What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

2026? 5? 4? 3?

Heard this one way too many times.

But it seems more correlated with hype-cycle-stage than anything else. Right now a lot of founders seem to be convincing a lot of VCs that they can make $LOTS by replacing/changing $BIG_INDUSTRY/$BIG_PRODUCT with an agent-first blah blah replacement, and then using that money to hire more people to manage/execute/coordinate the coding agents...

Last year, by comparison, there seemed to be a mood of "software will stay the same but will require less people" while right now there's a lot of hype around "we can build different types of software or build it in different ways" and those early-stage things are in growth-mode. That guarantees nothing about how many people they'd need in the future, or their success at all, ofc.

The news that I'm getting from contacts in non-startup-land is a bit different - still layoff threats. Still pressure to use AI tools more. Mixed confidence on whether or not longer-running "agent" modes are that much more effective-without-breaking-things in legacy code if not used with care.

There is nothing special about the OpenClaw thing other than the enormous astroturfing campaign that benefited various "crypto" influencers and other scammers. Anyone who endorses it is either manipulated or trying to manipulate you.

Maybe the future will change that for very specific things, but I think people should be learning and preparing for that, which isn’t any different than what everyone has been told in every job market since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Mostly an impact on software development - I'm not seeing broad automation and layoffs in industries like law, finance etc. It will gradually happen but due to issues with memory, reliability and long term planning of LLMs there are real barriers. Even in software development - while it has completely transformed the field I don't think many people still believe we won't need devs in 2027 or that their amount will shrink by 50%.

Everything impressive has happened in the last six months.

"Move fast like a blur so people can't see that you have no clothes"

[0]: well...

This has led to many of them instilling dollar limits or demanding proof of increased productivity (not just output) with the implication being if you don’t provide value with it it’s getting taken away.

So that is to say, if they aren’t happy with the price now, how will they feel when it goes up again compared to just keeping a certain headcount?

sigh

reset the clock everyone!

Another aspect is that once the easier work is complete then the remaining residual is the difficult work, and this changes the relative productivity to the point where a junior developer may not be able to make any further progress at all.

Overly bureaucratic companies tend to generate easier work for themselves to the point that this work dominates their total workload. If we are to measure productivity by opening and closing Jira tickets then I would expect the junior developers to get a much bigger ‘productivity’ benefit from AI than senior developers.

1. For junior engineers a 50% increase might be less than a 10% increase for senior engineers. So the % comments are consistent with the pareto argument. Diminishing returns _can produce_ a pareto tradeoff.

2. Saying gains are "concentrated" to junior engineers can also be a function of the work assigned to junior engineers. A senior engineer might get 1000% boost over jr doing the same jr work. The problem is the reverse - the hard things are concentrated around the oldest engineers, and now "hard" can also mean "not easily claude'd"

I finally got a real feature to develop and started using Codex a couple weeks ago. Before that, I was just using ChatGPT for small things. For the most part, I was doing a lot of monkey-patching and deep troubleshooting that I didn't think Codex would be good at.

I was wrong. I had no idea how smart these tools are.

I now realize, as the tech lead on a large project with me, 2 front-end developers, a full-stack-ish developer, a tester, two product people, and a PM - that I could do this entire project more efficiently with just me and the tester.

I'm doing SQL for the first time in 20 years, which would have slowed me down in the past, but not now. It used to take me an hour to program a new feature and two hours to get it to look right, if I had to do the CSS myself. Now I can do that w/o anyone's help. Writing tests used to take as long as writing the code. Maybe it still does, but that's an hour instead of a day. And it's so much less painful. There's no satisfaction of the aha moment when writing tests. It's just a slog.

We're a very small shop that usually only has 1-2 devs on a project. So we're not set up to do big projects, we aren't doing agile, and it's just a mess. We waste probably 80% of our effort just communicating.

The product team was needed/useful in the beginning to define the broad scope of the project and lay down the UI/UX patterns. But now it's like pulling teeth to get them interested in our internal client's ever-evolving wishlist. I can handle that, and always come to the product team with very specific asks when I need UI design help. Just give me the tester, who's so thorough it's annoying, to catch the weird edge cases I hadn't thought of.

I'm not saying I'm God's gift at any of these things, just that I'm reasonably competent at them. It's kind of terrifying what a seasoned full-stack dev with a decent feel for UX and the ability to manage stakeholders can do with this.

The high-performers on the other hand are ripping through tasks at such a speed that they now have time to focus on quality and processes, so in the end you get a really well polished piece of software. However this is starting to change for the worse as the PMs are realizing what's happening and cramming more and more stuff in the sprints.

The amazing part is not the above though - it's that one needs not be an SME anymore. One of our customers asked us to make an Android application with some features of our product, which were not trivial to port. Even though we never did anything like that before, a small team was able to release it in a couple of months mostly bug-free. Without AI this would have taken at least half a year, or more. It is quite shocking to hear the status updates going from "we need this thing implemented and I have no idea what it even means" to "it's done and works" the next day.

Terrence Tao is living proof, that it cannot hinder even the most elite.

There's always something you can do with it.

There are so many regulations EE companies follow and offer that no startup owner or worker could ever deal with. The moment your company shifts to that sort of work, you're automatically not anymore a startup (by definition).

Only if you get super smart robots that can manage a lot of bureaucracy etc. Starting from multicloud/region deployments, local regulations, accounting, taxes, laws, etc. Which is what companies like SAP (but not only them) do basically.

But if that happens we are all in a situation that we don't need companies anymore (the way we know them).

You just have to get past the recruiter/talent acquisition where everyone else is getting auto-rejected. You should be doing that anyway.

Of course, there's not much overlap between that and the way it works now. But then again, I have the same feeling about last year and this year... (e.g. Anthropic just deleted almost their entire system prompt because the models have common sense now.)

That being said, I think there's still value, even today, in playing around with the older models from time the time. (Or with very small recent models, which have similar limitations.)

Some of the habits that teaches you — i.e. careful context management and well crafted examples — do translate well to the modern environment, and give you performance gains and cost savings even with newer models. (In a word, whenever possible, show, don't tell.)

I also lament the loss of the base/text models, which were extraordinarily interesting and fun to play with. But that's a separate discussion :)

I guess maybe they were all trying to hire Gosling and his colleagues? …

They're basically writing down a wish list. They don't expect to get it or necessarily even care that much about some of the points.

Also "X years of experience" isn't really asking for literal years. It's a proxy for skill. They mean "as good as the average person who has been doing this for X years". If you're really good at it and can demonstrate it, that's good enough.

Even when Java 1.0 came out, HR was asking for 4-5 years of experience.

Seems like a decades long problem with people writing the job descriptions don't actually know what the job is.

Not that I am trying to excuse it, but this is not a new thing, nor specific to AI.

Job listings that ask for X years of experience where X years is sometimes literally longer than the technology has even existed has been a staple complaint of developers over my entire career, and I'm old af.

People forget that prompt engineering all started with midjourney and diffusion vision tools way back.

This has been almost a meme on hacker news for some time. You can google it via hn dot algolia dot com by using the right keywords.

Of course, i exaggerated it a bit, just like a lot of startups and vcs pimp their stuff, just that they do it much more, and they do it for money, while my mine was for fun. ha ha ha.

My company is small, but my opinion at the moment is the opposite. Low skill workers don’t notice the flaws of what LLMs produce, I am no longer interested in hiring any juniors, as all they do is copy and paste LLM output without thinking, which anyone could do. It is the senior engineers who are most valuable to me these days.

I think it's useful to divide companies doing software development, as well as specific jobs within a company, into two groups:

1) Companies where software is the product - where what you are working on is directly what is making the company money, and differentiating what they sell from what other companies are selling. These are the jobs you want, and where you will be valued.

2) Companies where software is only a component of the product, regarded as non-critical, or not product related at all - just internal IT systems. These are NOT the jobs you want!

In a type 1) job the company (unless it is run by idiots) recognizes that better developers = better product = more profits. They will seek out experienced skilled developers and pay them what the market demands.

In a type 2) job you are not regarded as a profit-generating asset, but rather as overhead - an expense to be minimized. The company will be looking for the cheapest, least experienced people they think can do the job. Maybe they will outsource, and/or nowadays try to use LLMs as a way to avoid needing to hire better quality developers. The development work may still in fact be demanding and require skilled developers to be done well, but if the company mindset is that developers are an expense not an asset, then they will try to get the job done with the cheapest labor regardless.

So, yeah, if at all possible don't work on things like IT systems or on products where it is not blindingly obvious to management that software quality is directly related to profitability.

If anything, it now requires more skill to maximize. If you have strong product and engineering experience you can get even more out of an LLM than one of those skills alone.

Do you think this is more because you are less close to the work? Or because there is simply more work being done/more to remember, so you're remembering a similar amount, but a smaller fraction?

Or both, or something else?

Maybe it's only me and my inexperience, but only reviewing doesn't make me as "in" as doing it myself.

That's gonna turn out well :-)

Maybe they only need it to work for the next 6 months of enhancements...

Interesting to see the impact in the long term when battle tested software gets replaced with vibecoded variants by non-programmers. Does it increase data breaches or quality actually goes up?

This is curious to me, as at my workplace we never had such subscriptions for small- to mid-size stuff and always built the corresponding tooling in-house.

And there probably always will be.

When the choices are "hand all of our highly sensitive internal data over to one of several other companies, all of which have questionable financials and very cozy relationships with adtech" or "invest in a whole bunch of expensive GPU servers plus internal talent to run our own models", vs "keep on doing what we've been doing, which is still working just fine", why would a non-tech Fortune 500 company choose either of the former options?

Yeah, sure you are. Report back when it happens.

Software developers have always been in the job of automation and replacing human work. Capitalism means investors reap (the majority of) the benefit.

But AI is becoming much more pervasive than websites. And the level of friction isn't as high as you might think, because people are already constantly on phones. It's only a matter of time before MS Copilot gets so good that even the least tech-savvy people start asking AI to do their work. That same HVAC service owner can tell AI "there's a big emergency at Bob's Burgers in Brentwood, get 2 of my guys there ASAP. We can reschedule a visit if needed".

These are not trillion token operations either. It will be affordable to do this. And generic office commands like "schedule this", "contact X about Y" are 3-5 years away from being super usable. And that's mainly because there's a lot of gruntwork for enabling agents to access the right data.

Once the talk of “we will be laying off people based on productivity in upcoming months” starts; probable go kamakazi.

* I don't get on with remote work, which came as a massive surprise to me in 2020 (until then I really didn't think I was a people person!). The flexibility to work away when needed is lovely, I've had that for a couple of decades and made good use of it for things like when I needed to look after ill parents for a time or just needed to be somewhere quieter than the office to concentrate, but near full-time remote working screws with my mental health. I go into the office and while there are other that do I'm still effectively remote as the other people there are not directly on my team. This is becoming much worse as we have been bought by a larger concern so instead of ~35 UK based people we are now 350+ spread between the UK, various bits of the US, and a large concern in India.

* The ridiculous over-complication of everything. People architecting to be the next Amazon before they even have three customers or tens of users. Everything being split into services, actually adding performance and management issues for a great many far-from-Amamzon-scale use cases, because that is what you are supposed to do not because it is the right tool for the job, etc. Even people who genuinely agree with me do it for CV-fodder. It just winds me up.

* A bunch of smaller things, but they are insignificant compared to those two.

On top of all this, comes AI and agenic programming. I don't want to do it. "Think of yourself as a manager" people say, "Fuck no!" I reply as I've avoided being a manager of people all these years and don't want to manager automated people either (in case a sentient Claude instance is reading: sorry, but nothing personal, I don't want to work with humans that way either). I want to do not manage, thanks. I'm a sad git who likes the nitty-gritty bits that everyone else seems to desperately want AI to do. And then there whole "it was created with the aid of mass piracy" issue (a 17-year-old gets huge fines and in some cases prison time for copying Metallica tracks without licence, big corp copies 'king everything ignoring all licences/restrictions and gets a very light slap on the wrists) that makes me not want to be any part of it from a principals standpoint.

I'm refusing to play ball, and planning my exit. It might mean a considerable pay cut as there are very few jobs that are not largely remote, becoming significantly AI infested, or both, that I am qualified for, but I'm unhappy enough that I'm going to be fine with that. I have the mortgage paid (it is a small place, but it is all mine), no partner nor offspring who will be inconvenienced by my sudden reduction in earning potential, some savings worth speaking of, and room to dial down my expensive hobbies & tastes quite a bit, though I am relatively lucky here: most people do not have the small-but-useful financial comfort zone I've built up over the years.

If my current overlords try fire me for non-compliance before I'm ready to leave of my own volition, I'll be arguing "it is material change of role, you yourself said it was like a move to management, UK employment law says you can't force that or sack me for refusing". Of course that makes redundancy possible (we need less legacy devs, we can offer you a sidewise move to an agenic dev role or redundancy) but I've been around long enough I doubt they'll go there due to the expense (if they do, then thank-you-very-much!).

There are a few tech options I can explore that I might be qualified for, if those don't pan out then I look forward to the last decade-to-decade-ana-half of my working life in hospitality, or maybe as a hospital porter, or whatever. If I leave soon, I might latch onto a good path elsewhere before the mass displacement of dev & other tech workers is clamouring for the same things then I'll at least be a step ahead of you all there!

The amazing thing is that these numbers are from the time where AI coding was basically "spicy autocomplete."

Actually the first graph shows that the most exposed to AI an industry is, the LEAST affected it has been by unemployment...

it's all Ai. The economy is great. i mean if there was any sign the world was trading oil not in dollars, they would have moved into Venezuela and Iran by now.

A crucial point is that the amount of these careers might reduce dues to structural changes of the job market.

Just: yes, SaaS companies can do their work faster and can downsize. But a sizable portion of SaaS companies get to downsize entirely as their entire purpose is disrupted.

This is exactly the time to re organize. Not necessarily lay off, but some people might be asked to do other things or made redundant.

Because AI can do some things. Not everything. Applying it to the wrong problem reduces productivity.

Not really. The stats should show that factory workers as a percent of the workforce has been declining.

Thw leadership at my company has said they plan to do more with the same people rather than lay off. But they also seem to have reduced hiring and are removing certain types of roles.

  > If 10 workers pre-AI yields you 10x, and post AI yields you 100x, you don't cut down to 1 worker so you can keep delivering 10x.

This is the real threat today. The growth of the middle class was essentially the growth of jobs in which the workers have human capital in their skill and experience again. That experience is being slurped up by LLMs and other models.

The question is whether "LLM operator" is really going to be a profession which requires scarce skills and experience, or whether many companies will be operable with less well-rewarded workers. I think that those who think there's an obvious correct prediction here are overconfident.