We're not in a February 2020 moment, and ordinary people will be fine
Two days ago, someone named Matt Shumer posted an essay on Twitter with the title “Something Big Is Happening.” Almost immediately, his essay went extremely viral. As of this writing, it’s been viewed about 100 million times and counting; and it’s been shared by such strikingly diverse figures as the conservative commentator Matt Walsh (“this is a really good article”) and the liberal pundit Mehdi Hasan (“perhaps the most important piece you read today, this week, this month”). I’ve heard countless reports of people being sent the article unprompted by parents and siblings and friends. I expect that Shumer’s essay will end up being the most widely-read piece of long-form writing this year.
And it’s not hard to see why it’s touched such a nerve. For most people who use it, “artificial intelligence” amounts to free-tier ChatGPT; for them AI is useful for answering questions and drafting emails. But now people are starting to realize that AI will be a massive force in the world. This is the year that ordinary people start to think about how it’ll change human life. And it shouldn’t shock you that the first thing they’re thinking about is whether AI will take away their jobs, render any skills they have worthless, and make their lives worse. There’s a growing sense of panic. The Atlantic is talking about AI job loss. Bernie Sanders is talking about AI job loss. Matt Walsh says that “AI is going to wipe out millions of jobs. It’s happening now. Everything is changing. The avalanche is already here. Most of what we’re currently arguing about will be irrelevant very soon.” We are entering a moment of panic.
So it’s the exact perfect moment for someone claiming to be part of “the AI industry” to write an essay saying that we’re in a moment just like February 2020, watching COVID infections go exponential. And just like COVID did, artificial intelligence is about to crash into ordinary people’s lives with unbelievable force; and that the only way they can get ahead of this massive shock is by buying subscriptions to AI products, saving more money, spending an hour a day experimenting with AI, and perhaps following Matt Shumer so that you can “stay current on which model is best at any given time.” It’s not a very good essay—much of it was transparently generated by AI, and Shumer admits as much—but timing and positioning are much more important factors for the success of any argument. And Shumer’s timing and positioning were impeccable. I don’t think that any other piece of writing is going to do more to shape what ordinary people think of AI than Shumer’s essay will. It’s going to become a key document of this moment.
And that’s a very bad thing. Not because the essay is AI-generated, but because it’s entirely wrong on the merits of what AI will do. I don’t think that we’re living in anything like the pre-COVID moment of February 2020. I don’t think that ordinary people have very much to worry about from AI. And I don’t think that the forecasts that people are taking away from the essay—imminent mass job loss, the entire world transforming rapidly starting in the next few months, “the avalanche is already here”—are grounded in reality. And I’m worried that these misperceptions are going to result in disaster.
I’m not saying this because I don’t believe in AI. I think that AI is going to be extremely important; I expect that it will end up being at least as important as the discovery of electricity or the steam engine, and there’s a good chance it’s the most important thing that humans ever invent. I think that the future is going to be very different from the past.
But I don’t think that this implies the “February 2020” world that people seem to imagine. I honestly don’t think that we’re going to see mass unemployment, or the sudden death of human cognitive labor, or anything that feels like an “avalanche.” The years to come will be weird, especially if you’re keeping abreast of the latest developments in AI. But the actual impacts of AI in the real world will be a lot slower and more uneven than people like Shumer seem to think. Human labor is not going away anytime soon. And whether or not they spend an hour a day using AI tools, ordinary people will be fine.
AI will be extraordinarily capable: it will continue to awe and amaze us with what it can do, and it will only get better, and it will get better at an accelerating pace. There are already a lot of tasks where AI is as capable as a competent human; and that number is only going to grow.
But that doesn’t actually imply the mass replacement of human labor.
The most important thing to know about labor substitution, the place where any serious analysis has to start, is this: labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. The question isn’t whether AI can do specific tasks that humans do. It’s whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone: in other words, whether there is any way that the addition of a human to the production process can increase or improve the output of that process. That’s a very different question. AI can have an absolute advantage in every single task, but it would still make economic sense to combine AI with humans if the aggregate output is greater: that is to say, if humans have a comparative advantage in any step of the production process.
It’s certainly the case right now, even in a domain like software engineering where the extent of AI capabilities is on full display, that the human-AI combination, the “cyborg,” is superior to AI alone—not least because you still need to tell the coding agent your preferences, or your company’s preferences, or your customer’s preferences. This is good for human labor, because it means that workers are more productive, and as long as demand for the goods they produce is elastic, we should be pretty optimistic about human labor under this regime. (This is probably why the number of job postings for software engineers has increased in the twelve months since Claude Code was first released.)
The faster that AI capabilities advance, of course, the quicker we’ll tend to see complementarity diminish: I don’t think that the cyborg era is necessarily a permanent one. The world where human complementarity disappears entirely isn’t a realistic one: it’s a corner solution where AI is so superior at every conceivable task, under every conceivable condition, that there is literally nothing a human could do to improve any production process anywhere. That’s not a realistic scenario. It’s not hard to imagine that we move closer to such a world in an asymptotic way, approaching but never reaching. But serious human complementarity with AI will last much longer than people today seem to think.
I don’t say that because I think that AI models are bad or because I think they won’t get better; I think that AI models are very good and will get much better. No. The fault is not with the models, but with us. The world is run by humans, and because it’s run by humans—entities that are smelly, oily, irritable, stubborn, competitive, easily frightened, and above all else inefficient—it is a world of bottlenecks. And as long as we have human bottlenecks, we’ll need humans to deal with them: we will have, in other words, complementarity.
People frequently underrate how inefficient things are in practically any domain, and how frequently these inefficiencies are reducible to bottlenecks caused simply by humans being human. Laws and regulations are obvious bottlenecks. But so are company cultures, and tacit local knowledge, and personal rivalries, and professional norms, and office politics, and national politics, and ossified hierarchies, and bureaucratic rigidities, and the human preference to be with other humans, and the human preference to be with particular humans over others, and the human love of narrative and branding, and the fickle nature of human preferences and tastes, and the severely limited nature of human comprehension. And the biggest bottleneck is simply the human resistance to change: the fact that people don’t like shifting what they’re doing. All of these are immensely powerful. Production processes are governed by their least efficient inputs: the more efficient the most efficient inputs, the more important the least efficient inputs.
In the long run, we should expect the power of technology to overcome these bottlenecks, in the same way that a river erodes a stone over many years and decades—just as how in the early decades of the twentieth century, the sheer power of what electricity could accomplish gradually overcame the bottlenecks of antiquated factory infrastructure, outdated workflows, and the conservatism of hidebound plant managers. This process, however, takes time: it took decades for electricity, among the most powerful of all general-purpose technologies, to start impacting productivity growth. AI will probably be much faster than that, not least because it can be agentic in a way that electricity cannot. But these bottlenecks are real and important and are obvious if you look at any part of the real world. And as long as those bottlenecks exist, no matter the level of AI capabilities, we should expect a real and powerful complementarity between human labor and AI, simply because the “human plus AI” combination will be more productive than AI alone.
And I suspect that the presence of bottlenecks explains one of the big questions of the last few years, which is why, given how good the models are, we’ve seen such a small amount of actual labor replacement.
If you had come to me ten years ago and told me about the leading AI models that we have today, that GPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.6 would be publicly available via a cheap API call, I would have thought that we’d be seeing something like mass unemployment. I would have said something similar, honestly, about GPT-4: if you had shown GPT-4 to me ten years ago, I would have thought that within 12 or 24 months of its release, we’d at least have automated away most of the outsourced customer service industry. People were saying the same about GPT-3 when it came out in 2020.
GPT-3 has been out for six years; GPT-4 for three; and none of that has happened. Even in the outsourced customer service sector, the lowest-hanging fruit on the automation tree, we’re just not yet seeing mass layoffs due to AI. I’ll be frank in telling you that this has been a huge surprise to me. (And to others.) There is change, but it is gradual; it looks more like standard technological diffusion than a tsunami of replacement. And we should think seriously about why this has been the case.
Is this because the models aren’t smart enough? I don’t think that’s it. I think the models we have today are very capable, and they’ve been capable for a long time, and they’ll only get more capable from here: we shouldn’t forget how amazing even, say, GPT-3.5 would be from the perspective of 2016. The experience of the last few years should tell us clearly: intelligence is not the limiting factor here. It might be that at the limit, everything is soluble in intelligence; if we invent a digital god, it should presumably be able to figure out how to run a call center. But short of that corner-solution world, we’re still in a regime governed by human bottlenecks. In the case of the call center those might be contractual obligations, or liability issues, or integration with legacy systems, or the human desire to yell at another human when frustrated. But even for this simplest of real-world jobs, we are in the world of bottlenecks.
And as long as we are in the bottleneck world, we should be quite optimistic about human labor.
Why should we be optimistic about human labor at a time when AI is gaining an absolute advantage in a huge set of tasks?
Simply put, because demand for most of the things that humans produce is much more elastic than we recognize today; and as long as humans are complementary to the production process, it won’t be rare for efficiency gains to get swallowed up by demand growth. This is the famous Jevons paradox, the tendency for the more efficient use of a resource to increase total consumption of that resource, rather than decrease it. Energy is the classic Jevons case: we find over and over again that as energy becomes more efficient to produce, people respond not by consuming the same amount of it, but by increasing their consumption—such that overall energy use tends to rise. (Thus the “paradox” part: energy efficiency increases energy consumption!)
And I suspect that the same elasticity of demand that we see with energy applies to a lot of the things that humans create. As a society, we consume all sorts of things—not just energy but also written and audiovisual content, legal services, “business services” writ large—in quantities that would astound people living a few decades ago, to say nothing of a few centuries ago. Demand tends to be much, much more elastic than we think.
Take software. Software simply means “the things that a computer can do”: and because software is so broad and so capable, we should expect that it’s energy-like and that there’s an enormous latent demand for more software in the world. For that reason we’ve found that every increase in the efficiency of software programming—the move from lower-level to higher-level languages, the emergence of frameworks and libraries, the endless move away from bare metal as compute becomes ever-cheaper and more abundant—has resulted in a dramatic increase in demand for software engineering labor. There are many more people employed in software engineering today than there were 20 or 30 years ago. If AI accelerates these productivity gains dramatically, it would not be so outlandish to see demand for software engineering labor rise. We see a version of this, for example, with the huge popularity of Claude Code and Codex. Coding is far more efficient than it used to be; but people have responded by spending much more time coding than they used to, because the latent demand for software is so enormous.1
All of this makes me suspect that, as long as we are in the cyborg era of human-AI complementarity, we should be quite optimistic about human labor. The world is governed by bottlenecks; as long as those bottlenecks are real, there will be complementarity between humans and AI; and if the human-AI combination can make human labor vastly more productive, we should expect that to be a very good thing: for consumers of course, who will benefit from an enormous consumer surplus, but also for workers.
So in the short to medium term, complementarity will preserve a place for human labor. But bottlenecks weaken over time and eventually are overcome: human complementarity to AI will always be a wasting asset, and at the limit it’ll converge on zero. Eventually we really will live in an unrecognizable future. What happens then?
I don’t think that it’s worth worrying much about this world. The transition to it will be longer and gentler than people today think; and by the time we reach that state, we’ll have spent quite a while in a world of such abundance and plenty that jobs might simply be superfluous. Perhaps we’ll spend our lives in leisure, pursuing poetry or pure mathematics or the fine art of looksmaxxing. Or maybe this means that we’ll have invented a digital god whose power, wisdom, and intelligence is to ours as ours is to an insect’s: we’ll have immanentized the eschaton. If you believe that this will happen, there’s no point worrying about the displacement of software engineers: you should just try to forget it all and enjoy life while you can, because apocalypse and revelation are on their way.
I suspect that short of that apocalyptic scenario, human labor will always have a place in the world. We’ll invent jobs because we can, and those jobs will sit somewhere between leisure and work. Indeed this is the entire story of human life since the first agrarian surplus. For the entire period where we have been finding more productive ways to produce things, we have been using the surplus we generate to do things that are further and further removed from the necessities of survival. Today, our surplus is large enough that we can pay large numbers of people to be baristas, yoga instructors, physical trainers, video directors, podcast producers, and livestreamers; and we should expect that as the surplus grows, people will find strange and interesting things to do with their lives.
So I have a much more benign view of what AI will do to human labor. I don’t mean to say that every job or every person will be “safe.” There will be people who lose their jobs because of AI; there will be people who find that their skills are no longer valuable because of AI, and there will be people who don’t lose their jobs but who have to make serious adjustments they dislike.
But on the whole the economic transition that AI is ushering in will be much gentler than people seem to think. COVID is a terrible analogy for what’s coming. The ordinary person, the person who works at a regular job and doesn’t know what Anthropic is and invests a certain amount of money in a diversified index fund at the end of each month: that person will most likely be fine. I don’t think they have much to worry about from AI. A lot of things will get better for them, though often in ways that are so gradual and subtle that they’ll hardly notice. A few things will get worse, typically in ways that they will notice. And a surprising number of things won’t change. They’ll have to make adjustments to how they work: some of those adjustments will be pleasant and some will be less so. But those adjustments will happen as they come. They don’t really need to worry.
I do think that there will be a lot of weirdness and instability in the coming years: but that weirdness and instability won’t come from the technology’s actual economic impacts. It’ll more likely come from the political and social backlash that people like Shumer are inciting, intentionally or not. Telling ordinary people that we’re in February 2020 and that there’s an avalanche on the way is incorrect on the merits: but it’s also, frankly speaking, a catastrophic mistake.
I’ve seen how ordinary, non-online people are reacting to Shumer’s essay; and I now recognize, from the ambient sense of fear and panic, that we are in the very early stages of a massive populist backlash to AI. Telling people that AI is probably going to take their job doesn’t end with them getting a $20 subscription to ChatGPT Plus in order to learn about the frontier of technical development. It ends with an enormous cross-party populist movement to stop AI at all costs: with the complete banning of data center construction, with jobs guaranteed for life, and with laws passed to choke off the development and deployment of anything that could potentially make the economy more efficient. And if you think that AI can do very good things for the world, whether this means higher productivity growth or accelerated medical and scientific progress or the discovery of new and more glorious stages of human civilization, then you should recognize that outcome as a catastrophe for human welfare.
Maybe it’s a good thing that someone wrote an essay that broke through to ordinary people and alerted them that AI capabilities are very good and are getting better at a rapid clip. It’s good for people to know that AI can do more than write their emails. And Shumer is right that something big is happening in the world. But we don’t need to terrify ordinary people about what this will mean for them. I think they’ll be fine.
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Comments
I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the paradox they referred to. However, it also tends to come with a major shift in wealth since in the short term the owners of the machines are producing more with less. As it becomes more common place and prices change they lose much of that advantage, but the workers never get that.
> I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again.
That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.
What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.
Automation made the TV inexpensive, but if you look at a chart on inflation almost everything that cannot be easily automated has risen in price.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019-...
By raminism 2026-02-1413:26 That is the famous Baumol effect.
By next_xibalba 2026-02-142:152 reply Economies of scale were realized in the tv, but not the house. Maybe bc they aren’t realizable in housing, maybe bc regulation, maybe bc of the nimby veto, etc.
By tudorconstantin 2026-02-144:311 reply I think it’s rather because of scarcity: you can’t scale and automate land/prime-location land
By jama211 2026-02-147:12 Well you can scale it, which is why housing affordability is higher in many places where the cities are actually far denser than Australia. There are perverse incentives not to though, property prices don’t rise (which is what investors want) if you actually focus on increasing supply.
People are building houses with way more features, that last longer, have better thermoregulation, and just more comfortable to live in.
By kelipso 2026-02-145:11 Same goes for TVs too. That’s clearly not the reason why house prices rose so drastically.
By jakobnissen 2026-02-149:38 It's more like automated, industrial stuff is cheap, while land and human labor is expensive (and thank God for that!)
Some old stuff is now cheap: Grain, oils, clothes, steel, heating, electricity and books, for example.
By Der_Einzige 2026-02-143:251 reply Good quality Goodyear welted boots, adjusted for inflation, are cheap AF. I can get an excellent pair from Grant stone with horween leather for ~300 USD when on sale.
A pair of Nike jordans or air maxes is often in the ~120 range and made of far inferior materials.
Boots have never been cheaper/accessible before. The people that bring up repairable shoes don’t wear them or buy from shit brands like Thursday, doc martins, or timberland. You deserve your poor quality footwear.
Brand new boots are cheap because some child in a 3rd world country makes them. Having them repaired in my country costs enough to generally make it worth getting new ones.
By Der_Einzige 2026-02-146:43 [flagged]
By alchemism 2026-02-1323:45 As predicted in The Diamond Age.
>That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work
That's more because we are never given the chance. We only get to keep working or fall of the rat race and at best be delegated to Big Lebowski style pariah existance.
By marsten 2026-02-148:52 Yes, and housing is priced by competitive auction so if you drop out of the rat race and other people don't, you'll just get out-bid.
By SecretDreams 2026-02-142:34 > That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.
Is that trend still true? I can look from the 50s to 2000s and buy into it. I'm not clear it is holding true by all metrics beyond the 2000s, and especially beyond maybe the 2020s. Yes, we have better tech, but is life actually better right now? I think you could make the argument that we were in a healthier and happier society in that sweet spot from 95 - 2005 or so. At least in NA.
We've seen so much technological innovation, but cost of living has outpaced wages, division is rampant, and the technology innovations we have have mostly been turned against us to enshitify our lives and entrap us in SaaS hell. I'd argue medical science has progressed, but also become more inaccessible, and, somehow, people believe in western medicine LESS. Does not help that we've also seen a decline in education.
So do we still prefer improving our standards of living in the current societal framework?
By intended 2026-02-1418:12 Heck no. Given the choice most people would want to do remote work. COVID showed that we can actually achieve remote work, and suddenly many people realized they had a life they loved, without having to lose chunks of it to an unpaid commute that was baked into the cost of work.
Given actual alternatives, workers have made their preferences clear.
Culture also plays a part - America is uniquely mercantile and business first. Workers and citizens in other countries have made different choices.
By anonzzzies 2026-02-149:00 > we could likely accomplish that by working very little
Yeah I know many people who do in the small town I live in. Mostly elderly who are used to it still, but also some young people who want to work just enough to buy what they need and not 1 minute more. I could've retired at <20 if I would've enjoyed that. Now I enjoy it more; it's kind of relaxing that kind of lifestyle; not because of not working but because of needing nothing outside your humble possessions.
By paulddraper 2026-02-140:58 Exactly.
Living quarters, transportation, healthcare, food. What were theses figures in 1926, and how much work is needed to achieve them.
What land prices? There's plenty of cheap land, it's just a bit far away from where most people live. But guess what, population densities were also lower a century ago.
By rnewme 2026-02-1421:18 > it's just a bit far away from where most people live
And now you need a vehicle which with its yearly costs adds up to the price of the land in the first place, because there are no trains, you can't ride horses on the highway and you don't have neighbors that are selling/trading what you need.
Sure, just like less desirable products of every category cost less essentially by definition. But that’s not really a retort to someone asking by why land prices have risen so much.
By ipaddr 2026-02-141:01 Population increases through immigration or birth and the area (a city) staying the same size. Plus covid people valuing a house more.
By globalnode 2026-02-1323:32 sure sure
As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.
Seems pretty easy to work around with "UBI for citizens" only. There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.
I still like the idea of clawing back mineral and water rights and paying for basic services out of the money payed by industry for the right to dirty our air and water. As a citizen you're entitled to compensation for the smoke you're breathing.
People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs.
I'd love to make companies pay for their products' entire lifecycle, including disposal and cleanup. It's not right that a company can manufacture future-trash, sell it, and then absolve itself of the negative externality when the customer throws the product away and off it goes into a landfill.
If a company's process produces waste, it should bear the entire cost of leaving the environment the way they found it rather than just pumping the waste into it. If a company's products are not reused, it should bear the cost of taking the used product back and restoring the world to the way it was before the product was built.
By throw-qqqqq 2026-02-1323:251 reply > People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs
Of all the Scandinavian countries, only Norway has any oil resources of significance.
The Scandinavian welfare model is primarily tax-funded.
My quick look at Swedish exports shows that the largest export is finished equipment at 14%, fuel exports at 7.1, 4.8% wood and paper, 3.6% iron and steel, of which I'm sure a lot of that equipment is made. 3.4% plastics, which is just oil in another form.
It looks like you're right and their oil exports are all import/export rather than domestic, but that's still a good bit of mineral wealth.
By throw-qqqqq 2026-02-1417:10 Yes Sweden has non-trivial mineral resources, but nothing like e.g. China, Russia or Australia though.
The Scandinavian social programs are funded by high taxation. It is mostly a result of political prioritization, and not a windfall of natural resources.
There's been enormous pushback, pushes for privatizing (ruining) it, underfunding it from Congress, an absolute refusal to remove the criminally low income cap on contributions, etc.
By zrail 2026-02-1323:55 One could make the argument that the modern Republican Party has in fact largely been shaped by this pushback.
>There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.
The racist moral panic over "welfare queens" seems to be a counter example.
By tshaddox 2026-02-140:27 And the same person who posts about that on Facebook will the next day post “keep your government hands off my social security check.”
Minorities don’t just get social security. People don’t get social security if they don’t work or don’t have a spouse who worked. They pay in to the system via payroll taxes. With UBI who is going to pay into that? UBI just seems like a pipe dream.
By int_19h 2026-02-160:47 With UBI, everyone is going to pay into that via taxes. It's not any different from other forms of welfare.
By whattheheckheck 2026-02-1323:46 And why do citizens get it? USA killed a lot of the world for their wealth and kneecapped anyone who didn't play along
By Der_Einzige 2026-02-143:28 A lot of conservatives want to retroactively throw off non whites from citizenship because they think birthrate citizenship is disgusting.
Expect a real movement to reduce the number of citizens in this country. Specifically, if you can’t trace your lineage to a founding father (including for kids of Geman or iish immigrants), than they want you disenfranchised.
Heritage Americans vs “hyphenated Americans”
By allannienhuis 2026-02-1416:521 reply > I ain't giving people something for nothing but I suspect you do, or would do that for your children or immediate family.
I'm just some dude on the internet, so my opinions are worth exactly what you're paying for them (nothing). But when I try to understand this type of thinking, this is what I come up with:
In the old days of scarce resources (vast majority of civilization), children were expected to 'repay' their elders for the care they received by taking care of them in their old age. And the competition for resources made this idea of keeping those resources for your family only important for survival.
But with the resources available today, the dynamics a very different. Currently only about 25% of total employment is in agriculture, worldwide. In the rich countries this is very significantly less. Canada is 1%, USA is 2% [worldbank]
But we're living with the cultural baggage of generations of scarcity and tribalism, which still shape our policy in a time of incredible resources provided by technology. So instead of more sharing, we choose higher standard of living for ourselves. I know it will take time to change this culturally - generations - but I'm still disappointed it's not happening faster.
[worldbank]:https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS
I think it's hard for certain people with certain backgrounds to understand.
What I see as someone who grew up in a very working class family surrounded by those on benefits:
I see the janitor who busts their ass day in and day out to provide for their families totally lost in these conversations. They are expected to take money out of their check - doing a very difficult, thankless, and not all that well paying job - to even today help pay for a whole lot of people who are incredibly more privileged. I know quite a number of people who have college degrees but experienced "failure to launch" who see themselves as too good to go work in a kitchen, as a janitor, or what have you - but are quite happy to accept various form of public benefits due to their part time cushy employment.
I cannot square that circle. Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.
If you ask those taking said benefits who are working part time in a arts field or whatever, they will of course state that they are not the problem and "rich people" should pay more in taxes so the janitor also doesn't have to work. But now who is cleaning toilets or taking out trash? At some point the work has to be done and you run out of rich people to tax for wealth redistribution.
Considering how widespread this "condition" seems to be in my human experience, I cannot see a widescale implementation of "to each of their abilities, to each their need" ever working out simply due to how selfish humans appear to be. I love the idea - and I have often dream of starting my own commune of sorts of well-curated individuals who all have roles to play, but I just can't see it working out either in reality or in scale. The only reason such a limited scale commune might work is that you could rule with an iron fist and vote people off the island who start to take advantage of others and no longer pull their own weight.
I am quite convinced that if you implemented UBI or other means for the average person to never work you'd simply get a whole lot of people doing effectively nothing, if not outright destructive (for society) things with their time.
By allannienhuis 2026-02-1419:191 reply > Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.
But isn't the real problem that the janitor isn't being paid enough to save for retirement _and_ pay a 'fair' share of taxes? I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.
This sort of thinking reminds me of the old cartoon with three people at a table, one obviously rich person with a whole pile of cookies on his side of the table, and two other ordinary-working-class people each with a couple of cookies, with the rich guy saying to one of the other guys - watch out, that guy wants to take away one of your cookies!'
There are so many working class people convinced that the problem is the other poor people around them, instead of the very small number of people with > 50% of the resources. Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.
I'm not some revolutionary; far from it. I've always hoped that technology would be the thing that allowed virtually everyone to rise up out of poverty (and it has to some degree), but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.
> I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.
Many of these countries are going through the start of a lot of social upheaval in part due to these tax loads paying for social benefits that are simply not sustainable from a demographic perspective. There is an undercurrent of resentment for those who work non-enjoyable jobs and look at others who have it easier than them. This is from the blue collar/menial labor camp vs. the white collar/laptop classes who imo are totally and entirely out of touch with reality at this point.
> Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.
While there is a little bit of truth to this, I don't really believe this is truly the case. Folks compare themselves to those around them, and socially speaking those you are in contact with are what generally matters from a societal standpoint. It's sort of like shoplifting. Sure, it's not "worth it" for any single retail clerk to take the personal risk to tackle a shoplifter vs. just watch it happen. But it's corrosive to society as a whole when that retail working a job they likely do not get much enjoyment out of is forced to simply stand by and watch someone just ignore the social contract and get ahead the easy/illegal way. So there is definitely truth to the trope of "don't defend a billion dollar corporation while being paid retail wages" - at scale it's incredibly damaging to society as a whole.
Same goes for living with folks on my block growing up who decided to take the easy route and loaf off the backs of others. In the end it's labor. You could redistribute the top 10% of wealth but you'd still have the same (or even more!) labor that would need to be done. Someone has to do it. Many kids growing up in that environment saw that and decided to not even put the effort in. Those who somehow rose above it almost universally escaped the poverty cycle.
I am not against taxing the rich more - but I'd argue that the systemic reasons why the top 10% or whatever control over 50% of the wealth of the nation need to be corrected before anything else matters. You can't really fix that with post-redstribution in my opinion. It needs to be fixed at the point of value creation so workers can somehow capture more of their labor surplus. Everything I've seen in life does not point towards "redistribute the rewards evenly regardless of personal effort or sacrifice put in" being a sustainable answer. This doesn't even work on a small scale in small companies - if management allows "lazy" workers to exist for very long, it becomes corrosive to the entire culture of the company and you eventually fall apart as those putting the effort in either stop or move on to greener pastures where they are not dragging others along via their efforts. Same goes with society.
> but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.
This we can certainly agree on. Although I'll point out that the average HN poster is in this class of people.
By allannienhuis 2026-02-151:05 Yes, I certainly don't think taxing the richer is the only dial available. that was my point about the problem being the wages - the labor or non-capital portion of the pie is one of the key things that needs to be adjusted. But the entire system is designed to reward the risk takers. I don't really have any answers. I'm just naively hoping that the the real wealth that technology creates (real-world efficiencies) can somehow benefit everyone, not only the risk takers. That's one of the scarier parts of the AI and robotics boom - it seems virtually all of the benefits are going in one direction. I know we've seen this type of thing before with the industrial revolution, and we somehow got to a point where most of us really did benefit with higher living standards (including the poorest) but it hard seeing most of the really rich ones not doing much to balance that out (most trying their hardest to keep the scales unbalanced).
By lbreakjai 2026-02-1410:20 I don't think the communism club would disagree with you. Historically, labour was a right _and_ an obligation.
The floor being three square meals and a roof would be a vast improvement compared to now.
By zthrowaway 2026-02-1412:15 Historically speaking, you don’t get kicked out of the communist club, they just kill you.
By flanked-evergl 2026-02-1323:474 reply [flagged]
By happens 2026-02-1411:47 The useless people you are talking about _are_ the ownership class. They haven't worked a day in their life like you have, they are getting all the loans they want, and they are paying them off with welfare (tax cuts and loopholes).
You can't afford an apartment because the ownership class is working very hard to keep housing prices high while paying you as little as possible for the two decades you have been working. Not because some disabled person elsewhere is struggling to get by on government loans and welfare.
By flanked-evergl 2026-02-146:541 reply The people keeping housing prices high are the leftist that push regulations that make it impossible to build while importing immigrants who disproportionately use welfare and get starter loans which they then use to push up housing prices without contributing anything to the economy. If this is the "ownership class" I guess stop voting for leftist. But nobody does, they just keep doing it, and housing becomes even more unaffordable.
The right wing here are the only people where I live with an actual viable plan for helping working people, even low class working people. The left makes deliberate choices that everyone knows will make things worse for lower class working people.
This sounds like a Fox News fever dream.
Even if we assume there are tons of jobless immigrants being ‘imported’ they would be renters, not buyers.
Generally, house pricing is primarily a supply problem. Removing immigrants will make this worse given that they are 30%+ of the construction workforce.
By flanked-evergl 2026-02-148:061 reply [flagged]
By suzzer99 2026-02-1418:50 > 75% of welfare is going to immigrants
This is complete nonsense. Immigrants use less social services than the average American. Here's the not remotely liberal Cato institute: https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-still-use-much-less-wel...
"There is a persistent myth that the United States lacks an extensive welfare state, despite all the evidence to the contrary. One look at this brief will disabuse you of any such belief. Total spending on means-tested welfare and entitlement programs climbed to about $3.4 trillion in 2023. About $823 billion went to means-tested programs such as Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, TANF, and refundable tax credits, while approximately $2.3 trillion was spent on old-age entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Native-born Americans use an average of $7,134 in old age entitlements and $3,638 in means-tested benefits in 2023. By comparison, immigrants used $4,864 in old age entitlements and $3,370 in means-tested benefits. If native-born Americans had consumed the same per capita dollar amount of means-tested welfare and entitlement benefits as all immigrants, the total expenditures on these programs would have been about $715 billion less in 2023. That’s a tremendous savings, even for the federal government, considering it is approximately 42 percent of the federal budget deficit in 2023. We are tempted to suggest that native-born Americans should start assimilating toward immigrant levels of welfare and entitlement consumption.
Across nearly all major welfare and entitlement programs, immigrants consume less per capita than native-born Americans, but not uniformly so. They use much less Social Security and Medicare, but only slightly less Medicaid. Immigrants also use SNAP, SSI, and TANF at lower rates and lower dollar amounts per person, but those programs are relatively small compared to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Immigrants receive more per capita through the relatively small Earned Income Tax Credit and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. For the latter, immigrants use $3 more per year on a per capita basis than native-born Americans. Immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to use any welfare program and, when they do, use fewer of them for a shorter period. The typical lifetime abuser of welfare was born in this country."
The ownership class is doing no such thing. Zoning, regulation, nimby-ism are what keep prices high.
> Zoning, regulation, nimby-ism
And who exactly do you think controls these items?
By flanked-evergl 2026-02-148:09 [flagged]
By allannienhuis 2026-02-1416:26 who do you think is responsible for all of those things, if not the ownership class?
By zrail 2026-02-140:02 (Citation needed)
By tty456 2026-02-1323:06 Such is the republican lizard brain these days.
You also need a system that is ok with giving you some of said abundance without you working.
Last year the US voted to hand over the reigns, in all branches of government, to a party whose philosophy is to slash government spending and reduce people’s dependence on the government.
To all the US futurists who are fantasizing about a post-scarcity world where we no longer work, I’d like to understand how that fits in with the current political climate.
The thing a lot of people leave out is that literally billions must die for this to happen. In some fully automated world everyone except for a few tens of thousands of the owner class and their technicians will be unneeded. And then what to do?
By initramfs2 2026-02-141:251 reply How did you arrive at that conclusion? Dividing infinity by 1m or 1b doesn't matter if it's really infinite. Just make more machines to make the machines. The existential crisis happens afterwards, and people will kill themselves off without the need for any class warfare at all. In fact the owner class will die first since there will be no more conception of ownership, since everything is supposedly abundant and at your fingertips.
You really believe today's billionaire class will just give up their power over the populace? A world of abundance means the billionaires are irrelevant because everyone would have access to everything and they would never let that happen.
They will hoard the resources, land, anything that is needed for people to stay alive.
By int_19h 2026-02-160:48 Your argument seems to be boiling down to, there's no point to improve quality of life because billionaires are just going to hoard all the improvements.
Surely the problem with that is the billionaires, not the world of abundance though?
By _DeadFred_ 2026-02-140:41 Voting for 'indifference to peoples dependence on the government' does not equal 'reduce people's dependence on the government'.
There is zero actual intentional reduction of dependence, just elimination of government support.
By hnthrow0287345 2026-02-140:21 It fits because now you can start up the conquering war machine and have a bunch of soldiers who're willing to kill in another country before starving in theirs
By initramfs2 2026-02-141:174 reply I am also fairly certain that if we do arrive at some abundant utopia where you can wish for anything can have it arrive, society will collapse. It's just bringing up 7 billion (probably more) spoiled brats at that point of time. Work on its own is also a form of "social control". Idle hands are the devil's tools etc.
By jbxntuehineoh 2026-02-143:57 Imo instead of no-strings-attached UBI we should have something like the WPA. Spend ten hours a week or whatever working in local parks/schools/libraries/etc and get paid a basic living wage in return
By ndsipa_pomu 2026-02-141:283 reply Throughout history, big advances have come from humans having more "idle time", so we should be aiming for the population to be less busy as they can then hopefully focus on pursuing the arts or sciences.
Big advances have also come from some of the most violent, destructive wars the planet has seen.
I agree with you on principle, but I don't think it's straightforward as your point states.
By ndsipa_pomu 2026-02-1414:30 Well, wars are going to happen anyway. If we abolish all idle time, it's pretty much the same as getting rid of artists, poets, philosophers, writers etc.
> big advances have come from humans having more "idle time"
A few people
By RiverCrochet 2026-02-144:512 reply If you can wish for anything and have it arrive, spoiled brats won't be a thing, because competition and envy for things will be pointless.
By jcgl 2026-02-1412:04 Throughout history, the hedonic treadmill has always triumphed. Competition and envy conjure their own objects.
Even if you want to allege that the proverbial pie will become infinitely large, any one person’s slice is finite. However big my neighbor’s slice might be, I can strive to make mine even bigger.
By ThrowawayR2 2026-02-1421:47 Humans being humans, they will find something petty and pointless to compete socially for or even kill each other for despite being provided infinite physical abundance.
By int_19h 2026-02-160:49 Collapse in a sense of many existing power structures becoming meaningless, yes, certainly.
But that is a good thing.
By simianwords 2026-02-141:042 reply You are painting this like it’s a bad thing. The workers decided that they would rather have higher working time to buy more things!
A lot of people would not choose to work for half the time as they do now because they do actually like to buy things.
By johnnyanmac 2026-02-141:272 reply I'd happily work for 20 hours @200k a year. It'd give me time to work on my own projects.
Issue is that virtually no company offers that deal unless you already have noteriety or money at the level of retiring anyway.
I've met plenty of people that do this. They are contractors, they take on a contract, work for 6 months, take the next 6 off. I also know some tax accountants that do this.
By johnnyanmac 2026-02-146:42 I'd say being able to work on and off at that schedule isn't something I can find on a job board. Hence my point above of noteriety.
By PeterHolzwarth 2026-02-147:27 Most companies won't hire people with a high degree of notoriety. They may hire those people if they have some degree of fame.
How can you say that when workers don't have a choice? What accessible job has professional level pay and is part time?
By derektank 2026-02-143:05 Nursing
See, we have enough food to feed the entire world, every year.
It's not our production capabilities that keep people hungry; it's either greed or the problem of distribution.
Automation will definitely amplify production but it'll certainly continue to make rich richer and poor, well, the same. As inequality grows, so too does the authoritarian need to control the differential.
By quantummagic 2026-02-142:45 Maybe we only have enough food to feed the entire world, because of greed. Every time we've tried to impose a system that spreads the wealth to the masses, rather than it resulting in equality, it has led to suffering and bloodshed. And ironically, in the Soviet Union and China, the death of millions from starvation.
By wnc3141 2026-02-142:07 This pattern suggests the remaining knowledge work becoming increasingly extracted upon by the owners of ai enabled firms, in similar fashion to sugar plantation workers across the global south. I would think the cost of doing so would be a level of social and civic unrest similar to the colonial revolutions (Bolivar for example) of the 19th century.
>such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century.
I'm 0.6 centuries old and have never heard that said for existing tech. Human level AI could presumably do human work by definition but that's not the case before we get that, including now.
By johnnyanmac 2026-02-141:131 reply The 0.90 century old economicists were discussing the idea.
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...
Keynes was a different thing - that we could cut working hours to 15 a week rather than never have to work again. I think that would be quite possible with a drop of living standards - you could do it today by moving somewhere cheap and doing some remote work. I think it didn't happen due to human nature. We both quite like doing something useful with our time and like increasing living standards.
I inherited some money and don't need to work, but do work on stuff because I like doing it. I imagine that's what things will be like post agi.
By RevEng 2026-02-1418:22 Be careful not to conflate AGI with the current generative AI revolution. Even if it may eventually lead to AGI, it is quite a way from that and the social implications of the current and near term AI is what we are talking about. We can only imagine what this will be like post AGI, but we have some idea of what shifts happen when a technology comes along that greatly amplifies human labor.
By int_19h 2026-02-160:50 Post-scarcity utopia was not an uncommon thing in mid-20th-century sci-fi, especially when you also include Soviet Bloc countries.
By RevEng 2026-02-1418:17 Do a search for "the 20 hour work week". You will find plenty of articles from the 50s and 60s talking about how technology is going to make it so we don't have to work anymore. Popular Science was particularly keen on this but they certainly weren't the only ones.
By kovek 2026-02-1322:48 All of those technologies of the past can be managed by humans. Once computers can manage themselves AND other technologies and people, I think it'll be a different situation.
If you want to live with no electricity, no running water, and a lack of refrigerated food, you could do so purely on welfare. In that sense, we already have the UBI that Marx predicted.
However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.
Most non-banana republics across the world define the Minimum standard of living as having all of the things you listed, meaning welfare/social safety nets provide for that. As they should. We’re not animals.
By sparky_z 2026-02-1323:54 Correct. Of course, that wasn't the case in 1750 or 1900. It wouldn't have been possible then.
Hence why prior technological changes that increased productivity didn't result in living lives of extended leisure, despite some predictions to that effect. Instead people kept working to raise the overall standard of living to what could be achieved when using the new tools to their fullest extent. Doing more, not doing the same with less effort. As you say, we're not animals. We can strive for better.
By cortesoft 2026-02-1323:45 I think that is part of the point, though. As our productivity increases, we don’t see an increase in leisure, instead we see an increase in what we consider the minimum standard of living.
By globalnode 2026-02-1323:58 So I can keep track of your wonderful comment, I'd like to add that looking up "banana republic", I realised Australia seems to fit that description perfectly! The latest crop they've come up with seems to be housing, but instead of fruit companies we have real estate cabals. With respect to the workers at the bottom of a banana republic, whats missing is the element of real choice. They say yes you can choose to not work harder but then you die early or suffer from disease, not much of a choice. Modern slavery is built on this idea of false choice.
I appreciate that Finland considers Internet access of a minimum of 1 Mb to be a basic human right. I am not sure if other countries follow, but I wish the USA did.
It's laughably slow given how bloated the modern Web is. In fact even 10Mbps is barely enough to stream 1080p content.
By derektank 2026-02-143:12 You’re not entirely wrong about bloat on modern websites, but if you griped about being unable to stream 1080p video to someone even just 15 years ago you would sound absurdly privileged
I’m not really sure the point you’re trying to make behind “as long as you don’t mind dying early and painfully from easily preventable diseases technically you can live in utopia”. Would you mind clarifying your position here?
By beeflet 2026-02-140:11 the pre-industrial utopia has been created
By gordonhart 2026-02-1320:0016 reply Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a functioning product.
"The steamroller is still many inches away. I'll make a plan once it actually starts crushing my toes."
You are in danger. Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%, or you already have enough money to retire, or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant, it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.
By overgard 2026-02-145:51 What contingency plan is there exactly? At best you're just going from an automated-already job to a soon-to-be-automated job. Yay?
I'm baffled that so many people think that only developers are going to be hit and that we especially deserve it. If AI gets so good that you don't need people to understand code anymore, I don't know why you'd need a project manager anymore either, or a CFO, or a graphic designer, etc etc. Even the people that seem to think they're irreplaceable because they have some soft power probably aren't. Like, do VC funds really need humans making decisions in that context..?
Anyway, the practical reason why I'm not screaming in terror right now is because I think the hype machine is entirely off the rails and these things can't be trusted with real jobs. And honestly, I'm starting to wonder how much of tech and social media is just being spammed by bots and sock puppets at this point, because otherwise I don't understand why people are so excited about this hypothetical future. Yay, bots are going to do your job for you while a small handful of business owners profit. And I guess you can use moltbot to manage your not-particularly-busy life of unemployment. Well, until you stop being able to afford the frontier models anyway, which is probably going to dash your dream of vibe coding a startup. Maybe there's a handful of winners, until there's not, because nobody can afford to buy services on a wage of zero dollars. And anyone claiming that the abundance will go to everyone needs to get their head checked.
My contingency plan is that if AI leaves me unable to get a job, we are all fucked and society as a whole will have to fix the situation and if it doesn’t, there is nothing I could have done about it anyway.
By chadcmulligan 2026-02-141:351 reply As a fellow chad I concur. Though I am improving my poker skills - games of chance will still be around
You likely already know, but the "Pluribus" poker bot was beating humans back in 2019. Games of chance will be around if people are around, but you'll have to be careful to ensure you're playing against people, unassisted people.
By chadcmulligan 2026-02-146:001 reply Yeah, thanks, I only play live games. I'm in australia so online poker is illegal here. I was thinking of getting a vpn and having a play online, then I saw this recently https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1qi69...
So much of these degenerate online gambling / "investment" platforms are illegal here for good reason. If you are just a normal person playing fairly, you are being scammed. Same for things like Polymarket, the only winners are the people with insider knowledge.
By chadcmulligan 2026-02-146:06 Even horse racing, it's a solved problem, and if you start winning they'll just cancel your a/c (happened to a friend of mine)
By everettde 2026-02-142:38 this has been me ever since my philosophy undergrad.
By tired-turtle 2026-02-140:431 reply This is a sensible plan, given your username.
Yeah seriously. Don't people understand the fact that society is not good at mopping up messes like this—there has been a K shaped economy for several decades now and most Americans have something like $400 in their bank accounts. The bottom had already fallen out for them, and help still hasn't arrived. I think it's more likely that what really happens is that white collar workers, especially the ones on the margin, join this pool—and there is a lot of suffering for a long time.
Personally, rather devolving into nihilism, I'd rather try to hedge against suffering that fate. Now is the time to invest and save money. (or yesterday)
By sarchertech 2026-02-143:281 reply If white collar workers as a whole suffer severe economic setback over a short term timespan, your savings and investments won’t help you.
Unless you’re investing in guns, ammo, food, and a bunker. We’re talking worse unemployment than depression era Germany. And structurally more significant unemployment because the people losing their jobs were formally very high earners.
That’s the cataclysmic outcome, though. Although I deemed that that’s certainly possible and I would put a double digit percentage probability on it, another very likely outcome is a very severe recession, or a recession, wear a lot of, but not all, white collar work is wiped out. Maybe there’s a significant restructuring in the economy I think in a scenario like that, which also seems to be in the realm of possibility, I think having resources still matters. Speech to text, sorry for the poor grammar.
By sarchertech 2026-02-146:11 It’s definitely possible that there’s an impact that is bad but not cataclysmic. I figure in thst case though my regular savings is enough to switch to something else. I could retire now if I was willing to move somewhere cheap and live on $60k a year. There’s a lot of things that could cause that level of recession though without the need for AI.
I do also think the mid level bad outcome isn’t super likely because of AI is good enough to replace a lot of white collar jobs, I think it could replace almost all of them.
> You are in danger. Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%
It's not the odds of the breakthrough, but the timeline. A factory worker could have correctly seen that one day automation would replace him, and yet worked his entire career in that role.
There have been a ton of predictions about software engineers, radiologists, and some other roles getting replaced in months. Those predictions have clearly been not so great.
At this point the greater risk to my career seems to be the economy tanking, as that seems to be happening and ongoing. Unfortunately, switching careers can't save you from that.
We are the French artisans being replaced by English factories. OpenAI and its employees are the factory.
By snowwrestler 2026-02-1420:02 Checking the scoreboard a bit later on: the French economy is currently about the same size as the UK.
By nitwit005 2026-02-150:12 That has little to do with what I wrote, and isn't addressing the central issue.
By adamkittelson 2026-02-140:12 I'm not worried about the danger of losing my job to an AI capable of performing it. I'm worried about the danger of losing my job because an executive wanted to be able to claim that AI has enhanced productivity to such a degree that they were able to eliminate redundancies with no regard for whether there was any truth to that statement or not.
> Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%
I do. Show me any evidence that it is imminent.
> or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant
Not in my lifetime.
> it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.
No, I'm actually measuring the risk, you're acting as if the sky is falling. What's your contingency plan? Buy a subscription to the revolution?
> What's your contingency plan? Buy a subscription to the revolution?
I’ve been working on my contingency plan for a year-and-a-half now. I won’t get into what it is (nothing earth shattering) but if you haven’t been preparing, I think you’re either not paying enough attention or you’re seriously misreading where this is all going.
By small_model 2026-02-140:402 reply This ^ been a SWE for 20 years the market is the worst I have seen it, many good devs been looking for 1-2 years and not even getting a response, whereas 3-4 years ago they would have had multiple offers. Im still working but am secure in terms of money so will be ok not working (financially at least). But I expect a tsunami of layoffs this and next year, then you are competing with 1000x other devs and Indians who will works for 30% of your salary.
By realusername 2026-02-141:401 reply That's called an economic crisis, it has nothing to do with AI, my friends also have trouble to find 100% manual jobs which were easily available 2 years ago.
Yes I said the word that none of these company want to say in their press conference.
By small_model 2026-02-141:521 reply Thats because there are more tech/service workers competing for the manual jobs now.
By realusername 2026-02-142:14 Tech workers aren't numerous enough to have that effect.
Besides that, why aren't we seeing any metrics change on Github? With a supposedly increase of productivity so large a good chunk of the workforce is fired, we would see it somewhere.
By Seattle3503 2026-02-142:11 A lot of non-AI things have happened though.
So AI is going to steamroll all feasible jobs, all at once, with no alternatives developing over time? That's just a fantasy.
It'd probably be cold day in Hell before AI replaces veterinary services, for example. Perhaps for mild conditions, but I cannot imagine an AI robot trying to restrain an animal.
By laichzeit0 2026-02-147:08 All these so-called safe jobs still depend on someone being able to afford those services. If I don't have a job, I can't go see the vet, the fact that no one else can do the vets job is irrelevant at such a point.
I would like to know if there's some kind of inflection point, like the so-called Laffer curve for taxes, where once an economy has X% unemployment, it effectively collapses. I'd imagine it goes: recession -> depression -> systemic crisis and appears to be somewhere between 30-40% unemployment based on history.
By ares623 2026-02-142:13 Every job deemed "safe" will be flooded by desparate applicants from unsafe jobs.
> it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.
What contingencies can you really make?
Start training a physical trade, maybe.
If this the end of SWE jobs, you better ride the wave. Odds are you're estimate on when AI takes over are off by half a career, anyways.
By sarchertech 2026-02-143:30 Working in the trades won’t help you at 40-50% unemployment. Who’s going to pay for your services. And even the meager work remains would be fought over by the hundred million unemployed who are all suddenly fighting tooth and nail for any work they can get.
By snowwrestler 2026-02-1420:22 Isn’t it a bit silly to say AI is going to eat the entire economy, but you have a contingency plan?
It seems kind of like saying “I’m smarter than all the AIs in this one particular way.” If someone posted that, you would probably jump in to say they’re fooling themselves.
By watt 2026-02-168:31 Unless I misunderstand your metaphor, there is nothing you can do about the steamroller, it is going to roll, no matter what.
While true, my personal fear is that the higher-ups will overlook this fact and just assume that AI can do everything because of some cherry-pick simple examples, leading to one of those situations where a bunch of people get fired for no reason and then re-hired again after some time.
> leading to one of those situations where a bunch of people get fired for no reason and then re-hired again after some time.
More likely they get fired for no reason, never rehired, and the people left get burned out trying to hold it all together.
By easymodex 2026-02-140:13 Exactly, now which one do you wanna be? The burned out ones but still working in SWE or the fired ones which in the long run converge to manual labor which AI can't do. Not to mention in SWE case the salaries would be pushed down to match cost of AI doing it.
As if "higher-ups" is an assigned position.
If you fail as a "higher up" you're no longer higher up. Then someone else can take your place. To the extent this does not naturally happen is evidence of petty or major corruptions within the system.
By Seattle3503 2026-02-142:14 In competitive industries, bad firms will fail. Some industries are not competitive though. I have a friend that went a little crazy working as a PM at a large health insurance firm.
I look through the backlog for my team consisting of 9 trillion ill-defined (if defined at all) tickets that tells you basically nothing.
The large, overwhelming majority of my team's time is spent on combing through these tickets and making sense of them. Once we know what the ticket is even trying to say, we're usually out with the solution in a few days at most, so implementation isn't the bottleneck, nowhere near.
This scenario has been the same everywhere I've ever worked, at large, old institutions as well as fresh startups.
The day I'll start worrying is when the AI is capable of following the web of people involved to translate what the vaguely phrased ticket that's been backlogged for God knows how long actually means
By arcologies1985 2026-02-1414:03 At my workplace we now use Claude Code to parse written specs and source code, search through JIRA, and draft, refine and organize tickets (using the JIRA API via a CLI tool). Way faster than through the UI.
However as you point out we have no program-accessible source of data on who stakeholders, contributors, managers, etc. are and have to write a lot of that ourselves. For a smaller business perhaps one could write all of that down in an accessible way to improve this but for a large dynamic business it seems very difficult.
By UncleOxidant 2026-02-140:491 reply The memory problem is already being addressed in various ways - antigravity seems to keep a series of status/progress files describing what's been done, what needs doing, etc. A bit clunky, but it seems to work - I can open it up on a repo that I was working in a few days back and it seems to pick up this context such that I don't have to completely bring it up to speed every time like I used to have to do. I've heard that claude code has similar mechanisms.
I've been doing stuff with recent models (gemini 3, claude 4.5/6, even smaller, open models like GLM5 and Qwen3-coder-next) that was just unthinkable a few months back. Compiler stuff, including implementing optimizations, generating code to target a new, custom processor, etc. I can ask for a significant new optimization feature in our compiler before going to lunch and come back to find it implemented and tested. This is a compiler that targets a custom processor so there is also verilog code involved. We're having the AI make improvements on both the hardware and software sides - this is deep-in-the-weeds complex stuff and AI is starting to handle it with ease. There are getting to be fewer and fewer things in the ticket tracker that AI can't implement.
A few months ago I would've completely agreed with you, but the game is changing very rapidly now.
this works fine for like 2-3 small instruction sets. once you start getting to scale of a real enterprise system, the AI falls down and can't handle that amount of context. It will start ignoring critical pieces or not remember them. And without constant review AI will start priotizing things that are not your business priority.
I don't agree they have solved this problem, at all, or really in any way that's actually usable.
By UncleOxidant 2026-02-141:551 reply What I'm saying is, don't get to thinking that the memory problem is some kind of insurmountable, permanent barrier that's going to keep us safe. It's already being addressed, maybe crudely at first, but the situation is already much better than it was - I no longer have to bring the model up to speed completely every time I start a new session. Part of this is much larger context windows (1M tokens now). New architectures are also being proposed to deal with the issue, as well.
By cweld510 2026-02-1414:04 Context windows are a natural improvement, but new architectures are completely speculative and it’s unclear we can make any sort of predictable progress with new, better architectures. Most progress has been made on essentially the same architecture paradigms, although we did move from dense models to MoE at some point.
A lot of this can be provided or built up by better documentation in the codebase, or functional requirements that can also be created, reviewed, and then used for additional context. In our current codebase it's definitely an issue to get an AI "onboarded", but I've seen a lot less hand-holding needed in projects where you have the AI building from the beginning and leaving notes for itself to read later
By gordonhart 2026-02-1320:325 reply Curious to hear if you've seen this work with 100k+ LoC codebases (i.e. what you could expect at a job). I've had some good experiences with high autonomy agents in smaller codebases and simpler systems but the coherency starts to fizzle out when the system gets complicated enough that thinking it through is the hard part as opposed to hammering out the code.
I'd estimate we're near a million LoC (will double check tomorrow, but wouldn't be surprised if it was over that to be honest). Huge monorepo, ~1500 engineers, all sorts of bespoke/custom tooling integrated, fullstack (including embedded code), a mix of languages (predominantly Java & JS/TS though).
In my case the AI is actively detrimental unless I hand hold it with every single file it should look into, lest it dive into weird ancient parts of the codebase that bear no relevance to the task at hand. Letting the latest and "greatest" agents loose is just a recipe for frustration and disaster despite lots of smart people trying their hardest to make these infernal tools be of any use at all. The best I've gotten out of it was some light Vue refactoring, but even then despite AGENTS.md, RULES.md and all the other voodoo people say you should do it's a crapshoot.
By zozbot234 2026-02-140:13 Ask the AI to figure out your code base (or self-contained portions of it, as applicable) and document its findings. Then correct and repeat. Over time, you end up with a scaffold in the form of internal documentation that will guide both humans and AIs in making more productive edits.
By wenc 2026-02-1322:43 If you vector index your code base, agents can explore it without loading it into context. This is what Cursor and Roo and Kiro and probably others do. Claude Code uses string searches.
What helps is also getting it to generate a docs of your code so that it has map.
This is actually how humans understand a large code base too. We don’t hold a large code base in memory — we navigate it through docs and sampling bits of code.
By enraged_camel 2026-02-1323:41 Around 250k here. The AI does an excellent job finding its way around, fixing complex bugs (and doing it correctly), doing intensive refactors and implementing new features using existing patterns.
By christkv 2026-02-1322:39 Our codebase is well over 250k and we have a hierarchy of notes for the modules so we read as much as we need for the job with a base memory that explains how the notes work
By servercobra 2026-02-1322:581 reply cloc says ours is ~350k LoC and agents are able to implement whole features from well designed requirement docs. But we've been investing in making our code more AI friendly, and things like Devin creating and using DeepWiki helps a lot too.
By sarchertech 2026-02-141:461 reply If you have agents that can implement entire features, why is it only 350k loc? Each engineer should be cranking out at least 1 feature a week. If each feature is 1500-2000 lines times 10 engineers that’s 20k lines a week.
If the answer is that the AI cranks out code faster than the team can digest and review it and faster than you can spec out the features, what’s the point? I can see completely shifting your workflow, letting skills atrophy, adopting new dependencies, and paying new vendors if it’s boosting your final output 5 or 10x.
But if it’s a 20% speed up is it worth it?
By sarchertech 2026-02-145:53 It’s not a measure of productivity, but some number of new lines is generally necessary for new functionality. And in my experience AI tends to produce more lines of code than a decent human for similar functionality. So I’d be very shocked if an agent completing a feature didn’t crank out 1500 lines or more.
By tharkun__ 2026-02-1320:29 We have this in some of our projects too but I always wonder how long it's going to take until it just fails. Nobody reads all those memory files for accuracy. And knowing what kind of BS the AI spews regularly in day to day use I bet this simply doesn't scale.
Just keep in mind that there are many highly motivated people directly working on this problem.
It's hard to predict how quickly it will be solved and by whom first, but this appears to be a software engineering problem solvable through effort and resources and time, not a fundamental physical law that must be circumvented like a physical sciences problem. Betting it won't be solved enough to have an impact on the work of today relatively quickly is betting against substantial resources and investment.
By slopinthebag 2026-02-1323:281 reply Why do you think it's not a physical sciences problem? It could be the case that current technologies simply cannot scale due to fundamental physical issues. It could even be a fundamental rule of intelligent life, that one cannot create intelligence that surpasses its own.
Plenty of things get substantial resources and investment and go nowhere.
Of course I could be totally wrong and it's solved in the next couple years, it's almost impossible to make these predictions either way. But I get the feeling people are underestimating what it takes to be truly intelligent, especially when efficiency is important.
>It could even be a fundamental rule of intelligent life, that one cannot create intelligence that surpasses its own.
Well that is easily disproved by the fact that people have children with higher IQ's than their own.
By slopinthebag 2026-02-1323:453 reply That's not what I mean, rather than humans cannot create a type of intelligence that supersedes what is roughly capable from human intelligence, because doing so would require us to be smarter basically.
Not to say we can't create machines that far surpass our abilities on a single or small set of axis.
By mitthrowaway2 2026-02-141:411 reply Think hard about this. Does that seem to you like it's likely to be a physical law?
First of all, it's not necessary for one person to build that super-intelligence all by themselves, or to understand it fully. It can be developed by a team, each of whom understands only a small part of the whole.
Secondly, it doesn't necessarily even require anybody to understand it. The way AI models are built today is by pressing "go" on a giant optimizer. We understand the inputs (data) and the optimizer machine (very expensive linear algebra) and the connective structure of the solution (transformer) but nobody fully understands the loss-minimizing solution that emerges from this process. We study these solutions empirically and are surprised by how they succeed and fail.
We may find we can keep improving the optimization machine, and tweaking the architecture, and eventually hit something with the capacity to grow beyond our own intelligence, and it's not a requirement that anyone understands how the resulting model works.
We also have many instances in nature and history of processes that follow this pattern, where one might expect to find a similar "law". Mammals can give birth to children that grow bigger than their parents. We can make metals puter than the crucible we melted them in. We can make machines more precise than the machines that made those parts. Evolution itself created human intelligence from the repeated application of very simple rules.
By slopinthebag 2026-02-142:512 reply > Think hard about this. Does that seem to you like it's likely to be a physical law?
Yes, it seems likely to me.
It seems like the ultimate in hubris to assume we are capable of creating something we are not capable of ourselves.
On the contrary, nearly every machine we've created is capable of things that we are not capable of ourselves. Cars travel more than twice as fast as the swiftest human. Airplanes fly. Calculators do math in an instant that would take a human months. Lightbulbs emit light. Cranes lift many tons. And so on and so forth.
So to create something that exceeds our capabilities is not a matter of hubris (as if physical laws cared about hubris anyway), it's an unambiguously ordinary occurrence.
By slopinthebag 2026-02-145:48 > Not to say we can't create machines that far surpass our abilities on a single or small set of axis.
By jatari 2026-02-1422:31 Well your great great ... great grandfather was a fish. So the universe is clearly fine with gradual intelligence increments. So all we need to do is make an AI that itself can make an AI that is slightly smarter than itself.
By small_model 2026-02-140:432 reply Given SOTA models are Phd level in just about every subject this is clearly provably wrong.
By zozbot234 2026-02-140:53 I'll believe that claim when a SOTA model can autonomously create content that matches the quality and length of any average PhD dissertation. As of right now, we're nowhere near that and don't know how we could possibly get there.
SOTA models are superhuman in a narrow sense, in that they have solid background knowledge of pretty much any subject they've been trained on. That's great. But no, it doesn't turn your AI datacenter into "a country of geniuses".
By slopinthebag 2026-02-142:53 Are humans just Phd students in a vat? Can a SOTA model walk? Humans in general find that task, along with a trillion other tasks that SOTA models cannot do, to be absolutely trivial.
By ordersofmag 2026-02-140:52 Seems like if evolution managed to create intelligence from slime I wouldn't bet on there being some fundamental limit that prevents us from making something smarter than us.
By ThrowawayR2 2026-02-143:27 Many highly motivated people with substantial resources and investment have worked on a lot of things and then failed at them with nothing to show for it.
By datsci_est_2015 2026-02-1323:18 The implication of your assertion is pretty much a digital singularity. You’re implying that there will be no need for humans to interact with the digital world at all, because any work in the digital world will be achievable by AI.
Wonder what that means for meatspace.
Edit: Would also disagree this isn’t a physics problem. Pretty sure power required scales according to problem complexity. At a certain level of problem complexity we’re pretty much required to put enough carbon in the atmosphere to cook everyone to a crisp.
Edit 2: illustrative example, an Epic in Jira: “Design fusion reactor”
By matt_heimer 2026-02-1320:152 reply It's not binary. Jobs will be lost because management will expect the fewer developers to accomplish more by leveraging AI.
By louiereederson 2026-02-1321:071 reply Big tech might ahead of the rest of the economy in this experiment. Microsoft grew headcount by ~3% from June 2022 to June 2025 while revenue grew by >40%. This is admittedly weak anecdata but my subjective experience is their products seem to be crumbling (GitHub problems around the Azure migration for instance), and worse than they even were before. We'll see how they handle hiring over the next few years and if that reveals anything.
By JetSpiegel 2026-02-1322:33 Well, Google just raised prices by 30% on the GSuite "due to AI value delivered", but you can't even opt out, so even revenue is a bullshit metric.
By datsci_est_2015 2026-02-1323:26 Already built in. We haven’t hired recently and our developers are engaged in a Cold War to set the new standard of productivity.
By krackers 2026-02-143:59 >progressively understands the business
This is no different than onboarding a new member of the team, and I think openAI was working on that "frontier"
>We started by looking at how enterprises already scale people. They create onboarding processes. They teach institutional knowledge and internal language. They allow learning through experience and improve performance through feedback. They grant access to the right systems and set boundaries. AI coworkers need the same things.
And tribal knowledge will not be a moat once execs realize that all they need to do is prioritize documentation instead of "code velocity" as a metric (sure any metric gets goodhearted, but LLMs are great at sifting through garbage to find the high perplexity tokens).
>But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form
This may not be the case, large enough context-windows plus external scratchpads would mostly obviate the need for true in context learning. The main issue today is that "agent harnesses" suck. The fact that claude code is considered good is more an indication of how bad everything else is. Tool traces read like a drunken newb brute-forcing his way through tasks. LLMs can mostly "one-shot" individual functions, but orchestrating everything is the blocker. (Yes there's progress in metr or whatever but I don't trust any of that, else we'd actually see the results in real-world open source projects).
LLMs don't really know how to interact with subagents. They're generally sort of myopic even with tool calls. They'll spend 20 minutes trying to fix build issues going down a rabbit hole without stepping back to think. I think some sort of self-play might end up solving all of these things, they need to develop a "theory of mind" in the same way that humans do, to understand how to delegate and interact with the subagents they spawn. (Today a failure case is agents often don't realize subagents don't share the same context.)
Some of this is certainly in the base model and pretraining, but it needs to be brought out in the same way RL was needed for tool use.
Can you give an example to help us understand?
I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.
By gordonhart 2026-02-1320:294 reply Here's an example ticket that I'll probably work on next week:
The body doesn't give much other than the high-level motivation from the person who filed the ticket. In order to implement this, you need to have a lot of context, some of which can be discovered by grepping through the code base and some of which can't:Live stream validation results as they come in- What is the validation system and how does it work today?
- What sort of UX do we want? What are the specific deficiencies in the current UX that we're trying to fix?
- What prior art exists on the backend and frontend, and how much of that can/should be reused?
- Are there any scaling or load considerations that need to be accounted for?
I'll probably implement this as 2-3 PRs in a chain touching different parts of the codebase. GPT via Codex will write 80% of the code, and I'll cover the last 20% of polish. Throughout the process I'll prompt it in the right direction when it runs up against questions it can't answer, and check its assumptions about the right way to push this out. I'll make sure that the tests cover what we need them to and that the resultant UX feels good. I'll own the responsibility for covering load considerations and be on the line if anything falls over.
Does it look like software engineering from 3 years ago? Absolutely not. But it's software engineering all the same even if I'm not writing most of the code anymore.
By Rodeoclash 2026-02-1320:50 This right here is my view on the future as well. Will the AI write the entire feature in one go? No. Will the AI be involved in writing a large proportion of the code that will be carefully studied and adjusted by a human before being used? Absolutely yes.
This cyborg process is exactly how we're using AI in our organisation as well. The human in the loop understands the full context of what the feature is and what we're trying to achieve.
By codegangsta 2026-02-1321:391 reply But planning like this is absolutely something AI can do. In fact, this is exactly the kind of thing we start with on our team when it comes to using AI agents. We have a ticket with just a simple title that somebody threw in there, and we asked the AI to spin up a bunch of research agents to understand and plan and ask itself those questions.
Funny enough, all the questions that you posed are things that come up right away that the agent asks itself, and then goes and tries to understand and validate an answer, sometimes with input from the user. But I think this planning mechanism is really critical to being able to have an AI generate an understanding, then have it be validated by a human before beginning implementation.
And by planning I don't necessarily mean plan mode in your agent harness of choice. We use a custom /plan skill in Claude Code that orchestrates all of this using multiple agents, validation loops, and specific prompts to weed out ambiguities by asking clarifying questions using the ask user question tool.
This results in taking really fuzzy requirements and making them clear, and we automate all of this through linear but you could use your ticket tracker of choice.
Absolutely. Eventually the AI will just talk to the CEO / the board to get general direction, and everything will just fall out of that. The level of abstraction the agents can handle is on a steady upward trajectory.
By sarchertech 2026-02-143:44 If AIs can do that, they won’t be talking to a CEO or the board of a software company. There won’t be a CEO or a board because software companies won’t exist. They’ll talk to the customers and build one off solutions for each of them.
There will be 3 “software” companies left. And shortly after that society will collapse because of AI can do that it can do any white collar job.
By lexoj 2026-02-1421:56 But the llm could still take ownership of that and ask clarifications, reach stakeholders while taking notes, and so on.
I mean, what is the validation system? Either it exists in code, and thus can be discovered if you point the AI at repo, or... what, it doesn't exist?
For the UX, have it explore your existing repos and copy prior art from there and industry standards to come up with something workable.
Web scale issues can be inferred by the rest of the codebase. If your terraform repo has one RDS server, vs a fleet of them, multi-region, then the AI, just as well as a human, can figure out if it needs Google Spanner level engineering or not. (probably not)
Bigger picture though, what's the process of a human logs an under specified ticket and someone else picks it up and has no clue what to do with it? They're gonna go ask the person who logged the bug for their thoughts and some details beyond "hurr Durr something something validation". If we're at the point where AI is able to make a public blog post shaming the open source developer for not accepting a patch, throwing questions back to you in JIRA about the details of the streaming validation system is well within its capabilities, given the right set of tools.
By gordonhart 2026-02-1321:053 reply Honestly curious, have you seen agents succeed at this sort of long-trajectory wide breadth task, or is it theoretical? Because I haven't seen them come close (and not for lack of trying)
By codegangsta 2026-02-1321:42 Yeah I absolutely see it every day. I think it’s useful to separate the research/planning phase from the building/validadation/review phase.
Ticket trackers are perfect for this. Just start with asking AI to take this unclear, ambiguous ticket and come up with a real plan for how to accomplish it. Review the plan, update your ticket system with the plan, have coworkers review it if you want.
Then when ready, kick off a session for that first phase, first PR, or the whole thing if you want.
By fragmede 2026-02-1323:25 Opus 4.6, with all of the random tweaks I've picked up off of here, and twitter, is in the middle of rewriting my golang cli program for programmers into a swiftui Mac app that people can use, and it's totally managing to do it. Claude swarm mode with beads is OP.
By kolinko 2026-02-1322:59 In my expedience, Claude Code with opus 4.5 is the first one to tackle such issues well.
Then why isn't it? Just offload it to the clankers and go enjoy a margarita at the beach or something.
By contagiousflow 2026-02-1320:111 reply Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything
As always, the limit is human bandwidth. But that's basically what AI-forward companies are doing now. I would be curious which tasks OP commenter has that couldn't be done by an agent (assuming they're a SWE)
This sounds bogus to me: if AI really could close 100% of your backlog with just a couple more humans in the loop, you’d hire a bunch of temps/contractors to do that, then declare the product done and lay off everybody. How come that isn’t happening?
Because there's an unlimited amount of work to do. This is the same reason you are not fired once completing a feature :-) The point of hiring a FTE is to continue to create work that provides business value. For your analogy, FTEs often do that by hiring temp, and you can think of the agent as the new temp in this case - the human drives an infinite amount of them
By sarchertech 2026-02-143:501 reply Why hasn’t any of the software I use started shipping features at a breakneck speed then? The only thing any of them have added is barely working AI features.
Why aren’t there 10x the number of games on steam? Why aren’t people releasing new integrated programming language/OS/dev environments?
Why does our backlog look exactly the same as when I left for posterity leave 4 months ago?
By sarchertech 2026-02-145:10 Someone asked why the backlog doesn’t get finished. You answered that it does but the backlog just refills. So I asked where is the backlog evidence that the original backlog was completed.
I’m still waiting for the evidence. I still haven’t seen externally verifiable evidence that AI is a net productivity boost for the ability to ship software.
That doesn’t mean that it isn’t. It does mean that it isn’t big enough to be obvious.
I’m very closet watching every external metric I can find. Nothing yet. Just saw the steam metrics for January. Fewer titles than January last year.
By catmanjan 2026-02-149:00 Sounds more like busy work rather than something that makes money
By rockbruno 2026-02-1320:16 I think the "well defined prompt" is precisely what the person you responded to is alluring to. They are saying they don't get worried because AI doesn't get the job done without someone behind it that knows exactly what to prompt.
By dwa3592 2026-02-1320:12 >>I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI.
That's a sign that you have spurious problems under those tickets or you have a PM problem.
Also, a job is a not a task- if your company has jobs which is a single task then those jobs would definitely be gone.
By yodsanklai 2026-02-140:191 reply > ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today
I think it's more nuanced than that. I'd say that - 0% can't be implemented by AI - but a lot of them can be implemented much faster thanks to AI - a lot of them can be implemented slower when using AI (because author has to fix hallucinations, revert changes that caused bugs)
As we learn to use these tools, even in their current state, they will increase productivity by some factor and reduce needs for programmers.
By sarchertech 2026-02-143:40 What factor of increased productivity will lead to reduced need for programmers?
I have seen numerous 25-50% productivity boosts over my career. Not a single one of them reduced the overall need for programmers.
I can’t even think of one that reduced the absolute number of programmers in a specific field.
By vincent_s 2026-02-145:16 Ha, this triggered me. I'm building exactly this.
It's a coding agent that takes a ticket from your tracker, does the work asynchronously, and replies with a pull request. It does progressively understand the codebase. There's a pre-warming step so it's already useful on the first ticket, but it gets better with each one it completes.
The agent itself is done and working well. Right now I'm building out the infrastructure to offer it as a SaaS.
If anyone wants to try it, hit me up. Email is in my profile. Website isn't live yet, but I'm putting together a waitlist.
By danesparza 2026-02-1320:211 reply Apparently you haven't seen ChatGPT enterprise and codex. I have bad news for you ...
By gordonhart 2026-02-1320:35 Codex with their flagship model (currently GPT-5.3-Codex) is my daily driver. I still end up doing a lot of steering!
By audience_mem 2026-02-148:39 0%? This is as wrong as people who say it can do 100% of tasks.
We're all slowly but surely lowering our standards as AI bombards us with low-quality slop. AI doesn't need to get better, we all just need to keep collectively lowering our expectations until they finally meet what AI can currently do, and then pink-slips away.
By tines 2026-02-145:34 Exactly. This happens in every aspect of life. Something convenient comes along and people will accommodate it despite it being worse, because people don’t care.
By ninetyninenine 2026-02-1320:13 [dead]
By zozbot234 2026-02-1322:32 > Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying.
Um, you do realize that "the memory" is just a text file (or a bunch of interlinked text files) written in plain English. You can write these things out yourself. This is how you use AI effectively, by playing to its strengths and not expecting it to have a crystal ball.
Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away.
Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics.
Let's be charitable and assume that this type of fast food worker gets paid $50,000 a year. For that job to be displaced it needs to be performed by a robot that can be acquired for a reasonable capital expenditure such as $200,000 and requires no maintenance, upkeep, or subscription fees.
This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer. The reality is that they pay service technicians and professionals a lot of money to keep that equipment barely working.
The burger cook job has already been displaced and continues to be. Pre-1940s those burger restaurants relied on skilled cooks that got their meat from a butcher and cut fresh lettuce every day. Post-1940s the cooking process has increasingly become assembly-lined and cooks have been replaced by unskilled labor. Much of the cooking process _is_ now done by robots in factories at a massive scale and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up. In the past 10 years, automation has further increased and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English. In conclusion, both the required skill-level and amount of labor needed for restaurants has been reduced drastically by automation and in fact many higher skilled trade jobs have been hit even harder: cabinetmakers, coachbuilders and such have been almost eradicated by mass production.
It will happen to you.
> and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up
This is correct. This also is a lot more complex than it sounds and creates a lot of work. Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled.
> and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English
Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee because "the kiosk won't let me". Want to add Mac sauce? Get the wrong order in the bag? Machine took payment but is out of receipt paper? Add up all these "edge cases" and a significant amount of these "contactless" transactions involved plenty of contact!
> It will happen to you.
Any labor that can be automated should be. Humans are not supposed to spend their time doing meaningless tasks without a purpose beyond making an imaginary number go up or down.
> Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled.
Okay so the job of "cook" just became "grease disposal engineer"?
> Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee because "the kiosk won't let me"
That hasn't stopped some places I've visited from only allowing people to order from the kiosk. Literally I've said something to the person behind the counter who pointed to the iPad and when I said I wanted something else, shrugged and said we can't do that.
By ddtaylor 2026-02-141:27 > Okay so the job of "cook" just became "grease disposal engineer"?
That is the current way the job works. The idea that even the most basic "burger flipper" job is isolated into a single dimension (flipping a burger) is false. That worker has to get supplies, prepare ingredients, stage them between cooking, dispose of waste product, etc.
> Literally I've said something to the person behind the counter who pointed to the iPad and when I said I wanted something else, shrugged and said we can't do that.
That's because corporate told them to maximize kiosk usage or because the employee was lazy. That's always going to happen. The McDonalds in Union Station DC has broken glass on the floor, because it's a shithole and the employees don't care, but it means not much else IMO
I lost my job as a software developer some time ago.
Flipping burgers is WAY more demanding than I ever imagined. That's the danger of AI:
It takes jobs faster than creating new ones PLUS for some fields (like software development) downshifting to just about anything else is brutal and sometimes simply not doable.
Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc
By sarchertech 2026-02-143:583 reply > Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc
I have no idea what in the world you are talking about. Most 20 year olds working at McDonald’s are stoned and move at half a mile an hour whether it’s a lunch rush or it’s 2am. I worked retail for years before I finally switched full time to programming. It’s certainly not full of amazing motivated athletes with excellent coordination. You’re lucky if most of them can show up to work on time more than half the time.
By iberator 2026-02-169:37 I am not in USA. here we got swarms of Ukrainian immigrants who are super slim, fast and motivated. Very hard to compete. Obisity doesn't exist in them heh
By ddtaylor 2026-02-1421:14 > It’s certainly not full of amazing motivated athletes with excellent coordination. You’re lucky if most of them can show up to work on time more than half the time.
Every once in a while a 16-year old from Ukraine shows up and acts normal and all the other 16-year olds make up rumors about him being 30+ because "how he do that" - very amusing to watch.
By booleandilemma 2026-02-147:131 reply Do you really wanna be competing with those people though? I'll be honest, I don't even want to be in the same room as them.
By sarchertech 2026-02-1412:561 reply No, but I’m over the absurd pessimism.
By ddtaylor 2026-02-154:02
By parpfish 2026-02-1323:50 There’s the issue of the job itself being more demanding, but also the managers in “low skilled” jobs being ultra-demanding petty dictators.
As a white collar computer guy, I can waste some time on Reddit. Or go for a walk and grab coffee. Or let people know that I’m heading out for a couple of hours to go to the doctor. There are a LOT of little freedoms tha you take for granted if you haven’t worked a shitty minimum wage job. Getting on trouble for punching in one minute late, not being allowed to sit down, socializing too much when you’re not on a break.
I’m pretty sure that most tech employees would just quit when encountering a manager like that
Ugh.. sorry to hear :( I am myself unemployed right now. Its really hard to land a job in tech.. Luicky, I dont need to flip burgers for now...
Who's gonna play you to flip burgers with no experience doing it and everyone else needing a job as well?
By wombatpm 2026-02-140:29 Who’s buying $6.00 burgers when the old customers have been replaced by AI?
There is a huge demand for low-skill labor in other industries. Stuff like plumbing, HVAC, and a ton of other traditionally unsexy jobs that can barely keep enough people in a town to perform these jobs at higher costs than normal.
By ddtaylor 2026-02-142:20 I agree. I didn't mean to disparage anyone. I have a massive appreciation (and some involvement!) in these trades. The amount of knowledge these guys have about their trade is impressive.
By paulryanrogers 2026-02-140:151 reply Those jobs don't often pay well until you graduate out of journeyman / apprentice, or are a business owner. They usually require some training and testing ahead of time. They also carry a higher risk of serious injury or death.
The average salary for a software developer in Montana is $88k/yr. The average salary for an HVAC technician in Montana is $58k/yr.
The average salary for a software developer in Oregon is $118k/yr. The average salary for an HVAC technician in Oregon is $74k/yr.
It's for sure less, but the gap is smaller than some might think. I think some markets (SF) distort the cost a bit.
By iberator 2026-02-169:35 you will not land job as plumber or HVAC without piór experience or similar experience. People shun software developers at once im because THEY KNOW that you simply don't fit as typical candidate.
Also: people doesn't want to hire someone who got 'better' education than them... :/
By ddtaylor 2026-02-1321:57 I have worked in the restaurant industry within the last 5 years and I'm probably older than you.
By mattlondon 2026-02-1320:201 reply Jobs that require physical effort will be fine for the reasons you state
Any job that is predominantly done on a computer though is at risk IMO. AI might not completely take over everything, but I think we'll see way fewer humans managing/orchestrating larger and larger fleets of agents.
Instead of say 20 people doing some function, you'll have 3 or 4 prompting away to manage the agents to get the same amount of work done as 20 people did before.
So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.
> So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.
And that's probably something most people are okay with. Work that can be automated should be and humans should be spending their time on novel things instead of labor if possible.
By techpression 2026-02-1323:351 reply What society is ready for that? We are looking at an possible outcome that will make the Great Depression look like a strong financial era of growth and prosperity. I don’t think most people are ok with the road to the goal in this case, doesn’t matter if you have work or not, mass unemployment destroys societies.
I interpreted the parent comment as asking what society _specifically_? Not some abstract concept, but something that exists a step or two away from where we are right now.
By techpression 2026-02-148:261 reply That is correct, living in Sweden with pretty high levels of social protection, but even so, high levels of white collar unemployment would make our very high risk housing market (we as a population has a very high loan ratio, much of it committed to housing) collapse once people can’t pay. That would make the banks likely to collapse because their money no longer exist and they’re all of a sudden real estate brokers with inventory far below what they paid out in loans. Union coffers would deplete fast, there would be no blue collar work so they also get dragged in with the storm. Oh and of course, the stock exchange will crash completely.
Covid gave us a glimpse, this would make it look like child’s play, because there’s no solution and it’s not getting better.
The rich will of course get richer, even if absolute value goes down, the relative value of their wealth will go up.
But what is their wealth, exactly? Assets which no longer have value. Money which no longer has a use. Who's going to maintain their jets when the economy collapses? Who's going to build the parts? Who's going to build the tools to build the parts? Who's going to mine the ores?
Their lives are built atop the same supply chain we all depend on. They don't have their own miners, or aerospace engineers to design planes, or naval architects to build their boats.
They can not consume the marginal capacity of an economy that doesn't exist.
By I-M-S 2026-02-1416:58 They will still be ahead as long as they can provide to people swinging the batons.
By kristiandupont 2026-02-149:141 reply >And that's probably something most people are okay with
You think most people are okay with most white collar jobs disappearing? I certainly am not, personally.
By ddtaylor 2026-02-1412:06 A job that can be automated should be, the alternative is you pay people to do tasks that aren't needed. Why would most people want to have higher prices and more complexity unless it added value to the products or services they are using?
all jobs will be automatable, and there will be no room for humans to work on novel things.
That's like saying we shouldn't push the space exploration boundary because people are so used to staying within it.
If you want to make the argument that singularity has occurred and that knowledge oracles are no longer needed, that's a bold claim.
If you want to make the argument it would escape our control, etc. that's a valid argument for proper controls.
If you want to make the argument that LLMs are sentient and that it's not ethical to "enslave" them, that's also a pretty bold stance currently.
Humans have been inventing technology and improving the quality of life (of our species!) for a very long time and that strategy hasn't changed IMO
I'm not saying any of that I am just saying that you and everyone you love will be killed by this technology and the world as we know it will be destroyed.
Why do you think humans automating more things destroys us? Did the calculator or horse and buggy make us obsolete?
Why didn't the Internet cause a massive death plague?
By beeflet 2026-02-150:51 Because they didn't completely automate all labor. Your frog is boiling, and extrapolating that his hot tub will continue to become increasingly comfortable.
By password54321 2026-02-1319:522 reply >the most unskilled labor
People are worried about white-collar not blue-collar jobs being replaced. Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI.
By ddtaylor 2026-02-1322:01 > Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI
I agree, but people are conflating the two. We have seen a lot of advancements in robotics, but as of current that only makes the economics worse. We're not seeing the complexity of robots going down and we're seeing the R&D costs going up, etc.
If it didn't make sense a few years ago to buy a crappy robot that can barely do the task because your business will never make money doing it, it probably doesn't make sense this year to buy a robot that still can't accomplish the tasks and is more expensive.
Yeah, although in the "Something big is happening" Shumer did say at the end "Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects."
Being the hype-man that he is I assume he meant humanoid robots - I think he's being silly here, and the sentence made me roll my eyes.
By beeflet 2026-02-140:20 what difference does it make if the robots are humanoid or not?
It merely reflects the designer's willingness to engage in sci-fi tropes.
By Der_Einzige 2026-02-1320:011 reply Funny, I go to South Korea and the fast food burger joints literally operate exactly as you say they couldn't. I've had the best burger in my life from a McDonalds in South Korea operated practically by robots.
It's a non reality in America's extremely piss poor restaurant industry. We have a competency crisis (the big key here) and worker shortage that SK doesn't, and they have far higher trust in their society.
By ddtaylor 2026-02-1322:10 > McDonald’s global CEO has famously stated that while they invest in "advanced kitchen equipment," full robotic kitchens aren't a broad reality yet because "the economics don't pencil out" for their massive scale.
> While a highly automated McDonald’s in South Korea (or the experimental "small format" store in Texas) might look empty, the total headcount remains surprisingly similar to a standard restaurant
By slavoingilizov 2026-02-1320:011 reply Can you walk me through this argument for a customer service agent? The jobs where the nuance and variety isn’t there and don’t involve physical interaction are completely different to flipping burgers
By ddtaylor 2026-02-1322:06 A customer service agent that can be automated should be, but it's not working right now. Most support systems are designed to offload as much work as possible to the automated funnel, which almost always has gaps, loops, etc. The result is customers who want to pay for something or use something that get "stuck" being unable to throw money at a company. Right now the cost of fraud is much greater than the cost of these uncaptured sales or lost customers.
Eventually that will change and the role of a customer service agent will be redefined.
By phil21 2026-02-1418:05 > Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics.
In actual reality, McDonalds has already automated to a vast degree. People were talking about burger-flipping robots as a trope 30+ years ago. Their future has come, just not in the way imagined.
If the McDonalds franchises near me are anything to go by we went from a busy lunch rush needing a staff of 20 or so individuals to properly handle, to around half a dozen. At least a half reduction in peak staffing needs - nearly entirely due to various forms of automation and supply chain optimization. The latter of which is just another name for automation further upstream and abstracted from the point of sale.
> This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer.
Perhaps grills are the hardest bit to automate, so they may never not be staffed by humans. I'd argue some places have done a fairly good job "automating" this aspect too if you squint a little. Stuff like double-sided grills where the top comes down and cooks a burger from both sides at once. Doubles your line throughput. Call this mechanization if you want, but it's in the same bucket to me.
But look at soft drink machines. They are now fully automated with some locations able to go from 3-4 people staffing two machines during a busy lunch rush, down to a single person who simply puts caps on stuff coming off the tiny conveyor belt. Mistakes are also cut down to close to zero, including stuff like "less ice" or "more ice" customizations.
The locations I'm aware of now operate fryers on a rotation so the "wait for fresh fries" experience is a thing of the past. This probably wasn't a major capital investment - just an improvement in the automation of data collection, modeling, and demand prediction. Still an automation though, as it replaces some manager making those decisions.
Ordering kiosks are the obvious one everyone knows about, so not worth discussing. They are universal in large cities these days, and I'm starting to see them more and more even in small towns during road trips. App-based ordering is also not someone anyone predicted 20 years ago either. Locations went from 6-8 cashiers on duty down to 1 or 2.
It already happened. Fast food is getting more out of less workers, just as predicted. It just happened incrementally over decades. Sure, a typical fast food franchise will never be operated in a "lights out" style manner with a roving team of highly paid technicians simply responding to alerts. But the labor force has been reduced and optimized for efficiency, and will continue to be chipped away little by little as technology gets better.
