Many of the people reading HN will be making a lot less money in two years. Some will be unemployed. Some will be homeless.

Human intelligence becomes less valuable in quantity as AI gets better. Being big and strong was once valuable. Not so much any more.

"When this machine learns your job, what are you going to do?"

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csbartus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The question is whether AI / LLMs gets better.

I'm not an ML expert, but regarding code _quality_ I see no progress at all in the last couple of years. LLMs still write code by using probabilistic calculations vs. applying rigorous thinking and logic.

This is only good while no one has to look under the hood. When trying to understand and fix code written by LLMs you'll realize what a mess they produce. It's a codebase without any systematic thinking inside. Everything is ad-hoc, wired together to pass the tests, and to conform to some templates. No deliberate practice, no intelligence at all in the code.

This can't be a long term strategy for an entire industry.

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thenoblesunfish 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You are going to be asked to do your job, faster, and you are going to have a massive headache managing a bunch of machines mostly doing your job.

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dag100 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That is the status quo now. If LLMs get better and better, managers will simply direct them, well, directly. That's what the parent comment means by the machine learning to do your job. It completely, not mostly, replaces you.

	▲	hn_throw2025 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have some doubt here, because I do know that managers of at least some seniority have the political antennae to be wary of taking responsibility for something they don’t understand blowing up in their face. If they use LLMs directly, then the number of production outages will increase with the use of these powertools in unskilled inexperienced hands. The causes will probably just tilt towards design mistakes and unforeseen exceptions rather than coding language defects. I can see them wanting to keep some techies around simply to have someone to blame. You don’t get far up the ladder without learning how to cover your ass.
	▲	robotpepi 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> managers will simply direct them that Made me laugh. what you say won't happen. it's not that AI won't be sufficiently intelligent, it's that managers are not.
	▲	lodovic 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I don't think they'll let the chain of managers above you handle the llm directly. That is just too much risk of incompetence. Instead, there will be micro teams (1 dev, 1 sre, 1 product owner) that are meta manageed by a LLM. And their llm reports directly to a higher up's llm. And software will diversify to prevent all these supply chain attacks we've seen lately.
	▲	fcatalan 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Managers can barely direct me without shitting their pants. What saves them most of the time is my ability to say "No". Until LLMs can do that, which seems quite hard to do so far, good luck replacing me.
	▲	ares623 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		To all the managers reading this and thinking "phew. so long suckers!", I'd be willing do what you do for 50% of the pay. Surely it is _I_ that will be irreplaceable!