Society provides support to this kind of decision, it's obvious why it happens.

And nobody really believes this whole "we got too efficient" so now we don't need 40% of our company anymore.

Now with LLMs, code is cheap and it also has quality, therefore "quality code can be had in the cheap".

Do you really believe this is the case? Why don't companies fire all their developers if they can have an algorithm that can output cheap and quality code?

But the thing is, there are many unknowns. We humans are very capable of adapting as we go. LLMs have a fixed data they were trained on and prompt engineering can only get you so far.

I think anyone asking this with the intention of actually replacing humans with LLMs don't really understand neither humans nor LLMs. They are just talking money.

Many enterprises are currently exploring to see if they can invite developers to leverage AI tools—like they leveraged the compiler—to be more productive. To operate on a higher plane of agency, collaborating on what we should be building and not just technical execution. Those actively hostile or just checked out with the idea of relearning skills are being laid off. (Some unprofitable business sections are being swept up opportunistically too.) The idea that all developers would be fired if AI tools can write good code doesn’t meet the lessons of history

The thing is, developers have been hired to automate process, and as for any professional doing a good job, that means the output should perform reliably. But now they are forcing us to use a tools that everyone knows is not reliable, but the onus is still on us to keep the same reliability. So do you see why we are not thrilled?

It’s like providing a faulty piano (that shuffles the notes when a key is pressed) and expecting a good rendition of the Moonlight Sonata.

Or a crane that will stall and drop its load randomly. It would have been sent to the scrapyard on the first day.

The only reason you have the concept that engines can "stall" is because people have bought engines that can stall by the hundreds of millions, instead of the earliest people refusing to buy them at all and all waiting for the perfect engine.

Container ships can sink with all the containers lost at sea. Still used.

Steam train engines could explode, derailing the train and killing some passengers and employees. Still used.

Buildings can collapse. Still used.

Pneumatic tyres can burst. Still used.

Here[1] is Tom Scott using a recreation walking crane from the 13th century, a technology going back to Roman times, which has no evidence that it ever had brakes on it historically. Look at that and tell me you think the rope never snappped, the wood never broke, the walker never tripped and the thing never unreeled the load back to the ground with the walker severely injured, because if it went wrong builders would refuse to use it? No chance.

Nothing functions like you're claiming; that's where we get the saying "don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough", as soon as stuff is better than not having it, people want to make use of it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk9v3m7Slv8

Real world is chaotic, technology was always first about controlling, then improving said control. A lot of the risks in the situations you described have been brought down that the savings (time, money,…) are magnitude more than the cost of the failure.

I’m not asking for perfection, but something good enough that we can demonstrate the savings outweigh the costs. So far there’s none. In fact, we are increasing it. And fast.

Why generalizing your own experience on other's?

I dont think AI is the reason for the layoffs. Its just easier to say "because of AI we are firing" than to say "because we overhired and its actually our fault".

[1]https://djinni.substack.com/p/2021-in-review [2]https://blog.djinni.co/post/q1-analytics-en [3]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

I know that things like “clean code” exists but I always felt that actual code quality only shows when you try adding or changing existing code. Not by looking at it.

And the ability to judge code quality on a system scale is something I don’t think LLMs can do. But they may support developers in their judgment.

Quality doesn't matter if you're writing throwaway code or you need your startup to find a market before you run out of cash.

But once it matters, it matters a lot.

Because it takes an experienced developer to get the machine to output cheap and quality code well enough to be useful.

That developer is just a whole lot more valuable now, because they can do more work at a higher quality.

I can see not everybody here will agree with me, but I find this take absolutely reasonable. The European space has the capacity and the resources to create a product that replaces something as trivial as Linkedin, and yet it takes the lazy approach of just using American products.

It's the same thing with China's manufactured products, at some point the rest of the world just accepted that everything gets done in China and then keep complaining about how abusive China can be.

The most recent issue is the military question. Europe relied for decades on the "cheap" protection of the USA. Now the USA gave the middle finger to Europe and Europe acts shocked, but Europe is not so shocked when it comes to the military budget it did not spend on self defense during all the time the Americans provided protection.

Fully agree. Europe expects some kids from nowheresville Tennessee to die in a ditch defending Ukraine. The war will be over the second they need to draft 18 year-olds at scale from anywhere in western Europe to go defend "Europe". Nobody in France will die defending Poland, nobody in Greece will die defending Latvia. The EU is such a joke.

Yet another person who thinks that there is a silver bullet for complexity. The mythical intelligent machines that from poorly described natural language can erect flawless complex system is like the philosopher's stone of our time.

And let's be honest that's not a new thing. It's been already a long time since you had a revolutionary idea in the shower only to google it(or use an LLM nowadays) and discover that there are already eight different apps that do what you were thinking.

Also I mean you and I can recognize people we know. A surveillance camera has millions of sensors sampling every ~50 ms. It’s plausible.

I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.

https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/

I can't believe I'm debating climate change on HackerNews. What happened here?

You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.

If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust.

This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.

On top of that I think that society, as a general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product.

The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.

I used to be very tolerant of people's idiosyncrasies but with the internet, social media etc. that brings out the worst in people I'm now much less so.

Agreed, fashion is deeply irrational but it's always been with us. The real problem now is the degree to which the fashion industry exploits the excessively 'vulnerable'—you know, the oddballs who were once ignored. It's why a $5 can now cost $500.

Moreover, something in fashion one day is out of fashion the next, and it's a damn nuisance. It's gotten completely out of hand. Recently, I bought a pair of cargo-style work pants and they were fine. About a month later I bought another pair of the same brand, size and type (going on the label they were same model and style, and there was only one type--supposedly). Got them home and the cut was not only different and they were less comfortable but the legs were cut narrow (they were now too tight).

Took them back and the sales assistant said "oh that's normal, styles usually change with every new shipment, you're supposed to check them first".

For fuck's sake they are ordinary utilitarian work pants—not something you'd expect to see on the catwalks of Paris. I ought to be able to buy exactly the same product time after time like I used to be able to do with Levi jeans by just by looking at the tag/label (nowadays you can't even rely on Levis being the same fit).

But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.

>If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted.

Car technology in the past was worse, we know that. Cars were more affordable though.

>Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples.

Like today then.

>We're benefiting greatly from the increase in productivity. We just view our great-grandfather luxuries as our necessities.

Young people are rotting at home unable to go ahead with their lives because wages nowadays are not enough to pay for a house and a family. Why do people try to deny this obvious reality? Productivity didn't benefit everyone equally and people in the past had more opportunities to build a life inside a standard that was socially acceptable.

Eehhhh... I really don't think that's true.

First, adjusted for inflation, new car prices really aren't that different than they were 10-30-50-70 years ago. You have to compare like for like, no cheating comparing a modern luxury car to Ford Pinto. For example the cheapest car in 1970 cost about $2000, with no frills like a radio, passenger wing mirror or floor matts. That's equivalent to about $17000 today. A base Nissan Versa today starts at $18000, yet includes power windows and an A/C.

Second, the maintenance requirements today are much, much lower than in the past. There's a whole list of expensive stuff you just don't have to think about with modern cars until long after those old cars would be at the junk yard (chassis lube, spark plugs, spark plug wires, carb and distributor, wheel bearings etc). That's a lot of labor you don't pay for, to say nothing of the parts!

Third, despite being heavier, more convenient and safer, modern cars have lower fuel consumption. Coming back to our Pinto vs Versa example, the Versa gets at least 50% better fuel economy.

Fourth, cars today just last longer. It used to be a minor miracle when a wasn't rusted out after 10 years or the engine still ran after 100k miles. Today, your car might be still under warranty at that point.

> Why do people try to deny this obvious reality?

Because it is not at all obvious that that is, in fact, reality. It doesn't help to complain about easily-disprovable things like the affordability of cars.

Well you can just search "why are cars so expensive" and then you will find dozens of articles like the one below. I'm not American but I have the impression that cars were a kind of milestone in the life of young people in the past and this disappeared due to affordability. How much does it cost to live in a van nowadays? Can a part time fast food worker afford it?

I don't like this hedonistic argument that you used, it sounds like cheating, you risk sounding like the GP saying that houses today that nobody can afford are in fact cheaper because they are less likely to catch fire.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/buying/why-owning-a-car-is-g...

A 2025 Nissan Sentra was pretty similar in constant dollars to my 1982 Datsun Sentra. A 2025 Honda Civic was pretty close to my 1989 Civic. A 2025 Honda CR-V was pretty close to my 2006 CR-V.

The average new car price now is quite a bit higher in constant dollars than the average new car price decades ago, but that is because preferences have shifted to cars that are at more expensive places in the lineup.

My 2006 CR-V for example was more than my 1989 Civic in constant dollars, but CR-Vs are at a higher price point that Civics. If I had gotten another Civic in 2006 it would have been about the same as my 1989 Civic.

If you don't believe the enormous amount of freely available data on the internet. I am American, I had grandparents who were American. Poverty was a whole different beast in the 1930's compared to today.

I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you're mostly buying the land.

> Car technology in the past was worse, we know that. Cars were more affordable though.

Car ownership in 1936 was far below what it is today.

> Like today then.

No, groceries were far more expensive. You can buy far more gallons of milks, eggs, lbs of ground beef, or potatoes at today's prices with todays median wage than you could in 1936 on the 1936 median wage. We have records of how much people made, and the cost of basic staples. This isn't something you need to guess about you can just google it.

> Young people are rotting at home unable to go ahead with their lives because wages nowadays are not enough to pay for a house and a family. Why do people try to deny this obvious reality? Productivity didn't benefit everyone equally and people in the past had more opportunities to build a life inside a standard that was socially acceptable.

Because 100 years of data says that this is a difference in expectations vs people being poorer. Yeah housing is more expensive than it should be due to regulation but despite that people are still much better off.

Plenty in Seattle.

People would raise a family on a single income. Boomers would work brain dead job and afford more than what a white collar worker can today, not to mention you could change careers when you wanted. Land was dirty cheap. People had multiple houses. You could find a job right out of highschool.

Nowadays people work dead end jobs to never be able to afford anything. Social security is being bankrupt by retirees who are collecting much more than they contributed and millennials and zoomers are repeatedly told they are not going to be able to retire. A degree became just a piece of paper. Any job interview has at least 3 stages. Childcare, education, etc ridiculously expensive. Houses and rent are ridiculously expensive.

>I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you're mostly buying the land.

You're completely out of touch. Even apartments are super expensive nowadays. I would gladly live in a house without A/C.

Why do you have so much certainty about what it's like in the US now vs 70 years ago when you're not American?

Are you saying that the data is wrong and the only way to know what it's truly like to make it in America is to not live there? That's sounds insane.

>Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.

I assume by catch fire GP means electrical wiring? Many houses on market today are literally not remodeled since the 1940s so retain that original wiring.