| ▲ | Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity(fortune.com) |
| 465 points by virgildotcodes 8 hours ago | 353 comments |
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| ▲ | crazygringo 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected, thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benefit to the economy overall. The reason is that investing in IT was very expensive, there were lots of wasted efforts, and it took a long time for the benefits to outweigh the costs across the entire economy. And so we should expect AI to look the same -- it's helping lots of people, but it's also costing an extraordinary amount of money, and the few people it's helping is currently at least outweighed by the people wasting time with it and its expense. But, we should recognize that it's very early days, and that productivity will rise with time, and costs will come down, as we learn to integrate it with best practices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox |
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| ▲ | matsemann 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Is this like the hotels first jumping on the wifi bandwagon? Spent lots of money up front for expensive tech. Years later, anyone could buy a cheap router and set up, so every hotel had wifi. But the original high-end hotels that were first out with wifi and paid much for it, has the worst and old wifi and charge users for it, still trying to recoup the costs. | |
| ▲ | kace91 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but I think there are enough short term supposed benefits that something should be showing there. | | |
| ▲ | abraxas 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book. | | |
| ▲ | fdefitte 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing. The real gains from AI show up when it changes what work gets done, not just how fast existing work happens. Most companies are still in the "do the same stuff but with AI" phase. | | |
| ▲ | Stromgren an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | And if you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that 100 people has to read, but it now takes 10% longer to read and understand, you’ve lost overall value. | | | |
| ▲ | seanhunter 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What happens if (and I suspect this to be increasingly the case now) you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that nobody reads and those people now use LLMs to not read the report whereas they were not reading it in person before? Then everyone saves time, which they can spend producing more things which other people will not read and/or not reading the things that other people produce (using llms)? Productivity through the roof. | |
| ▲ | injidup 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe the take is that those reports that people took a day to write were read by nobody in the first place and now those reports are being written faster and more of them are being produced but still nobody reads them. Thus productivity doesn't change. The solution is to get rid of all the people who write and process reports and empower the people who actually produce stuff to do it better. | | |
| ▲ | beAbU 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The managerial class are like cats and closed doors. Ofcourse they don't read the reports, who has time to read it? But don't even think about not sending the report, they like to have the option of reading it if they choose to do so. A closed door removes agency from a cat, an absent report removes agency from a manager. |
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| ▲ | wiseowise 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling. | | |
| ▲ | yoyohello13 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Your claim and the claims that all white collar jobs are going to disappear in 12-18 months cannot both be true. I guess we will see. | | |
| ▲ | onion2k 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's possible to automate the pointless stuff without realising it's pointless. | | | |
| ▲ | beeflet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think they can both be true. Perhaps the innovation of AI is not that it automates important work, but because it forces people to question if the work has already been automated or is even necessary. | |
| ▲ | zzrrt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, if a lot of it is bullshit that can also be done more efficiently with AI, then 99% of white collar roles could be eliminated by the 1% using AI, and essentially both were very close to true. |
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| ▲ | Retric 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Jobs you don’t notice or understand often look pointless. HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. In the end when jobs are done right they seem to disappear. We notice crappy software or a poorly done HVAC system not clean carpets. | | |
| ▲ | jdasdf 43 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. Interesting on how the very example you give for "oh this job isn't really bullshit" ultimately ends up being useless for the business itself, and exists only as a result of regulation. No, health insurance being provided by employers, or tax withholding aren't useful things for anyone, except for the state who now offloads its costs onto private businesses. |
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| ▲ | palmotea 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling. Cattle? You actually think that about other people? | | |
| ▲ | wao0uuno an hour ago | parent [-] | | I think what he meant was that the top 1% ruling class is keeping those bullshit jobs around to keep the poor people (their cattle) occupied so they won't have time and energy to think and revolt. | | |
| ▲ | Ekaros an hour ago | parent [-] | | Or for everyone in chain of command to have people to rule over. A common want for many in leadership positions. At least two ways, you want to control people. And your value to your peers is the amount of people or resources you control. |
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| ▲ | hattmall 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I find that highly unlikely, coding is the AIs best value use case by far. Right now office workers see marginal benefits but it's not like it's an order of magnitude difference. AI drafts an email, you have to check and edit it, then send it. In many cases it's a toss up if that actually saved time, and then if it did, it's not like the pace of work is break neck anyway, so the benefit is some office workers have a bit more idle time at the desk because you always tap some wall that's out of your control. Maybe AI saves you a Google search or a doc lookup here and there. You still need to check everything and it can cause mistakes that take longer too. Here's an example from today. Assistant is dispatching a courier to get medical records. AI auto completes to include the address. Normally they wouldn't put the address, the courier knows who we work with, but AI added it so why not. Except it's the wrong address because it's for a different doctor with the same name. At least they knew to verify it, but still mistakes like this happening at scale is making the other time savings pretty close to a wash. | | |
| ▲ | majormajor 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it has to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite, it has to meet the user's requests. There are a lot of white-collar tasks that have far lower quality and correctness bars. "Researching" by plugging things into google. Writing reports summarizing how a trend that an exec saw a report on can be applied to the company. Generating new values to share at a company all-hands. Tons of these that never touch the "real world." Your assistant story is like a coding task - maybe someone ran some tests, maybe they didn't, but it was verifiable. No shortage of "the tests passed, but they weren't the right test, this broke some customers and had to be fixed by hand" coding stories out there like it. There are pages and pages of unverifiable bullshit that people are sleepwalking through, too, though. Nobody already knows if those things helped or hurt, so nobody will ever even notice a hallucination. But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's special and AI won't work well for them. The "management says do more, workers figure out ways to be lazier" see-saw is ancient, but this could skew far towards "management demands more from fewer people" spectrum for a while. | | |
| ▲ | t43562 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Code may have to compile but that's a lowish bar and since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass. In all areas where there's less easy ways to judge output there is going to be correspondingly more value to getting "good" people. Some AI that can produce readable reports isn't "good" - what matters is the quality of the work and the insight put into it which can only be ensured by looking at the workers reputation and past history. |
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| ▲ | sanex 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not all code generates economic value. See slacks, jiras, etc constant ui updates. | | |
| ▲ | fakedang an hour ago | parent [-] | | That makes it a perfect use case for AI, since now you don't need a dev for that. Any devs doing that would, imo, be effectively performing one of David Graeber's bullshit jobs. |
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| ▲ | vrighter an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Code is much much harder to check for errors than an email. Consider, for example, the following python code: x = (5)
vs x = (5,)
One is a literal 5, and the other is a single element tuple containing the number 5. But more importantly, both are valid code.Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma among the 20kloc of code one so proudly claims AI helped them "write", especially if it's in a cold path. You won't see it. | |
| ▲ | nradov 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | LLMs might not save time but they certainly increase quality for at least some office work. I frequently use it to check my work before sending to colleagues or customers and it occasionally catches gaps or errors in my writing. | | |
| ▲ | toraway 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | But that idealized example could also be offset by another employee who doubles their own output by churning out lower-quality unreviewed workslop all day without checking anything, while wasting other people's time. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book. That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society. He couldn't even keep that straight, though. There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code? It didn't make sense and you could see that he didn't really understand software, other than how he imagined it fitting into his idealized world where everything anarchist and open source is good and everything corporate and capitalist is bad. Once you see how little he understands about a topic you're familiar with, it's hard to unsee it in his discussions of everything else. That said, he still wasn't arguing that the work didn't generate economic value. Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually. They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people. The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value. | | |
| ▲ | EliRivers an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | "They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people." Sure, but there's no such thing as "the company." That's shorthand - a convenient metaphor for a particular bunch of people doing some things. So those jobs can exist if some people - even one person - gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs that person to employ them. For example, a senior manager padding his department with non-jobs to increase headcount, because it gives him increased prestige and power, and the cost to him of employing that person is zero. Will those jobs get cut "eventually"? Maybe, but I've seen them go on for decades. | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code? I don't know if maybe he wasn't explaining it well enough, but that kind of reasoning makes some sense. A lot of code is written because you want the output from Foo to be the input to Bar and then you need some glue to put them together. This is pretty common when Foo and Bar are made by different people. With open source, someone writes the glue code, publishes it, and then nobody else has to write it because they just use what's published. In corporate bureaucracies, Company A writes the glue code but then doesn't publish it, so Company B which has the same problem has to write it again, but they don't publish it either. A hundred companies are then doing the work that only really needed to be done once, which makes for 100 times as much work, a 1% efficiency rate and 99 bullshit jobs. | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people. Not necessarily, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that were just flying under the radar. Sort of like a cockroach that skitters when light is on but roams freely in the dark. | |
| ▲ | mikem170 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hmmm, I got something different. I thought that Bullshit Jobs was based on people who self reported that their jobs were pointless. He detailed these types of jobs, the negative psychological impact this can have on employees, and the kicker was that these jobs don't make sense economically, the bureaucratization of the health care and education sectors for example, in contrast so many other professions that actually are useful. Other examples were status-symbol employees, sycophants, duct-tapers, etc. I thought he made a case for both societal and economic impact. | |
| ▲ | wolvesechoes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value. But he states that expressis verbis, so your discovery is not that spectacular. Although he gives examples of jobs, or some aspects of jobs, that don't help to deliver what specific institutions aim to deliver. Example would be bureaucratization of academia. | |
| ▲ | ccortes 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society. > Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually. Uhm, seems like Greaber is not the only one drawing conclusions from a hypothetical perfect world | |
| ▲ | DiggyJohnson 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Greaber’s best book is his ethnography “Lost People” and it’s one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Honestly this is how every critique of Graeber goes in my experience: As soon as his works are discussed beyond surface level, the goalposts start zooming around so fast that nothing productive can be discussed. I tried to respond to the specific conversation about Bullshit Jobs above. In my experience, the way this book is brought up so frequently in online conversations is used as a prop for whatever the commenter wants it to mean, not what the book actually says. I think Graeber did a fantastic job of picking "bullshit jobs" as a topic because it sounds like something that everyone implicitly understands, but how it's used in conversation and how Graeber actually wrote about the topic are basically two different things |
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| ▲ | jama211 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think it’s more likely that the same amount of work is getting done, just it’s far less taxing. And that averages are funny things, for developers it’s undeniably a huge boost, but for others it’s creating friction. | |
| ▲ | lolive 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We made an under-the-radar optimization in a data flow in my company. A given task is now much more freshData-assisted that it used to. Was a LLM used during that optimization? Yes. Who will correlate the sudden productivity improvement with our optimization of the data flow with the availability of a LLM to do such optimizations fast enough that no project+consultants+management is needed ? No one. Just like no one is evaluating the value of a hammer or a ladder when you build a house. | | |
| ▲ | camgunz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But you would see more houses, or housing build costs/bids fall. This is where the whole "show me what you built with AI" meme comes from, and currently there's no substitute for SWEs. Maybe next year or next next year, but mostly the usage is generating boring stuff like internal tool frontends, tests, etc. That's not nothing, but because actually writing the code was at best 20% of the time cost anyway, the gains aren't huge, and won't be until AI gets into the other parts of the SDLC (or the SDLC changes). | |
| ▲ | fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | CONEXPO, World of Concrete, and NAHB IBS is where vendors go to show off their new ladders and the attendees totally evaluate the value of those ladders vs their competitors. | |
| ▲ | ViewTrick1002 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is there a productivity improvement resulting tangible economic results coming from that optimization? It’s easy to convince yourself that it is, and anyone can massage some internal metric enough to prove their desired outcome. |
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| ▲ | overgard 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think this is extremely common and nobody wants to admit to it! | |
| ▲ | groundzeros2015 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these jobs that are surely bullshit but won’t identify them concretely. Not recognizing the essential role of sales seemed to be a common mistake. | | |
| ▲ | bubblewand 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | What counts as “concretely”? And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit. It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought arms race, et c.) But not sales, IIRC. | | |
| ▲ | groundzeros2015 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit. It says stuff like why can’t a customer just order from an online form? The employee who helps them doesn’t do anything except make them feel better. Must be a bullshit job. It talks specifically about my employees filling internal roles like this. > advertising I understand the arms race argument, but it’s really hard to see what an alternative looks like. People can spend money to make you more aware of something. You can limit some modes, but that kind of just exists. I don’t see how they aren’t performing an important function. | | |
| ▲ | tehjoker 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's an important function in a capitalist economy. Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life". That said, some advertising can be useful to inform consumers that a good exists, but convincing them they need it by synthesizing desires or fighting off competitors? Useless and socially detrimental. | | |
| ▲ | dns_snek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life". There's nothing inherent to socialism that would preclude advertising. It's an economic system where the means of production (capital) is owned by the workers or the state. In market socialism you still have worker cooperatives competing on the market. | |
| ▲ | Wilder7977 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Plus, a core part of what qualifies as a bullshit job is that the person doing it feels that it's a bullshit job. The book is a half-serious anthropological essay, not an economic treaty. | | |
| ▲ | wolvesechoes an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, guy states that in multiple places, and yet here we are, with an impression that most people referencing the book apparently didn't read it. |
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| ▲ | inglor_cz an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life"." Ever actually lived in anything approaching one? Yeah, if the stores are empty, it does not make sense to produce ads for stuff that isn't there ... ... but we still had ads on TV, surprisingly, even for stuff that was in shortage (= almost everything). Why? Because the Plan said so, and disrespecting the Plan too openly would stray dangerously close to the crime of sabotage. You have no idea. | | |
| ▲ | dns_snek 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | None of that is inherent to socialism. There can be good and bad management, freedom and authoritarianism in any economic system. | | |
| ▲ | inglor_cz 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Socialist economies larger than kibbutzes could only be created and sustained by totalitarian states. Socialism means collective ownership of means of production. And people won't give up their shops and fields and other means of production to the government voluntarily, at least not en masse. Thus they have to be forced at a gunpoint, and they always were. All the subsequent horror is downstream from that. This is what is inherent to building a socialist economy: mass expropriation of the former "exploitative class". The bad management of the stolen assets is just a consequence, because ideologically brainwashed partisans are usually bad at managing anything including themselves. | | |
| ▲ | dns_snek 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | This is exactly what I meant, a centrally-planned economy where the state owns everything and people are forced to give everything up is just one terrible (Soviet) model, not some defining feature of socialism. Yugoslavia was extremely successful, with economic growth that matched or exceeded most capitalist European economies post-WW2. In some ways it wasn't as free as western societies are today but it definitely wasn't totalitarian, and in many ways it was more free - there's a philosophical question in there about what freedom really is. For example Yugoslavia made abortion a constitutionally protected right in the 70s. I don't want to debate the nuances of what's better now and what was better then as that's beside the point, which is that the idiosyncrasies of the terrible Soviet economy are not inherent to "socialism", just like the idiosyncrasies of the US economy aren't inherent to capitalism. |
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| ▲ | thesmtsolver2 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How does that make advertising a bullshit job? The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition. | | |
| ▲ | bubblewand 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The parts that are only done to maintain status quo with a competitor aren’t productive, and that’s quite a bit of it. Two (or more) sides spend money, nothing changes. No good is produced. The whole exercise is basically an accident. Like when a competing country builds their tenth battleship, so you commission another one to match them. The world would have been better if neither had been build. Money changed hands (one supposes) but the aim of the whole exercise had no effect. It was similar to paying people to dig holes a fill them back in again, to the tune of serious money. This was so utterly stupid and wasteful that there was a whole treaty about it, to try to prevent so many bullshit jobs from being created again. Or when Pepsi increases their ad spending in Brazil, so Coca Cola counters, and much of the money ends up accomplishing little except keeping things just how they were. That component or quality of the ad industry, the book claims, is bullshit, on account of not doing any good. The book treats of several ways in which a job might be bullshit, and just kinda mentions this one as an aside: the zero-sum activity. It mostly covers other sorts, but this is the closest I can recall it coming to declaring sales “bullshit” (the book rarely, bordering on never, paints even most of an entire industry or field as bullshit, and advertising isn’t sales, but it’s as close as it got, as I recall) | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Best product should be picked according to requirements by LLM without bullshit advertising. |
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| ▲ | nradov 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bullshit Jobs is one of those "just so" stories that seems truthy but doesn't stand up to any critical evaluation. Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers. While in large enterprises there is some level of empire building where managers hire more workers than necessary just to inflate their own importance, in the long run those businesses fall to leaner competitors. | | |
| ▲ | ccortes 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > in the long run those businesses fall to leaner competitors This is not true at all. You can find plenty of examples going either way but it’s far from truth from being a universal reality | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers. Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off anyone, especially for cost saving. It is interesting how you think that people are laid off because they’re unproductive. | |
| ▲ | busterarm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's only after decades of experience and hindsight that you realize that a lot of the important work we spend our time on has extremely limited long-term value. Maybe you're lucky enough to be doing cutting edge research or do something that really seriously impacts human beings, but I've done plenty of "mission critical right fucking now" work that a week from now (or even hours from now, when I worked for a content marketing business) is beyond irrelevant. It's an amazing thing watching marketing types set money on fire burning super expensive developer time (but salaried, so they discount the cost to zero) just to make their campaigns like 2-3% more efficient. I've intentionally sat on plenty of projects that somebody was pushing really hard for because they thought it was the absolute right necessary thing at the time and the stakeholder realized was pointless/worthless after a good long shit and shower. This one move has saved literally man years of work to be done and IMO is the #1 most important skill people need to learn ("when to just do nothing"). |
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| ▲ | protocolture 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Would hardly drag Graeber into this, theres a laundry list of issues with his research. Most "Bullshit Jobs" can already be automated, but can isnt always should or will. Graeber is a capex thinker in an opex world. | |
| ▲ | emp17344 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The thesis of Bullshit Jobs is almost universally rejected by economists, FYI. There’s not much of value to obtain from the book. | | |
| ▲ | wolvesechoes an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Not surprising, because thesis is not about economy. > There’s not much of value to obtain from the book. Anthropological insight has much more value than anything economists may produce on economy. | |
| ▲ | gzread 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why should I believe "economists" over "David Grabber"? |
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| ▲ | gruez 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How viable are the $20/month subscriptions for actual work and are they loss making for Anthropic? I've heard both of people needing to get higher tiers to get anything done in Claude Code and also that the subscriptions are (heavily?) subsidized by Anthropic, so the "just another $20 SaaS" argument doesn't sound too good. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I am confident that Anthropic make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that customer. Claude Code has rate limits for a reason: I expect they are carefully designed to ensure that the average user doesn't end up losing Anthropic money, and that even extreme heavy users don't cause big enough losses for it to be a problem. Everything I've heard makes me believe the margins on inference are quite high. The AI labs lose money because of the R&D and training costs, not because they're giving electricity and server operational costs away for free. | | |
| ▲ | tverbeure 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Nobody questions that Anthropic makes revenue from a $20 subscription. The opposite would be very strange. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A lot of people believe that Anthropic lose money selling tokens to customers because they are subsidizing it for growth. | | |
| ▲ | Drakim an hour ago | parent [-] | | But that has zero effect on revenue, it only affects profit. |
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| ▲ | brandensilva 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah it's the caching that's doing the work for them though honestly. So many cached queries saving the GPUs from hard hits. | | |
| ▲ | xienze 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | How is caching implemented in this scenario? I find it unlikely that two developers are going to ask the same exact question, so at a minimum some work has to be done to figure out “someone’s asked this before, fetch the response out of the cache.” But then the problem is that most questions are peppered with specific context that has to be represented in the response, so there’s really no way to cache that. | | |
| ▲ | marcyb5st an hour ago | parent [-] | | From my understanding (which is poor at best), the cache is about the separate parts of the input context. Once the LLM read a file the content of that file is cached (i.e. some representation that the LLM creates for that specific file, but I really have no idea how that works). So the next time you bring either directly or indirectly that file into the context the LLM doesn't have to do a full pass, but pull its understanding/representation from the cache and uses that to answer your question/perform the task. |
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| ▲ | Esophagus4 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I always assumed that with inference being so cheap, my subscription fees were paying for training costs, not inference. | | |
| ▲ | beAbU 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Is inference really that cheap? Why can't I do it at home with a reasonable amount of money? | |
| ▲ | simonw 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Anthropic and OpenAI are both well documented as losing billions of dollars a year because their revenue doesn't cover their R&D and training costs, but that doesn't mean their revenue doesn't cover their inference costs. | | |
| ▲ | overgard 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Does it matter if they can't ever stop training though? Like, this argument usually seems to imply that training is a one-off, not an ongoing process. I could save a lot of money if I stopped eating, but it'd be a short lived experiment. I'll be convinced they're actually making money when they stop asking for $30 billion funding rounds. None of that money is free! Whoever is giving them that money wants a return on their investment, somehow. | | |
| ▲ | vidarh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | At some point the players will need to reach profitability. Even if they're subsidising it with other revenue - they'll only be willing to do that as long as it drives rising inference revenue. Once that happens, whomever is left standing can dial back the training investment to whatever their share of inference can bear. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Once that happens, whomever is left standing can dial back the training investment to whatever their share of inference can bear. Or, if there's two people left standing, they may compete with each other on price rather than performance and each end up with cloud compute's margins. |
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| ▲ | simonw 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It matters because as long as they are selling inference for less than it costs to serve they have a potential path to profitability. Training costs are fixed at whatever billions of dollars per year. If inference is profitable they might conceivably make a profit if they can build a model that's good enough to sign up vast numbers of paying customers. If they lose even more money on each new customer they don't have any path to profitability at all. | |
| ▲ | krainboltgreene 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's an argument to be made that a "return on investment by way of eliminating all workers" is a reasonable result for the capitalists. | | |
| ▲ | generic92034 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | At least until they are running out of customers. And/or societies with mass-unemployment destabilize to a degree that is not conducive for capitalists' operations. | | |
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| ▲ | vrighter an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Models are fixed. They do not learn post training. Which means that training needs to be ongoing. So the revenue covers the inference? So what? All that means is that it doesn't cover your costs and you're operating at a loss. Because it doesn't cover the training that you can't stop doing either. |
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| ▲ | smashed 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Doubtful |
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| ▲ | what 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that customer Seems like a pretty dumb take. It’s like saying it only takes $X in electricity and raw materials to produce a widget that I sell for $Y. Since $Y is bigger than $X, I’m making money! Just ignore that I have to pay people to work the lines. Ignore that I had to pay huge amounts to build the factory. Ignore every other cost. They can’t just fire everyone and stop training new models. | | |
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| ▲ | _jss 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Merely for the viability part: I use the $20/mo plan now, but only as a part-time independent dev. I will hit rate-limits with Opus on any moderately complex app. If I am on a roll, I will flip on Extra Usage. I prototyped a fully functional and useful niche app in ~6 total hours and $20 of extra usage, and it's solid enough and proved enough value to continue investing in and eventually ship to the App store. Without Claude I likely wouldn't have gotten to the finished prototype version to use in the real world. For Indy dev, I think LLMs are a new source of solutions. This app is too niche to justify building and marketing without LLM assistance. It likely won't earn more than $25k/year but good enough! | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think the assumption that Anthropic is losing money on subscriptions holds up. I think each additional customer provides more revenue than the cost to run their inference, on average. For people doing work with LLMs as an assistant for codebase searching, reviews, double checks, and things like that the $20/month plan is more than fine. The closer you get to vibecoding and trying to get the LLM to do all the work, the more you need the $100 and $200 plans. On the ChatGPT side, the $20/month subscription plan for GPT Codex feels extremely generous right now. I tried getting to the end of my window usage limit one day and could not. > so the "just another $20 SaaS" argument doesn't sound too good Having seen several company's SaaS bills, even $100/month or $200/month for developers would barely change anything. | |
| ▲ | 8note 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | id guess the 200 subscription sufficient per person. but at that point you could go for a bugger one and split amongst headcount |
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| ▲ | jstummbillig 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I see no reason to believe that just handing a Claude subscription to everyone in a company simply creates economic benefit. I don't think it's easier than "automating customer service". It's actually very strange. I think it could definitely already create economic benefit, after someone instructed clearly how to use it and how to integrate it in your work. Most people are really not good at figuring that out on their own, in a busy workday, when left to their own devices and companies are just finding out where the ball is moving and what to organize around too. So I can totally see a lot of failed experiments and people slowly figuring stuff out, and all of that not translating to measurable surpluses in a corp, in a setup similar to what OP laid out. | |
| ▲ | azuanrb 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | $20 is not useable, need $100 plan at least for development purposes. That is a lot of money for some countries. In my country, that can be 1/10 of their monthly salary. Hard to get approval on it. It is still too expensive right now. | | |
| ▲ | iwontberude 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah it’s not obvious at first but a big project will cause usage to skyrocket bc of how much context it will stuff with reading files. I can use my $20 subscription’s 5 hour limit in mere seconds. |
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| ▲ | 46493168 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >I think there are enough short term supposed benefits that something should be showing there. As measured by whom? The same managers who demanded we all return to the office 5 days a week because the only way they can measure productivity is butts in seats? | | | |
| ▲ | meager_wikis 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If anything, the 'scariness' of an old computer probably protected the company in many ways. AI's approachability to the average office worker, specifically how it makes it seem like it easy to deploy/run/triage enterprise software, will continue to pwn. | |
| ▲ | vessenes 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Agreed. We do have a way to see the financial impact - just add up Anthropic and oAI's reported revenues -> something like $30b in annual run rate. Given growth rates, (stratospheric), it seems reasonable to conclude informed buyers see economic and/or strategic benefit in excess of their spend. I certainly do! That puts the benefits to the economy at just around where Mastercard's benefits are, on a dollar basis. But with a lot more growth. Add something in there for MS and GOOG, and we're probably at least another $5b up. There are only like 30 US companies with > $100bn in revenues; at current growth rates, we'll see combined revenues in this range in a year. All this is sort of peanuts though against 29 trillion GDP, 0.3%. Well not peanuts, it's boosting the US GDP by 10% of its historical growth rate, but the bull case from singularity folks is like 10%+ GDP growth; if we start seeing that, we'll know it. All that said, there is real value being added to the economy today by these companies. And no doubt a lot of time and effort spent figuring out what the hell to do with it as well. | | |
| ▲ | mikem170 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Investors are optimistic, but what will this new tech be used for? Advertising? Propaganda? Surveillance? Drone strikes? Does profitable always equal useful? Might other cultures justifiably think differently, like the Amish? | | |
| ▲ | vessenes 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The Amish are skilled at getting cash from the “English” as they call non-Amish. I imagine they also think that the money they receive is roughly tied to value they create. I wasn’t talking valuations, just revenue - money that CFOs and individuals spent so far, and are planning on spending. I also didn’t talk profitable. Upshot, though, I don’t think it’s just a US thing to say that when money exchanges hands, generally both parties feel they are better off, and therefore there is value implied in a transaction. As to what it will be used for: yes. | | |
| ▲ | mikem170 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You did specify revenue. The original comment mentioned benefits. I was thinking that the two are different. |
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| ▲ | dahcryn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | not true at all, onboarding is complex too. E.g. you cant just connect claude to your outlook, or have it automate stuff in your CRM. As a office drone, you don't have the admin permissions to setup those connections at all. And that's the point here: value is handicapped by the web interface, and we are stuck there for the foreseeable future until the tech teams get their priorities straight and build decent data integration layers, and workflow management platforms. | |
| ▲ | y42 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Problem is, that just having a Claude subscription doesn't make you productive. Most of those talks happen in a "tech'ish" environments. Not every business is about coding. Real life example: A client came to me asking how to compare orders against order confirmation from the vendor. They come as PDF files. Which made me wonder: Wait, you don't have any kind of API or at least structured data that the vendor gives you? Nope. And here you are. I am not talking about a niche business. I assume that's a broader problem. Tech can probably automate everything and this since 30 years. Still business lack of "proper" IT processes, because at the end every company is unique and requires particular measures to be "fully" onboarded to IT based improvements like that. | |
| ▲ | overgard 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've never looked at enterprise licensing, but regular license wise, a Claude subscription is actually $200 a month. I don't count the $20 or $100 tiers because they're too limited to be useful (especially professionally!) | |
| ▲ | delaminator 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You still need to teach a 2020s employee how to use Claude. - protect yourself from data loss / secret leaks
- what it can and can't do
- trust issues & hallucinations
- Can't just enable Claude for Excel and expect people to become Excel wizards. | |
| ▲ | Zardoz84 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And nobody talks that the "20 bucks per worker" it's selling it at loss. I'm waiting to see when they put a price that expects to generate some net income... | |
| ▲ | latchkey 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Like Uber/Airbnb in early days, this is heavily subsidized. |
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| ▲ | unkulunkulu 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ok, this article inspired some positivity in my view. Here comes, of course a disclaimer that this is just "wishful thinking", but still. So we are in the process of "adapting a technology". Welcome, keep calm, observe, don't be ashamed to feel emotions like fear, excitement, anger and all else. While adapting, we learn how to use it better and better. At first, we try "do all the work for me", then "ok, that was bad, plan what you would do, good, adjust, ok do it like this" etc etc. A couple of years into the future this knowledge is just "passed on". If productivity grew and we "figured out how to get more out of the universe", then no jobs had to be lost, just readapted. And "investors" get happy not by "replacing workers", but by "reaping win-win rewards" from the universe at large. There are dangers of course, like "maybe this is truly a huge win-win, but some loses can be hidden, like ecology", but "I hope there are people really addressing these problems and this win-win will help them be more productive as well". | |
| ▲ | _aavaa_ 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | For more on this exact topic and an answer to Solow’s Paradox, see, the excellent, The Dynamo and the Computer by Paul David [0]. [0]: https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2018/03... | | |
| ▲ | gsf_emergency_6 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Stanford prof rebutts David's idea[0] that it's difficult to extract productivity from the data https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25148/w251... I don't agree that real GDP measures what he thinks it measures, but he opines >Data released this week offers a striking corrective to the narrative that AI has yet to have an impact on the US economy as a whole. While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth. https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419... [0] on the basis that IT and AI are not general technologies in the mold of the dynamo, keyword "intangibles", see section 4 p21, A method to measure intangibles |
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| ▲ | whynotminot 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it. On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon. You can’t expect revolutionary impact while people are still learning how to even use the thing. We’re so early. | | |
| ▲ | overgard 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think "results don't match promises" is the same as "not knowing how to use it". I've been using Claude and OpenAI's latest models for the past two weeks now (probably moving at about 1000 lines of code a day, which is what I can comfortably review), and it makes subtle hard-to-find mistakes all over the place. Or it just misunderstands well known design patterns, or does something bone headed. I'm fine with this! But that's because I'm asking it to write code that I could write myself, and I'm actually reading it. This whole "it can build a whole company for me and I don't even look at it!" is overhype. | | |
| ▲ | scoopdewoop 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Prompting LLMs for code simply takes more than a couple of weeks to learn. It takes time to get an intuition for the kinds of problems they've seen in pre-training, what environments it faced in RL, and what kind of bizarre biases and blindspots it has. Learning to google was hard, learning to use other peoples libraries was hard, and its on par with those skills at least. If there is a well known design pattern you know, thats a great thing to shout out. Knowing what to add to the context takes time and taste. If you are asking for pieces so large that you can't trust them, ask for smaller pieces and their composition. Its a force multiplier, and your taste for abstractions as a programmer is one of the factors. In early usenet/forum days, the XY problem described users asking for implementation details of their X solution to Y problem, rather than asking how to solve Y. In llm prompting, people fall into the opposite. They have an X implementation they want to see, and rather than ask for it, they describe the Y problem and expect the LLM to arrive at the same X solution. Just ask for the implementation you want. Asking bots to ask bots seems to be another skill as well. | |
| ▲ | vidarh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you use an agent harness to have it review code for you before you do? If not, you don't know how to use it efficiently. A large part of using AI efficiently is to significantly lower that review burden by having it do far more of the verification and cleanup itself before you even look at it. |
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| ▲ | politelemon 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You are assuming that we all work on the same tasks and should have exactly the same experience with it, which is it course far from the truth. It's probably best to start with that base assumption and work on the implications from there. As for the last example, for all the money being spent on this area, if someone is expected to perform a workflow based on the kind of question they're supposed to ask, that's a failure in the packaging and discoverability aspect of the product, the leaky abstraction only helps some of us who know why it's there. | |
| ▲ | harrall 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’ve been helping normal people at work use AI and there’s two groups that are really struggling: 1. People who only think of using AI in very specific scenarios. They don’t know when you use it outside of the obvious “to write code” situations and they don’t really use AI effectively and get deflated when AI outputs the occasional garbage. They think “isn’t AI supposed to be good at writing code?” 2. People who let AI do all the thinking. Sometimes they’ll use AI to do everything and you have to tell them to throw it all away because it makes no sense. These people also tend to dump analyses straight from AI into Slack because they lack the tools to verify if a given analysis is correct. To be honest, I help them by teaching them fairly rigid workflows like “you can use AI if you are in this specific situation.” I think most people will only pick up tools effectively if there is a clear template. It’s basically on-the-job training. | |
| ▲ | mrtksn 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In a WhatsApp group full of doctors, managers, journalist and engineers (including software) in age of 30-60 I asked if anyone heard of openclaw and only 3 people heard of it from influencers, none used it. But from my social feed the impression was that it is taking over the world:) I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me but as it appears there’s no real adoption yet. Maybe there will be some once they release it as part of ChatGPT but even then it looks like too early as actually few people are using the more advanced tools. It’s definitely in very early stage. It appears that so far the mainstream success in AI is limited to slop generation and even that is actually small number of people generating huge amounts of slop. | | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I asked if anyone heard of twitter vaporware and only 3 people heard of it from influencers, none used it. Shocking results, I say! | | |
| ▲ | KellyCriterion 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, these people ("managers, engineers" etc.) do just not work in tech & IT but in other fields and they do not read tech news in your country etc. Most people are just "not that deep in there" as most people on HN. | | |
| ▲ | wiseowise an hour ago | parent [-] | | > “Tech news” A guy attached Claude to his socials, groundbreaking tech. | | |
| ▲ | KellyCriterion 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Once I was working for a consulting & development company; they were trying to enter sector ABC by stuffing up a team of people, so I was told, who had interest in sector ABC stuff and want to do some projects there. While they were deep in software development in general, no body of them read any of the essential/required daily industrial news (also not that one related to doing software development in sector ABC) :-) So no, even people somehow attached to a topic are not necessarily somehow deeper involved. |
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| ▲ | alephnerd 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me If you have been working on a usecase similar to OpenClaw for sometime now I'd actually say you are in a great position to start raising now. Being first to market is not a significant moat in most cases. Few people want to invest in the first company in a category - it's too risky. If there are a couple of other early players then the risk profile has been reduced. That said, you NEED to concentrate on GTM - technology is commodified, distribution is not. > It appears that so far the mainstream success in AI is limited to slop generation and even that is actually small number of people generating huge amounts of slop The growth of AI slop has been exponential, but the application of agents for domain specific usecases has been decently successful. The biggest reason you don't hear about it on HN is because domain-specific applications are not well known on HN, and most enterprises are not publicizing the fact that they are using these tools internally. Furthermore, almost anyone who is shipping something with actual enterprise usage is under fairly onerous NDAs right now and every company has someone monitoring HN like a hawk. | | |
| ▲ | mrtksn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Do you think that it is a good idea to release it first on iOS, announce on HN and Producthunt? How would you do? On my app the tech is based on running agent generated code on JavaScriptCore to do things like OpenClaw, I’m wrapping the JS engine with the missing functionality like networking, file access and database access so I believe I will not have a problem with releasing it on Apple AppStore as I use their native stack. Then since this stack is also OS, I’m making a version that will run on Linux, the idea being users develops their solution on their device(iOS&Mac currently) see it working and and then deploys on a server with a tap of a button, so it keeps running. | | |
| ▲ | alephnerd 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Who's your persona? How are you pricing and packaging? Who is your buyer? Are you D2C? Consumer? Replacing EAs? Replacing Project Managers? ... You need to answer these questions in order to decide whether a Show HN makes sense versus a much more targeted launch. If you do not know how to answer these questions you need to find a cofounder asap. Technology is commodified. GTM, sales, and packaging is what turns technology into products. Building and selling and fundraising as 1 person is a one-way ticket to burnout, which only makes you and your product less attractive. I also highly recommend chatting with your network to understand common types of problems. Once you've identified a couple classes of problems and personas for whom your story resonates, then you can decide what approach to take. Best of luck! | | |
| ▲ | mrtksn 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The persona is, someone who knows what are they doing but need someone to actually automate their work routine. I.e. maybe it’s a crypto trader that makes decisions on signals interpretation so they can create a trading bot that executes on their method. Maybe its a compliance who needs automate some routine like checking details further when some conditions arise. Or maybe a social media manager that needs to moderate their channels.Maybe someone who needs a tool for monitoring HN that specific way? Thanks for the advice! I’m at a stage where I want to have such tool and see who else wants it. Not sure yet about it’s viability as a business and what is the exact market. Maybe I will find out by putting it into the wild and that’s why I consider to release it as a mobile app first. |
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| ▲ | walterbell 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > every company has someone monitoring HN like a hawk. Monitoring specific user accounts or keywords? Is this typically done by a social media reputation management service? |
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| ▲ | bigbuppo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And it will get worse once the UX people get ahold of it. | | |
| ▲ | scrubs 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You got that right . .. imagine AI making more keyboard shortcuts, "helping" wayland move off X more so, new window transistions, overhauling htmx ... it'll be hell+ on earth. | | |
| ▲ | alternatex 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | We can indeed only imagine. For now, AI has been a curse for open source projects. |
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| ▲ | KellyCriterion 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A neighbour of me has a PhD and is working in research at a hospital. He is super smart. Last time he said: "yes yes I know about ChatGPT, but I do not use it at work or home." Therefore, most people wont even know about Gemini, Grok or even Claude. | |
| ▲ | tstrimple 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > On hacker news, a very tech literate place I think this is the prior you should investigate. That may be what HN used to be. But it's been a long time since it has been an active reality. You can still see actual expert opinions on HN, but they are the minority more and more. | | |
| ▲ | alephnerd 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think one longtime HN user (Karrot_Kream I think) pinpointed the change in HN discourse to sometime in mid 2022 to early 2023 when the rate of new users spiked to 40k per month and remained at that elevated rate. From personal experience, I've also noticed that some of the most toxic discourse and responses I've received on this platform are overwhelmingly from post-2022 users. |
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| ▲ | slopinthebag 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. Really? Can you show any examples of someone claiming AI models cannot generate working code? I haven't seen anyone make that claim in years, even from the most skeptical critics. | | |
| ▲ | autoexec 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've seen it said plenty of the times that the code might work eventually (after several cycles of prompting and testing), but even then the code you get might not be something you'd want to maintain, and it might contain bugs and security issues that don't (at least initially) seem to impact its ability to do whatever it was written to do but which could cause problems later. | | | |
| ▲ | KellyCriterion 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Scroll up a few comments where someone said Claude is generating errors over and over again and that Claude cant work according to code guidelines etc :-)) | |
| ▲ | dangus 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And really the problem isn’t that it can’t make working code, the problem is that it’ll never get the kind of context that is in your brain. I started working today on a project I hadn’t touched in a while but I now needed to as it was involved in an incident where I needed to address some shortcomings. I knew the fix I needed to do but I went about my usual AI assisted workflow because of course I’m lazy the last thing I want to do is interrupt my normal work to fix this stupid problem. The AI doesn’t know anything about the full scope of all the things in my head about my company’s environment and the information I need to convey to it. I can give it a lot of instructions but it’s impossible to write out everything in my head across multiple systems. The AI did write working code, but despite writing the code way faster than me, it made small but critical mistakes that I wouldn’t have made on my first draft. For example, it just added in a command flag that I knew that it didn’t need, and it actually probably should have known it, too. Basically it changed a line of code that it didn’t need to touch. It also didn’t realize that the curled URL was going to redirect so we needed an -L flag. Maybe it should have but my brain knew it already. It also misinterpreted some changes in direction that a human never would have. It confused my local repository for the remote one because I originally thought I was going to set a mirror, but I changed plans and used a manual package upload to curl from. So it out the remote URL in some places where the local one should have been. Finally, it seems to have just created some strange text gore while editing the readme where it deleted existing content for seemingly no reason other than some kind of readline snafu. So yes it produced very fast great code that would have taken me way longer to do, but I had to go back and consume a very similar amount of time to fix so many things that I might as well have just done it manually. But hey I’m glad my company is paying $XX/month for my lazy workday machine. | | |
| ▲ | KellyCriterion 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >>The AI doesn’t know anything about the full scope of all the things in my head about my company’s environment and the information I need to convey to it.<< This is your problem: How should it know if you do not provide it? Use Claude - in the pro version you can submit files for each project which are setting the context: This can be files, source code, SQL scripts, screenshots whatever - then the output will be based on your context given by providing these files. |
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| ▲ | __jf__ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Paul Strassmann wrote a book in 1990 called "Business Value of Computers" that showed that it matters where money on computers is spent. Only firms that spent it on their core business processes showed increased revenues whereas the ones that spent it on peripheral business processes didn't. | |
| ▲ | gsf_emergency_6 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Fwiw fortune had another article this week saying this J-curve of "General Technology" is showing up in the latest BLS data https://fortune.com/2026/02/15/ai-productivity-liftoff-doubl... Source of the Stanford-approved opinion:
https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419... https://www.apolloacademy.com/waiting-for-the-ai-j-curve/ | |
| ▲ | masteruvpuppetz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | An old office colleague used to tell us there was a time when he'd print a report prepared with Lotus123 (Ancient Excel) and their boss would verify the calculations on a calculator saying computers are not reliable. :o | |
| ▲ | heresie-dabord 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benefit to the economy overall. The 1990s boom was in large part due to connectivity -- millions[1] of computers joined the Internet. [1] _ In the 1990s. Today, there are billions of devices connected, most of them Android devices. | | | |
| ▲ | overgard 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The coding tools are not hard to pick up. Agent chat and autocomplete in IDE's are braindead simple, and even TUI's like Claude are extremely easy to pickup (I think it took me a day?) And despite what the vibers like to pretend, learning to prompt them isn't that hard either. Or, let me clarify, if you know how to code, and you know how you want something coded, prompting them isn't that hard. I can't imagine it'll take that long for an impact to be seen, if there is a major impact to be seen. I think it's more likely that people "feel" more productive, and/or we're measuring bad things (lines of code is an awful way to measure productivity -- especially considering that these agents duplicate code all the time so bloat is a given unless you actively work to recombine things and create new abstractions) | | |
| ▲ | kylebyte 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It reminds me a lot of adderall's effect on people without ADHD. A pretty universal feeling that it's making you smarter, paired with no measurable increase in test scores. | | |
| ▲ | overgard 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's a good analogy. I've never done stimulants, but from what I've heard about them they make people very active but that isn't the same as productive. |
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| ▲ | ozgrakkurt 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don’t think LLMs are similar to computers in terms of productivity boost | |
| ▲ | Waterluvian 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wow I didn’t realize that. But I always thought it. I was bewildered that anyone got any real value out of any of that pre-VisiCalc (or even VisiCalc) computer tech for business. It all looked kinda clumsy. | | |
| ▲ | KellyCriterion 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | (pre) VisiCalc:
You have to understand that the primary users (accountants etc.) do not care about how a thing looks in their working process: If a tool helps them, they will use it even if its ugly according to aesthetical frontend questions :-) (Think about this old black/white or green mainframe screens - horrible looking but it gets their job done) |
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| ▲ | arisAlexis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Only it's much more exponential | |
| ▲ | kamaal 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One part of the system moving fast doesn't change the speed of the system all that much. The thing to note is, verifying if something got done is harder and takes time in the same ballpark as doing the work. If people are serious about AI productivity, lets start by addressing how we can verify program correctness quickly. Everything else is just a Ferrari between two traffic red lights. | | |
| ▲ | hawaiianbrah 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Really? I disagree that verifying is as hard as doing the work yourself. It’s like P != NP. |
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| ▲ | globular-toast an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If things like computer-aided design and improved supply chain management, for example, make manufactured goods last longer and cause less waste, I would expect IT to cause productivity to go down. I drive a 15 year old car and use a 12 year old PC. It's a good thing that productivity goes down, or stays the same. | |
| ▲ | joering2 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > And so we should expect AI to look the same Is that somewhat substantiated assumption? I recall learning on University in 2001 the history of AI and that initial frameworks were written in 70's and that prediction was we will reach human-like intelligence by 2000. Just because Sama came up with this somewhat breakthrough of an AI, it doesn't mean that equal improvement leaps will be done on a monthly/annual basis going forward. We may as well not make another huge leaps or reach what some say human intelligence level in 10 years or so. | |
| ▲ | killingtime74 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | productivity may rise with time, and costs may come down. The money is already spent | |
| ▲ | calvinmorrison 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > it's helping lots of people, but it's also costing an extraordinary amount of money Is it fair to say that wall street is betting America's collective pensions on AI... | | |
| ▲ | autoexec 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They're betting a lot more than that, but since all their chips are externalities they don't care. | |
| ▲ | HWR_14 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Very few people have pensions anymore. People now direct their own retirement funds. | | |
| ▲ | noddingham 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's what he was saying. Wall Street (the stock market) are people's "pensions" now because everyone has a 401k or equivalent so their retirement is tied to the market. Thus, these companies are betting America's collective retirement on AI... |
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| ▲ | tabs_or_spaces 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My experience has been * If I don't know how to do something, llms can get me started really fast. Basically it distills the time taken to research something to a small amount. * if I know something well, I find myself trying to guide the llm to make the best decisions. I haven't reached the state of completely letting go and trusting the llm yet, because the llm doesn't make good long term decisions * when working alone, I see the biggest productivity boost in ai and where I can get things done. * when working in a team, llms are not useful at all and can sometimes be a bottleneck. Not everyone uses llms the same, sharing context as a team is way harder than it should be. People don't want to collaborate. People can't communicate properly. * so for me, solo engineers or really small teams benefit the most from llms. Larger teams and organizations will struggle because there's simply too much human overheads to overcome. This is currently matching what I'm seeing in posts these days |
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| ▲ | aurareturn 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI assistants. I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies. Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10 engineers each What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1 engineer each Same number of engineers. We are about to enter an era of explosive software production, not from big tech but from small companies. I don't think this will only apply to the software industry. I expect this to apply to every industry. | | |
| ▲ | matwood 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > smaller companies And large companies. The first half of my career was spent writing internal software for large companies. I believe it's still the case that the majority of software written is for internal software. AI will be a boon for these use cases as it will make it easier for every company big and small to have custom software for its exact use case(s). | | |
| ▲ | ch4s3 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > AI will be a boon for these use cases as it will make it easier for every company big and small to have custom software Big cos often have the problem of defining the internal problems they’re trying to solve. Once identified they have to create organizational permission structures to allow the solutions. Then they need to stay on tasks long enough to build and use the software to solve the problem. Only one of these steps is easily improved with AI. | |
| ▲ | dgoldstein0 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | And thenb potentially suffer from integration hell. The benefit of using off the shelf software is that many of the integration problems get solved by other people. Heck you may not even know you have a problem and they may already have a solution. Custom software on the other hand could just breed more demand for custom software. We gotta be careful how much custom stuff we do lest it get completely out of hand |
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| ▲ | itake 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | yeah, I agree. When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage. | | |
| ▲ | aurareturn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was not replaced. We are doing more than ever. Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we just build the custom demands in the time we took to meet to discuss whether we should even do it. Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. The original developers left the company. All I know is what is suppose to go into the service and what is suppose to come out. When there is a bug, I ask the AI why. The AI almost always finds it. When I need to change something, I double and triple check the logic and I know how to test the changes. No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. That's why I still have a job. But how I spend my time as a software engineer has changed drastically and so has my productivity. When a software dev say AI doesn't increase their productivity, it truly does feel like they're using it wrong or don't know how to use it. | |
| ▲ | alternatex 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Now if only companies knew how to correctly assess actual impact and not perceived impact. | | |
| ▲ | itake 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't think this is an AI problem. Even before AI, FANGA companies famously optimize promotions on perceived impact. During the promo review, people will look how many projects were done and the impact of those projects. |
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| ▲ | lnsru 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That means the system will collapse in the future. Now from bunch of people some good programmers are made. Rest go into marketing, sales, agile or other not really technical roles. When the initial crowd will be gone there will be no experienced users of AI. Crappy inexperienced developer will make more crap without prior experience and ability to judge the design decisions. Basically no seniors without juniors. | | |
| ▲ | aurareturn 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This implies that writing code by hand will remain the best way to create software. The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools. Maybe people will become more of generalists rather than specialists. | | |
| ▲ | lnsru 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Generalist is not automatically bad. I design digital high speed hardware and write (probably crappy) Qt code. The thing is that I have experience to judge my work. Greenhorns can’t and this will lead to crapification of the whole industry. I often ask AI tools for an advice. Sometimes it’s very useful, sometimes it’s complete hallucination. On average it definitely makes me better developer. Having rather abstract answer I can derive exact solution. But that comes from my previous experience. Without experience it’s a macabre guessing game. | |
| ▲ | xienze 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools. That’s putting it mildly. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when an entire generation of software developers who’ve only ever known “just ask the LLM to do it” are unleashed on the world. I think these people will have close to no understanding of how computing works on a fundamental level. Sort of like the difference between Gen-X/millenial (and earlier) developers who grew up having to interact with computers primarily through CLIs (e.g., DOS), having to at least have some understanding of memory management, low-level programming, etc. versus the Gen-Z developers who’ve only ever known computers through extremely high level interfaces like iPads. | | |
| ▲ | aurareturn 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I barely know how assembly, CPUs, GPUs, compilers, networking work. Yet, software that I've designed and written have been used by hundreds of millions of people. Sure, maybe you would have caught the bug if you wrote assembly instead of C. But the C programmer still released much better software than you faster. By the time you shipped v1 in assembly, the C program has already iterated 100 times and found product market fit. | | |
| ▲ | gzread 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Casey Muratori says that every programmer should understand how computers work and if you don't understand how computers work you can't be a good programmer. | | |
| ▲ | aurareturn an hour ago | parent [-] | | I might not be a good programmer but I've been a very productive one. Someone who is good at writing code isn't always good at making money. | | |
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| ▲ | mirsadm 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This seems like a bot comment. | |
| ▲ | vjk800 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies. This would be strange, because all other technology development in history has taken things the exact opposite direction; larger companies that can do things on scale and outcompete smaller ones. | | |
| ▲ | aurareturn an hour ago | parent [-] | | This would be strange, because all other technology development in history has taken things the exact opposite direction; larger companies that can do things on scale and outcompete smaller ones.
I don't think this has always been true.Youtube allowed many more small media production companies - sometimes just one person in their garage. Shopify allowed many more small retailers. Steam & cheap game engines allowed many more indie game developers instead of just a few big studios. It likely depends on the stage of the tech development. I can see Youtube channels consolidating into a few very large channels. But today, there are far more media production companies than 30 years ago. |
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| ▲ | Herring 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My compsci brain suggests large orgs are a distributed system running on faulty hardware (humans) with high network latency (communication). The individual people (CPUs) are plenty fast, we just waste time in meetings, or waiting for approval, or a lot of tasks can't be parallelized, etc. Before upgrading, you need to know if you're I/O Bound vs CPU Bound. |
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| ▲ | al_borland 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | When my company first started pushing for devs to use AI, the most senior guy on my team was pretty vocal about coding not being the bottleneck that slowed down work. It was an I/O issue, and maybe a caching issue as well from too many projects going at the same time with no focus… which also makes the I/O issues worse. | | |
| ▲ | noosphr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Ironically using Ai on records of meetings across an org is amazing. If you can find out what everyone is talking about you can talk to them. Privacy is non existent, every word said and message sent at the office is recorded but the benefits we saw were amazing. | | |
| ▲ | beAbU 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yep. Previous org I was at had the fancy copilot integrated into teams. All meetings were auto transcribed and you could chat with copilot about the meeting directly in the chat. It was absolutely magical at extracting action points, decisions and other salient points. It was like having a secretary for each and every meeting. |
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| ▲ | koiueo an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | So how is it going for him? Was he able to prove his point? | | |
| ▲ | al_borland 38 minutes ago | parent [-] | | He was laid off… unrelated to these opinions. He was correct though. For example, I’ve been waiting over a month for another team to set me up so I can test something they wanted me to develop. I’ve followed up multiple times. AI coding tools aren’t going to solve my blocker. |
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| ▲ | kjellsbells 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe experienced people are the L2 cache? And the challenge is to keep the cache fresh and not too deep. You want institutional memory available quickly (cache hit) to help with whatever your CPU people need at that instant. If you don´t have a cache, you can still solve the problem, but oof, is it gonna take you a long time. OTOH, if you get bad data in the cache, that is not good, as everyone is going be picking that out of the cache instead of really figuring out what to do. | | |
| ▲ | canyp 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | L2? I'm hot L1 material, dude. But I like your and OP's analogy. Also, the productivity claims are coming from the guys in main memory or even disk, far removed from where the crunching is taking place. At those latency magnitudes, even riding a turtle would appear like a huge productivity gain. |
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| ▲ | notepad0x90 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In my opinion, you're very wrong. There is typically lots of good communication -- one way. The stuff that doesn't get communicated down to worker bees is intentional. "CPUs" aren't all that fast either, unless you make them by providing incentives. if you're a well paid worker who likes their job, i can see why you would think that, but most people aren't that. Meetings are work, as much as IPC and network calls are work. Just because they're not fun, or what you like to do, it doesn't mean they're any less of a work. I think you're analyzing things from a tactical perspective, without considering strategic considerations. For example, have you considered that it might not be desirable for CPUs to be just fast, or fast at all? is CISC faster than RISC? different architectural considerations based on different strategic goals right? If you're an order picker at an amazon warehouse, raw speed is important. being able to execute a simpler and more fixed set of instructions (RISC), and at greater speed is more desirable. if you're an IT worker, less so. IT is generally a cost-center, except for companies that sell IT services or software. if you're in a cost center, then you exist for non-profit-related strategic reasons, such as to help the rest of the company work efficiently, be resilient, compete, be secure. Some people exist in case they're needed some day, others are needed critically but not frequently, yet others are needed frequently but not critically. being able to execute complex and critical tasks reliably and in short order is more desirable for some workers. Being fast in a human context also means being easily bored, or it could mean lots of bullshit work needs to be invented to keep the person busy and happy. I'd suggest taking that compsci approach but considering not just the varying tasks and workloads, but also the diversity of goals and user cases of users (decision makers/managers in companies). There are deeper topics with regards or strategy and decision making surrounding the state machines of incentives and punishments, and decision maker organization (hierarchical, flat, hub-and-spoke,full-mesh,etc..). | |
| ▲ | 8note 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | operationally, i think new startups have a big advantage on setting up to be agent-first, and they might not be as good as the old human first stuff, but theyll be much cheaper and nimble for model improvements | | |
| ▲ | kamaal 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Start ups mostly move fast skipping the necessary ceremony which large corps have to do mandatorily to prevent a billion dollar product from melting. Its possible for start ups because they don't have a billion dollar to start with. Once you do have a billion dollar product protecting it requires spending time, money and people to keep running. Because building a new one is a lot more effort than protecting existing one from melting. | | |
| ▲ | etothepii 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This. Once you have revenue you have downside to protect. Pre-revenue the worst that can happen is that you have to start again knowing more than you did. |
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| ▲ | hackable_sand an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | None of this fits | |
| ▲ | amrocha 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Then where are all the amazing open source programs written by individuals by themselves? Where are all the small businesses supposedly assisted by AI? | | |
| ▲ | Herring 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inf... | | |
| ▲ | amrocha 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | There’s lots of slop out there, that doesn’t mean it’s actually good or useful code. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Keep moving those goal posts. | | |
| ▲ | jdlshore 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Doesn’t look like goal-post moving to me. GP argued that AI isn’t making a difference, because if it was, we’d see amazing AI-generated open source projects. (Edit: taking a second look, that’s not exactly what GP said, but that’s what I took away from it. Obviously individuals create open source projects all the time.) You rebutted by claiming 4% of open source contributions are AI generated. GP countered (somewhat indirectly) by arguing that contributions don’t indicate quality, and thus wasn’t sufficient to qualify as “amazing AI-generated open source projects.” Personally, I agree. The presence of AI contributions is not sufficient to demonstrate “amazing AI-generated open-source projects.” To demonstrate that, you’d need to point to specific projects that were largely generated by AI. The only big AI-generated projects I’ve heard of are Steve Yegge’s GasTown and Beads, and by all accounts those are complete slop, to the point that Beads has a community dedicated to teaching people how to uninstall it. (Just hearsay. I haven’t looked into them myself.) So at this point, I’d say the burden of proof is on you, as the original goalposts have not been met. Edit: Or, at least, I don’t think 4% is enough to demonstrate the level of productivity GP was asking for. | | |
| ▲ | beart 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It has been argued for a very long time, lines of code is largely meaningless as a metric. But now that AI is writing those lines... it seems to be meaningful again? I continue to be optimistically skeptical. | |
| ▲ | famouswaffles 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not a great ask. Who's going to quantify what is 'amazing open source work'? 4% for a single tool used in a particular way (many are out there using AI tools in a way that doesn't make it clear the code was AI authored) is an incredible amount. Don't see how you can look at that and see 'not enough'. The vast majority of people using these tools aren't announcing it to the world. Why would they ? They use it, it works and that's that. | | |
| ▲ | sensanaty 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | So we're suddenly going back into measuring lines of code as a useful metric? Just because people are shitting out endless slop code that they never bothered to throw a 2nd glance at doesn't mean it'sgood or that it's leading to better projects or tools, it literally just means people are pushing code out haphazardly . If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing billions of lines of code added! But none of it is useful in any way. Same with AI, sure we're generating endless piles of code, but how much of it is actually leading to better software? |
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| ▲ | thesmtsolver2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > where are all the amazing open source programs > amazing Nobody moved the goal posts. | |
| ▲ | techpression 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They didn’t, amazing open source was asked for, meaningless stats were given. Not that GitHub public repositories were amazing before AI, but nothing has changed since, except AI slop being a new category. | |
| ▲ | amrocha 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I deliberately asked for amazing open source projects. I’ve yet to see a single AI coded project i would use. Keep licking those boots. | | |
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| ▲ | com2kid 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Seemingly every day on Show HN? Also small businesses aren't going to publish blog posts saying "we saved $500 on graphic design this week!" | | |
| ▲ | hackable_sand an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | But they could have saved that $500 by paying... a human | |
| ▲ | amrocha 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is saving 500$ by generating some shitty AI art the bar? I thought this supposed to replace entire departments | | |
| ▲ | afavour 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Someone asked “where are all the small businesses”, this was a reply to that. Small businesses don’t have entire art departments. | | |
| ▲ | amrocha 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Gotcha, so the impact of AI is small businesses get to save a couple hundred dollars and the cost is only 2% of your countries GDP. That’s good. | | |
| ▲ | com2kid 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Prior to industrialization if you wanted to paint something you had to know how to mix your own paints. And make your own brushes. Before the printing presses came along, putting up flyers was not even imaginable. Signs for businesses used to hand carved. Then printed. A store sign was still produced by a team of professionals, but small businesses coils reasonably afford to print a sign. Not often updated, but it existed. Then desktop publishing took off. Now lone graphic designers could design and send work off to a print shop. Small businesses could now afford regularly updated menus, signage, and even adverts and flyers. Now small businesses can make their own creatives. AI can change stylesheets, write ad copy, and generate promotional photos. Does any of this have the artistry of hand carved signs from 600 years ago? Of course not. But the point is technology gives individuals control. | | |
| ▲ | habinero 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | None of this is even slightly correct lol People have been painting with red and yellow ochre and soot for at least 50K years for sure, and probably several hundred thousand years in truth. You don't need a brush, you have fingers or a twig. The walls on the streets of Pompeii are full of advertising -- they had an election going on and people just scribbled slogans and such on walls. You don't need flyers lol. The idea that signs or advertising was "artistry" is deeply ahistorical. The reason old stuff looks real fancy is because labor was extremely cheap and materials were expensive. | | |
| ▲ | com2kid 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > People have been painting with red and yellow ochre and soot for at least 50K years for sure, Compare those to the pigments used (mixed up!) by professional painters, and then to what printers could make. If you wanted to paint fine art in the 1400s you were possibly making your own canvases, your own paint brushes, and your own paints. And on top of that you had to be a skilled painter! > The walls on the streets of Pompeii are full of advertising -- they had an election going on and people just scribbled slogans and such on walls. You don't need flyers lol. The American revolution included a lot of propaganda courtesy of printing presses and some very rich financers who had a vested interest in a revolution occuring. Pamphlets everywhere. It is one thing to scribble on a wall, it is another to produce messages at a mass scale. That sense of scale has been multiplied yet again by AI. |
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| ▲ | altmanaltman 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, that's just the impact that you're not going to hear in the news ("Small business saves a couple of hundred dollars" is not a good headline). But that's not the only "impact of AI". The bigger impacts are reflected in the news and the stock market almost on a daily basis over the last two years. | |
| ▲ | AstroBen 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Couple hundred dollars ..a month ..multiplied by how many small businesses globally? |
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| ▲ | MrDarcy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Interesting analogy to explore a Distributed System as compared to Organizational Dynamics. | |
| ▲ | Haven880 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think both. Most organizatuons lack someone like Steve Jobs to prime their product lines. Microsoft is a good example where you see their products over the years are mostly meh. Then meetings are pervasive and even more so in most companies due to msteam convenience. But currently they faced reduced demands due softer market as compare 2-3 years ago. If you observed that no effect while they layoff many and revenue still hold or at least no negative growth, I would surmise that AI is helping. But in corporate, it only counta if directly contributed sales numbers. |
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| ▲ | chrismarlow9 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The slow part as a senior engineer has never been actually writing the code. It has been: - reviews for code - asking stakeholders opinions - SDLC latency (things taking forever to test) - tickets - documentations/diagrams - presentations Many of these require review. The review hell doesn't magically stop at Open source projects. These things happen internally too. |
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| ▲ | vagrantstreet 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Perhaps something went wrong along the career path of a developer? Personally during my education there is a severe lack of actual coding done mid lectures, especially any sort of showcase of tools that are available. We didn't even get taught how to use debuggers, I see late year students still struggle how to do basic navigation in a terminal. And the biggest irony is that the "scariest" projects we had at our university ended up being maybe 500-1000 lines of code, things really must go back to hands on programming with real time feedback from a teacher. LLM's only output what you ask and won't really suggest concepts used by professionals unless you go out of your way to ask for it, it all seems like a vicious cycle even though meaningful code blocks can range along 5 to 100 lines which. When I use LLM's I just get information burn out trying to dig through all that info or code |
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| ▲ | sebmellen 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. Other white collar business/bullshit job (ala Graeber) work is meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate those thoughts, thinking about market positioning, etc. Maybe tools like Cowork can help to find files, identify tickets, pull in information, write Excel formulas, etc. What’s different about coding is no one actually cares about code as output from a business standpoint. The code is the end destination for decided business processes. I think, for that reason, that code is uniquely well adapted to LLM takeover. But I’m not so sure about other white-collar jobs. If anything, AI tooling just makes everyone move faster. But an LLM automating a new feature release and drafting a press release and hopping on a sales call to sell the product is (IMO) further off than turning a detailed prompt into a fully functional codebase autonomously. |
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| ▲ | LPisGood 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? If you weren’t doing much of that before, I struggled to think of how you were doing much engineering at all, save some more niche extremely technical roles where many of those questions were already answered, but even still, I should expect you’re having those kinds of discussions, just more efficiently and with other engineers. | | |
| ▲ | ragall 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? The vast majority of software engineers in the world. The most widespread management culture is that where a team's manager is the interface towards the rest of the organization and the engineers themselves don't do any alignment/consensus/business thinking, which is the manager's exclusive job. I used to work like that and I loved it. My managers were decent and they allowed me to focus on my technical skills. Then, due to those technical skills I'd acquired, I somehow got hired at Google, stayed there nearly a decade but hated all the OKR crap, perf and the continuous self-promotion I was obliged to do. | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It seems that to some number of folks, "engineering" means "writing code." | |
| ▲ | danans 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? I'd suspect the kind that's going away. | | |
| ▲ | LPisGood 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | That kind was already reserved for junior roles, contractors, and off shoring. | | |
| ▲ | r0m4n0 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m not sure everyone would agree with that statement. As a more senior engineer at a big tech company, our execs still believe more code output is expected by level. Hell they even measure and rate you on lines of code deltas. I don’t agree with it or believe it’s smart but it’s the world we live in |
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| ▲ | bandrami 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In a lot of larger organizations there is a whole stable of people whose job is to keep stakeholders and programmers from ever having to talk to each other. This was considered a best practice a quarter-century ago ("Office Space" makes fun of it), and in retrospect I concede it sometimes had a point. | |
| ▲ | pmontra 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In my case * meeting with people, yes, on calls, on chats, sometimes even on phone * “aligning expectations”, yes, because of the next point * getting consensus, yes, inevitably or how else do we decide what to do and how to do it? * making slides/decks to communicate that, not anymore, but this is a specific tool of the job, like programming in Java vs in Python. * thinking about market positioning, no, but this is what only a few people in an organization have agency on. * etc? Yes, for example don't piss off other people, help custumers using the product, identify new functionalities that could help us deliver a better product, prioritize them and then back to getting consensus. | |
| ▲ | tayo42 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ime a team or project lead does that and the rest of the engineers maybe do that on a smaller scale but mostly implement. | |
| ▲ | sebmellen 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well that’s why AI will not replace the software engineer! |
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| ▲ | lich_king 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > making slides/decks to communicate those thoughts, That use case is definitely delegated to LLMs by many people. That said, I don't think it translates into linear productivity gains. Most white collar work isn't so fast-paced that if you save an hour making slides, you're going to reap some big productivity benefit. What are you going to do, make five more decks about the same thing? Respond to every email twice? Or just pat yourself on the back and browse Reddit for a while? It doesn't help that these LLM-generated slides probably contain inaccuracies or other weirdness that someone else will need to fix down the line, so your gains are another person's loss. | | |
| ▲ | sebmellen 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, but this is self-correcting. Eventually it will get to a point where the data that you use to prompt the LLM will have more signal than the LLM output. But if you get deep into an enterprise, you'll find there are so many irreducible complexities (as Stephen Wolfram might coin them), that you really need a fully agentically empowered worker — meaning a human — to make progress. AI is not there yet. |
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| ▲ | ozgrakkurt 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Thinking is always the hardest part and the bottleneck for me. It doesn’t capture everyone’s experience when you say thinking is the smaller part of programming. I don’t even believe a regular person is capable of producing good quality code without thinking 2x the amount they are coding | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Agree. I remember in school in the 1980s reading that a good programmer can write about 10 lines of code a day (citing The Mythical Man-Month) and I thought "that's ridiculous, I can write hundreds of lines a day" but didn't understand that's including all the time understanding requirements, thinking about design, testing, debugging, etc. Writing the code is a small portion of what a software engineer does. | | |
| ▲ | pmontra 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also remember that programs were much smaller, code had to be typed in full and read accurately because compilers were slow and you didn't want to waste time for a syntax error. Anyway it's common even today to work half a day thinking, debugging, testing and eventually git diff shows only two changed lines. |
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| ▲ | jama211 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most people (and most businesses) aren’t making good quality code though. Most tools we use have horrible codebases. Therefore now the code can often be a similar quality to before, just done far faster. |
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| ▲ | overgard 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP. No coder I've ever met has thought that thinking was anything other than the BIGGEST allocation of time when coding. Nobody is putting their typing words-per-minute on their resume because typing has never been the problem. I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less cognitively intense than sending emails and making slide decks. I honestly think a project managers job is actually a lot easier to automate, if you're going to go there (not that I'm hoping for anyone's job to be automated away). It's a lot easier for an engineer to learn the industry and business than it is for a project manager to learn how to keep their vibe code from spilling private keys all over the internet. | | |
| ▲ | Kiro 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Our job is not the intellectual exercise you think it is. We're not smarter than anyone else and software development is not automatically more thought-intensive than other jobs. The fact that programming is the first job task to be fully automated says it all. | | |
| ▲ | whaleidk 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It’s weird that you equate time spent thinking with intelligence and egotism. Plenty of “normal people” jobs require lots of time spent thinking like art, writing, product and ad design. The only one implying taking time to think equals big brain master race is you |
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| ▲ | 8note 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. huh? maybe im in the minority, but the thinking:coding has always been 80:20 spend a ton of time thinking and drawing, then write once and debug a bit, and it works this hasnt really changed with Llm coding either, except that for the same amount of thinking, you get more code output | | |
| ▲ | sebmellen 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, ratios vary depending on how productive you are with code. For me it was 50:50 and is now 80:20, but only because I was a relatively unproductive coder (struggled with language feature memorization, etc.) and a much more productive thinker/architect. | | |
| ▲ | overgard 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Struggling with language feature memorization" is what we call "unemployed", not "relatively unproductive". |
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| ▲ | DaedalusII 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | when the work involves navigating a bunch of rules with very ambiguous syntax, AI will automate them to the point computers automated rules based systems with very precise syntax in the 1990s https://hazel.ai/tax-planning this software (which i am not related to or promoting) is better at investment planning and tax planning than over 90% of RIAs in the US. It will automate RIA to the point that trading software automated stock broking. This will reduce the average RIA fee from 1% per year to 0.20% or even 0.10% per year just like mutual fund fees dropped in the early 00s | | |
| ▲ | arctic-true 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | You could have beaten the returns of most financial professionals over the last several years by just parking your money in the S&P 500, and yet plenty of people are still making a lucrative career out of underperforming it. In some fields, “being better and cheaper” does not always spell victory. | | |
| ▲ | DaedalusII 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | you are right on beating money managers. when I said investment planning, I meant planning the size and tax structures for investments. this software automates all of the technical work that goes on inside financial planning firms, which is done by tens of thousands of white collar professionals in US/UK/EU, et c. it will then lead to price competitiveness. more expensive silly companies will exist, but the cheap ones get the scale. SP500 index funds have over 1 trillion in the top 3 providers. cathy wood has like 6-7 billion. BNYMellon is the custodian of $50 trillion of investment assets. robinhood has $324bn. silly companies get the headlines though |
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| ▲ | mark_l_watson an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the best point made in this conversation is that AI is often enough used to do things quickly that have little value, or just waste people’s time. I am glad to see articles like this that evaluate impact, but I wish the following would get more public interest: With LLMs we are chasing sort-of linear growth in capability at exponential cost increases for power and compute. Were you mad when the government bailed out mis-managed banks? The mother of all government bailouts might be using the US taxpayer to fund idiot companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that are spending $1000 in costs to earn $100. I am starting to feel like the entire industry is lazy: we need fundamental new research in energy and compute efficient AI. I do love seeing non-LLM research efforts and more being done with much smaller task-focused models, but the overall approach we are taking in the USA is f$cking crazy. I fear we are going to lose big-time on this one. |
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| ▲ | bubblewand 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My company’s behind the curve, just got nudged today that I should make sure my AI use numbers aren’t low enough to stand out or I may have a bad time. Reckon we’re minimum six months from “oh whoops that was a waste of money”, maybe even a year. (Unless the AI market very publicly crashes first) |
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| ▲ | bazmattaz 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My manager mentioned that his manager (an executive) is not happy because the org we are in are not using as much tokens as other orgs in the company. Pretty wild | | |
| ▲ | coffeebeqn 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just have Claude code churn out some Harry Potter fan fiction for an hour a day and you’ll meet your KPI easily | | |
| ▲ | hackable_sand 38 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It could literally be internal marketing fan fiction on the org's intent to meet KPI's with a focus on synergistic evolution towards x-functional singularity between department hiveminds including a footer on projected outcomes for operational efficiency. I think LinkedIn is in the dataset, right? |
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| ▲ | mr_toad 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So management basically have no clue and want you to figure out how to use AI? Do they also make you write your own performance review and set your own objectives? | | |
| ▲ | datenyan 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > So management basically have no clue and want you to figure out how to use AI? This is basically the same story I have heard both my own place of employment and also from a number of friends. There is a "need" for AI usage, even if the value proposition is undefined (or, as I would expect, non-existent) for most businesses. | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Do they also make you write your own performance review and set your own objectives? Not to get off on a tangent but this has got to be a "tell" for how much a company is managed by formula and how much it's actually got thinking people running things. Every time I've had to write my own review I fill out the form with some corporatese bullshit, my supervisor approves it and adds some more bullshit, it disappears into HR and I never hear anything about it until it's time for the next review, and it starts over again. There isn't even reference to any of my "objectives" from the last review, because that review has simply disappeared. But I'm sure some HR exec is checking boxes for following "best practices" in employee evaluation. | | |
| ▲ | ileonichwiesz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That’s exactly what we do at the Fortune 500 company where I work, and it’s surreal. In my first year I didn’t know any better, so I tried to set myself some actual objectives (learn to use XYZ, improve test coverage by X%, measurable stuff that would actually help). Fortunately my manager showed me how to do it correctly, so now my goals are to “differentiate with expertise” and to “empower through better solutions”. Every year I open up the self-review, grade myself a 5/5 on these absurd, unmeasurable goals, my manager approves it, and it disappears off somewhere into the layers and layers of ever-higher management where nobody cares to look at it. |
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| ▲ | fn-mote 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Look, to make something productive out of it: a job seeker who has high level skills using LLM assistance will be much more valuable than one without the experience. Never mind your current company mangement's policies. | |
| ▲ | HWR_14 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Management probably also wants them to figure out how to use the laptops, ide and other resources provided to them. Getting a tool for your employees that you've been told is important but have no idea what to do with is a perfectly valid management task. |
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| ▲ | n_u 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Original paper https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34836/w348... Figure A6 on page 45: Current and expected AI adoption by industry Figure A11 on page 51: Realised and expected impacts of AI on employment
by industry Figure A12 on page 52: Realised and expected impacts of AI on productivity
by industry These seem to roughly line up with my expectations that the more customer facing or physical product your industry is, the lower the usage and impact of AI. (construction, retail) A little bit surprising is "Accom & Food" being 4th highest for productivity impact in A12. I wonder how they are using it. |
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| ▲ | EastLondonCoder an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the deluge on projects on show HN points to something real, its possible today to ship projects as a one man shop that looks like something that just a year or so would have required a team. Personally I have noticed strange effects, where I previously would have reached for a software package to make something or solve an issue, its now often faster for me to write a specific program just for my use case. Just this weekend I needed a reel with a specific look to post on instagram but instead of trying to use something like after effects, i could quickly cobble together a program that was using css transforms that outputted a series of images I could tie together with ffmpeg. About a month ago I was unhappy with the commercial ticketing systems, they were both expensive and opaque so I made my own. Obviously for a case like that you need discipline and testing when you take peoples money, so there was a lot of focus on end to end testing. I have a few more examples like this, but to make this work you need to approach using LLMs with a certain amount of rigour. The hardest part is to prevent drift in the model. There are a certain number things you can do to make the model grounded in reality. When the tool doesn’t have a reproducer, it’ll happily invent a story and you’ll debug the story. If you ground the root cause in for example a test, the model can get context enough to actually solve the problem. Another issue is that you need to read and understand code quickly, but its no real difference from working with other developers. When tests are passing I usually do a PR to myself and then review as I usually would do. A prerequisite is that you need tight specs, but those can also be generated if you are experienced enough. You need enough domain intuition to know what ‘done’ means and what to measure. Personally I think the bottleneck will go from trying to get into a flow state to write solutions to analyze the problem space and verification. |
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| ▲ | lm28469 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > I think the deluge on projects on show HN points to something real, its possible today to ship projects as a one man shop that looks like something that just a year or so would have required a team. Lots of these project have a lifespan of a week and will never ever be maintained. When you pour blood and sweat in a projet you get attached to it, when you vibe code it in an afternoon and it's not and instant hit you move on to the next one. |
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| ▲ | jurschreuder 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Workers may see the LLM as a productivity boost because they can basically cheat a their homework. As a CEO I see it as a massive clog up of vast amounts of content that somebody will need to check. A DDoS of any text-based system. The other day I got a document of 155 pages in Whatsapp. Thanx. Same with pull requests. Who will check all this? |
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| ▲ | beart 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Who will check all this? The answer to that, for some, is more AI. I had a peer explain that the PRs created by AI are now too large and difficult to understand. They were concerned that bugs would crop up after merging the code. Their solution, was to use another AI to review the code... However, this did not solve the problem of not knowing what the code does. They had a solution for that as well... ask AI to prepare a quiz and then deliver it to the engineer to check their understanding of the code. The question was asked - does using AI mean best-practices should no longer be followed? There were some in the conversation who answered, "probably yes". > Who will check all this? So yeah, I think the real answer to that is... no one. | |
| ▲ | thisoneisreal 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just yesterday one of my junior devs got an 800-line code review from an AI agent. It wasn't all bad, but is this kid literally going to have to read an essay every time he submits code? |
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| ▲ | DaedalusII 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you include microsoft copilot trials in fortune 500s, absolutely. A lot of major listed companies are still oblivious to the functionality of AI, their senior management don't even use it out of laziness |
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| ▲ | bccdee 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's a lot of rote work in software development that's well-suited to LLM automation, but I think a lot of us overestimate the actual usefulness of a chatbot to the average white-collar worker. What's the point of making Copilot compose an email when your prompt would be longer than the email itself? You can tell ChatGPT to make you a slide deck, but slide decks are already super simple to make. You can use an LLM as a search engine, but we already have search engines. People sometimes talk about using a chatbot to brainstorm, but that seems redundant when you could simply think, free from the burden of explaining yourself to a chatbot. LLMs are impressive and flexible tools, but people expect them to be transformative, and they're only transformative in narrow ways. The places they shine are quite low-level: transcription, translation, image recognition, search, solving clearly specified problems using well-known APIs, etc. There's value in these, but I'm not seeing the sort of universal accelerant that some people are anticipating. | |
| ▲ | bandrami 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's probably true for some, but I think a lot of big orgs are simply risk-averse and see AI in general as a giant risk that isn't even fully baked enough to quantify yet. The security and confidentiality issues alone will make Operations hesitant, and Legal probably has some questions about IP (both the risk of a model outputting patented or otherwise protected code, and the huge legal gray area that is the copyrightability of the output of an LLM). Give it a year or two and let things settle down and (assuming the music is still playing at that time) you might see more dinosaurs start to wander this way. | |
| ▲ | jeron 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | it turns out it's really hard to get a man to fish with a pole when you don't teach them how to use the reel | | |
| ▲ | Banditoz 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If AGI is coming, won't there just be autofishers and no one will ever have to fish again, completely devaluing one's fishing knowledge and the effort put in to learn it? | | |
| ▲ | moregrist 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s not a great analogy but... “Autofishers” are large boats with nets that bring in fish in vast quantities that you then buy at a wholesale market, a supermarket a bit later, or they flash freeze and sell it to you over the next 6-9 months. Yet there’s still a thriving industry selling fishing gear. Because people like to fish. And because you can rarely buy fish as fresh as what you catch yourself. Again, it’s not a great analogy, but I dunno. I doubt AGI, if it does come, will end up working the way people think it will. | |
| ▲ | tsukurimashou an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If AGI is coming spoiler, it's not |
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| ▲ | conductr 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In regards to copilot, they’ve also been led on a fishing expedition to the middle of a desert | |
| ▲ | throwawaysleep 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or give them a stick with twine and a plastic fork as a hook, as is the case with Copilot. |
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| ▲ | chaos_emergent 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefiting from the productive gains of these systems. | | |
| ▲ | yodsanklai 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical. For my team at least, the productivity boost is difficult to quantify objectively. Our products and services have still tons of issues that AI isn't going to solve magically. It's pretty clear that AI is allowing to move faster for some tasks, but it's also detrimental for other things. We're going to learn how to use these tools more efficiently, but right now, I'm not convinced about the productivity gain. | | |
| ▲ | david_shaw 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical. What improvements have you noticed over that time? It seems like the models coming out in the last several weeks are dramatically superior to those mid-last year. Does that match your experience? | | |
| ▲ | nrclark 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not the grandparent, but I've used most of the OpenAI models that have been released in the last year. Out of all of them, o3 was the best at the programming tasks I do. I liked it a lot more than I like GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro. Overall, I'm not at all convinced that models are making forward progress in general. |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is your backlog and/or your velocity increasing, decreasing, or the same? That's really the ultimate question. | |
| ▲ | techpression 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In a team of one at work I see clear benefits, but having worked in many different team sizes for most of my career I can see how it quickly would go down, especially if you care about quality. And even with the latest models it’s a constant battle against legacy training data, which has gotten worse over time.
”I have to spend 45 minutes explaining why a one minute AI generated PR is bad code” was how an old colleague summarized it. |
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| ▲ | DaedalusII 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think anthropic will succeed immensely here because when integrated with Microsoft365 and especially Excel it basically does what co-pilot said it would do. The moment of realisation happen for a lot of normoid business people when they see claude make a DCF spreadsheet or search emails claude is also smart because it visually shows the user as it resizes the columns, changes colours, etc. Seeing the computer do things makes the normoid SEE the AI despite it being much slower | | |
| ▲ | slopinthebag 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Hilarious lack of self awareness. Calling others "normoids" yet you believe you can emphasise with them enough to predict how they will adopt AI? | |
| ▲ | sheeshkebab 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No one wants a chatbot “integrated” with excel and office365 crap, it’s clippy 2.0 bullshit. Replace excel and office stuff with ai model entirely then people will pay attention. | | |
| ▲ | DaedalusII 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | that only works if you can oneshot. but nobody can oneshot. iterating over work in excel and seeing it update correctly is exactly what people want. If they get it working in MSWord it will pick up even faster. If the average office worker can get the benefit of AI by installing an add-on into the same office software they have been using since 2000 (the entire professional career of anyone under the age of 45), then they will do so. its also really easy to sell to companies because they dont have to redesign their teams or software stack, or even train people that much. the board can easily agree to budget $20 a head for claude pro the other thing normies like is they can put in huge legacy spreadsheets and find all the errors Microsoft365 has 400 million paid seats |
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| ▲ | oblio 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > normoid Do you work extra hard to be this arrogant or does it come naturally? |
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| ▲ | dimitri-vs 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | IMO Copilot was "we need to give these people rope, but not enough for them to hang themselves". A non technical person with no patience and access to a real AI agent inside a business is a bull in a china shop. Copilot Cowork is the closest thing we have to what Copilot should have been and is only possible now because models finally got good enough to be less supervised. FWIW Gemini inside Google apps is just as bad. | |
| ▲ | dboreham 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This isn't my experience. I see many non-software people using AI regularly. What you may be seeing is more: organizations with no incentive to do things better never did anything to do things better. AI is no different. They were never doing things better with pencil and paper. |
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| ▲ | lukaslalinsky 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There was a recent post where someone said AI allows them to start and finish projects. And I find that exactly true. AI agents are helpful for starting proof of concepts. And for doing finishing fixes to an established codebase. For a lot of the work in the middle, I can be still useful, but the developer is more important there. |
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| ▲ | alexwennerberg 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Large firms are extremely bureaucratic organizations largely isolated from the market by their monopolistic positions. Internal pressures rule over external ones, and thus, inefficiency abounds. AI undeniably is a productive tool, but large companies aren't really primarily concerned with productivity. |
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| ▲ | vjk800 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Indeed. Most large companies don't need AI to increase productivity - they just need to stop wasting time on stupid bullshit. However, figuring out what is stupid bullshit and what is not seems to be an impossible task, and I don't think AI is going to help here at all. |
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| ▲ | virgildotcodes 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://archive.is/L70Ha |
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| ▲ | Havoc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I find this difficult to reconcile with things like for example freelance translation being basically wiped out wholesale Or even the simple utility of having a chatbot. They’re not popular because they’re useless Which to me says it’s more likely that people under estimate corporate inertia |
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| ▲ | J_Shelby_J 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It’s simple calculus for business leaders: admit they’re laying off workers because the fundamentals are bad and spook investors, admit they’re laying off workers because the economy is bad and anger the administration, or just say it’s AI making roles unnecessary and hope for the best. |
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| ▲ | vjk800 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My experience has been that AI is much more useful on my own systems than on company systems. For AI to (currently) be useful, I need to choose my own tooling and LLM models to support AI centered workflow. At work, I have to use whatever (usually Microsoft) tools my company has chosen to purchase and approve for my corporate computer, and usually nothing works as well as on my own machine where I get to set it up as I want. |
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| ▲ | mark_l_watson 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree with you, but then I am retired so my opinion is not that relevant. I have a sweet spot for using just Emacs, no other IDEs except very occasional use of AntiGravity. For a particular fun project or researching how to use generative models in applications, I like to start low: see if a small local model with appropriate tool use or agentic library will get the job done, if not move up to using something cheap like gemini-3-flash, and only if none of these approaches work, then use an expensive model. I was advising a friend’s company last month on their application that effectively uses LLM models, but I was blown away by their zeal to spend lots of money on tokens. | |
| ▲ | sigmoid10 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | What you are describing is a failure to integrate AI into said company systems. I have seen quite a few companies now that buy MS AI products with great hopes only to be severely disappointed, because they may as well have just used vanilla ChatGPT (in fact then they would at least get newer models faster). But there are counter examples too. If you can pull all your company documentation into a vector db and build a RAG based assistant, you can potentially save countless hours across your workforce and possibly customers too. But this is not easy and also requires some level of UI interactivity that noone really offers right now. In fact they can't offer it, because you usually need to integrate ancient, arcane sources into your system. So you do have to write a lot of integration code yourself at every step. Not many companies are willing to spend that kind of money and effort, because managers just want to buy a MS product and be done with improving efficiency by next quarter. | | |
| ▲ | mark_l_watson 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I have been using vector based RAG for about two years now, I am not knocking the tech, but last year I started experimenting with going way back in time and also in parallel trying BM25 search (or hybrid BM25 and vector). So: not even a very good example use case of LLMs, the tech is not always applicable. EDIT: I am on a mobile device and don’t have a reference handy but there have been good papers on RAG scaling issues - basically the embedding space gets saturated (too many document chunks cluster in small areas of the embedding space), if my memory is correct. |
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| ▲ | littlecranky67 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm saying it over and over, AI is not killing dev jobs, offshoring is. The AI hype happens to fall into the end of the pandemic, and lots of companies went to work-from-home and are now hiring cheaper devs around the world. |
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| ▲ | amelius 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In other words, everybody is benefiting from AI, except CEOs. |
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| ▲ | hestefisk an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I am in strategy consulting and I can tell you the productivity gains are real in terms of research, model building, and summarising work. The result is price pressure from our clients. |
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| ▲ | ahepp 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I read an article in FT just a couple days ago claiming that increased productivity was becoming visible in economic data > My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7 per cent for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4 per cent annual average that characterised the past decade. good for 3 clicks:
https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/97861f... |
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| ▲ | beloch 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The article suggests that AI-related productivity gains could follow a J-curve. An initial decline, as initially happened with IT, followed by an exponential surge. They admit this is heavily dependent on the real value AI provides. However, there's another factor. The J-curve for IT happened in a different era. No matter when you jumped on the bandwagon, things just kept getting faster, easier, and cheaper. Moore's law was relentless. The exponential growth phase of the J-curve for AI, if there is one, is going to be heavily damped by the enshitification phase of the winning AI companies. They are currently incurring massive debt in order to gain an edge on their competition. Whatever companies are left standing in a couple of years are going to have to raise the funds to service and pay back that debt. The investment required to compete in AI is so massive that cheaper competition may not arise, and a small number of (or single) winner could put anyone dependent on AI into a financial bind. Will growth really be exponential if this happens and the benefits aren't clearly worth it? The best possible outcome may be for the bubble to pop, the current batch of AI companies to go bankrupt, and for AI capability to be built back better and cheaper as computation becomes cheaper. |
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| ▲ | robinwhg 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | But there already is cheaper competition? Open models may be behind, but only ~6 months for every new generation. |
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| ▲ | 1broseidon 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the 'AI productivity gap' is mostly a state management problem. Even with great models, you burn so much time just manually syncing context between different agents or chat sessions. Until the handoff tax is lower than the cost of just doing it yourself, the ROI isn't going to be there for most engineering workflows. |
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| ▲ | matt3210 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’m not sure about this. I’ve been 100% ai since jan/1 and I’m way more productive at producing code. The non code parts (about 90% of the work) is taking the same amount of time though. |
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| ▲ | an-allen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yep just a risk amplifier. We are having a global warming level event in computing and blindly walling into it. |
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| ▲ | carefree-bob 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's not just technology, it's very hard to detect the effect of inventions in general on productivity. There was a paper pointing out that the invention of the steam engine was basically invisible in the productivity statistics: https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/crafts.pdf |
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| ▲ | robinwhg 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The first steam engine was invented by a Turk and he used it solely to make kebab spin. Never thought about using it for anything else. |
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| ▲ | transcriptase 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Mentioning AI in an earnings call means fuck all when what they’re actually referring to is toggling on the permissions for borderline useless copilot features across their enterprise 365 deployments or being convinced to buy some tool that’s actually just a wrapper around API calls to a cheap/outdated OpenAI model with a hidden system prompt. Yeah, if your Fortune 500 workplace is claiming to be leveraging AI because it has a few dozen relatively tech illiterate employees using it to write their em dash/emoji riddled emails about wellness sessions and teams invites for trivia events… there’s not going to be a noticeable uptick in productivity. The real productivity comes from tooling that no sufficiently risk adverse pubco IS department is going to let their employees use, because when all of their incentives point to saying no to installing anything ever, the idea of giving the permissions required for agentic AI to do anything useful is a non-starter. |
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| ▲ | cmiles8 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I like AI and use it daily, but this bubble can’t pop soon enough so we can all return to normally scheduled programming. CEOs are now on the downside of the hype curve. They went from “Get me some of that AI!” after first hearing about it, to “Why are we not seeing any savings? Shut this boondoggle down!” now that we’re a few years into bubble, the business math isn’t working, and they only see burning piles of cash. |
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| ▲ | sowbug 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "return to normally scheduled programming" is probably not the exact phrasing you want to use. :) | |
| ▲ | boxedemp 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I consume a lot of different content on a lot of different places. Every site or app has its vibe and communal beliefs. They rarely if ever agree on anything, but they all agree we're in a massive bubble. I don't have a point, just that it's an unlikely unity. |
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| ▲ | yalogin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Every technology, whether it improved existing systems and productivity or not, created new wealth by creating new services and experiences. So that is what needs to happen with this wave as well. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | If nothing else AI is making great strides in surveillance. It makes mistakes, but that only matters when there's accountability, and now it can make them at scales that were unthinkable before. Most of us are not going to enjoy the new experiences AI brings us, but a small number of people are already making a lot of money selling new services to government and law enforcement. |
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| ▲ | pram 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It’s funny because at work we have paid Codex and Claude but I rarely find a use for it, yet I pay for the $200 Max plan for personal stuff and will use it for hours! So I’m not even in the “it’s useless” camp, but it’s frankly only situationally useful outside of new greenfield stuff. Maybe that is the problem? |
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| ▲ | fourthark 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why do you find it useless for legacy code? I find I have to give it plenty of context but it does pretty well on legacy code. And Ask DeepWiki is a great shortcut for finding the right context… Granted this is open source and DW is free. Is it the specific nature of your work? |
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| ▲ | nowittyusername 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As we approach the singularity things will be more noisy and things will make less and less sense as rapid change can look like chaos from inside the system. I recommend folks just take a deep breath, and just take a look around you. Regardless on your stance if the singularity is real, if AI will revolutionize everything or not, just forget all that noise. just look around you and ask yourself if things are seeming more or less chaotic, are you able to predict better or worse on what is going to happen? how far can your predictions land you now versus lets say 10 or 20 years ago? Conflicting signals is exactly how all of this looks. one account is saying its the end of the world another is saying nothing ever changes and everything is the same as it always was.... |
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| ▲ | rr808 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| BTW the study was from September 2024 to 2025, so its the very earliest of adopters. |
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| ▲ | lqstuart 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I was in the “AI is grossly overhyped” camp because I work on large distributed deep learning training jobs and AI is indeed worthless for those, and will likely always be worthless since the APIs change constantly and the iteration loop is too cumbersome to constantly resubmit broken jobs to a training cluster. Then I started working on some basic grpc/fullstack crap that I absolutely do not care about, at all, but needs to be done and uses internal frameworks that are not well documented, and now Claude is my best friend at work. The best part is everyone else’s AI code still sucks, because they ask it to do stupid crap and don’t apply any critical thinking skills to it, so I just tell AI to re-do it but don’t fuck up the error handling and use constants instead of hardcoding strings like a middle schooler, and now I’m a 100x developer fearlessly leading the charge to usher in the AI era as I play the new No Man’s Sky update on my other PC and wait for whatever agent to finish crap. |
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| ▲ | coffeebeqn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Ah I see what my goal for this year is then. I have a large Steam backlog to work through. Unfortunately we currently code in short bursts and mostly are trying to figure out how these integrations are supposed to happen and why the different teams tell us different things | |
| ▲ | g-mork 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | this weirdly skirts my own experience yet somehow still read like sarcasm hehe. I think if we just return to calling it intelligent autocomplete expectations for productivity gain would be better established. trying to hacksmash Claude into outputting something it simply can't just produces endless mess. or getting into a fight pointing out issues with what it's doing and it just piles on extra layer upon layer of gunk. but meanwhile if you ask it to boilerplate an entire SaaS around the hard part, it's done in about 15 seconds. of course this says nothing about the costs of long term maintainability, and I think everyone by now recognises what that's going to look like |
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| ▲ | trappist 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Admitted" as the verb in a statement like this is blatant editorialization. Did they just finally "admit" what they had been reluctant to reveal? No doubt with their heads hung in shame? Maybe this bothers me more than it should. |
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| ▲ | istillcantcode 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Anyone read the goal lately? |
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| ▲ | AngryData 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the biggest problem is calling it AI to start with. It gives people a huge misrepresentation of what it is actually capable of. It is an impressive tool with many uses, but it is not AGI. |
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| ▲ | d--b 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| CEOs have no clue what's going on at the IC level. I bet many CEO PA are using AI for many tasks. It's typically a role where AI is very useful. Answering emails, moving meetings around, booking and buying a bunch of crap. |
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| ▲ | bandrami 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I ask this as a genuine question: who needs help "answering emails" and what part of it do they need help with? |
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| ▲ | VerifiedReports 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "What had promised to be a boom to workplace productivity.." No. BOON. A BOON to workplace productivity. And then the writer doubles down on the error by proving it was not a typo, ending the sentence with "...was for several years a bust." |
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| ▲ | enraged_camel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This study spans 3 years, so it goes back to ChatGPT 3.5 era. Not sure how valid it is, considering the breakneck speed at which everything moves. |
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| ▲ | jillesvangurp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the article is very premature. Lots of companies are slow to adapt. And while there are a lot of early adopters, there are way more people still not really adapting what they do. There are some real changes in day to day software development. Programmers seem to be spending a lot of time prompting LLMs these days. Some more than others. But the trend is pretty hard to deny at this point. That snowballed in just 6-7 months from mostly working in IDEs to mostly working in Agentic coding tools. Codex was barely usable before the summer (I'm biased to that since that is what I use but it wasn't that far behind Claude Code). Their cli tool got a lot more usable in autumn and by Christmas I was using it more and more. The Desktop app release and the new model releases only three weeks ago really spiked my usage. Claude Code was a bit earlier but saw a similar massive increase in utility and usability. It is still early days. This report cannot possibly take into account these massive improvements that hav been playing out over essentially just the last few months. This time last year, Agentic coding was barely usable. You had isolated early adopters of Claude Code, Cursor, and similar tools. Compare to what we have now, these tools weren't very good. In the business world things are delayed much more. We programmers have the advantage that many/most of our tools are highly scriptable (by design) and easy to figure out for LLMs. As soon as AI coders figured out how to patch tool calling into LLMs there was this massive leap in utility as LLMs suddenly gained feedback loops based on existing tools that it could suddenly just use. This has not happened yet for the vast majority of business tools. There are lots of permission and security issues. Proprietary tools that are hard to integrate with. Even things like wordprocessors, spreadsheets, presentation tools, and email/calendar tools remain poorly integrated. You can really see Apple, MS, and Google struggle with this. They are all taking baby steps here but the state of the art is still "copy this blob of text in your tool". Forget about it respecting your document theme, or structure. Agentic tool usage is not widely spread outside the software engineering community yet. The net result is that the business world still has a lot of drudgery in the form of people manually copying data around between UIs that are mostly not accessible to agentic tools yet. Also many users aren't that tool savvy to begin with. It's unreasonable to expect people like that to be impacted a lot by AI this early in the game. There's a lot of this stuff that is in scope for automating with agentic tools. Most of it is a lot less hard than the type of stuff programmers already deal with in their lives. Most of the effects this will have on the industry will play out over the next few years. We've seen nothing yet. Especially bigger companies will do so very conservatively. They are mostly incapable of rapid change. Just look at how slow the big trillion dollar companies are themselves with eating their own dog food. And they literally invented and bootstrapped most of this stuff. The rest of the industry is worse at this. The good news is that the main challenges at this point are non technical: organizational lag, security practices, low level API/UI plumbing to facilitate agentic tool usage, etc. None of this stuff requires further leaps in AI model quality. But doing the actual work to make this happen is not a fast process. From proof of concept to reality is a slow process. Five years would be exceptionally fast. That might actually happen given the massive impact this stuff might have. |
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| ▲ | deadbabe 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The people who will be most productive with AI will be the entreprompteurs who whip up entire products and go to market faster than ever before, iterating at dangerous speeds. Lean Startup methodology on pure steroids basically. Unfortunately I think most of the stuff they make will be shit, but they will build it very productively. |
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| ▲ | boxedemp 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Software doesn't need to be good to be successful; it only needs to solve a problem and be better than the competition. I predict a golden age for experienced developers! There will be an uncountable number of poorly designed apps with scaling issues. And many of them will be funded. | | |
| ▲ | deadbabe 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Meh, no. In a future where any app could be prompted, the only thing you’d get funding for is if you had managed to go viral and secure some large audience. This is not good. When all that matters is how viral your app is, people no longer compete on features and quality of life. |
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| ▲ | acjohnson55 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's weird being on here and seeing so much naysaying, because I see a radical change already happening in software development. The future is here, it's just not equally distributed. In the past 6 months, I've gone from Copilot to Cursor to Conductor. It's really the shift to Conductor that convinced me that I crossed into a new reality of software work. It is now possible to code at a scale dramatically higher than before. This has not yet translated into shipping at far higher magnitude. There are still big friction points and bottlenecks. Some will need to be resolved with technology, others will need organizational solutions. But this is crystal clear to me: there is a clear path to companies getting software value to the end customer much more rapidly. I would compare the ongoing revolution to the advent of the Web for software delivery. When features didn't have to be scheduled for release in physical shipments, it unlocked radically different approaches to product development, most clearly illustrated in The Agile Manifesto. You could also do real-time experiments to optimize product outcomes. I'm not here to say that this is all going to be OK. It won't be for a lot of people. Some companies are going to make tremendous mistakes and generate tremendous waste. Many of the concerns around GenAI are deadly,serious. But I also have zero doubt that the companies that most effectively embrace the new possibilities are going to run circles around their competition. It's a weird feeling when people argue against me in this, because I've seen too much. It's like arguing with flat-earthers. I've never personally circumnavigated Antarctica, but me being wrong would invalidate so many facts my frame of reality depends on. To me, the question isn't about the capabilities of the technology. It's whether we actually want the future it unlocks. That's the discussion I wish we were having. Even if it's hard for me to see what choice there is. Capitalism and geopolitical competition are incredible forces to reckon with, and AI is being driven hard by both. |
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| ▲ | azuanrb 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Curious why you like Conductor. I’m trying it out, but since I primarily live in the CLI, I might not see much value in it. | | |
| ▲ | acjohnson55 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fair point. What it really does for me is give me a better UX for having a bunch of parallel workstreams. I could achieve a similar effect thing with scripting, and maybe some clever ways of getting something like the sidebar for seeing the status of everything on a single pane. But Conductor packaged it up in a way that I found much improved over multiple Cursor or VSCode windows. |
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| ▲ | pengaru 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| At $dayjob GenAI has been shoved into every workflow and it's a constant source of noise and irritation, slop galore. I'm so close to walking away from the industry to resume being a mechanic, what a complete shit show. |
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| ▲ | bitwize 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Meanwhile in some auto shop, "Perfect! Let's delve into the problem with the engine. Based on the symptoms you describe, the likely cause is a blown head gasket..." |
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| ▲ | tehjoker 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is probably a threshold effect above which the technology begins to be very useful for production (other than faking school assignments, one-off-scripts, spam, language translation, and political propaganda), but I guess we're not there yet. I'm not counting out the possibility of researchers finding a way to add long term memory or stronger reasoning abilities, which would change the game in a very disorienting way, but that would likely mean a change of architecture or a very capable hybrid tool. |
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| ▲ | DaedalusII 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | the greatest step change will be when mainstream business realise they can use AI to accurately fill in PDF documents with information in any format filling in pdf documents is effectively the job of millions of people around the world | | |
| ▲ | oblio 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That would require accurate validation of said documents, which is extremely hard now. Pointing 1 million PDF LLM machine guns at current validation pipelines will not end well, especially since LLMs are inherently unreliable. | | |
| ▲ | coffeefirst 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is lost on people. A 98% accurate automation is useful if you can programmatically identify the 2% of cases that need human review. If you can’t, and it matters, then every case needs human review. So you lose a lot of benefits to the time sync, but since people tend to have their eye glaze over when the correction rate is low, you may still miss the 2% anyway. This is going to put a stop to a lot of ideas that sound reasonable on paper. |
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| ▲ | casey2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Of course AI is bullshit. If you couldn't just use it yourself and figure that out then ask yourself why people like Bezos or Altman are perfectly happy "investing" other people's money but not their own. If they actually believed their own bullshit they would personally be investing all of their money AND taking on personal debt.
Instead Bezos, a guy worth ~200B, sells 5B worth of stock to invest in "AI-adjacent" (power generation) industry, while making amazon invest 200B in data centers. Talk about conflict of interest! WTF! |
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| ▲ | johnnienaked 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The issue with framing this as a resurrection of the productivity paradox is that AI had never even theoretically increased productivity. I think in retrospect it's going to look very silly. |
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| ▲ | SilverElfin 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| These surveys don’t make sense. Ask the forward thinking companies and they’ll say the opposite. The flood of anti AI productivity articles almost feel like they’re meant to lull the population into not seeing what’s about to happen to employment. |
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| ▲ | slopinthebag 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Ask the forward thinking companies and they’ll say the opposite. Which ones? OpenAI? Microsoft? Anthropic? | |
| ▲ | throwawaysleep 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Eh, try using Microsoft Copilot in Word or PowerPoint. It is worthless. If your experience with AI was a Microsoft product, you would think it was a scam too. | | |
| ▲ | conductr 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s not just that though. You find when going through AI projects in an organization that many times the process is manual for a reason. This isn’t the first wave of “automation” that’s came through. Most things that can be fully automated already have been long ago and they manual parts get sold as we can make AI do it, until you see the specs and noodle around on the problem some then you realize it’s probably just going to remain manual as the amount of model training requires as much time and effort as just doing it by hand. | | |
| ▲ | sebmellen 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I have a dystopian future vision where humans are cheaper machines than robots, so we become the disposable task force for grunt work that robots aren’t cheap enough for. To some degree this is already happening. |
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| ▲ | transcriptase 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s comical that Microsoft inserted Copilot buttons throughout all of their productivity suite, and none of them are able to do the bare minimum that you would hope for. “Oh cool, copilot is in excel! I’m going to ask it a question about the data in the spreadsheet that it’s literally appearing beside natively in-app, or for help with a formula!” “Wait what, it’s saying it can’t see anything or read from the currently displayed worksheet? Why is it inside the application then? Why would I want an outdated version of ChatGPT with no useful context or ability to read/do anything inside all my Office applications?” | | |
| ▲ | bandrami an hour ago | parent [-] | | Meta's AI can't search posts on Meta's properties (or at least couldn't a few months ago). I'm not really sure what it's point is unless it's meant as a kind of help desk for the site (which they already also have). |
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| ▲ | yoyohello13 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah Microsoft has consistently been bragging about how so much code is written by AI, yet their products are worse than ever. Seems to indicate “using AI” is not enough. You have to be smart about when and where. |
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| ▲ | maininformer 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Thousand of companies to be replaced by leaner counterparts that learned to use AI towards greater employment and productivity |
