Comment by simonw
2 days ago
I find this attitude baffling.
Things are allowed to get better more than once!
The idea that "yeah, you said technology had improved in the past, and now you're saying it has improved again" is a gotcha just seems incoherent to me.
The context for some of these posts are yet-another-null-result coming out, saying that AI isn't having the expected objective result, with the posts defending AI by saying that it totally changed just after the cut-off the research. Evolutionary step changes are definitely a thing, but the problem isn't that AI is having such step changes, it's that you're saying that the most recent step change is the one that shows the improvement, and every study that comes out saying "no, that wasn't," the response to that is, "no, there's a new change that is totally the key inflection point!"
Or, put differently: if a study comes out next year saying they don't see major impacts from AI in 2026, will you admit your viewpoint as being wrong, or is your response going to be "no, there was a massive inflection point in September 2026 that completely invalidates the paper"?
I think people are, rightly or wrongly, identifying goalpost moving re: coding agents are only just this year working well enough to impact work. I'm reminded of a quote I read last year from one of my favorite writers, Noah Smith:
> The debate over whether AI is taking people’s jobs may or may not last forever. If AI takes a lot of people’s jobs, the debate will end because one side will have clearly won. But if AI doesn’t take a lot of people’s jobs, then the debate will never be resolved, because there will be a bunch of people who will still go around saying that it’s about to take everyone’s job. Sometimes those people will find some subset of workers whose employment prospects are looking weaker than others, and claim that this is the beginning of the great AI job destruction wave. And who will be able to prove them wrong?
Source: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/ai-and-jobs-again
> re: coding agents are only just this year working well enough to impact work
Or, more likely, since software touches every single industry of man, you're seeing AI slowly able to handle different types of work. People in the types of work that early models struggled with are now enabled. The goal post didn't change for the people in each group. It's not one entity.
The last people to say that their work will be impacted are those that work in areas with the most novel ideas/innovation, and/or working on things where libraries/examples don't exist.
For example, I work in test/manufacturing, mostly with robots. The whole industry is proprietary. There are basically no open source libraries/code for this stuff, so claude is still pretty terrible at it, but, with Opus 5, it is able to now do some of the work!
I don't think we disagree on the capabilities of the latest agents, but my point is that the software industry has already been through multiple rounds of "the [models,agents,bots] only just became good enough to impact work in the last few months," yet this and several other studies have shown that the clankers still haven't taken any jobs. If the November timeline doesn't show an impact, then it must be because we only just got access to Fable and Solus in July. And if the Fable and Solus timeline don't show an impact, then it's because of this other thing that happened where models really took off – the data just needs to catch up.
Everyone has an anecdote about someone being laid off because of AI, and everyone has anxiety about the next model being the big one that will really cause the industry to implode, but there's never any hard labor impact. It's always still coming, still waiting for the next model, next study, next jobs report. As Smith said, people who believe that AI is going to take jobs will never be convinced that it's not coming eventually.
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I keep running into this as well. Someone shared a link to a study from last year telling me that AI doesn't make programmers as productive as they think. The study was obviously done months prior to it's release. So evaluating the state AI even further back.
But this didn't seem to concern them. The study said X, therefore it applies to today.
I'm just not sure it's worth it to argue with others about it at this point. Not that I'm 100% all behind AI coding, but I'm just shocked people are still this resistant.
> I'm just not sure it's worth it to argue with others about it at this point.
This is the correct response. Let closed-minded people do their thing. Makes them less competitive against you. There's nothing for you to gain by trying to help them understand what they are missing.
wait, who's being closed-minded?
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