Your Job Isn't Disappearing. It's Shrinking Around You in Real Time

[prng2021]

The author gives this example of the problem and incorrect way to leverage AI:

"Sarah was relieved. She thought she could focus on high-value synthesis work. She’d take the agent’s output and refine it, add strategic insights, make it client-ready."

Then they propose a long winded solution which is essentially the same exact thing but uses the magical term "orchestrate" a few times to make it sound different.

[TaupeRanger]

Well, the article was written by AI, so I wouldn't expect it to make valid arguments through a long article like this.

[dccoolgai]

In fairness to the author, I think their point was that you take _several_ agents (not just one) and find a way to have them work like a team of 20 people. In the example, Sarah is trying to do the same job she did before, just marginally better.

[veggieroll]

> add strategic insights

This claim has always been BS in my experience.

[penetrarthur]

God damn it. Can people write interesting articles in NORMAL writing style nowadays? Why is everyone writing in these stupid short "punchline" sentences?

[coffeefirst]

Seriously. This is trash. It presents no evidence, contains no original ideas, it’s just written—excuse me, generated—to be as provocative as possible.

I think I’ll just start flagging these. They’re just a new kind of spam.

[bux93]

It's exhausting to read.

I can't quite put my finger on it; obviously the "it's not this. It's that." is part of it, but even without the obvious tells that writing was AI-generated/improved, it's just so tiring to read?

Maybe a linguist can chime in why all these texts are so samey, cloying and annoying to read? Is it (just) the pacing?

[kykat]

Because it's not people doing the writing.

[dude250711]

That's ChatGPT for you:

> The ... isn’t just ... . It’s ... .

[rawgabbit]

It reads more like a transcript for a podcast. Somewhere along the way, we no longer favor illustrative anecdotes, logical arguments, or dialectical arguments. Everything is a podcast now.

[gchamonlive]

All of a sudden everybody is a writing style critic. The only question that is pertinent is if the message of the post is relevant.

Think about it. You wouldn't give someone crap for writing in broken English because there are many really smart people that are non English speakers. So why are we giving crap for people using AI to write better posts? If the idea is relevant, what's the point in criticizing the style?

A fair question would be "is the idea in the post actually the writer's or was it entirely done by AI"? However how can one actually tell if the idea, not the style is original? You can't. So it's pointless to be angry about style. Focus on the message.

[gedy]

Because they aren't writing, it's vibe blogging or whatever

[subpixel]

Because it’s a lead generation machine

[lelandfe]

> You saw a colleague generate something 80% as good in four minutes using an AI agent. Maybe 90% as good if you’re being honest.

Wish this were realistic - I'd have enjoyed the read more.

[coffeefirst]

It’s possible the author is such a bad writer that this is really 90% as good as they get.

Actually that’s probably the only way anyone would publish this without being embarrassed.

[FrustratedMonky]

The key "One critical caveat: this won’t work forever in its current form. Eventually, agents will get better at orchestration too. But it buys you three to five years. And in that time, you’ll see the next evolution coming"

The suggestion does sound a bit like 'work faster'.

Don't just work faster, but yes, work faster.

[direwolf20]

The only way to win is to already have enough money that you don't need a job.

Or get a physical job AI can't do. But all of those are commodities and pay shit wages.

[sevenzero]

In my situation the next best alternative is to end it all. I wont go back to wage slavery fuck ass companies not respecting me nor my time.

[DJBunnies]

AI is a glorified search engine, it can’t tell what solutions an org actually needs or how to plan & execute them safely.

[jofzar]

> Last week, you spent three hours writing a campaign brief. You saw a colleague generate something 80% as good in four minutes using an AI agent. Maybe 90% as good if you’re being honest.

No it's like 60% as good, but management and other "AI for brains" people can't see it.

[TaupeRanger]

If that's the case, then business results should get worse, and management should notice this. If business results don't get worse, then either 1) it's actually more than 60% as good, or 2) it doesn't matter to the business's bottom line that the result is only 60% as good instead of 80% as good, and management made the right decision.

[candiddevmike]

We're in a recession, it's the economy that's shrinking, not my job.

[RGamma]

What also seems to be shrinking is the awareness that the presence of LLMs does not obviate the need to understand the world.

Sleepwalking into Idiocracy x Waterworld while dreaming of Star Trek...

[api]

It’s a recession being masked by two things: inflation making nominal numbers not go down, and the fact that stock markets have fully decoupled from the actual economy. They are just casinos now.

[mono442]

Work that can largely accelerate AI seems pointless to me in the current situation. It’s fairly clear to me that this will soon lead to an oversupply of workers and a drop in wages. It’s possible that wages may even fall to such a level that pursuing those professions will no longer make sense at all. Unfortunately it seems like software engineering will be one of those professions.

[OutOfHere]

It seems inevitable that the wages for a software engineer will approach minimum wage. The role would then have transformed into a "requirements specification technician", which is something that a PM might even do directly.

[tharmas]

>this will soon lead to an oversupply of workers and a drop in wages

Precisely. So why are our masters still panicking about population decline and hyping the need for immigration?

[recursivedoubts]

AI slop, obviously.

The fundamental problem is not unlike what happened in the industrial revolution: we are suddenly much more productive as a society, how do we distribute that productivity?

A sane society would use a tool like the monetary supply to do so: money is a public good (it exists because we say it does) and thus should be managed for the public good. People should be able to work less while having a higher living standard, which is easily achievable given our almost comical productivity.

Because we've privatized money creation in the form of credit monopolies, this obvious mechanism isn't available, so it seems like we will end up with either short term crushing poverty followed by bloody revolution or the techno-feudalist utopia-for-the-few.

[calebt3141]

I need to stop using the metric of "if a hacker news post has a lot of comments, then the article is worth a read" and instead read the comments first.

Lately, there have many controversial articles (with a lot of comments) that are most likely written by AI and I regret wasting my time on. Sigh, is there a hacker news replacement with higher quality articles that I don't know about? I imagine all platforms are inundated with slop now.

[rambocoder]

Me too. I ended up reading the article first and then comments. It's definitely AI slop, can I have my ten minutes back.

[fwip]

AI-written article, as a heads up.

[b40d-48b2-979e]

I feel this comment can apply to 80% of the content that gets posted anymore.

[gedy]

We need a plugin to automatically detect AI posts as I'm basically skipping reading or clicking most links now due to a lot of it being generated word soup.

[beauzero]

This belongs on reddit. Not HN.

[OutOfHere]

Users need to stop shaming Reddit. It doesn't belong on Reddit either.

[nemomarx]

I tried to take the headline seriously, but reading deeper into the piece they just do a semantic trick - the current job is "shrinking" and you need to find a new better job to do instead. This is basically what disappearing would imply anyway?

Also very funny to use an AI to write this kind of article. I w wonder how they feel about their job writing blog posts shrinking.

[arnonejoe]

My job as a software engineer is not going anywhere. It’s only getting more interesting. Nice vibe blog / fear mongering piece.

[kykat]

The advice is: identify human constraints and remove them with agents.

Yet another simple stupid idea inflated to a massive article with ai.

[HardwareLust]

AI slop describing how AI slop is affecting your job. Cool.