Comment by nozzlegear
1 day ago
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?
> 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.
> that the software industry
You miss my point. There is no single software industry. There are people solving completely unrelated problems with software. Some of those problem spaces could be services with old models. Some only with new. It's a rise in tide, with little towns completely drowning, and the ones up the hill still safe for now.
A year ago claude could NOT write code for the robot controller we use that was usable. Now it can. The water is now ankle deep for where I am.