[f154hfds]

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll.

It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.

[stack_framer]

> It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise.

Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even believe I get to do it!

I've spent over a decade learning an elegant language that allows me to instruct a computer—and the computer does exactly what I tell it. It's a miracle! I don't want to abandon this language. I don't want to describe things to the computer in English, then stare at a spinner for three minutes while the computer tries to churn out code.

I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.

I want to write code.

[zparky]

It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.

[rester324]

I love to write code too. But what usually happens is that I go through running the gauntlet of proving how brilliant code I can write in a job interview, and then later conversely being paid for listening to really dumb conversations of our stakeholders and sitting in project planning, etc meetings just so that finally everybody can harass me to implement something that a million programmer implemented before me a million times, at which point the only metric that matters to either my fellow developers or my managers or the stakeholders is the speed of churning the code out, quality or design be damned. So for this reason in most cases in my work I use LLMs.

How any of that comes down to an investment portfolio manager as writing "world class code" by LLMs is a mistery to me.

[agumonkey]

I got mentally hit hard by the 2nd push of vibe coding (gemini-cli and similar) for reasons you mention. I'd add a that:

- inverse career growth structure and black hole effect

usually, an industry has a number of skills to hone, you start with simple ones, and as you go you may learn more to do harder, and earn more. the more you love, the more you learn, the better for you. this is evaporating.. and worse, the people who don't love it, get to run you over. you're now competing in the 'llm orchestration game' where the most mentally intense task is to chat with the cli and check its output.

llms may also be all encompassing, even if I adapt and accept that well software engineering is done for, i don't even foresee what i should learn now.. my brain thinking power is not that great, and the places where llms can't beat human are probably post-graduate intelligence and i can't compete much here either.

how i see it it's a middle layer collapse

[doug_durham]

Writing code is my passion, and like you I'm amazed I get paid to do it. That said in any new project there is a large swath of code that needs to be written that I've written many times before. I'm happy to let the LLM write the low value code so I can work on the interesting parts. Examples of this type of code are argument parsers and interfacing with REST interfaces. I add no value there.

[citrin_ru]

> I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.

Some people don't enjoy writing code and went into software development only because it's a well paid and a stable job. Now this trade is under the thread and they are happy to switch to prompting LLMs. I do like to code so use LLMs less then many my colleagues.

Though I don't expect to see many from this crowd in HM, instead I expect here to see entrepreneurs who need a product to sell and don't care if it is written by humans or by LLMs.

[averageRoyalty]

So write code.

Maybe post renaissance many artists no longer had patrons, but nothing was stopping them from painting.

If your industry truely is going in the direction where there's no paid work for you to code (which is unlikely in my opinion), nobody is stopping you. It's easier than ever, you have decades of personal computing at your fingertips.

Most people with a thing they love do it as a hobby, not a job. Maybe you've had it good for a long time?

[marcosdumay]

I'm quite ok with only writing code in my personal time. In fact, if I could solve the problems there faster, I'd be delighted.

Instead, I've reacted to the article from the opposite direction. All those grand claims about stuff this tech doesn't do and can't do. All that trying to validate the investment as rational when it's absolutely obvious it's at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than any arguably rational value.

[georgeecollins]

I also love to code, though it's not what people pay to do anymore.

You should never hope for a technology to not deliver on its promise. Sooner or later it usually does. The question is, does it happen in two years or a hundred years? My motto: don't predict, prepare.

[kace91]

>I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.

Regardless of AI this has been years in the making. “Learn to code” has been the standard grinder cryptobro advice for “follow the money” for a while, there’s a whole generation of people getting into the industry for financial reasons (which is not wrong, just a big cultural shift).

[thendrill]

Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares

Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”

Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.

Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.

That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.

So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.

I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.

[stego-tech]

I'm right there with you, and it's been my core gripe since ChatGPT burst onto the stage. Believe it or not, my environmental concerns came about a year later, once we had data on how datacenters were being built and their resource consumption rates; I had no idea how big things had very suddenly and violently exploded into, and that alone gave me serious pause about where things are going.

In my heart, I firmly believe in the ability of technology to uplift and improve humanity - and have spent much of my career grappling with the distressing reality that it also enables a handful of wealthy people to have near-total control of society in the process. AI promises a very hostile, very depressing, very polarized world for everyone but those pulling the levers, and I wish more people evaluated technology beyond the mere realm of Computer Science or armchair economics. I want more people to sit down, to understand its present harms, its potential future harms, and the billions of people whose lives it will profoundly and negatively impact under current economic systems.

It's equal parts sobering and depressing once you shelve personal excitement or optimism and approach it objectively. Regardless of its potential as a tool, regardless of the benefit it might bring to you, your work day, your productivity, your output, your ROI, I desperately wish more people would ask one simple question:

Is all of that worth the harm I'm inflicting on others?

[simianwords]

Some person asked this same question about computers back in the day.

[some-guy]

There are a few areas where I have found LLMs to be useful (anything related to writing code, as a search engine) and then just downright evil and upsetting in every other instance of using it, especially as a replacement for human creativity and personal expression.

[mrdependable]

What I don't understand is, will every company really want to be beholden to some AI provider? If they get rid of the workers, all of a sudden they are on the losing end of the bargaining table. They have incredible leverage as things stand.

[spjt]

Yeah if they thought unions were bad, they really won't like dealing with another company larger than them.

[Night_Thastus]

Don't worry that much about 'AI' specifically. LLMs are an impressive piece of technology, but at the end of the day they're just language predictors - and bad ones a lot of the time. They can reassemble and remix what's already been written but with no understanding of it.

It can be an accelerator - it gets extremely common boiler-plate text work out of the way. But it can't replace any job that requires a functioning brain, since LLMs do not have one - nor ever will.

But in the end it doesn't matter. Companies do whatever they can to slash their labor requirements, pay people less, dodge regulations, etc. If not 'AI' it'll just be something else.

[DevDesmond]

Text is an LLMs input and output, but, under the hood, the transformer network is capable of far more than mere re-assembly and remix of text. Transformers can approximate turing completeness as their size scales, and they can encode entire algorithms in their weights. Therefore, I'd argue they can do far more than reassemble and remix. These aren't just Markov models anymore.

(I'd also argue that "understanding" and "functional brain" are unfalsifiable comparisons. What exactly distinguishes a functional brain from a turing machine? Chess once required a functional brain to play, but has now been surpassed by computation. Saying "jobs that require a human brain" is tautological without any further distinction).

Of course, LLMs are definitely missing plenty of brain skills like working in continuous time, with persistent state, with agency, in physical space, etc. But to say that an LLM "never will" is either semantic, (you might call it something other than an LLM when next generation capabilities are integrated), tautological (once it can do a human job, it's no longer a job that requires a human), or anthropocentric hubris.

That said, who knows what the time scale looks like for realizing such improvements – (decades, centuries, millennia).

[oytis]

I dunno, I might be getting old, but I think the idea that people absolutely need a job to stay sane betrays lack of imagination. Of course getting paid just enough for survival is pretty depressing, but if I can have healthy food, a spacious place to live, ability to travel and all the free time I can have, I'd be absolutely happy without a job. Maybe I'd be even writing code, just not commercially useful one.

[rurp]

I don't think this is the scenario most people are worried about. Having basic needs met while also having a lot of freedom and time probably sounds great to the majority of people. But there's roughly 0% chance we end up in that kind of world if current AI leads to massive job elimination.

Just look at who is building, funding, and promoting these models! I can't think of a group of people less interested in helping millions of plebs lead higher quality lives if it costs them a penny to do it.

[classified]

> artificial creativity

This artificial creativity will only go so far, because it's a simulated semblance of human creativity, as much as could be gathered from training data. If not continually refueled by new training data, it will run out sooner or later. And then it will get boring really quickly.

[spjt]

But it is being continually refueled. The output of an LLM, at least in the process of generating code, is a combined product of human creativity and the LLMl. I have told it what to do, fixed what it got wrong, and verified the solution was correct through testing.

[Joel_Mckay]

LLM slop doesn't have aspirations at all, its just click bait nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0

Drives people insane:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU

And LLM are economically and technologically unsustainable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA

These have already proven it will be unconstrained if AGI ever emerges.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM

The LLM bubble will pass, as it is already losing money with every new user. =3

[asdff]

I think it just reflects on the sort of businesses that these companies are vs others. Of course we worry about this in the context of companies that dehumanize us, reduce us to line item costs and seek to eliminate us.

Now imagine a different sort of company. A little shop where the owner's first priority is actually to create good jobs for their employees that afford a high quality life. A shop like that needn't worry about AI.

It is too bad that we put so much stock as a society in businesses operating in this dehumanizing capacity instead of ones that are much more like a family unit trying to provide for each other.

[0manrho]

Regarding that PS:

> This strikes me as paradoxical given my sense that one of AI’s main impacts will be to increase productivity and thus eliminate jobs.

The allegation that an "Increase of productivity will reduce jobs" has been proven false by history over and over again it's so well known it has a name, "Jevons Paradox" or "Jevons Effect"[0].

> In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use [...] results in overall demand increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise.

The "increase in productivity" does not inherently result in less jobs, that's a false equivalence. It's likely just as false as it was in 1915 with the the assembly line and the Model T as it is in 2025 with AI and ChatGPT. This notion persists because as we go through inflection points due to something new changing up market dynamics, there is often a GROSS loss (as in economics) of jobs that often precipitates a NET gain overall as the market adapts, but that's not much comfort to people that lost or are worried about losing their jobs due to that inflection point changing the market.

The two important questions in that context for individuals in the job market during those inflections points (like today) are: "how difficult is it to adapt (to either not lose a job, or to benefit from or be a part of that net gain)?" and "Should you adapt?" Afterall, the skillsets that the market demands and the skillsets it supplies are not objectively quantifiable things; the presence of speculative markets is proof that this is subjective, not objective. Anyone who's ever been involved in the hiring process knows just how subjective this is. Which leads me to:

> the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.

Disagree that that's what the promise about. That IS happening, I don't disagree there, but that's not the promise that corporate is so hyped about. If we're being honest and not trying to blow smoke up people's ass to artificially inflate "value," AI is fundamentally about being more OBJECTIVE than SUBJECTIVE with regard to costs and resources of labor, and it's outputs. Anyone who knows what OKR's are and has been subject to a "performance review" in a self professed "Data driven company" knows how much modern corporate America, especially the tech market, loves it's "quantifiables." It's less about how much better it can allegedly do something, but the promise of how much "better" it can be quantified vs human labor. As long as AI has at least SOME proven utility (which it does), this promise of quantifiables combined with it's other inherent potential benefits (Doesn't need time off, doesn't sleep, doesn't need retirement/health benefits, no overtime pay, no regulatory limitations on hours worked, no "minimum wage") means that so long as the monied interests perceive it as continuing to improve, then they can dismiss it's inefficiencies/ineffectiveness in X or Y by the promise of it's potential to overcome that eventually.

It's the fundamental reason why people are so concerned about AI replacing Humans. Especially when you consider one of the things that AI excels at is quickly delivering an answer with confidence (people are impressed with speed and a sucker for confidence), and another big strength is it's ability to deal with repetitive minutia in known and solved problem spaces(a mainstay of many office jobs). It can also bullshit with best of them, fluff your ego as much as you want (and even when you don't), and almost never says "No" or "You're wrong" unless you ask it to.

In other words, it excels at the performative and repetitive bullshit and blowing smoke up your boss' ass and empowers them to do the same for their boss further up the chain, all while never once ruffling HR's feathers.

Again, it has other, much more practical and pragmatic utility too, it's not JUST a bullshit oracle, but it IS a good bullshit oracle if you want it to be.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[harimau777]

If that's the case, then why do we live in this late capitalist hell hole? Any technology that gets developed will be used for its worst, most dehumanizing purpose possible. That's just the reality of the shity society we live in.