Ask HN: What skills are future proof in an AI driven job market?

ssunny678 about 5 hours ago 28 comments

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For developers and non-developers alike: What's worth learning today to stay relevant in an AI first world

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Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

kimhjo•about 1 hour ago

Judgment and domain expertise. AI can write the code, but it can't tell you what's worth building or why the architecture will hurt you in two years.

Areena_28•about 3 hours ago

Judgment in ambiguous situations is the one thing that's held up consistently. AI is good at defined tasks, bad at knowing when the task definition itself is wrong.

Also, deep domain knowledge is the other one..... knowing what good output looks like in your field is something models can't fake convincingly at the edges.

fiftyacorn•about 3 hours ago

Communication and networking - i think we'll see devs expected to bridge to the BA role and deliver based on that. So being able to communicate will become more important

sunny678•about 3 hours ago

Yeah! Soft skills is a key skill to learn these days.

10keane•about 1 hour ago

management and critical thinking.

management - it occured to me that giving instructions to agent is very similar to giving instructions to human employees - even the best of them make mistakes.

i learnt that asking claude code to "investigate for 3 potential root causes" is more effective than "investigate the root cause" in bug fix. this blows my mind as i realize that agent can be lazy, can be careless, and we can give better instruction to prevent that.

another reason why i said this is that giving enough context and defining blast boundary is more efficient than hand-holding/micromanaging and checking every tool call for agents. the management skill for human employees also works here.

critical thinking - you just need to have your judgement on the seemingly solid but actually halluncinated agent bs.

Ashbt•about 3 hours ago

Meta skills: https://share.google/aimode/Fhd3GapqYWJ5vBBXo

sunny678•about 3 hours ago

Seems interesting. Thanks for sharing

alegd•about 3 hours ago

knowing how to give AI good context. Thats the skill nobody talks about. I use Claude Code daily and the difference between a lazy prompt and a well structured doc is massive.

also just understanding how the models work. I'm doing an AI masters right now and once you know whats happening under the hood the anxiety disappears.

bottom line: learn it and embrace it.

phillc73•about 4 hours ago

Paramedicine and nursing. These roles will adapt and use AI, but because they're still so hands-on, and there's already a shortage of staff in those roles in general, I don't see job cuts there.

sunny678•about 3 hours ago

Agree, but can't learn it now- I am in a tech space.

phillc73•about 2 hours ago

Plenty of tech happening in that space too.

As examples, check out:

Cosinuss: https://www.cosinuss.com/en/

Medictool: https://www.medic-tool.com/

LifesaverSim: https://www.lifesaversim.com/

cal_dent•about 3 hours ago

Social skills. Same as it ever was. That beats talents/smarts every time in a corporate environment

benj111•about 2 hours ago

Don't you mean sociopathy? Or it that just my autistic side talking?

nicbou•about 2 hours ago

Empathy, getting along with people, seeking mutual benefit are also valuable skills.

hackable_sand•about 2 hours ago

If someone is "learning" those to keep their job then yeah I'd say that's a huge red flag

bayarearefugee•about 3 hours ago

If LLMs have roughly peaked, then everything is safe except for things that are already being eaten away like translation and call center work.

If they haven't and we have hit the exponential growth mark, nothing is safe and even the temporarily "safe jobs" will also suffer greatly from being crunched on both the supply and demand sides (there will be more labor supply for those jobs as the displaced try to flee to safe jobs, there will be less demand for the output of those jobs because the displaced will no longer have income to pay for those goods or services). And LLMs and robots will eventually come for many of those jobs too, likely at a rate that exceeds people's ability to retrain.

Better hope that either things have peaked, or that we can somehow manage to stop treating all forms of socialism as evil or we're going to see the violent unmaking of modern society in our lifetimes.

Krssst•5 minutes ago

Robots require material resources and are quite difficult to produce. I wouldn't be surprised if we go through a period of time were intellectual work is outdated and most people are back to exhausting manual work. Basically, no middle class anymore, just some elites and many manual workers doing what the AI asks. I guess, to those future elites, humans would just be self-reproducing robots. (well robots like those we have now would definitely see use, but I am not sure about the timeline for general-purpose robots that can do many things including assemble themselves).

I don't have a strong belief this will happen however, and I hope it does not.

KetoManx64•about 5 hours ago

Plumbing and electrical work

Areena_28•about 3 hours ago

damm true haha

ensocode•about 3 hours ago

small scale farming to get your kids fed

mykowebhn•about 4 hours ago

Restaurant work

SilentM68•about 4 hours ago

Psychology, psychiatry, medical, construction, auto repair, at least in the short term. The jury is still out on the long-term view which is a bit hazy at the moment :(

cantrevealname•about 3 hours ago

I agree with construction and auto repair, but why psychology and psychiatry? If there's anything that's perfect for LLMs, it self-diagnosis and self-treatment by chatting with them. Other than prescribing drugs, an AI system could do everything a psychologist or psychiatrist does.

The only significant barrier is that it's not condoned by the medical establishment and by law (which I imagine will indeed take a few years to work around).

fabulousman•about 5 hours ago

Maths

bartvk•about 2 hours ago

It depends on the level, though. You can easily ask AI to "Calculate intersection with X-axis for sin(2πx)" and I found many and I mean MANY errors in my textbook.

zhouzhao•about 3 hours ago

Critical thinking.

benj111•about 2 hours ago

Unfortunately that's a skill that makes you less employable.

num42•about 4 hours ago

Metrology, mechanical and materials science engineering, manufacturing and tool engineering, precision engineering, and electrical and electronics engineering, combined with being a generalist and having one specialization in physical or hardware engineering along with computation.

As people often say, matter, energy, and information are the fundamentals of everything. I think we need mathematics, analytic philosophy, the arts and humanities, and physics too. Sorry we need every skill. /s