[jackfranklyn]

I build automation tools for bookkeepers and accountants. The thing I keep seeing firsthand is that automation doesn't eliminate the job - it eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts.

Before our tools: a bookkeeper spends 80% of their time on data entry and transaction categorisation, 20% on actually thinking about the numbers. After: those ratios flip. The bookkeeper is still there, still needed, but now they're doing the part that actually requires judgment.

The catch nobody talks about is the transition period. The people who were really good at the mechanical part (fast data entry, memorised category codes) suddenly find their competitive advantage has evaporated. And the people who were good at the thinking part but slow at data entry are suddenly the most valuable people in the room. That's a real disruption for real humans even if the total number of jobs stays roughly the same.

I think the "AI won't take your job" framing misses this nuance. It's not about headcount. It's about which specific skills get devalued and how quickly people can retool. In accounting at least, the answer is "slowly" because the profession moves at glacial speed.

[OccamsMirror]

You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment.

AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because:

- Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline.

- Quality becomes more auditable because outputs can be checked with automated review layers.

- Communication overhead shrinks with fewer back-and-forth cycles when AI pre-fills and structures the work.

- Labor arbitrage expands and the limiting factor stops being “can we find someone locally who knows our messy process” and becomes “who is cheapest who can supervise and resolve exceptions.”

So yeah, the jobs mostly remain and some people become more valuable. But the clearing price for that labor moves toward the global minimum faster than it used to.

The impact won’t show up as “no jobs,” it is already showing up as stagnant or declining Western salaries, thinner career ladders, and more of the value captured by the firms that own the workflows rather than the people doing the work.

[chunkmonke99]

Isn't that what a well run company does when creating a process? Bureaucracy and process, reduces the penalty of weak domain context and in fact is designed to obviate that need. It "diffuses" the domain knowledge to a set of specifications, documents, and processes. AI may be able to accelerate it, or subsume that bureaucracy. But since when has the limiting factor been "finding someone locally who knows the process?" Once you document a process, the power of computing means you can outsource any of that you want no? Again, AI may subsume, all the back office or bureaucratic office work. Perhaps it will totally restructure the way humans organize labor, run companies, and coordinate. But that system will have to select for a different set of skills than "filling out n forms quickly and accurately." The wage stagnation etc etc. predates AI and might be due to other structural factors.

[jackfranklyn]

The salary compression point is the one I find hardest to push back on. Accounting BPO to the Philippines was already growing fast pre-AI - firms like TOA Global were scaling rapidly. With AI reducing the training overhead for domain-specific work, that arbitrage gets even easier. The remaining barrier is local regulatory knowledge (UK tax law, Companies House requirements, etc.) but even that erodes when you're mostly supervising exceptions rather than doing the full work yourself.

[WillPostForFood]

"it is already showing up as stagnant or declining Western salaries"

Real median salary, and real median wages are both rising for the last couple years. Maybe they would have risen faster if there was no AI, but I don't think you can say there has been a discernible impact yet.

[Bayko]

> AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context

This is why (personal experience) I am seeing a lot of FullStack jobs compared to specialized Backend, FE, Ops roles. AI does 90% of the job of a senior engineer (What the CEOs believe) and the companies now want someone that can do the full "100" and not just supply the missing "10". So that remaining 90 is now coming from an amalgamation of other responsibilities.

[simianwords]

Funny you ignored the third order effect where the efficiency really does enable lower cost

[Animats]

> automation tools ... eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts.

But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified.

There's also a tradeoff between automation flexibility and cost. If you need an LLM for each transaction, your costs will be much higher than if some simple CRUD server does it.

Here's a nice example from a more physical business - sandwich making.

Start with the Nala Sandwich Bot.[1] This is a single robot arm emulating a human making sandwiches. Humans have to do all the prep, and all the cleaning. It's slow, maybe one sandwich per minute. If they have any commercial installations, they're not showing them. This is cool, but ineffective.

Next is a Raptor/JLS robotic sandwich assembly line.[2] This is a dozen robots and many conveyors assembling sandwiches. It's reasonably fast, at 100 sandwiches per minute. This system could be reconfigured to make a variety of sandwich-format food products, but it would take a fair amount of downtime and adjustment. Not new robots, just different tooling. Everything is stainless steel or food grade plastic, so it can be routinely hosed down with hot soapy water. This is modern automation. Quite practical and in wide use.

Finally, there's the Weber automated sandwich line.[3] Now this is classic single-purpose automation, like 1950s Detroit engine lines. There are barely any robots at all; it's all special purpose hardware. You get 600 or more sandwiches per minute. Not only is everything stainless or food-grade plastic, it has a built-in self cleaning system so it can clean itself. Staff is minimal. But changing to a product with a slightly different form factor requires major modifications and skills not normally present in the plant. Only useful if you have a market for several hundred identical sandwiches per minute.

These three examples show why automation hasn't taken over. To get the most economical production, you need extreme product standardization. Sometimes you can get this. There are food plants which turn out Oreos or Twinkies in vast quantities at low cost with consistent quality. But if you want product variations, productivity goes way, way down.

[1] https://nalarobotics.com/sandwich.html

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YdWBEJMFyE

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRUfdBEpFJg

[csa]

> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified.

In many cases, this is a fallacy.

Much like programming, there is often essentially an infinite amount of (in this case) bookkeeping tasks that need to be done. The folks employed to do them work on the top X number of them. By removing a lot of the scut work, second order tasks can be done (like verification, clarification, etc.) or can be done more thoroughly.

Source: Me. I have worked waaaay too much on cleaning up the innards of less-than-perfect accounting processes.

[catdog]

> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified.

Not necessarily. Automation may also just result in higher quality output because it eliminates mistakes (less the case with "AI" automation though) and frees up time for the humans to actually quality control. This might require the people on average to be more skilled though.

Even if it only results in higher output volume you often have the effect that demand grows also because the price goes down.

[jama211]

No? You don’t only gain justification for automation by cutting costs. You can gain justification by increasing profits. You can keep the same amount of people but use them more efficiently and you create more total value. The fact you didn’t consider this worries me.

Also the statement “show why automation hasn’t taken over” is truely hysterically wrong. Yeah, sure, no automation has taken over since the Industrial Revolution

[0_____0]

The Nala bot reminded me of the guys at Felipe's in Cambridge MA. When they're building burritos during dinner rush, you'd swear to god that multiple different ingredients were following a ballistic trajectory toward the tortilla at any given time. If there was a salsa radar it would show multiple inbounds like the Russkies were finally nuking us.

ETA: It didn't remind me of this because the robot is good at what it does. It reminded me of just how far away from human capabilities SOTA robotic systems are.

[intended]

Thank you. Having automation means process control, which means handling sources of variation for a defined standard/spec. The claims of all jobs being done by AI end up also assuming that we will end up with factories running automated assembly lines of thought.

I have been losing my mind looking at the output of LLMs and having to nail variability down.

[Ensorceled]

I recently did a contract at medium sized business with a large retail and online business that had a CFO and several accountants / bookkeepers. You're describing a situation where that CFO only needs two or three accountants and bookkeepers to run the business and would lay off two or three people.

It IS about headcount in a lot of cases.

[jackfranklyn]

Fair enough - I'm probably biased because I mostly see small practices (1-3 people) where headcount can't really shrink further. In that context it's about throughput per person. But you're right that in a larger org with a CFO making staffing decisions, the efficiency gains get captured as cost savings rather than more clients served. The 5-to-3 scenario you describe is realistic and happening now.

[jama211]

Or they’d keep the same number of people and increase total value output. Businesses tend to like the idea of growth more than cost cutting after all.

[molsongolden]

Another component or view of this is that automating the rote work is "eliminating the boring parts" (I love this and have worked extensively on this) but it is also eliminating the less cognitively demanding work.

Once you have automated extensively, all of the remaining work is cognitively demanding and doing 8 hours of that work every day is exhausting.

[jarjoura]

I frame the shift more like this:

Systems engineering is an extremely hard computer science domain with few engineers either interested in it, or good at it.

Building dashboards is tedious and requires organizational structure to deliver on. This is the bread and butter of what agents are good at building right now. You still need organization and communication skills in your company and to direct the coding agents towards that dashboard you want and need. Until you hit a implementation wall and someone will need to spend time trying to understand some of the code. At least with dashboards, you can probably just start over from scratch.

It's arguably more work to prompt in english to an AI agent to assist you in hard systems problems, and the signals the agent would need to add value aren't readily available (yet?!). Plus, there's no way systems engineers would feel comfortable taking generated code at face-value. So they definitely will spend the extra mental energy to read what is output.

So I don't know. I think we're going to keep marching forward, because that's what we do, but I also don't think this "vibe-coded" automated code generator phase we're in right now will ultimately last. It'll likely fall apart and the pieces we put back together will likely return us to some new kind of normal, but we'll all still need to know how to be damn good software engineers.

[christofosho]

I understand where you're coming from, and think there is something missing in your final paragraph that I'm curious to understand. If LLMs do end up improving productivity, what would make them go away? I think automated code generators are here until something more performant supersedes them. So, what in your mind might be possibilities of that thing?

[enraged_camel]

>> The thing I keep seeing firsthand is that automation doesn't eliminate the job - it eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts.

No, not necessarily. There are different kinds of automation.

Earlier in my career I sold and implemented enterprise automation solutions for large clients. Think document scanning, intelligent data extraction and indexing and automatic routing. The C-level buyers overwhelmingly had one goal: to reduce headcount. And that was almost always the result. Retraining redundant staff for other roles was rare. It was only done in contexts where retaining accumulated institutional knowledge was important and worth the expense.

Here's the thing though: to overcome objections from those staff, whom we had to interview to understand the processes we were automating, we told them your story: you aren't being replaced, you're being repurposed for higher-level work. Wouldn't it be nice if the computer did the boring and tedious parts of your job so that you can focus on more important things? Most of them were convinced. Some, particularly those who had been around the block, weren't.

Ultimately, technologies like AI will have the the same impact. They weren't quite there yet, but I think it's just a matter of time.

[matwood]

> The C-level buyers overwhelmingly had one goal: to reduce headcount.

For many businesses this is the only way to significantly reduce costs.

[mcv]

This is exactly why I'm not that worried. I've noticed that AI is great at the parts of software engineering that I'm bad at, like implementing a new unfamiliar library, deploy pipelines, infra configuration, knowing specific technical details and standard patterns.

It's bad at the stuff I'm good at: thinking about the wider context, architecture, how to structure the code in an elegant, maintainable way, debugging complex issues, figuring out complex algorithms. I've tried using AI for those things, but it sucks at them. But I've also used it to solve configuration problems that I doubt I'd been able to figure out on my own.

[kungito]

one reason why i started enjoying programming less and less was because i felt i was spending 95% of the time on the problems you described which i felt were more or less the same over the years and werent complicated but annoying. unfortunately or fortunately, after coding for over 15 years for the past 4 months ive only been prompting and reading the outputted code. it never really feels like writing something would be faster than just prompting, so now i prompt 2-3 projects at the same time and play a game on the side to fill in the time while waiting for the prompts to finish. its nice since im still judged as if its taking the time to do it manually but if this ever becomes the norm and expectations rise it would become horribly draining. mentally managing the increased speed in adding complexity if very taxing for me. i no longer have periods where i deep dive into a problem for hours or do some nice refactoring which feels like its massaging my brain. now all i do is make big decisions

[hateful]

I would imagine, in this example, that the fact that you put in the numbers yourself gives you a mental map of where the numbers are and how they relate to each other, that having AI do it for you doesn't give you.

You could stare at a large sheet of numbers for a long time, and perhaps never get the kind of context you gained by entering them.

Additionally, if there was a mistake, it may not be as noticeable.

[roenxi]

> The bookkeeper is still there, still needed, but now they're doing the part that actually requires judgment.

The argument might be fundamentally sound, but now we're automating the part that requires judgement. So if the accountants aren't doing the mechanical part or the judgement part, where exactly is the role going? Formalised reading of an AI provided printout?

It seems quite reasonable to predict that humans just won't be able to make a living doing anything that involves screens or thinking, and we go back to manual labour as basically what humans do.

[selylindi]

Even manual labor is uncertain. Nothing in principle prevents a robot from being a mass produceable, relatively cheap, 24/7 manual worker.

We've presumably all seen the progress of humanoid robotics; they're currently far from emulating human manual dexterity, but in the last few years they've gotten pretty skilled at rapid locomotion. And robots will likely end up with a different skill profile at manual tasks than humans, simply due to being made of different materials via a more modular process. It could be a similar story to the rise of the practical skills of chatbots.

In theory we could produce a utopia for humans, automating all the bad labor. But I have little optimism left in my bones.

[chrisweekly]

By what logic are the "manual labor" jobs available? And if you're right and they somehow are, isn't that just another way of saying humanity is enslaving itself to the machines?

[raw_anon_1111]

You’re not taking into account that a successful bookkeeper may have hired someone like a new grad to take the drudgery off of their hands and now they can just do it themselves.

[wnc3141]

I'd imagine that when the 80% of less productive time is automated, the market doesn't respond by demanding 80% more output. There's just 20% as much work either making this a part time job or more likely a much smaller workforce as the number of man*hours demanded by the market greatly reduces.

[csa]

Scope will increase.

Good accounting teams will have more time and resources to do things like identify fraud, waste, duplicated processes, etc. They will also have time to streamline/optimize existing practices.

Good teams will earn many multiples of their cost in terms of savings or increased earnings.

There may be increased competition for the low-cost “just meet the legal compliance requirements” offerings, but any business that makes money and wants to make more will gladly spend more than the minimum for better service.

[skeptic_ai]

Let’s do some math.

He does 100 units of product per 100 units of time.

80 units of time on data entry 20 units of time on “thinking”

We now automatise the task in such a way that ratios flip:

So now we do 20 units of time for 100 products. Let’s assume we use same thinking as before of 20. So we use 40 units of time to produce 100 units of product.

Now let’s assume it’s linear growth:

We use 40 units of time for each task and we produce 200 units of product for 80 units of time.

Let’s now do 50 units of time for each and produce 250 units of product with same time as before. It’s definitely not the same.

you either work 40 and produce the same or work the same and produce 250. NOT THE SAME

[gizajob]

The desktop PC was the same - everyone said that it was going to wipe out jobs, when the main thing it wiped out was filing cabinets.

AI commentators seem to overlook that one of the primary functions of capitalism is to keep people in busywork: what David Graber called Bullshit Jobs. So AI is going to automate most of the bullshit away but the bullshit employees will keep working, because there wasn’t much need for them in the first place.

[ksec]

You are describing in cases where small businesses have little headcount and cant shrink any further.

But in a much bigger picture AI is akin to what Excel did to a building of people doing accounting and bookkeeping. Except at the time there were plenty of opportunities for those people doing different thing in the market. Something that economists constantly burp about.

I dont see this now. For whatever reason the economy has so much more bullshit job than those days, despite computer and technology we have far more administration hurdle and employees than before. And 70% of those will go away in the next 5 years. We automated those needless complexity. It isn't clear to me in a world today where many jobs are specialised, there is enough time and room for them to relearn the skills required for other job opportunities, if there are that many to fill the ones who were laid off.

[midnitewarrior]

Accountants will still exist, but we'll need fewer of them at any given time. In your example of flipping the 80/20 ratio, you are implying that each accountant would be able to (theoretically) handle a 5x workload with AI making up the gap.

Perhaps in reality more like a 3x advantage, due to human inefficiencies and the overhead of scaling the business to handle more clients.

Given that, 3x increase of productivity implies we either need 1/3 the accountants, or the accountancy supply brings down prices and more clients start hiring accountants due to affordability.

[gamblor956]

(I work in house handling the tax function.)

If AI tools worked, they would eliminate the bookkeepers. Their job is data entry and validation.

But bookkeeping is extremely important. Bad bookkeeping has killed more companies than bad accounting. Without proper books, the accounting, finance, and tax teams are just cosplaying.

[shaky-carrousel]

That would happen if the AI were good and consistent at doing the mechanical part. Which it is, sometimes.

I've found it's better to have the bot write a program to do the mechanical part that trusting it not to have a lazy day.

[Sparkyte]

I am not in the sams context. As we shift in job roles lots of people will get uprooted and it will have a negative impact on life in a general sense.

Similar to any industrial advancement in human history.

[lelanthran]

> And the people who were good at the thinking part but slow at data entry are suddenly the most valuable people in the room.

No, they aren't. They are now competing with everyone - the slow thinkers, the barely-conscious thinkers, the erratic thinkers, the "unable to reach a conclusion" thinkers as well as the people quick at "data entry", with the caveat that the people quick at "data entry" are almost certainly going to be better thinkers than those that weren't quick at data entry.

IOW, you think AI isn't coming for some specific class of programmers, but you are wrong. You and the "other types" will continue this debate in the soup kitchen.

[dawsmik]

Both jobs are going away. Prepare.

[xyzzy123]

I'm not very familiar with the field on a practical basis.

What parts of the job require judgement that is resistant to automation? What percentage of customers need that?

If the hours an accountant spends on a customer go from 4 per month to 1, do you reckon they can sustainably charge the same?

[dullcrisp]

Why would better efficiency mean they have to charge less?

[ArchieScrivener]

Yeah bro, its been three years. We are just beginning. We will replace the vast majority of professional service workers in 10 years including lawyers as Ai shifts to local and moves away from the cloud.

[sarchertech]

If we wipe out the vast majority of white collar jobs in just 10 years, we’re talking complete economic collapse.

No society can possibly absorb that kind of disruption over such a short time.

Also even assuming AI could completely replace lawyers. Lawyers control the legislature. They may not be able to stop your local model from telling you how to do something, but they can stop you from actually doing it without a lawyer.

[overgard]

I'm glad we have intelligent, mature, uncorrupted politicians who will be able to work together to make sure that this doesn't cause a depression so profound that the entire economy ceases to be viable.

Oh..

[gamblor956]

Lawyers, doctors, and accountants aren't just paid to be knowledge workers.

They're paid to accept responsibility for when they fuck up (even when it's not intentional).

Programmers aren't held responsible for their screw-ups. If they were, software wouldn't be the buggy mess it is today.

[coldtea]

That's 70% of the population living in ghettos and the economy collapsing through lack of people with disposable income with extra steps.