alt Hacker NewsIt Still Can't Do My Job: Four Years of Moving Goalposts (2022–2026)
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IDK why you needed AI to write the little blurbs, it's not really a lot of text.
Like if you feel it's not important enough to write yourself, just don't put anything there?
As my company experiments with AI-heavy programming, I don’t feel like my job’s going away, but as a “full stack” programmer who’s also good at and comfortable managing a task board, walking “stakeholders” and SMEs through requirements-gathering, et c., I am increasingly wondering why our “teams” still have a couple non-programmers doing that stuff. Dedicated QA, for that matter—all that test-writing and test-data-generating and stuff is so fast now. It’d speed things up if one or two programmers just did the whole thing.
But maybe my particular skill set where all those roles were only really out of reach for me for time-constraint reasons is less common than I think… I dunno, though, between people who’d moved up into managing projects but can drive an LLM pretty competently for programming (ex programmers) and versatile can-talk-to-people seasoned programmers, it’s all the other roles that look increasingly like they’re slowing productivity, rather than increasing it, now.
Someone on a call the other day tentatively brought up that they were noticing it was taking longer to get all the paperwork right for a bug fix or even mid-sized feature than it was to actually write and test the fix, by the time they looped in some variety of person in a jira-wrangler role. It’s clear those jira-wranglers are gonna have to fight to keep their jobs (I don’t really know how they’re gonna do it, I feel apprehensive on their behalf in every meeting now)
> Call me when it stops making things up.
We haven’t moved past this yet
Although it's not the most important thing here, I love the IQ badge on the right side of the screen. At IQ 200, the AI is finally qualified to carry a pager for production.
I'm in the pagerduty lineup, and shockingly, my IQ isn't even a mere 185.
Man the one-shot game that is genuinely good in 2027 is crazy. A good game typically takes around 3-8 years of development by multiple skilled people. Maybe 3 years or so for 1 guy that's super dedicated.
Right now single prompt with Fable can get us a small protype of like 1 game mechanic that's not even remotely production ready. So this guy thinks it'll 100,000X in a year.
AI boosters are something else.
The irony is that while this is all mostly true, the site itself is clearly written with AI. Clearly matters here, because although it can do all of these remarkable things the prose it writes is still completely banal.
I like that this goofy fear-based boosterism is on the front page at the same time as an actually well reasoned and well written article about how fear-based boosterism has actually harmed the AI industry instead of making everyone panic-buy like they intended.
I assume that’s entirely due to not being able to downvote submissions on HN.
As for the article, as another user put it:
> Call me when it stops making things up.
We haven’t moved past this yet
I'm having a hard time understanding what the writer is trying to accomplish with this (weird) post, especially the "IQ" part on the side (wtf?). Yes, the goal posts change as the technology changes (this is true of ALL technology), and it turns out that people keep underestimating with each release of this technology what it would actually take to replace a job.
I hate to say it as I think the author is well intentioned but I think this is every bit as silly as the perspectives it is shooting down
1. this is prone to taking the fringe perspectives and making them "everyone" 2. most of the points are highly highly interpretive (growth could be pressure, laziness, FOMO, self deception, real valid growth.. we don't know yet)
LLMs are definitely the most transformative thing I have seen in 25 years in tech, but I still think like every other hype cycle there is a lot of lying and self delusion, I don't really think any of us, neither myself nor the author really know what we have here.
The one-shot game is definitely the hardest one here by a long shot, no idea why this is considered easier than having a model on pager duty. Aside from needing to generate coherent assets and having a meaningful creative vision, a good game is hard to make because it requires a lot of taste, not being good at programming (see the many indie hits from people who learned to program just to make their game, and were wildly successful with atrocious code).
The thing that annoys me most about this obviously AI-generated article is: "The quotes in orange boxes are real and checkable." No they aren't - you AI generated them, just like you generated the rest of the page.
I don’t care what it does really. It’s another tool.
It’s the economics that make no sense. That situation has been demonstrably getting progressively worse.
Call me. When the AI stops writing. Every blog post. Like this.
This is strawmaning the article
Thank you very much for creating this!
I’m gonna send this to people when they tell me that nothing‘s happening and none of this is real
I love this so much thank you
I think this is true of "AGI" too.
AI is already better than us at a bunch of things, and worse at a few. The list of things it's better than us at increases every month.
In 5 years, people will still be saying "Well, I can still ride a unicycle blindfolded better than a robot so it's not AGI."
AGI is such a meaningless term and puts too much importance on human-level intelligence.
You should add a parallel timeline of how many times AI CEOs have claimed their next model is too dangerous to release, AGI is months away, or some white collar job will be obsolete within 6 months.
I don’t know anyone in the tech industry who thinks AGI will never happen or that software engineering and white collar jobs can’t be automated. We all read sci fi, you’re not some unique visionary for anticipating AI. The frustration is with how much the claims have outpaced reality and how poorly the investors and executives have treated their workers during this transition.