I was never excited for automation. Automation doesn't mean we do less. It means that we do as much work, and now also the work has a higher complexity ceiling; you need to understand the systems that are being automated, and need to maintain the automation. More things are possible, but everything is more complex, and of course, you still need to work 40 hours a week. Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem.
And yes, I only talked about automation, but the same high-level issues apply to LLMs, but with different downsides: you need to check the LLM output which becomes a bigger topic, and then potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more.
My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it.
Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more.
I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more issues you'll find. Suddenly we needed to achieve 4x more, and that meant finding 4x more problems. The thing about automation is that it doesn't speed up debugging time. This leads to more stress.
One senior guy took me aside and said management would not reward me for my efforts, but will get the benefit of all my work.
He was right.
Eventually, I left because I automate things to make my life easier. If it's not making my life easier (or getting me more money), why should I do it?
Since then, whenever I get a new job, I test the waters. If the outcome is like that first job, I stop working on process improvements, and look for another job.
I read a great article a while ago (can't remember where) when they tasked some embedded guys with building a somewhat complex front end app.
When it was done, there were no bugs. Not a single issue. They asked the embedded guys how they had accomplished it. They said "we didn't know bugs were allowed".
Many people have never authored or even been involved with a high quality piece of software, so they just don't know what it looks like, or why you'd want it.
You'd think that someone in the exec team would have some personal pride and ownership in the code and would want to flush out bugs and improve quality. But nah.
The trick is to automate for your own benefit and keep quiet. Automate your 8hr/day job down to as low as possible, and use the free time for entertainment or another job (where you ideally do the same).
The reward for good work is more work. If they company wanted to pay you more, they would've already done so. If the company wanted automation, they would put that as a job description and pay accordingly (or more likely outsource it and get a shitty result for 10x the price - despite never willing to pay you anywhere close to that even if you were to give them the fully working solution).
This is just the reality of scaling. Largely but not necessarily automation. Think of customer service now compared to early 2000s. Thats not really a story of automation. Instead, it's a story of 1) outsourcing 2) a bit of legitimate self service options (automation) and 3) abandonment - they simply stopped supporting at a good level. Quality is much worse but throughput is much higher - a necessary evil to scale.
AI actually has some ability to improve things. At least when I think about manufacturing and farming. When you produced at such a massive scale you could never individually inspect every potato, widget, or target every weed etc. You could produce WAAAY more but more bad products went out the door. But now you can inspect every individual thing. May not extend to every industry though.
I have a friend who automated his entire days work down to the click of a single button. He did not tell management because they were pretty scummy. He got written up for not "looking busy" despite his output being higher than his coworkers.
Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.
Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation.
I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever.
> Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem.
This is broadly false. Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs.
Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. Once that leap happens it becomes accepted as the new normal, so it never feels like automation is making changes.
> Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs.
This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted.
CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechanics of CNC, we can't manufacture something more precise than we can measure.
LLMs are inverted; it's incredibly easy to get them to output something, and hard to validate that the output is correct.
The analogy falls apart if you apply that same constraint to CNC and PCB machines. If they each had a 10% chance of creating a faulty product in a way that can only be detected by the purchaser of the final product, we would probably go back to hand-assembling them.
> Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward.
I suspect there will be a spectrum, as there historically has been. Some companies will use AI heavily and get crazy velocity, but have poor stability as usage uncovers bugs in a poorly understood codebase because AI wrote most of it. Others will use AI less heavily and ship fewer features, but have fewer severe bugs and be more able to fix them because of deep familiarity with the codebase.
I suspect stability wins for many use cases, but there are definitely spaces where being down for a full day every month isn't the end of the world.
I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply.
>At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes.
I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
I think "bottom up" or worker led automation works far, far better than top down. Leadership always comes up with "efficiency" ideas for automation without ever spending a day in the life of the people who will use the automation. And they almost always fail to realize any gains but disrupt everyone's workflow.
> I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever.
Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation.
People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute.
If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines
You recoup the saving of home automation immediately as additional leisure time. But for most people, work automation neither reduces your working time nor increases your wage.
Are you sure you spend less time per week on clothes washing than people did before the clothes washer? I suspect that before, people would wash their clothes considerably more seldom - which might even out the efficiency gains of the machine.
It's an interesting analogy. But one difference between dishwashers and LLMs is that you don't need to check the dishes afterward (if you maintain and use it properly).
The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 10x the widgets in the same amount of time thanks to a new automated widget machine, if you're capital, you now have 10x the widgets to sell. Awesome! However, if you're labor, you still have a 40/hr a week job, regardless of how many widgets you make in a week. And the boss is counting how many widgets you make on the new machine they bought. At the edges of this in the tech industry we have website building. The market haven't yet totally adjusted to the lower costs of labor. What used to take 10 hours to build and you'd charge a client $3,000 for, now takes 2 hours but since the client was previously paying $3,000 for that service, you're not going to charge them less, you're going to take on additional clients. Or spend more time at the beach. In this scenario, the programmer is capital, not labor, and gets to reap the rewards of automation. Until the market catches up, anyway. Given that the industrial machine in the website builder's factory is a laptop and a cloud hosting bill, it's unclear if the Marxist division between capital and labor, burgousie and proletariat is still the right place to draw the lines, but the trade off is still there. If you're selling your time in exchange for money, automation means a faster conveyor belt that you need to adapt to, but you're still working 40/h a week. If you're selling widgets, automation means more widgets to sell.
I think it all hinges on recognizing what opportunities automation helps.
For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt.
There are a lot of tasks that you do not do often enough to commit them fully to memory, but every time you do them it takes a lot of time. LLM-based automation really speeds up these tasks. Similar for refactors that an IDE or language server cannot do, some kinds of scripts etc.
On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code.
It’s all about getting a feeling for the right opportunities. As with any tool.
> For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt.
> On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code.
See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test run, modify as necessary, and ultimately let the AI loose and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, I probably have a script kicking around somewhere that will rename a batch of files, and I can modify it pretty quickly to match a new pattern, test it out, and be confident that it will do exactly what I expect it to do.
Is one of these paths faster than the other? I'm not sure; it's probably a wash. The AI would definitely be faster if I was confident I could trust it. But I'm not sure how I can cross that threshold in my mind and be confident that I can trust it.
Do you like washing laundry at the river or carrying water from the well back to your house? You cannot talk in generalities about this topic as it is too broad.
There are definitely many things which when automated loses out on some edge cases. But most folks don't need artisanal soap.
> and then potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more.
I hear this so often these days and I quite do not understand this part. If I trust LLM do to "X" that means i have made a determination that LLM is top-notch with "X" (if I did not make this determination then letting LLMs do X would be lunacy) and henceforth I do not give a flying hoot to know "X" and if my "X" skills deteriorate it is same thing as when we got equipment to tend to our corn fields and my corn picking skills deteriorated. of course I am being facetious here but you get the point.
IMO it's an economic problem (GDP must always rise because reasons) and the hedonic treadmill at play. I would even argue against the complexity point and rather point to overengineering being the root cause; an example would be using a robot arm to automate a cup of coffee instead of using existing vending machines for that purpose.
> potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more.
This is just empirically not true. Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity (with one relatively recent but currently very important caveat, the housing market).
Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.
A bigger caveat is that measuring improvement by 'prosperity' is both vague (are you using GDP, GDP/capita or GDP/capita of the lowest 10%) and arbitrary (perhaps a better measure is the life expectancy of the poorest 10%).
> Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.
Everyone I grew up with or met via work that is my age or younger has 1-3 more degrees than their parents and grandparents and are significantly worse off when it comes to standard life milestones like buying a home or ever having children.
We are not becoming relatively more prosperous as a people. We have more bread and circuses and less roofs over our heads on average
Too many people are trying to jump to the end when they don't even have their day to day managed or efficient today can tend to carry forward efficiency in a number of business workflows.
Checking the LLM output is required when it's not consistent, in many cases maintaining the benefit requires the human to know more on the subject than the LLM.
As always, labor is a marketplace, and the supply side boils down to a) how much the next person else is willing to work (all else equal), and b) external forces (like overtime requirements kicking in at 40 hours).
I'm seeing amount of changes needed to produce new features when coding with these AI tools constantly increasing, due to the absence of a proper foundation, and due to the willingness of people to accept it, with the idea that 'we can change it quickly'.
It has become acceptable to push those changes in a PR and present them as your own, filled with filler comments that are instant tech debt, because they just repeat the code.
And while I actually don't care who writes the code, I do expect the PR author to properly understand the code and most importantly, the impact on the codebase.
In my role as a mentor I now spend a lot of time looking at things written and wonder: Did the author write this, or did they AI? Because if the code is wrong, this question changes how the conversation goes.
It also impacts the kind of energy I'm willing to put in into educating the other person as to how things can be improved.
Which is a great idea until your superior asks why you're holding back the vibe coders and crippling their 100x productivity by rejecting their PRs instead of just going with the flow.
I know it's making me work more, and I am thrilled. I have not shipped production code for 20 years, and it was desktop back then.
I am now able to single-handedly create webapp MVPs, one of which is getting traction. If anything actually takes-off, there will certainly be need for a real dev to take over. Also, my commits are not "vibe coded." I have read every single loc, and found so many issues that I am stunned that "vibe coding" is actually a thing. I do let the models run wild on prototypes though.
I think that I happen to be in some magical sweet spot as a person who knows the words, kept up with tech, but not the syntax of framework xyz.
I thought this sweet spot was very transient, and I am very happy that the tools appear to be reaching a plateau for now, so I still have at least another year of being useful.
Since agentic dev tools arrived, I am having the time of my life while gladly working 60hrs per week.
I realize that I am an outlier, but is anyone else in this same boat? If you have product ideas, is this not the best time ever to build? All of our ideas are being indirectly subsidized by billions of VC & FAANG dollars. That is pretty freaking cool.
> I realize that I am an outlier, but is anyone else in this same boat?
Yep. I have a computer science background but have always been "the most technical product management/marketing guy in the room". Now I'm having lots of fun building a SaaS and a mobile app to my standards, plus turning out micro-projects like pwascore.com in a day or two.
It turns out that I love designing/architecting products, just not the grind-y coding bits. Because I create lots of tests, use code analysis tools, etc., I'm confident that I'm creating higher quality code than (for example) what most outsourced coders are creating without LLMs.
Sounds like these are hobby projects that you're doing on your own. The point of AI making us work more is referring to people at companies, not for themselves. Employers are capturing the productivity benefits (if they exist), not employees.
I am getting paid. I was able to resurrect a startup that failed 8 years ago. Back then, we tried to bootstrap with a very nice off-shore dev for the MVP, that's all we could afford. The iteration period was ~24hrs. That period is now minutes. You know who that helps? Every startup who didn't nail the idea from go, and requires iteration.
I can now meet with a user on Monday, show them the little feature they wanted by Tuesday... like a real full stack dev would have done 4 years ago. Is it ready for b2c scale on Tuesday? No, but that's not my goal.
I understand all the LLM-dev derision to some extent. But if you are not using the billions of non-gate-kept subsidies given to all of us right now, then either you are working on real computer science problems, or you are wasting what seems like the biggest opportunity of my lifetime.
This is the greatest time to build a startup ever. However, if you are stuck making that money for the boss, then yeah.. that's probably annoying. And yes, it is scary as hell that we are all going to be replaced, in possibly very short order. This is the time for every dev to learn to be a ... eeek... product dev, and not a just a software dev. I think Product Dev will become a thing.
I am in the same boat. But i am getting overwhelm with the code quantity i have to review[0] before i update my code. I don’t let llm touch my code, i ask for code for this or that and then save the code for future review. But ideas flow in faster that i can review then.
Yes. What they've shown me is that I don't like code. Hate it, actually. But I like building things, and can still read and reason about problems and code. So I chose the best stack for what we're doing, but I don't get bogged down in arcania. It's great.
I'd like to know, from people who really believe that we just need to invent the right technology, then we could all do 20 hour weeks and spend the rest of the time in leisure, what keeps them from doing that right now, and what exactly they believe that miracle tech would change.
It seems relatively obvious to me that if a society has work as its cultural core then no amount of productivity increase will get rid of work - it would destabilize the entire society before it could do so.
Some people seem to be under the impression that they (the employees) and their employers are a team, working towards the same goal (a better life with more spare time for everyone).
I just wrote this comment in another thread, but it fits here too:
The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money.
You, as an employee, are just means to an end. "The company" doesn't care about you and you will not reap the benefits of whatever efficiency improvements the future brings.
Yep. But new technologies like this are often flanked by press coverage that frames them as beneficial for employees because then they'd have to work less... I'm not sure if those articles are genuinely naive or simply propaganda.
This is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people.
The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs and still cling to the "jobs" model because that's all we know. It's the same reason vaccuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done. We never say "great, I can do less now because I have a thing to do it for me." That thing just enables me to fixate on the next thing "to be done." The next dollar to be gained.
A McDonalds robot should free the people of doing that kind of work. But instead those people become "unemployed" and one individual gets another yacht and creates a couple "marketing" jobs that don't actually provide any value in a holistic humanitarian sense.
>It's the same reason vacuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done.
It's true that some of the some of the capacity created by technology was consumed by increasing standards, the data do show a significant reduction in time spent on chores in spite of this.
1965-2011 hours spent on housework decreased 40%, while male housework doubled and female housework halved. The proportion of mothers working went up 90%, but somehow time spent with children went up 70% for men and women, again with improvements in gender equality.
Technology dramatically improved the efficiency of household chores. People invest some of that efficiency into further quality of living improvements or work, and still got to spend more time with their family.
If you go further back in time the differences would be even more stark.
Yes, we can do better. Expectations on parents have gotten ridiculous, and much of this additional time is spent ferrying their children between 10 different extracurriculars. We spend a lot of time chasing more (thanks, dopamine) which could be spent enjoying what we have.
But the lack of understanding that technology and science have led to dramatic improvements in quality of life has led us to start turning our backs on it as a species, and we will pay a huge price for that.
Those statistics are extremely broad, hard to draw much inference from...do they account for the cleaning/maid industry? How has that changed over the same period? It could be possible that the general accumulation of wealth/tech allowed for more people to pay for someone to clean.
The dramatic improvements to quality of life brought by science and tech are undoubtable, it was not my intent to question that. More just that we as people have a hard time with the concept of a goal state. It is about balance. Let's keep creating new and great things to improve our lives, but let's also acknowledge the futility and desperation of an infinite treadmill.
That's part of it, but I think not the whole picture. Many jobs do have some genuine benefits they give the employee (in addition to salary) : practical experience and skill training, but most importantly a certain degree of influence and power: You can't go on strike if you don't have a job.
Those are cold comfort if compensation isn't enough or the job ruins your health or drives you into burnout, but I think their absence becomes important if you talk about popular UBI or "end of work" scenarios.
That's why I think even if we had some friendly tech company that did All The Jobs for free using automation and allowed everyone to live a comfortable life without even the need for an income, and even if we changed the culture such that this was totally fine, it would still be a dystopia, or at least risk very quickly drifting into one: Because while everyone could live a happy, fully consumption-oriented life, they'd have zero influence how to live that life: If the company does everything for you that is to be done, it also has all the knowledge and power to set the rules.
practical experience and skill training, but most importantly a certain degree of influence and power: You can't go on strike if you don't have a job.
People don't have to need these things though. For a lot of people it's all just the means to the end of being able to live comfortably.
Because while everyone could live a happy, fully consumption-oriented life, they'd have zero influence how to live that life:
I don't think most people care much about that. But either way, they have the option to. I don't think humanity will slip into a vegetative dystopia because the default spirit of life is grow, expand, go, go, go, don't stop to think about the bigger picture. There is always curiosity and ambition in the gene pool. But society is jammed up with this model that is low-efficiency for everyone except the people that are financially in a position where they don't have to care (and I include myself at the lower end of that tier).
Site is down to me, but I agree with the argument. I speak for myself: I think AI has removed a lot of small barriers that would naturally slow my work down, increasing dissatisfaction and stress with it. Without barriers, productivity increases and with it, work satisfaction. It's just nice to get things done(tm) faster and at a lower effort due to the quality of the virtual assistant.
This is certainly something I have felt. The idea of spending a day or two debugging a small problem, coming up with the right regex, or setting up boilerplate is all gone. Now it's 30 seconds, and you're right back to the high level "what do I build next" thinking.
Which is great, and has unblocked so much productivity, but I do miss some of the grunt work. I feel like it helped spawn new ideas and gave you some time to think through implementation.
You don't have the epiphany that you're going down a dead end road anymore ("there has to be a better way"). Now codebases will be littered with dead end roads.
Yes, and this a meme I have in my mind of LLM engineers talking to each other and a balloon: "If we could just get the right regex done in a few seconds we'd win the entire global programming community."
Same experience here. spend more hours babysitting AI but able to do 3x the work while i wait. and willing to start new challenges that take a lot of effort without the new tools.
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And yes, I only talked about automation, but the same high-level issues apply to LLMs, but with different downsides: you need to check the LLM output which becomes a bigger topic, and then potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more.
Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more.
I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more issues you'll find. Suddenly we needed to achieve 4x more, and that meant finding 4x more problems. The thing about automation is that it doesn't speed up debugging time. This leads to more stress.
One senior guy took me aside and said management would not reward me for my efforts, but will get the benefit of all my work.
He was right.
Eventually, I left because I automate things to make my life easier. If it's not making my life easier (or getting me more money), why should I do it?
Since then, whenever I get a new job, I test the waters. If the outcome is like that first job, I stop working on process improvements, and look for another job.
When it was done, there were no bugs. Not a single issue. They asked the embedded guys how they had accomplished it. They said "we didn't know bugs were allowed".
Many people have never authored or even been involved with a high quality piece of software, so they just don't know what it looks like, or why you'd want it.
You'd think that someone in the exec team would have some personal pride and ownership in the code and would want to flush out bugs and improve quality. But nah.
The reward for good work is more work. If they company wanted to pay you more, they would've already done so. If the company wanted automation, they would put that as a job description and pay accordingly (or more likely outsource it and get a shitty result for 10x the price - despite never willing to pay you anywhere close to that even if you were to give them the fully working solution).
AI actually has some ability to improve things. At least when I think about manufacturing and farming. When you produced at such a massive scale you could never individually inspect every potato, widget, or target every weed etc. You could produce WAAAY more but more bad products went out the door. But now you can inspect every individual thing. May not extend to every industry though.
Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.
I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever.
> Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem.
This is broadly false. Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs.
Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. Once that leap happens it becomes accepted as the new normal, so it never feels like automation is making changes.
This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted.
CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechanics of CNC, we can't manufacture something more precise than we can measure.
LLMs are inverted; it's incredibly easy to get them to output something, and hard to validate that the output is correct.
The analogy falls apart if you apply that same constraint to CNC and PCB machines. If they each had a 10% chance of creating a faulty product in a way that can only be detected by the purchaser of the final product, we would probably go back to hand-assembling them.
> Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward.
I suspect there will be a spectrum, as there historically has been. Some companies will use AI heavily and get crazy velocity, but have poor stability as usage uncovers bugs in a poorly understood codebase because AI wrote most of it. Others will use AI less heavily and ship fewer features, but have fewer severe bugs and be more able to fix them because of deep familiarity with the codebase.
I suspect stability wins for many use cases, but there are definitely spaces where being down for a full day every month isn't the end of the world.
I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply.
>At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes.
I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation.
People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute.
If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines
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For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt.
There are a lot of tasks that you do not do often enough to commit them fully to memory, but every time you do them it takes a lot of time. LLM-based automation really speeds up these tasks. Similar for refactors that an IDE or language server cannot do, some kinds of scripts etc.
On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code.
It’s all about getting a feeling for the right opportunities. As with any tool.
> On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code.
See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test run, modify as necessary, and ultimately let the AI loose and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, I probably have a script kicking around somewhere that will rename a batch of files, and I can modify it pretty quickly to match a new pattern, test it out, and be confident that it will do exactly what I expect it to do.
Is one of these paths faster than the other? I'm not sure; it's probably a wash. The AI would definitely be faster if I was confident I could trust it. But I'm not sure how I can cross that threshold in my mind and be confident that I can trust it.
There are definitely many things which when automated loses out on some edge cases. But most folks don't need artisanal soap.
I hear this so often these days and I quite do not understand this part. If I trust LLM do to "X" that means i have made a determination that LLM is top-notch with "X" (if I did not make this determination then letting LLMs do X would be lunacy) and henceforth I do not give a flying hoot to know "X" and if my "X" skills deteriorate it is same thing as when we got equipment to tend to our corn fields and my corn picking skills deteriorated. of course I am being facetious here but you get the point.
Without automation we would all be living in poverty.
> potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more.
There were some papers from microsoft that highlighted this point https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.
All of my grandparents retired in their 50s with fat pensions and then lived into their late 80s without having ever stepped foot on a college campus.
Everyone I grew up with or met via work that is my age or younger has 1-3 more degrees than their parents and grandparents and are significantly worse off when it comes to standard life milestones like buying a home or ever having children.
We are not becoming relatively more prosperous as a people. We have more bread and circuses and less roofs over our heads on average
Too many people are trying to jump to the end when they don't even have their day to day managed or efficient today can tend to carry forward efficiency in a number of business workflows.
Checking the LLM output is required when it's not consistent, in many cases maintaining the benefit requires the human to know more on the subject than the LLM.
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The folks at the top know how susceptible we are to being nerd-sniped and how readily we will build these things for them.
First things were made by hand, slowly - they were expensive and you could make a living making things.
Now those things are made in factories.
And they are 99% automated - like where software is going.
And whats left is to be a mindless factory worker doing repetitive things all day for a living wage.
But hey, you are so productive - now you make 100k items in a day. Must feel nice.
I'm seeing amount of changes needed to produce new features when coding with these AI tools constantly increasing, due to the absence of a proper foundation, and due to the willingness of people to accept it, with the idea that 'we can change it quickly'.
It has become acceptable to push those changes in a PR and present them as your own, filled with filler comments that are instant tech debt, because they just repeat the code.
And while I actually don't care who writes the code, I do expect the PR author to properly understand the code and most importantly, the impact on the codebase.
In my role as a mentor I now spend a lot of time looking at things written and wonder: Did the author write this, or did they AI? Because if the code is wrong, this question changes how the conversation goes.
It also impacts the kind of energy I'm willing to put in into educating the other person as to how things can be improved.
Forces the change in coding practice.
Which is a great idea until your superior asks why you're holding back the vibe coders and crippling their 100x productivity by rejecting their PRs instead of just going with the flow.
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I am now able to single-handedly create webapp MVPs, one of which is getting traction. If anything actually takes-off, there will certainly be need for a real dev to take over. Also, my commits are not "vibe coded." I have read every single loc, and found so many issues that I am stunned that "vibe coding" is actually a thing. I do let the models run wild on prototypes though.
I think that I happen to be in some magical sweet spot as a person who knows the words, kept up with tech, but not the syntax of framework xyz.
I thought this sweet spot was very transient, and I am very happy that the tools appear to be reaching a plateau for now, so I still have at least another year of being useful.
Since agentic dev tools arrived, I am having the time of my life while gladly working 60hrs per week.
I realize that I am an outlier, but is anyone else in this same boat? If you have product ideas, is this not the best time ever to build? All of our ideas are being indirectly subsidized by billions of VC & FAANG dollars. That is pretty freaking cool.
Yep. I have a computer science background but have always been "the most technical product management/marketing guy in the room". Now I'm having lots of fun building a SaaS and a mobile app to my standards, plus turning out micro-projects like pwascore.com in a day or two.
It turns out that I love designing/architecting products, just not the grind-y coding bits. Because I create lots of tests, use code analysis tools, etc., I'm confident that I'm creating higher quality code than (for example) what most outsourced coders are creating without LLMs.
I am getting paid. I was able to resurrect a startup that failed 8 years ago. Back then, we tried to bootstrap with a very nice off-shore dev for the MVP, that's all we could afford. The iteration period was ~24hrs. That period is now minutes. You know who that helps? Every startup who didn't nail the idea from go, and requires iteration.
I can now meet with a user on Monday, show them the little feature they wanted by Tuesday... like a real full stack dev would have done 4 years ago. Is it ready for b2c scale on Tuesday? No, but that's not my goal.
I understand all the LLM-dev derision to some extent. But if you are not using the billions of non-gate-kept subsidies given to all of us right now, then either you are working on real computer science problems, or you are wasting what seems like the biggest opportunity of my lifetime.
This is the greatest time to build a startup ever. However, if you are stuck making that money for the boss, then yeah.. that's probably annoying. And yes, it is scary as hell that we are all going to be replaced, in possibly very short order. This is the time for every dev to learn to be a ... eeek... product dev, and not a just a software dev. I think Product Dev will become a thing.
[0] https://medium.com/@xcf.seetan/adventures-on-the-ai-coding-s...
It seems relatively obvious to me that if a society has work as its cultural core then no amount of productivity increase will get rid of work - it would destabilize the entire society before it could do so.
I just wrote this comment in another thread, but it fits here too:
The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money.
You, as an employee, are just means to an end. "The company" doesn't care about you and you will not reap the benefits of whatever efficiency improvements the future brings.
The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs and still cling to the "jobs" model because that's all we know. It's the same reason vaccuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done. We never say "great, I can do less now because I have a thing to do it for me." That thing just enables me to fixate on the next thing "to be done." The next dollar to be gained.
A McDonalds robot should free the people of doing that kind of work. But instead those people become "unemployed" and one individual gets another yacht and creates a couple "marketing" jobs that don't actually provide any value in a holistic humanitarian sense.
It's true that some of the some of the capacity created by technology was consumed by increasing standards, the data do show a significant reduction in time spent on chores in spite of this.
1965-2011 hours spent on housework decreased 40%, while male housework doubled and female housework halved. The proportion of mothers working went up 90%, but somehow time spent with children went up 70% for men and women, again with improvements in gender equality.
Technology dramatically improved the efficiency of household chores. People invest some of that efficiency into further quality of living improvements or work, and still got to spend more time with their family.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter...
If you go further back in time the differences would be even more stark.
Yes, we can do better. Expectations on parents have gotten ridiculous, and much of this additional time is spent ferrying their children between 10 different extracurriculars. We spend a lot of time chasing more (thanks, dopamine) which could be spent enjoying what we have.
But the lack of understanding that technology and science have led to dramatic improvements in quality of life has led us to start turning our backs on it as a species, and we will pay a huge price for that.
The dramatic improvements to quality of life brought by science and tech are undoubtable, it was not my intent to question that. More just that we as people have a hard time with the concept of a goal state. It is about balance. Let's keep creating new and great things to improve our lives, but let's also acknowledge the futility and desperation of an infinite treadmill.
Since 1965? Except paying bills via the internet instead of in some bank office, what chore has become more efficient since 1965.
Regarding robot vacuum cleaners my take is that picking up stuff from the floor is what takes the most time anyway.
Those are cold comfort if compensation isn't enough or the job ruins your health or drives you into burnout, but I think their absence becomes important if you talk about popular UBI or "end of work" scenarios.
That's why I think even if we had some friendly tech company that did All The Jobs for free using automation and allowed everyone to live a comfortable life without even the need for an income, and even if we changed the culture such that this was totally fine, it would still be a dystopia, or at least risk very quickly drifting into one: Because while everyone could live a happy, fully consumption-oriented life, they'd have zero influence how to live that life: If the company does everything for you that is to be done, it also has all the knowledge and power to set the rules.
People don't have to need these things though. For a lot of people it's all just the means to the end of being able to live comfortably.
Because while everyone could live a happy, fully consumption-oriented life, they'd have zero influence how to live that life:
I don't think most people care much about that. But either way, they have the option to. I don't think humanity will slip into a vegetative dystopia because the default spirit of life is grow, expand, go, go, go, don't stop to think about the bigger picture. There is always curiosity and ambition in the gene pool. But society is jammed up with this model that is low-efficiency for everyone except the people that are financially in a position where they don't have to care (and I include myself at the lower end of that tier).
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Which is great, and has unblocked so much productivity, but I do miss some of the grunt work. I feel like it helped spawn new ideas and gave you some time to think through implementation.
Yes, and this a meme I have in my mind of LLM engineers talking to each other and a balloon: "If we could just get the right regex done in a few seconds we'd win the entire global programming community."
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