Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things.

Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.

I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.

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pdimitar 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work

That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.

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beepbooptheory 3 hours ago | parent [-]

How long does it take to learn all that then? Can't imagine it would take that long.. At least compared to, eg, becoming an experienced Rust or C programmer.

And if it does take that long, why is it so great anyway?

Making labor hyper-interchangeable is kinda like the whole pitch here. It's two steps away from b2b SaaS labor if the PR is to be believed.

Maybe you can say you're an elite prompter or whatever, but it always kinda sounds to me like "I know the secret menu at taco bell." Like the whole point of the product here is precisely to not need such pretense or complexity. You are paying hundreds (at least) a month to use something, but also you are using it in a special way? I really don't get it.

	▲	black_knight 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Judging by the students I have seen, it will take longer. You could become a mediocre programmer in months, and still be useful by doing grunt work. I don’t see how people will become master architects steering fleets of agents without a deep understanding of the fundamentals, which takes longer to master. Yes, you can vibe up a demo in no time. But LLMs still need guidance to produce an architecture that will hold up to real world scenarios.

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colechristensen 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those.

Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.

AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.

"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.