ed finally coming around to the coding use case, and even then he believes they're mostly used for summarizing and searching
we are so early
Readit Newsej88 commented on The AI Bubble Is an Information War wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bu... · Posted by u/spking
ej88 commented on An AI agent coding skeptic tries AI agent coding, in excessive detail minimaxir.com/2026/02/ai-... · Posted by u/minimaxir
Thanks Max! This was a really interesting article and closely matches my own experience with how the agents have been progressing
one of the takeaways I get when reading skilled engineers' experiences with these tools is that they essentially offer leverage, and the more skill someone already has the higher their ceiling will be
They generalized "the market." I know a lot of out of work SWEs right now.
is there any data about the overall job market on whether it's been good or bad? genuinely curious the most recent data point shows a rebound https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
and fwiw i dont know any swes struggling to find work personally
swe is so broad and in bubbles its hard to get an objective analysis
I'm still not sure I quite agree with this AI replacement premise.
Assuming the premise of profitability and a sound business then this sounds like a failure of product if anything. It just doesn't follow for me that when you see more productive teams the immediate answer is that you need less people. Especially for silicon valley types this seems antithetical to scaling.
Thinking of it in two ways
- Yes you could (in theory but I still argue not 100%) cut workforce and have a smaller # of people do the work that everyone else was doing
Or
- You could keep your people, who are ostensibly more productive with AI, and get even more work done
Why would you ever choose the first?
i feel similarly. suppose ai makes people more productive:
1. companies that are not doing well (slow growth, losing to competition etc) or are in a monopoly and are under pressure to save in the short term are going to use the added productivity to reduce their opex
2. companies that are doing well (growth, in competitive markets) will get even more work done and can't hire enough people
my hunch is block is not doing as well as they seem to be
Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
Yeah, you get 5 months of severance and a bunch of devices and such; but, does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?
If the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into this job market? Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric. If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that.
This seems … wrong.
obviously he's going to posture his company as growing and doing well, but clearly not enough for the board and shareholders given their headcount growth from zirp
some companies are in the position to go for moonshots and block hasn't panned out
It seems like the tech job market is exactly the opposite of this right now? Could you be more specific?
trimodal swe compensation (elite, big tech, everyone else) extends to the job markets too
I spent an hour with Gemini this morning trying to get instructions to compile a common open source tool for an uncommon platform.
It was an hour of pasting in error messages and getting back "Aha! Here's the final change you need to make!"
Underwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it.
But, even if I'm wrong, we were told that COBOL would make programming redundant. Then UML was going to accelerate development. Visual programming would mean no more mistakes.
All of them are in the coding mix somewhere, and I suspect LLMs will be.
> write an article dismissing ai
> usage is copy pasting code back and forth with gemini
the jokes write themselves
We contact support services to fix material problems. 'This booking is wrong.' 'I want a refund for that.' AI systems aren't empowered to solve these problems. At best they can provide information. If the answer is information - the user can likely already find it online themselves (often from a better AI model than they're going to find running your support line). If they're calling, they most often want something done.