I think he's right and we should be thinking about this a lot more. Even the IMF is worried about 40 - 60% of global employment: https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/01/14/ai-will-tra...

Focusing on Dario, his exact quote IIRC was "50% of all white collar jobs in 5 years" which is still a ways off, but to check his track record, his prediction on coding was only off by a month or so. If you revisit what he actually said, he didn't really say AI will replace 90% of all coders, as people widely report, he said it will be able to write 90% of all code.

And dhese days it's pretty accurate. 90% of all code, the "dark matter" of coding, is stuff like boilerplate and internal LoB CRUD apps and typical data-wrangling algorithms that Claude and Codex can one-shot all day long.

Actually replacing all those jobs however will take time. Not just to figure out adoption (e.g. AI coding workflows are very different from normal coding workflows and we're just figuring those out now), but to get the requisite compute. All AI capacity is already heavily constrained, and replacing that many jobs will require compute that won't exist for years and he, as someone scrounging for compute capacity, knows that very well.

But that just puts an upper limit on how long we have to figure out what to do with all those white collar professionals. We need to be thinking about it now.

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honeycrispy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

He's not right though. He's trying to scare the market into his pocket. It's well established that AI just turns devs into AI babysitters that are 10% more productive and produce 200% the bugs, and in the long-term don't understand what they built.

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keeda an hour ago | parent [-]

> It's well established that AI just turns devs into AI babysitters that are 10% more productive and produce 200% the bugs, and in the long-term don't understand what they built.

It's not well established at all. In fact, there is increasing evidence to the contrary if you look outside the HN echo chamber.

The nuanced take is that AI in coding is an amplifier of your engineering culture: teams with strong software discipline (code reviews, tests, docs, CI/CD, etc.) enjoy more velocity and fewer outages, teams with weak discipline suffer more outages. There are at least two large-scale industry reports showing this trend -- DORA 2025 and the latest DX report -- not to mention the infinite anecdotes on this very forum.

> He's trying to scare the market into his pocket.

People say this, but I don't get it. Is portraying yourself as a destroyer of the economy considered good marketing? Maybe there was a case to be made for convincing the government to impose regulations on the industry, but as we're seeing and they're experiencing first hand, the problem is the government.

	▲	shimman an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If these tools were so great they wouldn't be struggling so hard to sell them. Great sign that the company has to mandate a "productivity" tool that the workers hate. Hence why all these LLM companies love government contracts, they can't sell to consumers so they'll just steal from tax payers instead.

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overgard 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Focusing on Dario, his exact quote IIRC was "50% of all white collar jobs in 5 years" which is still a ways off, but to check his track record, his prediction on coding was only off by a month or so. If you revisit what he actually said, he didn't really say AI will replace 90% of all coders, as people widely report, he said it will be able to write 90% of all code.

Ugh, people here seem to think that all software is react webapps. There are so many technologies and languages this stuff is not very good at. Web apps are basically low hanging fruit. Dario hasn't predicted anything, and he does not have anyone's interests other than his own in mind when he makes his doomer statements.

	▲	ilumanty 38 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Claude keeps getting SQLite's weird GROUP BY with MIN/MAX behavior completely wrong. Generally, complex SQL is not its strong side.
	▲	keeda 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The problem is, the low hanging fruit, the stuff it's good at, is 90% of all software. Maybe more. And it's getting better at the other 10% too. Two years ago ChatGPT struggled to help me with race conditions in a C++ LD_PRELOAD library. It was a side project so I dropped it. Last week Codex churned away for 10 minutes and gave me a working version with tests.

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bdangubic 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 90% of all code, the "dark matter" of coding, is stuff like boilerplate and internal LoB CRUD apps and typical data-wrangling algorithms that Claude and Codex can one-shot all day long.

most of us are getting paid for the other 10%

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keeda 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If you mean "us" on this forum, I would believe that. I would bet the number of engineers working on stuff "outside the distribution" is overrepresented here.

If you mean "us" as in all software engineers, not at all. The challenge we're facing is exactly that, reskilling the 90% of engineers who have been working on CRUD apps to the 10% that is outside the distribution.

	▲	bdangubic an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 90% of engineers who have been working on CRUD apps I am a 30-year "veteran" in the industry and in my opinion this cannot be further from the truth but it is often quotes (even before AI). CRUD apps have been a solved problem for quite some time now and while there are still companies who may allow someone to "coast" doing CRUD stuff they are hard to find these days. There is almost always more to it than building dumb stuff. I have also seen (more and more each year) these types of jobs being off-shored to teams for pennies on a dollar. What I have experienced a lot is teams where there are what I call "innovators" and "closers." "Innovators" do the hard work, figure shit out, architect, design... and then once that is done you give it to "closers" to crank things out. With LLMs now the part of "closers" could be "replaced" but in my experience there is always some part, whether it is 5% or 10% that is difficult to "automate" so-to-speak