Fable Took My Job

echelon

> The frontier models are not good enough to replace an experienced engineer. Yeah they are. Two pizza team = 2 person team + Opus 5.5 Or for the really enterprising, solopreneur scaling to > $2.5 ARR (more than Goog's revenue per employee). This is a fundamentally different game now. I don't know why anyone assumes it just stops here.

gambiting

"both of them would lose their job next week with zero notice." What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change

amelius

This post is so sad it makes me wonder how many suicide notes Amodei and Altman had on their doormats, or will in the future.

brador

“AI makes features not software.” - MM

CodeCompost

This post is illegible.

wwind123

It's sad to see people lose jobs because executives believe AI could replace them. If it's any consolation, at some point most of those executives could be replaced by AI too.

cupofjoakim

i'm tired man. AI this, AI that, here's how we productmaxxed our deliveries, here's how many people we could remove, etc etc. Everyone is going crazy about ai, but no one is remembering the people affected. Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.

retinaros

AI is a slopening of everything that makes us humans. If we cant see it that is only because the last 30-40 years have been a constant assault on human intelligence. we became dumb and sloppy as well. peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time. Everything went downhill as technology progressed and people thoughts could be controlled and manipulated in ways where intelligence and curiosity were not seen as relevant skills to acquire and nurture.

f311a

Am I the only one who's having a hard time reading white text on a brown background? It makes me think about how many people just stop reading because it's not comfortable, and they don't bother turning on reading mode.

ninjagoo

For now, those with Capital will probably be ok. Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok. In the US? Who knows. In China, India, LATAM, Africa - who knows? Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero. Interesting times ahead? Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?

ahmetomer

> The joy of programming is dying. The joy of delivering results lives on.

feverzsj

Wait until the ceo finds out all his business secrets are sold to his competitors.

simianwords

If you think AI can't get so good that it is a superset of Human capabilities, there's a good news. We will expand the job market and create new jobs that weren't possible before.

A_D_E_P_T

> These models lack the taste that makes for effective product decision making. It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.' This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".

slopinthebag

i sympathise with the individual of course, and i wish they did not have the experience they wrote about. it makes me feel quite bad to read it actually. but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.

TrisEck

All the while Karpathy talking about how only a fraction of people understand the capability of (frontier) AI models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50047422 . As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.

poisonborz

> The joy of programming is dying. The joy of delivering results lives on. This sums it up well and will ring true no matter which side of the argument you're on.

voidifremoved

Remembering when I lost people to offshoring in the mid 00s. I made the case, with metrics, that the quality was nowhere near as good and the spec overhead was non-trivial. Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.

jalam

> It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.' This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary. And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".

laylower

>Do you know how hard it is to sleep when all you can hear is your own heartbeat? Do you know how hard it is to function with four effective hours of sleep when you offer your body ten? It is rough. This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch. I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.