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So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.
Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.
Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.
The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.
At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.
Of course, it's so hard to tell what the next big discovery or changes to the nature of world society might push things in one direction or another.
Your analogy isn’t necessarily wrong, but it might ignore the extreme importance of nurses. Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.
So lots of jobs for nurses.
Maybe for a very loose definition of medical facilities that includes assisted living facilities.
But for example in an ER, nurses come and go with very rapid turnover and it’s common to staff with temporary travel nurses.
> nurses tend to do most of the actual work
Techs, environmental services, phlebotomists, respiratory therapists, CNAs etc. probably do more of the “work” than nurses.
> highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors
Only if they go back to school and become a Nurse Practitioner or CRNA, but in that case they are no longer functioning as a nurse. Even then they are general operating under the direct supervision of a physician.
> Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors.
Only in absolute numbers. It’s far harder to hire a doctor than it is a nurse. I know an ex-NFL player who works as a physician recruiter.
It may take vastly more training but on average a full annual physical provides less benefit on average than a 30 second vaccination requiring minimal training. Value creation and skill are wildly different things in the medical profession.
I spent some time in the military, and my expression of medics and nurses are mostly derived from that experience, where I'm referring to a nurse as just any warm body who is able to provide aid.
For professional nurses who might work in hospitals, I'm sure that many of them have significant knowledge and experience to be very effective in providing medical assistance.
In such a future there would be a handful of lucky well paid artisans, a healthy community of hobbyists, and the overwhelming population of the planet who would be perfectly content to delegate their entire software diet to generative superplatforms that script themselves to perform any arbitrary software function. The idea of paying for individual bespoke software programs would become an anachronism for an era where software was so difficult to produce that entire teams spent years painstakingly tweaking programs to spec.
Wishful thinking by the managerial class. At best they can vibe code but they can’t verify that what was written is correct.
So I think it would be more comparable to something like literacy. There was a time when that was a fairly uncommon and highly valued skill. Now the guy flipping burgers or pouring a cup of coffee is also almost certainly fully literate. And in fact many jobs have evolved in a way such that it became mandatory, but only because it was already ubiquitous. I expect to see the same thing with software. The industry of producing software that do fairly simple tasks will probably die, but in its place will be a vast array of heavily customized and oft iterated software for companies and people achieving their own stuff.
The mobile industry is a perfect example of where this will be massive shift. Right now there's a million mobile apps to execute extremely basic functionality on phones, but it's loaded with advertising, begging, and general annoyances. As are the app stores themselves. When you can make software that does that in a few minutes with a single prompt, and people realize this (as we're already practically at this point), then that will be the end of those apps. This is because the one thing LLMs have shown is that natural language interfaces are way less friction than using search, whether on the web or an app store. And so there will be a time when it will be lower friction to simply just quickly build your own app to do [whatever] than dealing with somebody trying to monetize an alarm clock.
I don’t understand how people can say this and then continue talking about software. So we’re saying machines can now casually do complex and cognitively demanding jobs like software development (or 90% of all white-collar jobs out there) and we’re NOT worried about the lynching mob going door to door and hanging IT people on lampposts? And I’m being serious, the impact this would have on societies would be unprecedented.
> Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.
Nursing and being a physician aren't really the same thing at all, and they require different skill sets, it's not just "having more knowledge". Just because someone is an amazing surgeon doesn't mean they would also make a good nurse.
> Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.
I think you just described a staff swe
> The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.
These people already exist. They are the business analysts who know SQL and maybe Python, R, or VBA. Marketing people who work on Wordpress landing pages. People doing systems integration, the IT department, sales engineers, and on, and on, and on.
> At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.
You said it, no code/low-code has existed forever.
The medical field is also going to change though. Massively. Because people are going to realize you don’t need to pay someone $400k per year to hand out advice about moderate exercise and which antibiotic is appropriate for a sneeze-cough with yellow mucus.
Regulation isn’t going to prevent this. AI is already way too easily accessible to ever rein it in again. Not to mention that the US now has serious competition from a hostile country, so they can regulate their own AIs all they want without it making a difference in practice.
Who is going to realize that?
The same forces that prevent you from walking into a pharmacy and asking for antibiotics based on what you found on WebMD will prevent you from doing it with a ChatGPT printout in hand. Lawyers and doctors are the best-known examples of industries that are in control of who gets admitted to practice the profession.
What upset me a bit were phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me.
I have read so much Ai generated text recently, that I developed some AI-fatigue or AI-burnout, and I’m wondering if that might hit more fields - making more humans reject Ai work.
To be clear, I still like the text and I don’t know if it was written (partially) by Ai or not - but it’s this uncanny feeling I got reading it.
- i would assume it is reasonable that anyone comes and see what other posts a person has written except you cant find that page anywhere linked
According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall.
Sabotage behaviours include entering proprietary information into AI tools, using non-approved AI tools, refusing to use AI tools or outputs, ignoring guidelines or best practices, intentionally generating low-quality outputs, refusing to take AI training and tampering with performance metrics to make AI appear to underperform.
This is true as a sentiment, but my understanding is that the majority of students are overwhelmingly using AI for ~everything. If a thing provides massive utility people will use it.
Very open definition of sabotage.
The only question is what next?
Our only hope is to teach the AI to meld with our bodies and use them for gestation, energy or hibernation. The alternative is sustenance.
Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work".
Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for their basic needs. But if machines ensure that too, then wealth itself, as a reserve, is unnecessary.
How many man-hours go into various parts of the advertising distribution chain? Though a certain fraction of that energy goes to connecting people with goods and services they might find valuable, most of it goes into shifting numbers around for people that already don't personally have to worry about money.
We don't need to find endless ways for people to spin wheels, but as long as we're worried about "jobs," we will. We just need to find the social structures to provide people with basic needs and reserve "work" for things that are vital to society or truly inspired.
We will never automate all work so we with half of humanity doing nothing of value it will be a struggle for the people who do nothing of value to convince people to do work for them.
We can see it now where products dont target the people without money. There is no point because they cant give you any reward so instead you do your work for the people that can give you something in return. We can use the government to stimulate and balance this a bit but at a certain point the number gets to high and things collapse.
Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive.
This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...
These "needs" are sometimes enforced by the systems and government so that people don't stay away from the work and "economy" keeps churning. The housing prices could be a way to keep the people working for loan payments.
Instant foods, nursing homes for elderly, creches, roads, commuter trains - are all ways to have more workers and make them focused on work.
"Work" doesn't exist to keep people busy, it exists to keep them alive.
I can't wait to be kept in agistment by my overlords, fed on treacle and oats, ridden in circles once a fortnight, and shot when I break a leg.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/United-States-Farm-based...
Luxury horse living during the heyday of working horses and pit ponies, "horse power" wasn't left ideal for a fortnight.
> How many horses do you see now that the world
Personally, a surprising number perhaps, there's a pony club at the top of my street in town, and the area is still littered with horses and other livestock.
This isn't my area, but it's not dissimilar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45623799
Full size image: https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/a26664f6500a7c74...
For example, all the work like translations that used to be done by humans, now it is a CMS AI feature.
Secondly teams setup.
It used to be we did everything ourselves for development, then cloud, SaaS products and serverless decreased the teams size required for delivery.
Now with AI, there is an even greater push for low code/no code tooling, with agents, leaving the actual programming left for MCP tools that might not yet be available for the project.
Thus you get a team of five doing what used to be about 15 a decade ago.
I didn't do fewer hours in these weeks but had time to explore and innovate a little.
But it's at my day job, and it's because I was able to write a prompt which automates having Copilot review uploaded scanned PDFs of invoices with checks (and the bank line obscured with a pen, so no PII) and then write a batch file which renames the files per a file-naming convention, removing the need to open them in batches of 50, find the Invoice ID, re-save using that filename, then quit and re-launch Adobe Acrobat (if left running, eventually I run into a bug where it stops saving files), then run a .bat file which renames based on Invoice ID as a filename.
Problem of course is I've been running into a limit of number of allowed files per 24 hr. period.
Even if it's not less work, it feels like less effort.
> It’s funny. I was looking at my GH activity graph. It’s been pretty solid green, for years. I stay busy.
> But since I’ve been using an LLM, it’s been bright green.
> I always check in code manually. I don’t let the LLM do it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843115
The problem is they are now paying me more, plus paying for the cost of using the AI, and the needless complexity also slows down the employees. So more costs there as well, any future debugging is going to cost far more and at the end of the day they are getting less quality on the core function but far more presentation data that is essentially meaningless.
- Work is shifting from building/doing to evaluating, judging, and steering — that's where human value will concentrate.
Other supporting points. ------
- No lab milestone or "RSI breakthrough" will suddenly eliminate jobs — economic impact unfolds gradually over decades.
- Reliability, not raw capability, is the real bottleneck holding back AI automation today.
- Historically, making work cheaper/faster (ATMs, radiology, coding) has grown employment, not destroyed it.
- Superintelligence claims misunderstand human intelligence, which is itself amplified by tools like AI ("co-superintelligence").
It is not a good idea to compress articles like this but there are many of these opinions to read and trying to get to the point quickly to uncover new viewpoints.
There will always be new, hard problems to work on. AI will not, and can not eliminate that.
Does he want to fund the arts? Humanities?
> A battle of two narratives > Build wealth before AI obviates our skills > Build skills, agency, taste, judgement
both narratives are portrayed as being odds with each other but, I can't come up with a single "build wealth" scenario that doesn't involve building skills, agency, taste and judgement.
what am I missing ?
I would doubt however that this would be an 'Equals' or 'Implies' scenario. Let go of seeing either of them as binary, and then not even as scalers.
But we already do have have some kind of measurement of most of these types of side factors, and they actually aren't at zero and are increasing rapidly. So the implication that they will not be human level until decades from now is just (hopeful?) speculation or fuzzy thinking.
To me this looks like a really academic and official sounding version of the same quasi-religious hopium that usually defends the sanctity of the human. He is essentially saying that there is just something so special about humans that it will never be reproduced in a machine. It's very similar to dualism (and in many people actually is religious dualism). No AI is going to have human creativity or judgement. Not anytime soon. Why? Well, we all just _know_ that's not possible. Okay, maybe in a couple of decades (but they don't necessarily believe that anyway). Why would that take decades? Well we all can just _tell_ it's no where close, right? Because AI of today just isn't special like humans.
Aside from that worldview issue, I think that people still are not taking seriously or internalizing the concept of exponential improvement.
Computing efficiency gains can actually level off. In fact, they have many, many times before. But they always tilt back up again when we invent the next approach to get beyond the current level. This is how it has been for 90 years.
There are multiple ways that we continue to see huge gains in AI software, architecture, and hardware. There are huge efficiency gains available still as we move towards more radical fully compute in memory and/or analog approaches and other options like models implemented in hardware.
If you think it is different, just think of how many people write books professionally, or even publish online.
Once the noise settles down a bit and boardroom shakes off their delusions as you can see in rehiring in Ford and Zuck who was very bull on AI remark about "not being it". It will be just the same, but different.
Ford: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o IBM: https://qz.com/companies-rehiring-workers-ai-layoffs-automat...
AI can slop fork or clone existing software well, but a clone of an existing game is pointless, it's basically guaranteed to be derivative and worse than the original game, and games aren't so expensive that you can't just buy the original. AI can't know if new mechanics or angles to an existing genre will feel good to play, or if a new genre is fun, that requires a human to experience the game in its totality.
Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding, and if an indy game crashes nobody is getting paged.
I sort of worry about things like AI figuring out scripts so well that even multi-tier support work is gone. And learning how to write fiction or create foods so in accordance to our tastes (sugar, fat, etc with food, exactly what each of us is interested in, with writing) that we even lose those truly human creative jobs. Might not ever wanna leave those bubbles.
So much of the human drive is exploration and why and what if. Assuming everyone in the world can have no money problems, what will AI not be able to figure out? Will we enjoy the equivalent of a major breakthrough if an AI solves it in five minutes, or just the outcome? Why learn things?
AI could be a horrible jailor. And better at cancelling than any perhaps sager Gen Z or millenial. Bears some caution to be wary of this and where that power sinkhole will go.
But then, I still think the previous AI winters were more a result of sense and caution than most of us know, and we cannot fathom our species' ways of reasoning/thought processes the way we did as a species thirty, fifty, eighty years ago. Erring on the side of caution is not a terrible thing.
I mean, I have worked and work with AI, but it seems weird for us as a species not to have placed guardrails to prevent us from wiping one anothers' careers and relationships out. What will we talk about? If our generative AIs should be allowed to date?
Again, I am assuming a fast, though not sudden, acceleration that would compound, and sooner than most probably think.
If AI is subject to private ownership in a competitive market between competing suppliers, it will be like better cars, we’ll just drive faster.
Power consumption will be a limiting factor in those countries relying on intermittent, weather dependent power generation with no base load. Especially if users prefer Apple’s privacy first AI on edge devices.
Hopefully in western countries it can encourage more young women to bear three children before they turn 35. Young men have to pick up their game and create an environment to redirect their suicidal empathy into more productive pursuits.
“Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely un-skilled labour?” - Albert Crossfield 1954
However, this following quote has a simple reason that I don’t see anywhere in the article or framework:
“”” Why is there a huge gap between what people in various occupations could be using AI for and what they’re actually using it for? One reason could be that people are slow to adopt technology, and that’s certainly part of our framework. “””
I would like to add a reason: that the Silicon Valley companies who developed the LLMs are brigands: cognizant of their actions, they have stolen (and continue to steal) the world’s copyrighted material and are selling it back to the masses and the politicians as if they are the arbiters of information itself.
Specifically responding to the quoted question, I could be using Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or DeepSeek or any other to have come up with this comment, or to write emails, or to implement my Python for me, etc., but I use none of them for anything. Doing business with brigands is a choice, and a choice that I hope becomes less and less palatable so that the financial, political, social, and moral fever that is our zeitgeist finally breaks.