Comment by LogicFailsMe
10 hours ago
I don't see a world where a motivated soul can build a business from a laptop and a token service as a problem. I see it as opportunity.
I feel similarly about Hollywood and the creation of media. We're not there in either case yet, but we will be. That's pretty clear. and when I look at the feudal society that is the entertainment industry here, I don't understand why so many of the serfs are trying to perpetuate it in its current state. And I really don't get why engineers think this technology is going to turn them into serfs unless they let that happen to them themselves. If you can build things, AI coding agents will let you build faster and more for the same amount of effort.
I am assuming given the rate of advance of AI coding systems in the past year that there is plenty of improvement to come before this plateaus. I'm sure that will include AI generated systems to do security reviews that will be at human or better level. I've already seen Claude find 20 plus-year-old bugs in my own code. They weren't particularly mission critical but they were there the whole time. I've also seen it do amazingly sophisticated reverse engineering of assembly code only to fall over flat on its face for the simplest tasks.
That depends on how fast that change happens. If 45% of jobs evaporate in a a 5 year period, a complete societal collapse is the likely outcome.
Sounds like influencer nonsense to me. Touch grass. If the people are fed and housed, there's no collapse. And if the billionaire class lets them starve, they will finally go through some things just like the aristocracy in France once did. And I think even Peter Thiel is smarter than that. You can feed yourself for <$1000 a year on beans and rice. Not saying you'd enjoy it, but you won't starve. So for ~$40B annually, the billionaires buy themselves revolution insurance. Fantastic value.
OTOH if what you're really talking about is the long-term collapse in our ludicrous carbon footprint when we finally run out of fossil fuels and we didn't invest in renewables or nuclear to replace them, well, I'm with you there.
>Sounds like influencer nonsense to me. Touch grass.
I don't even know what this means.
The worst unemployment during the Weimar Republic was 25-30%. Unemployment in the Great Depression peaked at 25%.
So yeah if we get to 45% unemployment and those are the highest paying jobs on average then yeah it's gonna be bad. Then you add in second order effects where none of those people have the money to pay the other 55% who are still employed.
We might get to a UBI relatively quickly and peacefully. But I'm not betting on it.
>finally go through some things just like the aristocracy in France once did.
Yeah that's probably the most likely scenario, but that quickly devolved into a death and imprisonment for far more than the aristocrats and eventually ended with Napoleon trying to take over Europe and millions of deaths overall.
The world didn't literally end, but it was 40 years of war, famine, disease, and death, and not a lot of time to think about starting businesses with your laptop.
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>You can feed yourself for <$1000 a year on beans and rice. Not saying you'd enjoy it, but you won't starve. So for ~$40B annually, the billionaires buy themselves revolution insurance. Fantastic value.
You are the epitome of the tech bro.
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Peter Thiel might be smarter than that but I’m not sure about the other ones.
Look how Musk treated the Twitter devs or Bezos any of his workers or Trump anybody.
>If you can build things, AI coding agents will let you build faster and more for the same amount of effort.
But you aren't building, your LLM is. Also, you are only thinking about ways as you, a supposed builder, will benefit from this technology. Have you considered how all previous waves of new technologies have introduced downstream effects that have muddied our societies? LLMs are not unique in this regard, and we should be critical on those who are trying to force them into every device we own.
Would you say the general contractor for your home isn’t a builder because he didn’t install the toilets?
I think that's precisely his thinking and don't let him know about all those fancy expensive unitasker tools they have that you probably don't that let them do it far more cost effectively and better than the typical homeowner. Won't you think of the jerbs(tm)? And to Captain dystopia, life expectencies were increasing monotonically until COVID. Wonder what changed?
I think this argument would be make more sense if you were talking about an architect, or the customer.
A contractor is still very much putting the house together.
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I've struggled a bit with this myself. I'm having a paradigm shift. I used to say "but I like writing code". But like the article says, that's not really true. I like building things, the code was just a way to do that. If you want to get pedantic, I wasn't building things before AI either, the compiler/linker was doing that for me. I see this is just another level of abstraction. I still get to decide how things work, what "layers" I want to introduce. I still get to say, no, I don't like that. So instead of being the "grunt", I'm the designer/architect. I'm still building what I want. Boilerplate code was never something I enjoyed before anyway. I'm loving (like actually giggling) having the AI tie all the bits for me and getting up and running with things working. It reminds me of my Delphi days: File->New Project, and you're ready to go. I think I was burnt out. AI is helping me find joy again. I also disable AI in all my apps as well, so I'm still on the fence about several things too.
This resonates. I spent years thinking I enjoyed coding, but what I actually enjoy is designing elegant solutions built on solid architecture. Inventing, innovating, building progressively on strong foundations. The real pleasure is the finished product (is it ever really finished though?) — seeing it's useful and makes people's lives easier, while knowing it's well-built technically. The user doesn't see that part, but we know.
With AI, by always planning first, pushing it to explore alternative technical approaches, making it explain its choices — the creative construction process gets easier. You stay the conductor. Refactoring, new features, testing — all facilitated. Add regular AI-driven audits to catch defects, and of course the expert eye that nothing replaces.
One thing that worries me though: how will junior devs build that expert eye if AI handles the grunt work? Learning through struggle is how most of us developed intuition. That's a real problem for the next generation.