They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs.

This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective.

AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction.

Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount of bread with only 5 people.

You have a choice: fire 5 people, or produce 2,000 loaves per month. But does the city really need that many loaves?

To make matters worse, all your competitors also have the same semi-automatic ovens...

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hansmayer 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount of bread with only 5 people.

That is actually the case with a lot of bakeries these days. But the one major difference being,the baker can rely with almost 100% reliability that the form, shape and ingredients used will be exact to the rounding error. Each time. No matter how many times they use the oven. And they don't have to invent strategies on how to "best use the ovens", they don't claim to "vibe-bake" 10x more than what they used to bake before etc... The semi-automated ovens just effing work!

Now show me an LLM that even remotely provides this kind of experience.

	▲	therealdrag0 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Eh accuracy and reliability is a different topic hashed out many times on HN. This thread is about productivity. I’m a staff engineer and I don’t know a single person not using AI. My senior engineers are estimating 40% gains in productivity.

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0x3f 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris paribus.

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JR1427 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is what I find interesting - the response from most companies is "we will need fewer engineers because of AI", not "we can build more things because of AI".

What is driving companies to want to get rid of people, rather than do more? Is it just short-term investor-driven thinking?

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0x3f 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's an excuse to do needed lay offs without saying as much. So yes, preserving signals, essentially. I've never met a tech company that didn't love expanding work to fill capacity, even if the work is of little value.

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scruple 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How much more productive are we supposed to be in engineering? Are we 10x'ing our testing capability at the same time? QA is already a massive bottleneck at my $DAYJOB. I'm not sure what benefits the company at-large derives from having the typing machine type faster.

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SpicyLemonZest 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Perhaps this is one of the understanding gaps that crop up around AI development? At my current company and most others I've worked at, testing capability is part of the same bucket because engineers do their own QA.

	▲	scruple 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm far more interested in understanding how we can 10x our confidence in a change and not just our line counts.

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salawat 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The optimization function of capitalism and it's instrumental convergence. The AI Alignment problem is already here, and it is us.

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squidbeak 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A market has to exist for this expanded range and for the expanded ranges of every other bakery. Otherwise the bakery's just wasting flour.

Where is this expanded demand coming from?

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zdragnar 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Two loaves of bread off the same line are perfect substitutes for each other, and compete to be sold.

Lines of code within the same code base aren't competing to be sold. They either complement each other by adding new features, making the actual product sold more valuable, or one replaces another to make a feature more desirable- look better, work faster, etc.

The market grows if you add new features- your bread now doubles as a floatation device- or you introduce a new line of bread with nuts and berries.

So, the business has to decide- does it fire some workers and pocket the difference until someone else undercuts them, or does it keep the workers and grow the market it can sell to faster?

	▲	Covenant0028 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Adding new features doesn't necessarily grow the market. Your bread with nuts and berries competes with the regular bread for the customer's money. Other things also compete for the same money, such as medical, daycare, schooling etc. So increasing features won't necessarily grow the market because the market. Even in an optimistic scenario, those features only have a probability of increasing revenue, it's not certain. OTOH, if you fire those workers, it is a certainty that your bakery gets more cash. You can then use that cash to reward your shareholders (a category that conveniently includes you) via buybacks or dividends.
	▲	squidbeak 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Read the comment I replied to to see where the bread came from. But on your point (which seems to hinge on wish thinking), this infinity of new features you propose for every product still needs those new markets you take for granted to justify their inclusion in the product. However cornering a new market isn't as straightforward as deploying a new feature - we all wish it was. The tech that makes it trivial for one firm to develop these features, makes it trivial for everyone else to build them. This means any new market will be immediately saturated. Even if the leap of finding new markets was as easy as you think, you still need to explain why this hypothetical company would keep paying millions in avoidable salaries. Because whatever jobs you assign to AI, it won't be any less available to do the work of the human labor.

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bojan 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On another note, if you had 100 engineers and you lay almost all of them off and keep 5 super-AI-accelerated engineers, and your competitor keeps 50 of such engineers, your competitor is still able to iterate 10x as fast. So you still lay people off at the risk of falling behind.

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cowlby 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm starting to think for software it's produce 2,000 loaves per month. I'm realizing now software was supply-constrained and organizations had to be very strategic about what apps/UIs to build. Now everything and anything can be an app and so we can build more targeted frontends for all kinds of business units that would've been overlooked before.

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driverdan 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Writing software isn't like a small bakery with fixed demand. There are always more features to build and improvements to do than capacity allows. For better or worse software products are never finished.

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turblety 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe the bakery expands to make more than just loaves of bread, maybe different cakes, sandwiches, maybe expand delivery to nearby towns.

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slopinthebag 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think it's valid to reduce the act of creating software to an assembly line, especially with Amdahl's law.

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ataraxao 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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