alt Hacker NewsFable Took My Job
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> That first meeting crushed my soul. I heard my ears ring more violently than ever. The color drained from the world. I could barely walk straight.
There was a time that I really cared about my work and about my colleagues livelihoods.
Then I realised, it’s just a job. I’ve lost jobs before. I’ve taken shitty, low paid jobs before. It’s just a job. You turn up, they pay you, then you go home to your actual life, the one that matters.
People take their jobs too seriously.
Capital and Labor have always had a tense relationship, each one uneasy about the necessity of depending on the other. Unfortunately, Capital’s acquisition of power in the modern Western world has not been accompanied by a commensurate acquisition of confidence. In fact, as Capital’s power has increased, so has its sense of its precarity, becoming so acute as to tip over into paranoia. The moment AI achieved the barest shred of plausibility in its promise to replace Labor, it became an article of faith that Capital feverishly believes in and aggressively acts on.
All of this is to say that we have a case of “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” on steroids; Capital is going to fight like its life depends on it to stay irrationally convinced in their belief that AI can replace Labor.
Remembering when I lost people to offshoring in the mid 00s. I made the case, with metrics, that the quality was nowhere near as good and the spec overhead was non-trivial.
Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
This is a lesson I learned a long time ago, no matter how good you are, you could be obsolete and replaceable any day and the companies/corporations don't care. Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.
"These models lack the taste that makes for effective product decision making."
This sentence, whenever I see it, makes me chuckle now.
Surely the leopards won't eat my face. I have taste and you can't get that from a machine.
If the higher-ups don't care about the quality of your code when they compel you to tokenmaxx, what on earth gives you the impression they have a clue about your taste? It's not the AI that is going to fire you, it's that arsehole Brad who you made the grave mistake of beating too comprehensively at Catan.
> I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans
I do.
You don't need any sort of fancy harness as claimed.
All you need to do is type vague ideas into a text box. Then you need some UX taste to pick good concepts.
The building of the software happens trivially now. You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.
What you need next is someone with time and patience to QA test the software and provide feedback for the AI.
I guess ideally the same person, with the UX taste.
Give it a few weeks and the product is done, without the need for a team of 5-10. All it takes is one competent human.
I know that many here vehemently disagree and raise concerns about the viability and maintainability of the software.
I believe not a single one of them has made that experience, these concerns are based on their imagination of what they think would happen. Usually they tell you that they essentially review every line of code in their projects.
AI is now management's favorite excuse. But how many software engineers are actually losing their jobs due to the rise of AI and not due to the end of zero interest rates?
In other words, would those people have kept their jobs at current interest rates if there was no AI?
I think most wouldn't and leadership would be saying something else.
This post is so sad it makes me wonder how many suicide notes Amodei and Altman had on their doormats, or will in the future.
All the while Karpathy talking about how only a fraction of people understand the capability of (frontier) AI models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50047422.
As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.
> These models lack the taste that makes for effective product decision making. It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'
This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".
It's sad to see people lose jobs because executives believe AI could replace them. If it's any consolation, at some point most of those executives could be replaced by AI too.
I would argue that we all know the roles that have been barely justifiable, and now are glaringly obvious came to be as a result of the giddiness of agile and that 'culture'. As I can see now, those who wield a heavy sword are those who are 'allowed' to continue in the LLM-age of product development; I can see managers now developing build projects over teams (which is and can only lead to _less_ productivity and _less_ efficient orgs).
But I think it is important we all emphasise that this LLM-age giddiness sits squarely in those businesses where influence and product have always been their thing. It is unfortunate but, here we are. I don't believe a VP or MD or CXO is ever going to admit they were played by their peers on this one (agentic development).
The positive perhaps is the hardening of personal development, by need or necessity. LLM and agents are terrible at domain expertise still, and only until memory availability becomes abundent again (in end-user equipment), that is not going to change.
My big concern for the industry is when that happens, and anyone can build anything, but with the ability to tune to domain expertise via their own terms; this is the collapse, where no 'moat' exists at all, we are already seeing the collapse of the subscription model, and I believe pay-on-demand / purchase _is_ authentication is a tracking metric to that collapse. I forsee regulation being pushed to ensure the model however and foresee regulation on user equipment.
Larger institutions are perhaps 1-2 years lagging (for regulatory reasons) on uptake and perhaps that is the point in all this giddiness.
> The joy of programming is dying. The joy of delivering results lives on.
This sums it up well and will ring true no matter which side of the argument you're on.
We're heading towards the end of the year and I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans. What they have done is convince those with money to spend differently on their fellow humans.
> The joy of programming is dying.
Ever since LLMs took over everything I'm working or have worked on, I no longer have fun, no longer feel joy, or challenged to solve issues.
My question is, what now? What's the backup skill or job to develop next and still feel joy with it?
AI did not take your job; a person decided to use the productivity improvement from a new technology to realize increased short term profitability at the cost of losing you. That is not so much of a value judgement on the choice than a plea to the people making the choices to realize how short term that thinking is and to the author to not let them off the hook for making it.
> It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'
This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.
And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".
I just had a realization that the people who still have resources will need to invest their money to have any income. But it seems that Investment funds have been quite good in doing wealth transference, which basically means that overtime, any investment you do might have negative.
Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.
What will break first? The people or the system.
> The joy of programming is dying. The joy of delivering results lives on.
Before I went to college, I worked as an electrician apprentice. One of the guys I worked with was 50+, and had worked many jobs over his life. He told me that from 18 to to his late 20s he worked a factory job. Then, one year, they stared rolling down production. The company had decided to move production to China.
Most were just let go. No severance, or comp packages. Just a good luck with your job search, it was nice while it lasted.
For his next gig, he worked in fisheries. His 10 years of experience at the factory didn't mater, and he started with entry level pay. This lasted some years, until some bigger company bought his employer, and merged. Lots of people had to go, him included.
Then he landed work delivering mail. Worked there for 15 years, until the postal service started downsizing due to ever decreasing volume in mail being delivered.
So his last attempt was to just go to trade school, and try some trade. 50+ years old working on a apprentice salary, once again starting at the bottom rung of the ladder.
My point is, there are many people out there that have lived this life. For every software developer that have made bank for the past 20 years, and are now faced with the reality of being made obsolete, there are probably 10 people who've gone through this multiple times, but gone from one minimum wage job to another. Going back to start every time.
It sucks for everyone. But you just have to adapt. I guess one silver lining is that when the "white collar professional jobs"-apocalypse arrives, that's when we'll finally look at things like UBI.
Time and time again, we've seen that when working class jobs disappear, it is met with some sort of aw-shucks / but-they'll-find-something-else-to-do reaction. Whereas when the middle/professional class is affected, it is seemingly a end of times sign.
>Do you know how hard it is to sleep when all you can hear is your own heartbeat? Do you know how hard it is to function with four effective hours of sleep when you offer your body ten? It is rough.
This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.
I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.
For now, those with Capital will probably be ok. Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok. In the US? Who knows. In China, India, LATAM, Africa - who knows?
Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.
Interesting times ahead?
Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
What's the hmmm-hmmm part about? I didn't get that reference.
SWE as a job is over, this should have been obvious at start of the year, its is simple as knowing the capability and watching the progress of the models. Sitting waiting for it to happen and crying about it is a bad coping mechanism, accept it and have a plan B/C/D in the works while you are one of the lucky ones where it company has not made the move yet.
Am I the only one who's having a hard time reading white text on a brown background?
It makes me think about how many people just stop reading because it's not comfortable, and they don't bother turning on reading mode.
A lot of us already saw the writing on the wall, how LLMs capabilities could only improve and inevitably lead here. We were called "cultists" and mocked for predicting this exact situation. "It's just parroting the next token." "A SWE will always be needed" "(...)". I always pointed you to the 5 stages of grief and was met with obvious denial and anger.
Seems like we're now crossing into bargaining and depression.
I have empathy for those who were open minded enough not to mock those of us who were warning against this or swiftly dismissed our opinions. I hope you can now be open minded to the fact this will continue, and will extend to ALL jobs, that our society WILL dramatically change to the point of becoming unrecognizable in the not so distant future. We tend to be consistent in making the same errors when predicting the future. You just need to look into past predictions about our present time. Most people still make those errors. But once you see them you can try to avoid them, though unfortunately not making those mistakes usually leads you to seem crazy to others, which is also part of the reason those mistakes are so common.
Recently, an agency that used to give me work handed me an app they had built using AI.[1] But even though they had used only the best AI of the time, like Astra and Fable, in reality it had many bugs and many wrong points. If you're not a programmer, there's a lot of room to make mistakes even if you use AI. So honestly, I don't believe the claim that Fable can do everything. It's smart, and it writes code blocks far better than I do, and it writes algorithms far better than I do. But that doesn't mean it has the global consistency a program should have.
[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/fixing-a-vibe-coded-app
Tf;dr (Too Furry; Didn't Read)
The world where programmers and frankly most intellectual workers enjoyed privileged position and high salaries is ending. Some will survive most will have to adjust, start new careers, possibly never come close to income levels they enjoyed.
I was part of it in online poker world. You needed 2 functioning braincells to make 6 figures while playing a few hours a day back in 2005/2006. It got more and more difficult from there. First it got guys "living their life" while hustling on the side who thought it's an easy mode forever and didn't even bother to learn new tools. Then it turned previously good players into marginal grinders and then only a small group of winners remained. Many went to different/easier pastures - private games, heavy game selection at (super) high stakes. Most though lost their income and with it years of life that now seemed wasted in front of the computer.
Among my friends I've seen suicides (two), lost families (more than two), despair and poverty (too many to count). There are also positive stories - people who started doing something else, adjusted their expectation and are now living happy life even though their income will never be close to what their experienced in their early twenties.
In online poker - instead of Fable - we had ever developing tools. Databases, HUDs, HUDs connected to databases, auto-seating scripts (where a script looks for "donks" and auto seats you at the table when they seat) and then bots and solvers. I was on the frontier lab side I guess as the author of the most popular solver when they first came out. Now Fable is coming after my edge.
I am still a tech optimist. I think it will be a better and more abundant world at the end of it. There is still a lot of jobs we are not doing now because we don't have enough people. The transition is going to hurt though, especially those who don't have energy to start from scratch.
Gambling for living taught me no income stream is forever. Especially lucrative ones are going to be competed for and will dry out. Live below your means, try to save money, don't compete for status. It was always a good advice but it never hits until it's you who it applies to.
The irony looms large. Most of us have worked on projects that replaced people. I remember one from 2005; automating returns at an online retail company. The returns department was 15 people. We did a project that removed steps and automated others. Ten people were let go.
More so was agile having developers replace the heavy old product and project management organizations a lot of enterprises had. And then came devops were developers replaced sys admins? Remember those folks?
The billionaire class tell us the utopia is coming. Why should we believe them? Given that they’ve failed to share the benefits of the massive productivity gains of the last 50 years (stagnant pay, 30 hour work weeks, health care and social safety net?) why should we trust them to share this? We shouldn’t imo.
i sympathise with the individual of course, and i wish they did not have the experience they wrote about. it makes me feel quite bad to read it actually.
but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.
If you think AI can't get so good that it is a superset of Human capabilities, there's a good news.
We will expand the job market and create new jobs that weren't possible before.
> The frontier models are not good enough to replace an experienced engineer.
Yeah they are.
Two pizza team = 2 person team + Opus 5.5
Or for the really enterprising, solopreneur scaling to > $2.5 ARR (more than Goog's revenue per employee).
This is a fundamentally different game now.
I don't know why anyone assumes it just stops here.
Wait until the ceo finds out all his business secrets are sold to his competitors.
"both of them would lose their job next week with zero notice."
What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change
AI is a slopening of everything that makes us humans. If we cant see it that is only because the last 30-40 years have been a constant assault on human intelligence. we became dumb and sloppy as well. peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time. Everything went downhill as technology progressed and people thoughts could be controlled and manipulated in ways where intelligence and curiosity were not seen as relevant skills to acquire and nurture.
i'm tired man. AI this, AI that, here's how we productmaxxed our deliveries, here's how many people we could remove, etc etc. Everyone is going crazy about ai, but no one is remembering the people affected.
Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.
If you can direct AI and produce more value per $/time spent then a non software engineer directing AI to develop software then you still can produce a lot of value.
This should be the case now for anything that is not a prototype. The job has changed from "writing code" to "shipping software". A technical lead.
As AI gets more intelligent and the tooling around it develops and organizations figure out how to get it access to the data, the level of involvement needed for software engineers will decrease. Since the cost of developing software is plummeting, the amount of software being used is going to expand greatly- that will keep the technical lead positions available longer and also create more opportunities for consultant engagements.
Although someone can use AI to rewrite every software dependency and every paid piece of software, its still not worthwhile for them for most software, especially if the price of the software is low compared to the complexity it hides.
Users of a paid software product still need a human to be responsible for it.
As you develop your skills with AI, you now have the ability to develop your own software products. So there's an opportunity to become a small business owner. You didn't want to do these non-technical roles, but now you can continue to direct AI to automate all the aspects of the business.