alt Hacker NewsAnecdotally, I know people in the industry who tell me their job is "so easy" now because all they need to do is be a meat proxy for claude and take home the paycheck.
Question from someone written in AI? Just answer it in AI and send it back. What was it actually about - who cares? Bug comes in? Post the jira link in claude and don't even bother prompting anything else. If something critically breaks - well, eh, we'll deal with it then. FIRE (early retirement), a prediction their layoff is inevitable, and investing aggressively so you can finally escape actually working are often invoked in the same breath. Everyone feels like they're just trying to punch the drywall and grab as much copper wire out of the walls as they can until they're finally let go and/or the whole company fails.
There's a great deal of nihilism and cynicism in the industry currently, and it feels like LLMs are just greatly enabling it. Where you would've done a halfassed job previously, you'd now do an unchecked AI job.
Replies
Well it's the incentive given. A bit like the original comment writes above. If your performance and impact are measured by charts, meeting outputs, some kind of abstract KPIs and other means that traditionally kind of worked because people had agency, you are incentivized to just slopmaxx it. Otherwise you will fall behind your colleagues who slopmaxx and have a better number on their abstract KPI.
If you try to do good work, you won't be able to keep the pace with the slopmaxxers, which will mean you get laid off earlier. You will also be swamped in slop review.
If you get called out on some issue or shitty implementation, you can just make Claude abstract it away behind more complexity to the point where people have a hard time doubting you because they don't have time to get into the details and verify things.
Grab as much as you can, invest in immovable property and other shit that has value after a stock crash and enjoy the ride
> prediction their layoff is inevitable, and investing aggressively
If that happens on a large enough scale those investments won’t be worth much.
> Everyone feels like they're just trying to punch the drywall and grab as much copper wire out of the walls as they can until they're finally let go and/or the whole company fails
That’s very graphic.
The thing is, I already felt a bit like that before AI. It’s just money. This quarter’s. The rest doesn’t exist. Make flashy features faster and you’ll be promoted. Make things carefully so that they last and can be maintained easily, and you are be ignored.
I say this not as an engineer that tried to write maintainable software and now is butthurt, but as an (ex)manager who tried to promote such people. And now is butthurt. I found myself telling my engineers that if they wanted to get promotions they had to prioritize the shiny and skip the rest.
I hated it.
Now I am back to Engineering. I do use AI heavily at work because no one cares but if my output is “too slow” I will look bad. I at least try to raise concerns when I see them. The answer tends to be “yeah, we can’t afford to do that properly now”.
I use AI way more sparingly for my personal open source stuff. Because I care.
> a prediction their layoff is inevitable
It probably is. Where I work it has been made clear, as in actually stated by leadership, that any process that does not include AI input is to be considered broken and needing to be fixed. It doesn't matter if it works, if it is 100% human made and maintained, it is broken and needs to be fixed by injecting AI in a critical place. You should be in a position that if you lost access to the AI tools, you are unable to proceed.
This is the step towards replacing people. You don't need highly paid people in that process, you just need someone who can speak a language the AI tools can transcribe. This is no different than moving from a codebase or process that is tightly coupled to a specific technology to a more generic process so that you can easily and quickly change the backend tech on a whim. The technology being removed is the people. The AI is important, you are not.