>On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work. Who wins in the market?

The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.

10x the work requires exponentially more communication and coordination. At least according to Brooks "Mythical Man-Month" thesis. There's more to creating a marketable product than churning out code. I'm not aware that AI really changes this.

Most non-commoditized reasonable paying jobs are a product of information asymmetry. Anything that shrinks that asymmetrical surface is a threat to jobs. The company you are missing is the one that fires 99 of their engineers, hires 200 generally lower performing but far cheaper engineers and uses AI to accelerate their output.

Now whether or not that would actually work given the reality of the AI output is a question, but that's the general premise.

Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 horses two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. One company fires 90 horses and buys 10 cars. The other company keeps all its horses.

Do the horses win in the market?

I don’t think anyone has figured how to do 10x the work yet as we don’t know what the work is. AI cannot (yet) define the work that needs to be done, for some definition of needs to be done, and we need humans to figure that out for now. Us humans cannot work fast enough so we still build the same stuff but with less people.

The one who fires 90 engineers, just to see how things go with the 10, and then scales back up with cheaper off-shore talent if they can't keep up with demand.

>It's very normal to think that the extra revenue growth you bring in should mean you have either 1) a larger share of the pie for every efficiency increase that grows revenue or 2) less expectation from you, as a worker, to labor as intensively since you are continue to bring in surplus value that is being actively skimmed from.

It's also very normal to force businesses by law to either or both. But it's not happening these days.

Whenever I read comments like these I feel like people are living in a completely different reality.

Most of the tech companies I have worked at are ridiculously easy and generous, I get to work with smart people, and the entire job can be done in a few hours per week. It's not like we're doing manual labor and digging ditches; half the people on this website are laptop-class workers who occasionally use the slightest bit of energy to write a few lines of code or participate in a meeting.

I show up to work and I often do extra because I like it.

The company isn't "extracting" anything from me except the extremely consentual labor I want to give back simply out of the love of the game. If you don't feel that way, the problem isn't the capitalist system it's probably your own life choices.

What is missed is free time is just one good you can get. People like different "things". Sometimes that "thing" is free time. Sometimes that thing is more expensive food. Sometimes that thing is a bigger house. Sometimes that thing is... There are a lot of options. If you were willing to live like 1950 you could have the male working 20 hours a week and the female never leaving the home. What people forget is in 1950 having a black and white TV was unusual (though not uncommon) and color TV was still several years away. Your phone was a shared party line. You had one car which wasn't reliable by modern standards.

Cell phone provider is funny one here. Effectively most efficient thing to do is to get a deal from competitor and then accept winback offer from them. You can not even properly negotiate for deals very often but somehow those winbacks end up being near best deals. Last time I got negative deal for them. Meaning my mobile and wired internet ended up less than wired internet was before...

> Your counterparty will have its own agent, a larger budget for that agent, and a lot more skin in the game to ensure they retain their advantage

I did some work on negotiating agents. This doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. If you can craft a per-user package effectively (for many services) then both sides end up with a better deal, and competition in the market stops the provider entity from dictating terms.

It's fairly widespread and has been normalized for years. A very quick internet search turned up this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/business/dealbook/ai-prod...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/newe.12400

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/23/1130393/how-soci...