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points by citrin_ru 3 days ago | 0 comments

AI give employers immense leverage - by threading with AI layoffs they can exploit workers and in the current job market many have nowhere to go.

[–] rakejake 2 days ago

This precisely - AI takes away your leverage as a software engineer. AI models are very well trained at coding today so I'm not sure what further improvement really looks like. But even if humans stick around to guide the AI, I expect the job itself will get more unpleasant because capital/management have no reason to treat this labor class well anymore.

[–] bdcravens 3 days ago

Scarier than that is the idea of replacing you with someone far cheaper who can drive the AI.

[–] tonyedgecombe 3 days ago

Yeah, all those losers in the office that couldn't find their way out of a paper bag suddenly look as productive as you do.

[–] KeplerBoy 3 days ago

They actually don't. A lot of people still have no clue how to drive these tools.

[–] doctorwho42 2 days ago

Honestly I think that is more of a symptom of how slapped together the AI software stacks feel to an outsider.

All my dev friends swear this is the future, all my scientist coworkers just say it's a useful tool.

I have heard the pitch and have people explained how it works... But I have yet been handed a guide on how to set myself up properly to get the most out of AI. Like I have both a corporate openai gui agent as well as cli setup with a monthly allotment of tokens. But there is no clear standard guide on how I should be setting things up, like we do for python in books "here are the building blocks for python"/aka learn python the hard way

[–] DerArzt 2 days ago

I've been wanting a guide like you are but a question I haven't been able to answer is: what would go in it?

LLM and harnesses are changing so fast that if I had a guide from 6 months ago I'm not sure how relevant it would be today.

I'm guessing that when things calm down and the landscape isn't changing as much then we will get the guides.

[–] mmcnl 2 days ago

In my experience AI widens the gap, not closes it. The best engineers are 10x more productive, the worst engineers maybe 2x.

[–] iugtmkbdfil834 3 days ago

:D As a person who can do both ( and keeps logs of various interesting mishaps in our little corner of the universe ), neither is easy to do well, both require skill and, well, current literacy rates don't exactly make me optimistic.

edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that if we would embrace the full spectrum now, we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).

edit: conditional syntax

[–] pixl97 3 days ago

Just remember, it's not how good you are at your job, it's how hungry the person on your way to work is that's willing to split open your head and steal your wallet.

[–] iugtmkbdfil834 3 days ago

Trust me, the concept of social insurance is not lost on me. Frankly, the fact that we are running into this without considering likely outcomes ( or worse, considering it and plunging without relevant ways to keep people from going crazy ) is.. annoying to me. It shows me our leadership is.. not great.

[–] logicchains 3 days ago

AI also gives employees much more leverage than before, as they no longer need a large team to compete with BigCos at knowledge work. It's never been cheaper to start a software business.

[–] trollbridge 3 days ago

The skillset needed to be a productive employee who is, say, a programmer is not the same at all as the skillset to run an entire business.

For example, skills with sales are far more important than actual software engineering.

[–] logicchains 3 days ago

Yes, but before you needed someone good at sales and a team of programmers, now you just need a buddy good at sales.

[–] iugtmkbdfil834 3 days ago

Sales and, shudders, marketing. I am not joking. As much as I hate to say it, my personal opinion is that this is the 'safe' spot now.

[–] otikik 3 days ago

AI is definetly taking a big portion of the marketing budget as well.

Just today I was served a clearly AI-generated Halloween ad for Coca-Cola.

[–] debazel 3 days ago

The side effect of this is also that the value of software itself has never been lower, so starting a new software business isn't very attractive in today's market.

[–] chasd00 2 days ago

the cost of developing software has never been lower. That is maybe 10-15% of the value in a software business believe it or not. If you can do the other 85% it's a great time to start a software business.

[–] bmurphy1976 3 days ago

It cheaper to create one-off products. Creating a sustainable business though? Charging money for the product or service? Actually getting enough income to thrive? I think that also just got a lot harder. Sure, you quit and you undermined BigCo with your open source release, but somebody with even less to lose will now undermine you.

[–] soon_to_be_sb 3 days ago

> It's never been cheaper to start a software business.

99.99% of software business is marketing..lol

[–] markus_zhang 2 days ago

Tech is the least important thing even for a tech company. Unless you are a 10x better than anyone else in the game. This did happen once for a while but you can do it without AI anyway — and probably better for you because it’s a lot more difficult to copy yours. However, hardware oriented companies may be the outliers.

The ability to rent cheap AI capacities, the ability to push to a million consumers, the ability to persuade for large contracts, these are the most important ones.

[–] causal 3 days ago

I have been pondering whether I am a fool to continue to go it as an employee in the age of AI.

[–] Buttons840 3 days ago

I wonder how much companies would pay people to NOT replicate their products. Like, if I'm just hacking around with my LLM, and am approaching a near 100% drop-in replacement for the entire Atlassian suite--how much would they pay me to NOT do that? Is that worth 1 livable wage to them?

There's an alternate employment arrangement...

[–] NichoPaolucci 2 days ago

Well... I think the converse to this is the companies that WOULD pay you (slightly less than they currently pay Atlassian) TO replicate those products.

I expect some BRUTAL competition for these larger software companies. My company just recently replaced our CRM with an in-house tool. (Of course, the maintenance / buildout of that is costly, but it's eventually going to be less than we are paying for the third-party CRM)

Honestly, I cannot personally decide whether or not this is Jevon's Paradox in action or not. In theory, that software could be entirely hands off (Claude write me a 1:1 implementation of Salesforce CRM and make it never go down) but in reality, someone is going to want it tweaked, modified, changed, and thus we now have an internal CRM that we own that requires some level of expertise. Maybe it's not a software engineer, but a software engineer is probably the most well equipped to take that process over...

Who knows, though.

[–] causal 3 days ago

The install base is worth way more than the software

[–] chasd00 2 days ago

I think the would absolutely love you as a competitor.

[–] flir 3 days ago

It was never the coding that was hard, it was always the marketing.

[–] prmph 3 days ago

The coding is hard, unless by coding you mean slapping together CRUD forms. Many businesses are undone or fail to grow properly by neglecting this. This refrain that everything about starting a software business is hard except the coding needs to die.

If the coding was nothing, every good marketing guy could go solo and start large software businesses. It does not happen. You mostly see successful technical founders, or usually a marriage of technical and business cofounders.

Finding a fit between viable business opportunities and the tech to address it is what's hard, and requires several skills: technical, marketing, communication, product design, etc.

[–] jaynetics 3 days ago

At least for us dev types.

[–] flir 2 days ago

Thanks. I thought that was implicit, but I guess not.

[–] random_cat_8745 3 days ago

and infrastructure, it can be costly

[–] pmarsh 2 days ago

And customer support. Unless you aren't going to sell to humans they're going to break/not RTFM/have asks.

[–] esseph 3 days ago

Might be just as bad, possibly worse, if you aren't BigCo.

[–] gosub100 3 days ago

Cheaper now that they are running AI services at a loss.

[–] citrin_ru 3 days ago

The loss is from model training. Serving an open-weight model is profitable and these models are already good enough for many tasks. If Anthorpic/OpenAI will try to recover training investments with higher prices they'll loose the volume (and given infra spending commencements they need the volume). So I don't expect any significant price increase.