alt Hacker NewsWhat does it mean to even say "having just one of them"? I think the false dichotomy just torpedoes the ability to predict the effect of new tools at all. There's already a world of difference between the janitor who couldn't learn how to read but does his best to show up and clean the place as well as he can every day and the middle manager engineer with population-median math or engineering abilities but a 12-hour-day work ethic that has let him climb the ladder a bit. And the effect of these AI tools we're considering here is going to be MUCH larger on one than the other - it's gonna be worse here for the smarter one, until the AI's are shoveling crap around with human-level dexterity. (Who knows, maybe that's next.)
Anyone you'd interact with in a job in a HN-adjacent field has already cleared several bars of "not actually that lazy in the big picture" to avoid flunking out of high school, college, or quitting their office job to bum around... and so at that point there's not that same black-and-white "it'll help you but hurt you" shortcut classification.
EDIT: here's a scenario where it'll be harder to be lazy as a software engineer already, not even in the "super AI" future: in the recent past, if you were quicker than your coworkers and lazy, you could fuck around for 3 hours than knock something out in 1 hour and look just as productive, or more, than many of your coworkers. If everyone knows - even your boss - that it actually should only take 45 minutes of prompting then reviewing code from the model, and can trivially check that in the background themselves if they get suspicious, then you might be in trouble.
The "smart but lazy" person in an agentic AI workplace is the dude orchestrating a dozen models with a virtual scrum master. It's much more possible today to get a 40h work week's worth of work done in 4h than it ever has been before, because the gains that are possible with complex AI workflows are so massive, particularly if you craft workflows that match problems specifically. And because it's absolutely insane to do such a thing with modern tools and the lack of abstractions available to you, even insaner to expect people to do it, so you can't set proficiency targets on that rubric. You might have to actually work 40h at the onset, but I definitely work with someone who is considered a super hero for the amount of work they do, but I know they dick around and experiment all day every day, because all they do is churn Cursor credits into PRs through a series of insane agents. They're probably going to get a bonus for delivering an impossible project on time, as a matter of fact.
> Anyone you'd interact with in a job in a HN-adjacent field has already cleared several bars of "not actually that lazy in the big picture" to avoid flunking out of high school, college, or quitting their office job to bum around... and so at that point there's not that same black-and-white "it'll help you but hurt you" shortcut classification.
I'm clearly not talking about the _truly_ lazy people. I'm talking about classifications within the group of already successful creative/STEM professionals that are the ones who are going to be maximally impacted by AI. Obviously you're not as lazy as you could be if you manage to have a 20 year software career, but that doesn't mean you aren't fundamentally lazy or have a terrible work ethic, it just means you have a certain minimum standard you manage to hold yourself to. That's the person I'm talking about - the person who works twelve hours a day more isn't going to be able to meaningfully distinguish themselves any more. The quantity of their work becomes immaterial, so what matters is the quality, and the smarter, lazier dude is going to have better AI output because he has smarter inputs.