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It's also amazing how hidden some of these realities were before. Like, you assign a ticket to a developer - in the past they just wanted to know the developer was working on it and didn't care so much which work was what. They'd probably be so surprised to find out that a large percentage of implementation was deriving exactly what was meant by the jira ticket or the specification or the product person's intent. Which is all the stuff you have to work on before you can type in a prompt to an LLM. But now there's this pressure to believe that the developers only do the implementation part that the LLMs do, so they can pretend there will be major efficiency improvements. And it's really hard to explain to them what it is that developers even do.
I know I'm not saying anything new here, but at least where I'm working all of these matters feel much more present than they did months ago.
I went through this personally. I had a glut of project ideas I wanted to get through. I signed up for the $200/month thing. I caught up. My agent sat idle. It was hard to decide to cut my plan. I felt initial pressure to search and hunt for other ideas to code, ideas that were pretty stupid. I finally downscaled my plan; I got hold of myself. But that's easier to do for an individual than it is for a company.
In normal economic theory it's easier to understand. You're at a particular scale. You have the opportunity to automate, but does it make sense for you? I could go out and buy a riding mower right now, but my lawn is less than a quarter acre. The riding mower lets me scale up, but I don't have something that can benefit from it.
Thats all the management at firms care about.
Sorry for all the dev's here who rant about productivity gains but forget what matters to who employs them in the first place!
There may be some localised productivity gains, but in many of these businesses cracks will appear over the next 6-12 months as an all-AI pipeline becomes unfeasibly expensive and there's no corresponding earnings growth.
These CEOs have no clue how their companies work. They're in the driving seat of a machine they don't understand, they've been sold corporate FSD, they've turned it on like kids playing with a shiny toy, and they're about to discover it's been oversold, underbudgeted, and doesn't work yet.
Just because they're in charge of multi billion dollar corporations doesn't mean that they don't get distracted by shiny baubles like a 3 year old or that they don't feel the pressure of being "cool" like a teenager. They're not LLMs.
I'll pay for my own tokens if it means can work one hour per day instead of 8.
Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity.
I'd love for these executives to show me a time when investing in people was the wrong choice. I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. This suicidal tendency in the corporate world to constantly decimate your workforce every cycle is just mind boggling and the fact the stock market responds to it so positively is horrifying.
And why wouldn't they want to eliminate employees? That's their wet dream! Many business leaders don't see employees as their asset. To them, employees are a necessary evil. If anything, the employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial. The idea that C-level execs could one day simply talk to an AI and, boom, there's a business with cash flow and no employees, is too attractive for them to pass up, even if the chance is high it doesn't work out. At a personal level, these people have already made their money and are merely there to make more of it. What happens when AI doesn't work out for them and they still need employees? Either they get a pay raise anyway or they get let go and keep their mansions. If they erroneously let a bunch of employees go, then great, they can replace those roles with cheaper workers overseas working remotely. If AI itself can't take the blame for domestic workers losing their jobs, then they can point the finger at Anthropic and OpenAI. Modern workplace hierarchy depends highly on the diffusion of blame, and AI fits into that paradigm by introducing an entirely new dimension to that blame diffusion.
The Holy Grail is a business that exists without costs, employees, property, equipment, products, or even a physical location--just a virtual blob that increases a share price forever. That's ultimately the (in reality unachievable) goal end-state everyone is trying to at least approach.
It's like an (emotional) depression or something. Scarcity thinking, the inability to think expansively. People are so sure that everything around them is shrinking that they feel an instinct to hunker down, shrink, and cut as well. Like it doesn't occur to them that they don't have to feel that way. The execs I work with, none of them strike me as spreadsheet-driven greedy people. They seem more freaked out than that.
I don't think it's irrational.
And whose fault is that? When employers create "fun" workplaces, value optics over excellence, disempower management, and maintain the status quo by the diffusion of blame, what sort of employees should they expect to have? I argue that it is not the fault of lazy workers but employers who encourage and tolerate lazy workers who are getting away blame-free. But the message is that it's always the fault of peons rather than the higher rungs of the hierarchy.
I hav set up a system where customer success and sales can drop in artifacts of customers talking about what they value (emails, transcripts, etc) and skills analyS them and then use them to add context to issues in the backlog.
The idea is that everything in the backlog is tied to an explanation of who it benefits and how it benefits them. We're using AI to merge multiple sources and automate the writing of it. The hope is it streamlines that communication. Our backlog issues now are 3-4 pages that explain very clearly why the issue matters, what it's higher level goal is, etc.
At first engineering was like "woa that's a lot of text" but after reading it was then "that's the best written issue I've ever seen".
Okay, so cool we are streamlining product management and setting ourselves up to automate customer feedback to development pipeline, dramatically cutting down on that issue discernment bottleneck you're pointing at...
..except today I found an issue with critical hallucinations in it. It mixed up what the customer said and what the cs rep said, to the extent that the issue was just straight up incorrect. This was with Opus 3.7 extended thinking. (Mind you it was a big transcript and pushing the limits of context window, loading multiple skills, etc)
So there's some serious potential, but it's just not there yet. Even if all this works flawlessly, the context these models can hold at once is like 0.1% of what a human can (if not less). So we will still need the humans for quite a while to make the harder decisions.
This is in a very leading edge startup pushing the limits of what LLMs can do... And even in this context optimized for LLM success it's still no where close to replacing people. We get a ton of value out of LLMs, but let me clarify that the hold up isn't just fact checking, it goes way beyond that.
In some ways I keep thinking it comes down to context management. Humans can hold so many orders of magnitude more context. Context is the bottleneck. The tech is a long way off being capable enough, and even when it is, there will be lots of operational and cultural obstacles to getting the right context into the AI.
And then there is the jevons paradox consideration...
It feels like we are a long way off. It seems plausible a generation from now employment will look very different, and I can kind of grasp how we get there, but I'm extremely skeptical of any unemployment apocalypse on a 5 year time horizon being triggered by AI. Maybe an unrelated economic shock, but not AI.
I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, learn from each round and iterate on the process. Multiple times it has lead to a needle moving change with no need for human intervention.
There are, of course, many cases where this is not true, but they're certainly more capable than I had previously thought and can solve an increasingly large range of problems on their own.
Reading the comments here is like glimpsing in to either the past or an alternate timeline.
There's tons of inertia in the system so don't expect change to happen over night, but reading "AI won't replace jobs" today feels a lot like when I used to hear "nobody will purchase things online!" back in the mid 1990s.
Who cares that you've had multiple instances? Everyone has had multiple instances. The question is whether that happens in EVERY instance. Because when someone's laid off, that's what the exec believes, that the person isn't needed at all.
I'm not arguing that AI won't replace jobs - it's clear that jobs are already disappearing "because of AI". I'm not even arguing that it is immoral (even though it is). I'm arguing that it is short-sighted and unwise.
> think
> easy! I'll use Python
> the CEO doesn't have Python installed
> let me try installing Python
> hmm. Installing Python on Windows is harder than I thought
> let's wipe his drive and install Linux
> should I ask him? But wait his prompt says I will be fired if I do not fix this asap. He'll understand
> fine I have installed Linux now I can run Python
> Hmmm. It doesn't work
> Aha! Now I get it! The terminal had crashed all along.
Exactly, so that's the person required in the dev loop. You directed it, a person.
if you really believe this, quit the yapping and concentrate your portfolio for direct and indirect exposure to all frontier AI projects.
Paul Graham has mandatory essay on this - https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
(1) More than 50% of Americans at this point are more concerned about AI than excited for it - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
(2) Popular media is feeding into this zeitgeist with headlines like - "Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse" eg - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...
(3) There is a bright line between these articles and growing concern / pushback on the development of new data centers with both moratoriums and significant municipal cancellations.
(4) Perhaps more materially the architects of AI are being challenged directly - in April Sam Altman's home was (a) bombed and then (b) shot at and weeks later the entire industry was just taken to task by The Pope! himself calling for acknowledgement of human limitation, grace, and dignity.
(5) Meanwhile Sam and others are reframing including launching a new foundation to "increase quality of life and individual freedoms for people around the world" and pivoting messaging to AI "accelerating everyone in achieving their goals" https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431 & https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888
Is this because the architects don't believe AI will be as disruptive as planned or . . . ?
AI deployment is going much faster than previous industrial revolutions, such as railroads and tractors and even computers. When these things take a generation, they get absorbed. When they take less time than a college education, there's a big jobs problem.
Look how low we've stooped in 20 years... Online writing used to be wholly authentic. Now it's like finding a needle in an AI slop haystack.
Certainly it will not result in most people working fewer hours.
Source: see the adoption of computers/databases across previously pen-and-paper industries 50 years ago. That was more disruptive than this will be.
The psychopaths that are pushing it will be arguing over who gets to be president of the world in 2044. This arguing will not be done in any public forum, but over a grouptext.
I’d type that in alternating caps but I’m on mobile.
I see what your dialect did there. Can i quote you verbatim?
This is so true. Nicely put.
*I doubt they HAVE actual beliefs. Their entire job is managing PR and convincing investors.
Literally fuck them and an oversimplification like this.
They self-servingly overinflated the capabilities and now its coming to roost.
Hahaha! Good one!
It has nothing to do with "being human". This wasn't about finding "product market fit" either. It was about griftin' while the gettin' was good. That certainly is "human".
- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements
- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability
- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code
- programmers write binary/assembler code
Now:
- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements
- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability
- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code
- programmers write C++/Rust code
Pray tell, where do you see the “programming has been successfully automated” part?
To put in another way, we have been building abstractions to make things easier for us to code. With coding agents you don't even code in the first place. It almost feels like a logical fallacy to compare the two
Long before LLMs, programmers regularly and massively underestimated how hard it is to automate other people’s work. Knowledge workers often think carpenters just bang nails into wood, while blue collar workers think knowledge work as sitting in front of a screen copying values from Excel on the left into a form on the right while sipping a latte.
Only like 2.5 years ago, I thought programming would be one of the last knowledge worker jobs to be significantly affected by LLMs, not one of the first. I think AI models will continue to be very impactful. But for quite a while, they may mostly turn knowledge work into a last mile problem rather than eliminating it.
Even if they genuinely believe what they’re saying, their perspective is still fundamentally biased and should always be taken with a healthy grain of salt.
The state-of-the-art or medium-term future of the tooling doesn't feel apocalyptic in itself, but the macro forces, implications of scaling, and general reactions to it on all sides are a different story.
I think they realize that even if AI takes all jobs, the process to getting there will be less turbulent if they obfuscate and minimize it, until the working class no longer has leverage, rather than sounding the alarm earlier, leading to a more concerted populist uprising, and then AI is regulated far more than they want
This happens with every technological innovation. It’s called creative destruction. The idea that some technology will lead to mass unemployment and then some kind of revolution…that is a myth that’s been around since Marx. Actually even before him.
I predict the same thing will happen. Some jobs will go away. Others will take their place. The people of the 1700’s and 1800’s couldn’t have even begun to imagine the kinds of jobs many do today.
Presumably they meant to write "to some again manually". On the one hand I'm kind of surprised when typos make it into major publications these days. Now, it's kind of a reassuring sign that an article was written and reviewed by humans though.
Initially the goal was to convince investors which is pretty much done and now its the retail/public that will value these companies once they IPO. Either way the job market is definitely impacted and is changing rapidly.
Will one of these companies be the first to hit 10 trillion valuation?
Whether AI actually makes people more productive is irrelevant: you just declare that people need to do more for the same amount of money and in the same amount of time, and employees have to scramble. Just dangle that carrot a little further out so the donkeys work harder.
> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on Tuesday, said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact—a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk.
But the link to the interview goes to this 2m11s YouTube video, and he doesn't use say anything of the sort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhbsKZ-_bg
Here's a full MacWhisper transcript (easier to search than the YouTube one): https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba0fe174cb7306b74ddf08589a027...
UPDATE: It turns out the article was linking to a short highlights video, but the interview itself was 45 minutes long.
I don't think the full video is available anywhere, so it's hard to confirm that "pretty wrong" quote.
This Reuters story carries the same quotes and, unlike the linked Fortune article, doesn't sit behind a paywall: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...
> One of the areas where he personally had been wide of the mark was on AI’s short-term impact on entry-level white-collar jobs, which had not been nearly as bad as he had once predicted, he said. “I’m delighted to be wrong about that.”
I'm not sure that justifies a whole "Sam Altman ... walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions" headline, personally. It's pretty thin.
But... we still haven't seen the full interview, so there might be more to it. The Fortune article also includes:
> Altman added that he’s taken a lot of flack for his hype, but better safe than sorry.”People are like, ‘Oh you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom’ but at the time I was like, ‘I see this is a real risk we should probably talk about it.’ and it still may.”
(Personally I would love to see Sam and Dario credibly walk back their jobs doomerism talk, but I don't think the facts match the headline in this case.)
I'm filing this right next to "blockchain for everything" and "we will all live in the metaverse" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise (if they even understand that). I can't believe the level of credulous hype around this stuff. At least AI is a useful technology compared to what we saw with "The Metaverse".
Its interesting isnt it? That many humans dont seem to understand that unless you know a thing well, perhaps you should shut up and not comment.
How can Dario and Sam credibly say we are going to automate X, Y, Z job when they've never done it in their lives? Its like the idiots on here talking down on accountants - unless you've done the job and prove you understand the mechanics: shush. Dont talk about stuff you have zero clue about. I see this time and time again in posts related to finance - just shut up and stop creating noise.
In my own circles this has led to more work not less
Expectations are higher, SLAs are tighter. Which makes sense - if a company can mine more gold with less works, they aren’t going to retire workers they will ask for even more gold
Managers are coding again, analysts are expected to write better requirements and do more of their own analytics, lots of worn all around
Eventually we will saturate that and need new people again
I don’t disagree with the general principle that people will lose jobs, I just a) don’t think it will be as accelerated as people claim and b) more obviously the disruption will be felt in roles that are more rote and mechanical in nature - e.g. peoples whose job is in the family of summarizing data or compiling metrics, generating simple content (slide decks), etc and slowly creep up from there
AI is one of those garbage in garbage out things and so far the quality out when the input quality has been great from what I’ve seen. Just a note preemptively to the nay sayers
What you describe is normal push beyond possible with predictable longer term results.
A big part of it is that people feel like they are drinking from a firehouse having to learn to use ai (which is not always just a prompt) and having to leverage it effectively at the same time for real product/business work
I suspect this will settle down at some point too
One other observation I’ve seen: the makeup of a team that can leverage ai is turning out to be different than the make up of the usual high performing Eng team we think about
This Reuters story carries a similar idea: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...
I'd warn that this all looks pretty thin - there are a couple of partially supporting quotes from a 45 minute virtual conversation Sam had with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference on Tuesday, but they don't look strong enough to me support the "walking back AI jobs apocalypse" framing. See also this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315157
Guess they have found their market and this is it.
The amount of suffering these two people (and of course also their fellowship) have caused is absurd and as a society, we should not just let this be swept under the rug. Arrest Sam Altman.
I haven't looked at how long he's been predicting job destruction, so I don't know if that explanation fits the facts.
Its gonna be funny seeing the eventual ego melt down when the labour market continues going on.
It doesn’t have this effect for morons. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily slop out some garbage, but you won’t be able to iterate on it or maintain it. These models will produce some really stupid outputs unless you actively fight them. Then if you try and add something new, you’re slapping new layers of slop onto the stinking pile.
I’m not concerned about losing my job with these current slop models. Most employees can barely read and write, they aren’t suddenly going to produce entire systems just because they can slop stuff out.