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Comment by redwall_hp

1 day ago

Sure, it did some meaningful things:

* Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production

* Less junior hiring and suppressed wages

* Culture of uncertainty and fear

* Computers are really expensive now

* Some people now live with diesel generators and gas turbines making their neighborhood hazardous to their health

Totally agree. IMO it's mostly behind the scenes stuff though.

I think some of the most impressive stuff to show someone from 2016 might be LLMs doing a summary of complex topics, followed by self-driving (actually) cars and intricate robots... but other than that there is no "future magic" touching the lives of every day people going on.

Actually I'm pretty sure if you showed someone the latest and greatest from these big AI companies, these AI companions that can book flights, people would go "Oh, so its like a smarter Siri" and proceed to not care at all lol.

> Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production

Gosh, this has been my entire experience with AI, and I’ve never seen it this well articulated. Thank you!

Less junior hiring is a reflection of a) the maturity of the software business b) current expectations of the future

I have no doubt startups in particular are able to get away with using LLMs to produce sloppy code and ship. But this trend was on-going and sped up due to the infiltration of LLMs and marketing.

You do realise markets are highly imperfect in reality? That nonsense in econ books is fantasy.