| ▲ | lavendermon a day ago |
| The best quote I've seen about AI and work: "If your job can be done from a laptop, you should be seriously considering what you'll be doing in 5 years". |
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| ▲ | 8by3 a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Depending on the field, five years is generous. 6-12 months (if not already gone) for many things. I made my 20 year career as a person who could do stuff with computers, software engineer etc. Every time I hear someone say, "my non tech friend who vibe coded an app got a bug he couldn't fix" etc, my response is they are using the wrong model and give it a few months. And I say this with great pain, I am in no way an AI booster, just a realist. |
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| ▲ | gavinray 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Every task that would be a multi-week engineering effort, I defer for a few months, until inevitably a model that trivializes it appears, repeat ad-nauseum. |
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| ▲ | max_streese a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I am wondering whether us folks in the IT space are missing things about how the real world out there functions with those predictions. As long as we do not hand over our collective decision making power to the machine god, which I don't think is a good idea and am not sure is even possible, the world out there is at this moment still shaped by humans, with other humans, for humans. I have this feeling that there is more about society and economics than efficiency. I have right now people I know that work in jobs that could have been automated for many years to a very high degree. That is even without AI. |
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| ▲ | muvlon a day ago | parent [-] | | > As long as we do not hand over our collective decision making power to the machine god, which I don't think is a good idea and am not sure is even possible, Counterpoint: This is not only possible but has effectively already happened. From the outside, the current trajectory is indistinguishable from humanity serving the AI, pulling all possible resources out of literally everything else in order to burn them on AI R&D, training and inference. | | |
| ▲ | bertmuir a day ago | parent [-] | | You could say the same of cash crops, but probably wouldn't say so to argue that we have already given our collective decision making power to corn. I think the bar is much higher - something like "AI runs our political and social institutions" - the economic institutions it's involved with currently don't meet that bar. |
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| ▲ | benrutter a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm less convinced. I think as engineers/software-folks we tend to look at "something being built" as the end-result (since that's what we work towards). Big companies though, are more concerned with value and risk. Say some data model provides $5 million in value, hiring a data person to check "everything is kosha", even if in theory someone could vibe code it by prompting an LLM, is a pretty good investment if it derisks the process. |
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| ▲ | lavendermon a day ago | parent [-] | | To your point, I wonder if organizations will trend towards hiring 3rd party companies to check work so they have someone to blame and can "focus on innovation". It's already a popular tactic to hire consultants for risky business decisions. Perhaps this is a new prediction: companies get leaner while outsourcing the checks to the same people they fired. |
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| ▲ | lovlar a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It will probably take decades before the world adapts to AI. Even some of the most modern societies still haven’t fully digitilized yet. There will be plenty of time to ride the wave of this adaptation, and still get payed for software work. There’s not enough mechanisms in place required for a fully automated adaptation. Human expertise will remain the missing piece for doing this shift efficiently. |
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| ▲ | hypfer a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Isn't that the same message we've been hearing ad-nauseam by now? What makes that quote so special that it is worth pointing out as "the best" in 11/2026? |
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| ▲ | lavendermon a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not new, but especially after the release of Opus 5.5 it's been sticking in my mind lately. | | |
| ▲ | ilumanty a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I thought so too. After a few weeks of semi-auto mode, I can clearly see how my codebase deteriorates. Humanity is not over yet. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50438318 Edit: by "semi-auto", I mean auto mode + lots of manual involvement, as opposed to an agent loop or other yolo strategies | |
| ▲ | hypfer a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You haven't answered my question. | |
| ▲ | Marczelloni a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Since the release of Opus 5.5 I have more work than ever and it enables me to move out from the coding I never really enjoyed to a full stack product engineering. I'm also working on transitioning from a classic SWE to a small independent team doing our own products. Sure I won't make as much money for doing bullshit changes in some old legacy system but I will actually deliver things people will like using, and I'll be in touch with other people on a daily basis. | | |
| ▲ | hypfer a day ago | parent [-] | | Nice, now the less-than-14d old accounts are teaming up to push the narrative for the upcoming IPO | | |
| ▲ | Marczelloni a day ago | parent [-] | | I have zero stock or interest in Anthropic IPO, moreover I really hope open weights catch up price-wise to what Claude Max provides (tokens there are heavily subsidized right now), so that I can make a switch and not feed the beast. I'd like to also use a model on my owm hardware, but alas, I'm relatively young in the industry and my wallet is not fat enough for a local AI stack. | | |
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| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | 8by3 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | My view, as someone who was flat out "AI is a hype scam" up until around Jan this year. It was hype for a while, and forms of it are still very much hype, but the reality is catching up with the hype. I.e the reality has so far been ~2 years behind the hype. I'm not saying I like these companies, or that I think the economics of any of them is sane. Just saying LLM's are capable. edit. For some context, I only use open weight models these days and rather hope that big closed firms go bust. | | |
| ▲ | torginus a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I was out for 2 weeks, and the resident meat proxies on my team managed to half-destroy the project by doing everything the way AI wanted to, instead of how the company systems work, introduced like half a dozen cross-connections across barriers that should never be crossed, introduced a parallel artifact repo, permissions system, and different build tooling to what the rest use (including what the current project was built with), and managed to create a lot of drama with external teams who refused to work with these new systems. AI still needs lots of guidance, and might seem like a genius that does everything on its own, until you give it to people who can't guide it and things begin spiraling out of control. | | |
| ▲ | 8by3 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The same could easily have happened pre LLMs (just slower). Its why things like ArchUnit existed, or style guides, or annoying architects who stopped engineers from using latest JS framework pre LLMs, to define high level requirements for software. I try to avoid justifying my own existence, but its a reason why I think skilled engineers are way more productive using LLM's than person off the street. Because they can confine them. Though there is no technical reason that ability can't be codified. | | |
| ▲ | torginus a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think it'd have been likely. First, pre-LLM, people read code 90% of the time and wrote it 10% of the time - so the flow would've been to first understand the exsiting code and figure out how to interact with it, and/or asking others when stuck, rather than just plowing ahead with the favorite set of tools that particular LLM has | |
| ▲ | the_af a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The same could easily have happened pre LLMs (just slower). "Slower" is doing a lot of work there. It's the difference between an engineer or two wrecking havoc doing a major refactor and convincing a manager that it's ok while you're away on vacation, and the same engineers failing to convince the manager because it will take forever, and quietly dropping the project after hitting the first roadblock. "How long is this going to take?": "a week" vs "a quarter" makes a huge difference. Extreme speed is a form of quality; the fear is that it enables bad things to happen. |
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| ▲ | 8by3 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've actually been thinking about this issues for a while, that agents are way more successful if they have a decent architect guiding them vs. full vibe. I've been solo prenuering for the last year so didn't have a lot of data from others but your comment convinced me its a problem worth solving, so I put this together https://vitruvius.8by3.com/ Its hard wip, pushed seconds ago, paint still wet. But the idea is to "enforce" good architectural practices for your agents. Can store constrains and ADRs in git so everyone in a team (everyones agents) can read from the same page. |
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| ▲ | hypfer a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure, but these are still astroturfing bots, and treating the messages as anything else but that helps them achieve their goals. They weaponize the HN rules here. Which is frustrating, because one has to break the letter to defend the spirit. | | |
| ▲ | lavendermon a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Interesting that you think I'm a bot | | |
| ▲ | hypfer a day ago | parent [-] | | Well that's one option. It could also be someone that is paid. It could be someone who drank the Kool aid. It could be someone financially invested Or it could be a kid that watched too many tech YouTubers. But, fundamentally, that doesn't matter, because functionally it's as described. |
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| ▲ | lookimanewacc a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | hypfer a day ago | parent | next [-] | | We're now at three fresh accounts and one additional greybearded anti AI strawman. ___ Huh, actually, if I look back on my extensive conversations with LLMs and compare those with human conversations, the whole idea of a greybeard memorizing manpages is something they liked to come up with much more than humans do (if at all). The idea of a greybeard kinda died out in normal conversation a while ago. Mostly, at least. Good job on the abliteration I suppose. | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | deepsun a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm yet to see an AI that can take responsibility for me, and could go to jail if it does a poor job. I'd be delighted to pass it to an AI. PS: Yes I mostly work from a laptop. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If I am still on this realm, it will be getting closer to 60, thus getting some early retirement most likely. |
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| ▲ | gonzalohm a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So my job should require a desktop computer? |
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| ▲ | keybored a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Green account with three-hundred karma says that you should be afraid. More at your regularly scheduled programming. |
