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points by eudamoniac 2 days ago | 0 comments
Making your engineers use AI with little to no measurable improvement, but with very measurable high cost, is not delivering
[–] adventured 2 days ago
Astra, Fable, Opus 5.5 are drastically beyond the capabilities of the median software developer. It's not remotely close.

The bottom 2/3 of the human market is entirely dead. Their jobs are gone (AI-shored) they just haven't all gotten the forced retirement or pink slips yet, while they click a few more prompts for a few more pay checks. The frontier pushing forward will knock out most of the remaining top 1/3 without breaking a sweat over the next few years. The really good developers will graduate into babysitting AI as managers.

It is legitimately sad, it's millions of high paying jobs just in the US alone. It's going to be brutal on the housing market. Automation came for another field.

[–] mkotlikov 2 days ago
Software engineering isn't unique, if this is true then it's 99% of all white collar work. Those same software engineers are going to help automate every other job on their way out.
[–] imtringued 2 days ago
Correct. Everything will disappear, even hardware jobs and the trades but the people responsible with the automation jobs (software developers) will be the last to go.
[–] yeeeloit 2 days ago
Do you, personally, have a plan for the future? Like what are you doing about this, or are you hoping to be in the 1%?
[–] adventured 2 days ago
My income is not dependent on LLMs not taking all the software etc jobs from humans.

My suggestion to anybody staring this down is: do something for yourself while you can, while we're in the early going. Most people still have no understanding of AI, most tech employees are doing absolutely nothing interesting with it other than prompt prompt prompt prompt while at work and effectively doodling at home.

Go high value and go for the users. Do things that don't scale, that actually rings more true now than ever. Focus on areas of tech where it's really hard to get the users, where you have to practically hand acquire them to get started. Users are the moat.

It's not build the software and they will come. That's what nearly everybody has wrong about what is going on right now. The value is not in the software. Users, users, users, users - they should be your primary focus.

Also consider looking at software more as a layer related to something else you do, not as The Thing you do. Related to another service you offer, improving that service.

Let's say you started consolidating in the physical self-storage space ten years ago. You read that it was a very wide open field, where the market was not yet highly concentrated, 3/4 of the market was mom & pop operators. Over the next ten years you built up a lot of storage locations. LLMs can amplify your business, they can help you automate, layer better software on top of your physical business. You know what LLMs can't do? They can't build storage units, and humans love their storage space. That's just one example out of a zillion out there.

[–] fn-mote 2 days ago
I am improving my Spanish and staring at the massive savings that I have built up from my SV job. When my job goes and the industry is in flames, I am moving to Bolivia.

If you have a big mortgage and no savings, it’s going to be tough. Stop taking the Waymo now.

[–] eudamoniac 2 days ago
I don't get how anyone actively using AI can believe this. Astra sucks ass.