AIUI this might not be as bigger problem as you’d imagine. Aerodynamics dominate most of the resistance at medium to highway speeds. This was discussed in the recent Rivian R1T cannonball run conversion videos where they doubled the battery capacity (and therefore drastically increased the weight of the vehicle) without substantially affecting efficiency.
Yes, weight alone is not that important for fuel economy at highway speeds. Aerodynamic efficiency of a vehicle is determined by the cross section area + drag coefficient. A 90s Honda Civic has a worse drag coefficient but a vastly smaller cross section than the Rivian, so it needs to move less air out of the way to drive forward. Smaller EVs can go farther with smaller batteries, but the American consumer has decided for one reason or another that cars must be tall, and therefore less aerodynamically efficient.
This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang).
I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there.
If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.
For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).
Kind of. But the outcomes likely do not benefit the masses. People "accessing AI labor" is just a race to the bottom. Maybe some new tools get made or small businesses get off the ground, but ultimately this "AI labor" is a machine that is owned by capitalists. They dictate its use, and they will give or deny people access to the machine as it benefits them. Maybe they get the masses dependent on AI tools that are currently either free or underpriced, as alternatives to AI wither away unable to compete on cost, then the prices are raised or the product enshittified. Or maybe AI will be massively useful to the surveillance state and data brokers. Maybe AI will simply replace a large percentage of human labor in large corporations, leading to mass unemployment.
I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own it, not us.
As someone who has leaned fully into AI tooling this resonates. The current environment is an oligopoly so I'm learning how to leverage someone else's tool. However, in this way, I don't think LLMs are a radical departure from any proprietary other tool (e.g. Photoshop).
Indeed. Do you know how many small consultancies are out there which are "Microsoft shops"? An individual could become a millionaire by founding their own and delivering value for a few high-roller clients.
Nobody says there's no money to make anymore. But the space for that is limited, no matter how many millions hustle, there's only 100 spots in the top 100.
what makes you think that's actually possible? maybe if you really had the connections and sales experience etc...
but also, if that were possible, then why wouldn't prices go down? why would the value of such labor stay so high if the same thing can be done by other individuals?
I saw it happen more back in the day compared to now. Point being, nobody batted an eyelash at being entirely dependent on some company's proprietary tech. It was how money was made in the business.
Software development was a race to the bottom for the majority of developers aside from the major tech companies for a decade. I’m seeing companies on the enterprise/corp dev side - where most developers work - stagnate for a decade and not keep up with inflation in tier 2 cities - again where most developers work.
That is a fiction. None of us can waste tens of thousands of dollars whipping out a C compiler or web browser on a whim to test things.
If these tools improve to the point of being able to write real code, the financial move for the agent runners is to charge far more than they are now but far less than the developers being replaced.
It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place.
Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.
Originally spinners and weavers were quite happy. One spun, the other weaved, and the cloth was made.
Then along game the flying shuttle and the weavers were even happier - producing twice as much cloth and needing half as many spinners.
The the spinning jenny came along and spinners (typically the wife of the weaver) were basically unemployed, so much so that the workers took to breaking into the factories to destroy the jennys.
But the weavers were on the same track. They no longer owned their own equipment in their own home, they were centralised in factories using equipment owned by the industrialists.
Over the entire period first spinners, then weavers, lost their jobs, even with the massive explosion in output.
Meanwhile lower skilled jobs (typically with barely paid children) abounded (with no safety requirements)
Fortunately in the 1800s English industrialists had some amount of virtue, and the workers organised into unions, so economic damage wasn't as widespread as it could have been.
This power imbalance between the owners and workers was only really arrested after the world wars - first with ww1 where many owner's sent their children to battle and lost their heirs, then later with strong government reacting to the public post ww2.
If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point.
In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be false as it has been historically so far.
> If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point
I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it.
The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there."
"full effect" is a pretty squishy term.
My more concrete claim (and similar to "Ask again in 6 months. A year.") is the following.
With every new frontier model released [0]:
1. the level of technical expertise required to achieve a given task decreases, or
2. the difficulty/complexity/size of a task that a inexperienced user can accomplish increases.
I think either of these two versions is objectively true looking back and will continue being true going forward. And, the amount that it increases by is not trivial.
[0] or every X months to account for tweaks, new tooling (Claude Code is not even a year old yet!), and new approaches.
The transition from assembly to C, as I remember it, didn't involve using automated IP theft of scraped licensed source code to generate slop that no human has understood up until it's thrown at a code reviewer, though.
Six months ago, we _literally did not have Claude Code_. We had MCP, A2A and IDE integrations, but we didn't have an app where you could say "build me an ios app that does $thing" and have it build the damn thing start to finish.
Three months ago, we didn't have Opus 4.5, which almost everyone is saying is leaps and bounds better than previous models. MCP and A2A are mostly antiquated. We also didn't have Claude Desktop, which is trying to automate work in general.
Three _weeks_ ago, we didn't have Clawdbot/Openclaw, which people are using to try and automate as much of their lives as possible...and succeeding.
Things are changing outrageously fast in this space.
Society was been better without the internet. We have lost all our privacy, our third spaces, the concept of doing hobbies for fun instead of as content, and much more.
That's a "yet you participate in society" argument. It's not at all contradictory to use this communication medium to describe my perception of its negative impacts.
I guess the right word here is "disenfranchising".
Valuation is a relative thing based mostly of availability. Adding capital makes labor more valuable, not less. This is not the process happening here, and it's not clear what direction the valuation is going.
... even if we take for granted that any of this is really happening.
If the human race is wiped out by global warming I'm not so sure I would agree with this statement. Technology rarely fails to have downsides that are only discovered in hindsight IMO.
Or perhaps they would have advanced the cause of labor and prevented some of the exploitation from the ownership class. Depends on which side of the story you want to tell. The slur Luddite is a form of historical propaganda.
Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.
Trickle down economics has never worked in the way it was advertised to the masses, but it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.
problem today is that there is no "sink" for money to go to when it flows upwards. we have resorted to raising interest rates to curb inflation, but that doesn't fix the problem, it just gives them an alternative income source (bonds/fixed income)
I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.
so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.
You can reject the ideas in the aggregate. Regardless, for the individual, your skills are being devalued, and what used to be a reliable livelihood tied to a real craft is going to disappear within a decade or so. Best of luck
"Except the Luddites didn’t hate machines either—they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves."
Their valuation is dumb no matter what but you've got to think it's based off of the potential for B2B / gov revenue, not monetizing the consumer facing stuff directly.
Which is to say I feel like they're going to use ads on the consumer stuff just to stop bleeding out VC money as quickly, but nobody's deluded enough to think this is going to bring them much closer to profitability overall.
I try to fix it by having multiple opencode instances running on multiple issues from different projects at the same time, but it feels like I'm just herding robots.
I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself.
The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it.
So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed.
I also miss writing code. It was fun. Wrangling the robots is interesting in its own way, but it's not the same. Something has been lost.
You hire the junior developer because you can get them to learn your codebase and business domain at a discount, and then reap their productivity as they turn senior. You don’t get that with an LLM since it only operates on whatever is in its context.
(If you prefer to hire seniors that’s fine too - my rates are triple that of a junior and you’re paying full price for the time it takes me learning your codebase, and from experience it takes me at least 3 months to reach full productivity.)
Plenty of places, actually. Maybe not so much in the companies people here tend to be familiar with. It happens all the time where I work (smaller company far from the Bay area).
Because a junior developer doesn't stay a junior developer forever. The value of junior developers has never been the code they write. In fact, in my experience they're initially a net negative, as more senior developers take time to help them learn. But it's an investment, because they will grow into more senior developers.
The question really is what you think the long term direction of SWE as a profession is. If we need juniors later and senior's become expensive that's a nice problem to have mostly and can be fixed via training and knowledge transfer. Conversely people being hired and trained, especially when young into a sinking industry isn't doing anyone any favors.
While I think both sides have an argument on the eventual SWE career viability there is a problem. The downsides of hiring now (costs, uncertainity of work velocity, dry backlogs, etc) are certain; the risk of paying more later is not guaranteed and maybe not as big of an issue. Also training juniors doesn't always benefit the person paying.
* If you think long term that we will need seniors again (industry stays same size or starts growing again) given the usual high ROI on software most can afford to defer that decision till later. Goes back to pre-AI calculus and SWE's were expensive then and people still payed for them.
* If you think that the industry shrinks then its better to hold off so you get more out of your current staff, and you don't "hire to fire". Hopefully the industry on average shrinks in proportion to natural retirement of staff - I've seen this happen for example in local manufacturing where the plant lives but slowly winds down over time and as people retire they aren't replaced.
> The question really is what you think the long term direction of SWE as a profession is. If we need juniors later and senior's become expensive that's a nice problem to have mostly and can be fixed via training and knowledge transfer. Conversely people being hired and trained, especially when young into a sinking industry isn't doing anyone any favors.
Yes exactly!
What will SWE look like in 1 year? 5 years? 10?
Hiring juniors implies you're building something that's going to last long enough that the cost of training them will pay off. And hiring now implies that there's some useful knowledge/skill you can impart upon them to prepare them.
I think two things are true: there will be way fewer developer type jobs, full stop. And I also think whatever "developers" are / do day to day will be completely alien from what we do now.
If I "zoom out" and put my capitalist had on, this is the time to stop hiring and figure out who you already have who is capable of adapting. People who don't adapt will not have a role.
> If you think that the industry shrinks then its better to hold off so you get more out of your current staff, and you don't "hire to fire". Hopefully the industry on average shrinks in proportion to natural retirement of staff - I've seen this happen for example in local manufacturing where the plant lives but slowly winds down over time and as people retire they aren't replaced.
You can look even closer than that - look at some legacy techs like mainframe / COBOL / etc. Stuff that basically wound down but lasted long enough to keep seniors gainfully employed as they turned off the lights on the way out.
I'm convinced that VMs are the right primitive here, for now. Being able to give an agent full root and passing it in just the stuff you want it to have is super easy and it's extremely foolproof. I have my assistants free to install software, run docker, build their own nested VMs, etc. knowing that the boundary is sound and that no capabilities will ever be sacrificed.
I might switch to LXC to reduce the weight somewhat (easy with incus) but this requires providing a more limited set of tools (i.e. podman instead of docker).
bwrap is great, but you're stuck with the limitations of the environment, which depending on what you're doing may neuter the agent.
I guess in terms of the relative level of stupidity on display, it would be slightly less stupid to build huge reflectors in space than it is to try to build space datacenters, where the electricity can only power specific pieces of equipment that are virtually impossible to maintain (and are typically obsolete within a few years).
> Allowing states to differ wildly was what let bygones be bygones, but no we can't have that anymore, everything nowadays seems to need to be imposed on everyone via 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000 federal laws.
I'm not certain this is a good historical take.
When sates actually had this kind of leeway, they used it to defend chattel slavery, and even after losing a war in support of the institution they still distorted their laws to maintain apartheid.
Were bygones really bygones back in the good 'ol days of race based oppression? Maybe for the gentry, but obviously not for those who were being oppressed.
> Were bygones really bygones back in the good 'ol days of race based oppression? Maybe for the gentry, but obviously not for those who were being oppressed.
You're being far too black and white. There's a lot of space between "allow slavery" and "total federally-mandated conformity."
> I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review.
Even if you "think just as hard" the act of physically writing things down is known to improve recall, so you're skipping a crucial step in understanding.
And when I review code, it's a different process than writing code.
These tradeoffs may be worth it, because we can ask the tools to analyze things for us just as easily as we can ask them to create things for us, but your own knowledge and understanding of the system is absolutely being degraded when working this way.
He (and similarly poorly informed people) would be better served by delegating the research task to somebody who is more capable.
We've got laymen Dunning-Krugering our health policy. This is bad.
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