to predict when some massive breakthrough will occur Illya said 5-20 that really just means we don't know.

This is the context wherein the valuation of AI companies makes sense, particularly those that already got a head start and have captured a large swath of that market.

Ambivalent??

Horses and cars had a clearly defined, tangible, measurable purpose: transport... they were 100% comparable as a market good, and so predicting an inflection point is very reasonable. Same with Chess, a clearly defined problem in finite space with a binary, measurable outcome. Funny how Chess AI replacing humans in general was never considered as a serious possibility by most.

Now LLMs, what is their purpose? What is the purpose of a human?

I'm not denying some legitimate yet tedious human tasks are to regurgitate text... and a fuzzy text predictor can do a fairly good job of that at less cost. Some people also think and work in terms of text prediction more often than they should (that's called bullshitting - not a coincidence).

They really are _just_ text predictors, ones trained on such a humanly incomprehensible quantity of information as to appear superficially intelligent, as far as correlation will allow. It's been 4 years now, we already knew this. The idea that LLMs are a path to AGI and will replace all human jobs is so far off the mark.

Where did they go?

> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.

> But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.

This "our company is onto the discovery that will put you all out of work (or kill you?)" rhetoric makes me angry.

Something this powerful and disruptive (if it is such) doesn't need to be owned or controlled by a handful of companies. It makes me hope the Chinese and their open source models ultimately win.

I've seen Anthropic and OpenAI employees leaning into this rhetoric on an almost daily basis since 2023. Less so OpenAI lately, but you see it all the time from these folks. Even the top leadership.

Meanwhile Google, apart from perhaps Kilpatrick, is just silent.

Also maybe go out for some fresh air. Maybe knowledge work will go down for humans, but plumbing and such will take much longer since we'll need dextrous robots.

(A parenthetical comment explaining where he ballparked the measurements for himself, the "cheapest human labor," and Claude numbers would also have supported the argument, and some writers, especially web-focused nerd-type writers like Scott Alexander, are very good at this, but text explanations, even in parentheses, have a way of distracting readers from your main point. I only feel comfortable writing one now because my main point is completed.)

The article is a Misanthropic advertisement. The "AI" mafia feels that no one wants their products and doubles down.

They are so desperate that Pichai is now talking about data centers in space on Fox News. Next up are "AI" space lasers.

TL;DR If your work is answer questions, that can be retrieved from a corpus of data with inverted index + embedding, you'll be obsolete pretty fast.

Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is shoveling shit in his mouth then smiling brown teeth at the audience. 10 years from now there's a real possibility of "AI" being remembered as that "stuff that almost got to a single 9 reliability but stopped there".

As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much.

I think it's a very clear case of personal bias. The machines are rapidly coming for the lucrative software jobs. So those with an interest in protecting lucrative tech jobs are talking their book. The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent, as other industrial areas before it. Maybe 10% of the existing software development jobs will remain. There's no time to form powerful unions to stop what's happening, it's already far too late.