: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
Job cuts at the IRS's tech arm have gone faster and farther than expected, with 40 percent of IT staff and four-fifths of tech leaders gone, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday.
Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as the biggest in two decades.
This happened as the Trump administration reshaped the federal bureaucracy last year with Elon Musk's DOGE wielding the chainsaw.
The IRS lost a quarter of its workforce overall in 2025. But the tech team was clearly affected more deeply. At the start of the year, the team encompassed around 8,500 employees.
As reported by Federal News Network (FNN), Pandya said: "Last year, we lost approximately 40 percent of the IT staff and nearly 80 percent of the execs."
"So clearly there was an opportunity, and I thought the opportunity that we needed to really execute was reorganizing."
That included breaking up silos within the organization, he said. "Everyone was operating in their own department or area."
It is not entirely clear where all those staff have gone. According to a report by the US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IT department had 8,504 workers as of October 2024. As of October 2025, it had 7,135.
However, reports say that as part of the reorganization, 1,000 techies were detailed to work on delivering frontline services during the US tax season. According to FNN, those employees have questioned the wisdom of this move and its implementation.
At yesterday's conference, Pandya said better outcomes had yet to be delivered. "What it didn't lead to is automatically everybody coming together and working as one team. We just had different silos," he said. But his department had now set up "cross-functional" teams focused on end-to-end delivery of individual projects.
"This way there isn't a cold hand-off of, 'My job is X, and now I'm handing it off to somebody else,'" he said.
Ultimately, he said the aim was to have the IT group as a whole working toward a "scorecard."
Naturally, AI is expected to play a significant role in all this, making people better at their jobs and more end-user-focused, he said.
However, Pandya said IRS leaders are telling employees that AI won't endanger their jobs. Clearly the agency is perfectly capable of getting rid of people the old-fashioned way.
The US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said last month the agency was behind in its efforts to digitize paper returns. It noted: "The Information Technology function lost approximately 16 percent of its staff," who are responsible for updates for inflation and expiring or newly enacted tax provisions. This meant that "according to the IRS readiness reports, implementation of these legislative changes is at risk for the 2026 Filing Season." ®
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Comments
Defunding the IRS is nothing but an effort to reduce tax enforcement. People that have relatively straightforward finances can be trivially audited in a formulaic way with data that's on hand - a lack of human auditing resources tends to benefit those with more complex finances which also tend to be the people with a lot of money who can afford to lobby for less enforcement funding.
Also for reference, in 2024 the IRS had a rate of return of 415:1, they'll obviously target the lowest hanging fruit first but for every dollar of funding received they collected 415 dollars of tax revenue that would have been missed. This is an obscenely efficient organization.
Implied in your statement - it benefits those who can create more complex financial situations. Often the complexity of the situation is largely synthetic.
I agree that the complex financials are generally intentionally created for sheltering and that complexity is only possible because of our overly complex tax code which has been made significantly more complex by tax preparer lobbyists from Intuit and others.
The reflex when people hear "complex" in this era: "Can we use AI for it?".
Next month's headline: "IRS signs 200-million dollar deal with Grok to use AI to analyse tax returns, determine who gets audited".
You’re thinking too far behind. They can just use the AI to generate what your taxes would’ve been.
Just have a script with “what are the taxes owed by $name” and print the output
I’ll take $5M now and you can own 50% of my startup: GenTaxAI
By munk-a 2026-02-2015:32 Impossible - such a script would invalidate the need for Intuit and Intuit is critical for national security or something.
By oarla 2026-02-1921:16 I suspect something like this may already be in place.
By cranberryturkey 2026-02-1920:31 [flagged]
By yibg 2026-02-1920:55 In both cases though, mostly rich people.
By jandrewrogers 2026-02-1921:361 reply That “415:1” is misleading and manipulative. The target rate of recovery is ~10:1, which is roughly what the IRS actually achieves.
Audits are not an infinite money glitch. I used to work for a Federal audit agency that also recovered ~10:1. The reason we target 10:1 recovery on audits is because the return on funding additional audits beyond that falls off very sharply. Furthermore, more aggressive auditing greatly increases compliance costs which ultimately come back as costs to the Federal government, so the net recovered revenue is even less than the headline figure.
Audit recoveries tend to be about sloppy compliance, not people trying to cheat the system. People with more complex taxes are more likely to screw up the exponentially more complex compliance aspects. Auditors are mostly fighting entropy.
I'll admit - the 415:1 was pulled from an article detailing information from 2024 but the main point isn't the actual value but the fact that it's more than 1:1. When the IRS receives more funding the US government gets more money than what it is budgeting - this doesn't scale to infinity, at some point you'll have nearly complete auditing capture and more budget will just be burning money but we're no where near that point.
Putting money into the IRS is basically a free money printer for the US government and it's only deep corruption that keeps it so poorly funded.
By jandrewrogers 2026-02-200:101 reply There are substantial indirect costs not accounted for in that ratio. Anywhere close to 1:1 is a large net loss to the government. Your mental model of the cost effectiveness of audits completely ignores large second-order effects.
The Federal government has a century of empirical data on this. They set their targets accordingly, which as a heuristic is roughly optimal at around 10:1. This may not be intuitive to you. It wasn’t to me either until I worked at a Federal audit agency. Most of it actually makes sense once you understand the bigger picture.
By IG_Semmelweiss 2026-02-200:25 Second order effects is where the real damage is done.
That extra tax specialist could have been an additional production line worker, which would have created volume, which would have lowered prices, which would have made inputs for other goods cheaper, etc.
It is really wild when you think at a macro level, how much value is destroyed, all due to indirect costs which are extremely difficult to estimate.
They already have another money printer that they’re perfectly happy to rely on, at least for the time being.
By munk-a 2026-02-2015:35 Inflation! Just use the money printer to print more money! Subsidy checks for everyone! Unexpected bonus checks for military personnel, brand new accounts for children with money that needs to be invested in an approved stock market index fund, throwing even more money at DHS and the DoD budgets!
How will we pay for it? Debt or printing money!
By stephen_cagle 2026-02-1920:191 reply Is that 415:1 the rate of return of an audit, or the expense:revenue ratio of the IRS as a whole? I remember hearing some time ago that the expense ratio was 11% for the IRS? But 415:1 is way way less than 11%.
Captured revenue : cost to capture (could be an audit, billing for interest/fees due, etc. lots of avenues to capture revenue that is being missed).
The problem is these metrics aren't really scalable productivity metrics. If you doubled cost, it might go to 100:1, if you tripled cost, it might go to 0.5:1
Each dollar generally gets more expensive to capture.
By jandrewrogers 2026-02-200:18 A key point is that there are large indirect costs that scale up rapidly that are not accounted for in these direct costs. These costs show up on the balance sheet somewhere else in the government, which makes the ROI for the auditors look much better than it actually is.
This is well-understood by the Federal government. When they set their targets they fully account for the growth of indirect costs created by the audit activity that don’t show up in the ratio.
By stephen_cagle 2026-02-1922:26 Good point, and kind of interesting in that as we keep cutting funding to the IRS, this ratio will probably get wider (which looks good, but is actually bad for what it implies).
By AdamH12113 2026-02-1920:062 reply > Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that.
I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of the taxes you mentioned are levied by local governments to fund themselves. The United States has a federal system; it would be a much bigger change to centralize all of the funding.
By NooneAtAll3 2026-02-1921:312 reply I... don't understand how that excuses complexity?
what stops "local governments" from applying same type of tax as higher levels? why would they need taxes specific for them?
By AdamH12113 2026-02-1923:141 reply Well, local governments (cities and towns) also have expenses -- police, fire departments, trash collection, water and sewage, roads, public works. Schools are partially funded locally. That has to be paid for.
It's theoretically possible for a local government to levy an income tax, but a lot would need to change -- much more than just changing tax rates. Employers and banks report income to the federal government (and states, I suppose, but I live and work in Texas so I don't know much about that). They would have to report that information to towns and cities too. There's also the problem of granularity -- how does an employer or bank know where someone actually lives? If you have a P.O. box in a town, do you have to pay taxes in that town? If you work in a different municipality (not uncommon!), do you have to pay taxes there too? If you have a home in one town, work in another, but spend most of your free time hanging out in a third, are you completely off the hook for supporting the third town?
You could have the federal government collect all the money and then allocate it to state and local governments, but that's a massive change in how American society works, and I'm not sure it's any less complex in the end. Some of the complexity in the tax code (e.g. different levels of capital gains tax) is a policy choice, but some of it reflects the complexity of the real world.
By dragonwriter 2026-02-1923:211 reply > It's theoretically possible for a local government to levy an income tax,
“Theoretically possible” in that thousands of local jurisdictions, among about 1/3 of US states, already do either income or payroll taxes or both.
By AdamH12113 2026-02-206:021 reply Fair enough. I was thinking of local governments unilaterally deciding to impose income taxes. The impression I got was that existing local income taxes are effectively state funding for municipalities collected and distributed by state governments, which doesn't seem like quite the same thing, but perhaps I'm splitting hairs.
By dragonwriter 2026-02-2119:31 Existing local income taxes are imposed by local authorities. Because states (unlike the federal government) have general police powers, there generally must be authority for the local agency to do so in state law, but this is not the same as state taxes which are redistributed to local governments (which also exist.) Some states include in their laws allowing local jurisdictions to impose income taxes provisions for collection and distribution to the taxing authority by the state tax agency alongside state income taxes, to avoid the expense of duplicated administrative function, but I don't see how that changes the essential local character of the tax.
By conductr 2026-02-1922:17 I tend to agree with this. The logic should be the same with different rate tables for each taxing body. What I don't want though is the Fed govt being the collector and distributor of all the funds. They already weld too much power with their various funding influences for transportation, healthcare, etc. The states and local govts shouldn't need to pander so heavily to the federal govt for funds.
> The United States has a federal system
That doesn't prevent there being a single point of collection and distribution.
By conductr 2026-02-1922:23 It seems efficient and simple that way. But you don't want federal politics playing that much of a part of your local life. And you don't want your local politicians to have to pander to the federal levels just to get what they need or what is theirs. I think this would result in disaster as the federal politicians are too out of touch with local needs.
If we had a single formula for taxes, then each taxing body could have their own rate table to apply to it, but still collect it directly - then I think that would be a better approach.
For simplicity sake, take income tax at flat rates. Federal may be 20%, your state might be 10%, city might be 5%. Maybe my state rate is only 5% and you might want to move here, but nationally we all pay the Federal 20% rate.
By xnyan 2026-02-1921:21 By definition, a federal system does prevent a single point of collection and distribution. If states could not or did not collect taxes on their own authority, it would not be a federal system. States would just be adjuncts of a national government.
By rmah 2026-02-1921:08 It sorta does, that's one of the primary points of a federal system.
By KK7NIL 2026-02-1921:28 It literally does, this is one of defining differences of a federal system, that the states have a right to set and collect taxes.
You’re absolutely correct. For income taxes many states and the federal government offset each others debts.
In Canada provinces can choose to harmonize taxes or collect independently.
By bcrosby95 2026-02-1921:36 Which misses the point. If the point is to reduce the number of taxes, having the federal government collect 10 different types of taxes instead of state governments collecting 7 types of taxes won't change all the different taxes we have.
There is no singular place we can change how many different taxes you pay. There's... thousands? Tens of thousands? Once you factor in city, county, state, federal, special districts, etc.
By lazyasciiart 2026-02-1919:591 reply Didn’t they just get rid of the IRS automated filing app? You’ll have to kill off TurboTax and siblings to simplify the tax code.
By munk-a 2026-02-1922:34 Yes, it was completed and operational and the new administration pulled it from public use.
Taxes aren't just there to provide an income stream to the government. It's also a mechanism to guide behavior via incentives (or punishment). Right or wrong there we're providing an incentive to hold assets longer, or use less fuel or buy from domestic producers etc.
By claytongulick 2026-02-1921:10 IIRC, this was one of the main arguments for the Articles of Confederacy, the states were pretty nervous about this exact situation.
This was reaffirmed by Marshall [1] with the famous “the power to tax involves the power to destroy."
[1] https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/mcculloch-v-mar...
By munk-a 2026-02-1922:39 I wholly support drastically simplifying the tax code - I disagree with the extent to which you'd simplify it since there is a very good reason to have property taxes and some of the sin taxes have notable social benefits. Additionally, using tax rebates as an incentive to install home solar is an excellent initiative for the environment. Our tax code should be pretty simple - it shouldn't be a single line (or even multiple graduated lines).
Until we simplify the tax code, though, can we properly fund the IRS to actually audit it? I think my thing (funding the IRS) is a lot easier to do quickly than your thing (completely rewriting how the government garners revenue) and I don't want perfection to be the enemy of the good.
Ok what about for the people that mainly earn their living not from an income paid by a job; ie the richest people in the country?
That's an excellent criticism of the parent and why we really do want a somewhat complex tax code even if it should be far simpler than what we have today.
We also want to balance regressive and progressive taxes, we do want to influence some behaviors through taxes that provide positive social outcomes - there are several really good complexities to have in our tax code. Just not as many as we do today.
By rtkwe 2026-02-1923:21 Yeah so much of the complexity is around incentivizing or disincentivizing certain things; there's the mortgage interest exception because it's classified as a Good Thing (tm) to be encouraged/made easier and we have liqour/cigarette taxes because it's a Bad Thing we (societally) want less of.
So much of that complexity doesn't even really matter to most people anyways, there are a handful of credits most people may qualify for and then the standard deduction is more than something like 40% of people's itemized deductions. And those credits are usually one time events around particular events/purchases that are relatively well advertised. The most annoying one I've had is when the EV credit required me and my wife to file separately to qualify for.
It's so silly to think the entirety of the tax problem can be solved with one simple straight forward fix like the one proposed here. It's imo one of the peak examples of "broken tech brain" where people think the whole complexity of a situation can be solved with "one neat trick" kind of solutions. Far from exclusive to the tech world but I do see a lot of it from tech.
> Get rid of sales tax, property tax
The very first things you list aren't related to the IRS at all. They're local and state taxes, and to get rid of those would require a radical rewriting of the Constitution itself. Not to mention it would destroy all fire department, county hospital, school, city park, state park, etc. funding.
Of course they're not, but this is how you smell someone that doesn't really want to enforce paying taxes, but just wants to evade them as much as possible.
How quickly people show their colors.
I don't think that's fair. The US has so many administrative layers with taxing powers - federal, state, county, and municipal, and in many cases administrative bodies also charge massive filing fees, and courts charge large fees to finance themselves because they're consistently under-funded by legislatures.
So Americans get taxed a lot at many different levels of activity. The cognitive load of having so many different points of taxation is annoying and exhausting to a lot of people. It makes household budgeting a lot more work than it really needs to be.
But it is this way because of the Constitution
They maybe we should change that and have a simpler system with much less complexity. Dismissing people who object to the painful complexity of the US tax regime as 'evaders' is npt insightful or helpful.
By claytongulick 2026-02-1921:201 reply > maybe we should change that and have a simpler system with much less complexity
Wholeheartedly agree, but I see the root cause of the issue being income tax itself. As soon as you tax income, you'll go down and endless rabbit hole of what's fair to tax, how much, what kind of income, investment income vs wage income, percentage vs flat rate, etc...
That gave us the mess we have.
I like the idea of consumption tax exclusively (would require an amendment). You're taxed on your purchases.
It's easy to drive behavior (more tax on some things... tax on cigarettes, yachts and private jets) and easy to make more fair (exclude grocery staples).
Consumption taxes are almost always regressive and improperly place the majority of the tax burden on the poor - they're good to have (especially the sin taxes and tax discounts on specific encouraged behaviors) but they should be coupled with taxes on wealth (aka property) and income. And these taxes should be somewhat complex - just not to the extent we have today.
By claytongulick 2026-02-1923:542 reply > they should be coupled with taxes on wealth (aka property) and income
Why?
By KPGv2 2026-02-2015:35 Because wealth is destructive to democracy. Anything destructive to democracy should be difficult to reify.
To better spread the tax burden. In an idealized system taxes would be levied in such a manner where a good contribution of labor allowed a more comfortable lifestyle that scaled with diminishing returns. All people should be guaranteed a baseline of comfort and additional economic productivity would offer access to additional luxuries at a gradual rate. That kind of level of micromanagement is only do-able in a command economy which is terrible for a bunch of reasons I won't go into but our tax system should work to ensure that the poorest of us have access to a baseline of benefits at the expense of the richest. Wealth and income should be taxed since income is the most direct expression of productivity and wealth is an accumulation of unspent excess. I don't mean to lean too hard into utilitarianism because it got culty and BS over time but there is a diminishing return to luxuries and we can ensure more joy in society by trying to even the distribution of services.
By claytongulick 2026-02-2315:59 So, in your opinion, people have a right the the results of someone else's labor?
> The cognitive load of having so many different points of taxation
What in the world. The cognitive load of just paying the bill that was automatically calculated by someone else?
FIT is like the only thing that should occupy your brain at all, and I agree that in a sane world it'd just be a tax imposed on us with no deductions or credits, meaning no one even has to think about it.
By anigbrowl 2026-02-221:12 A simple example would be how the prices displayed in stores aren't inclusive of tax. So if you're grocery shopping, you've got to keep recalculating the tax as you go to know your total in advance. For anyone on a tight budget, that sales tax impacts their buying decisions and mistakes could be costly. Property or income tax liability can also involve a lot of effort to calculate correctly.
If you're never had to worry about this, congratulations! But for many others its an extra level of stress and complexity that they'd prefer to minimize.
By rkeene2 2026-02-1921:49 This misses the point that tax exemptions are the way politicians campaign for voter blocks. Having different kinds of taxes makes it easier to target a voter blocks more precisely.
By onlyrealcuzzo 2026-02-1920:071 reply Why would you simplify the tax code if the whole point of the tax code is to create loopholes so you can pay way less taxes than the public would vote for?
The tax code exists for Welfare Queen Billionaires like Elon Musk.
By DSMan195276 2026-02-1921:181 reply Well see, you actually missed the catch that by eliminating everything except income tax people like Elon wouldn't have to pay any tax, it's even better for them. He's not getting a W-2, virtually all of his income is actually capital gains or similar.
By dheera 2026-02-205:59 That's all income, call it income. Also make taking out a loan against an uncashedout gain a taxable event.
By guywithahat 2026-02-1920:102 reply Well it's a retort on the 2022 IRA bill, which increased the IRS budget by 80 billion over 10 years, and paved the way to hire 87,000 people. There has been a lot of hiring recently so it's hard to tell one thing from another but this isn't so much of mass layoff as an attempt at returning to normal.
By toomuchtodo 2026-02-1920:193 reply Please provide evidence for what you considered to be normal to be an effective workforce for the ongoing task at hand (nation state tax collection).
By guywithahat 2026-02-2018:34 We had an exceptional increase in funding, followed by an attempt to curb that increase in funding. The size of the IRS is not just a financial exercise but a moral one, and I believe the prior budget increases as part of the 2022 IRA provides important context to staffing in the IRS.
By nobodyandproud 2026-02-2019:37 I think we should first agree on what “normal” means.
I personally view our IRS head count as being at historical lows by raw headcount; and even lower by population size if we look at the last 40 years (would love data that goes back further).
By groundzeros2015 2026-02-1921:171 reply The evidence was the baseline before the increase
By toomuchtodo 2026-02-1921:471 reply The baseline was there was significant tax evasion by high net worth individuals. The staff up was to counter that, staffing down puts us back at reduced enforcement.
Someone has to pay to operate a nation state, you can’t borrow forever to fill the gap and there’s nothing left to cut. Roughly the bottom 60% of Americans do not make enough to have a federal income tax liability. So, we can kick the can on the top 40% paying until the bond vigilantes make the decision for the US.
By groundzeros2015 2026-02-1922:501 reply > The staff up was to counter that
Stated reasons may or may not be actual.
If you recall these were not just accountants but agents who carry guns etc.
I see this as very similar to the ICE situation. Biden has loyalty and power in IRS and so gave it money to help him police. As the government gets more corrupted I think we’ll find more agencies weaponized like this.
By toomuchtodo 2026-02-1922:521 reply Can you provide proof of this “loyalty and power” at the IRS to Biden mentioned? Because without proof, it sounds like a “deep state” conspiracy theory without evidence.
By groundzeros2015 2026-02-1923:052 reply I can provide evidence that the IRS and the majority of its employees have good relationships with democrats.
The equivalent question is can you provide proof that ICE provides power and is loyal to Trump?
I don’t think you would say that’s a deep state conspiracy.
By nobodyandproud 2026-02-202:052 reply OP talks about policing high net-worth individuals and organizations, causing most of the taxation headaches.
You’re shifting the discussion to organizations being political, hoping it becomes a divisive topic.
A well-worn and sleazy playbook to dodge any discussion of a problem that has exceeded the tipping point.
By guywithahat 2026-02-2018:471 reply I'm not the guy you replied to but the idea that "high-net worth individuals" (I assume you mean hundred-millionaires+) are skimping out on a meaningful amount of taxes is political. Most of these IRS agents will end up going after normal people, which is where most tax revenue comes from and where most of the fraud is. Billionaires have entire teams who do nothing but make sure their taxes are in order, a small business owner is more liable to make mistakes or try to commit fraud, which is who they will have to go after if they want to increase revenue. I think there's merit to his point, that the IRS has a history of targeting conservative organizations (https://grokipedia.com/page/IRS_targeting_controversy), and this has lead to their funding being a political issue.
I wouldn't call is comment sleazy I think he's just trying to discuss the topic at hand.
By nobodyandproud 2026-02-2019:13 > Most of these IRS agents will end up going after normal people,
Normal people are the easiest to chase; the cut backs have made this a foregone conclusion.
> which is where most tax revenue comes
Because normal people can’t afford transnational accounting shenanigans.
> from and where most of the fraud is.
The Panama papers prove deliberate tax dodges are not by “normal people”.
> I wouldn't call is comment sleazy I think he's just trying to discuss the topic at hand.
Injecting and steering a discussion towards party and identity politics a where there was none is a sure fire way to shutdown a discourse.
Deliberate or not, the method involved is sleazy.
By the way: Given that your definition of normal in your heavily downvoted comment, I’m not surprised you’re defending the comment.
Dig deeper and look back over decades. The 2022 bill and headcount to 100k was a push BACK to normal.
By groundzeros2015 2026-02-202:281 reply [flagged]
By nobodyandproud 2026-02-207:23 > Actually no. Did you notice I’m criticizing both administrations? The similarity to ICE funding is about the misuse of agencies as places to stock resources for your party.
You and only you brought party politics into a discussion about the wealthy needing a disproportionate amount of tax policing and oversight, yet getting policed less and less as the years and decades to by.
Irrelevant, bad-faith tactics and playbook.
By nobodyandproud 2026-02-2019:26 Normal?
The 100k headcount and bill doesn’t cover what we in the US used to enjoy, with a smaller population: - https://taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/2025-04/IRS%...
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/5856e771-dd09-4517-...
By wrs 2026-02-1921:24 I started a new LLC in December and applied for an EIN (company taxpayer ID, required for doing essentially anything else, like opening a bank account). Normally this is done online and takes two minutes. This time the online process failed and I had to fax the form in. Six weeks later, they faxed back the number.
To be clear: when it failed, I just got an error code and was told to fax in the paper form. Which contains exactly the same information I had just typed into the website.
I don’t think the IRS needs fewer tech people.
I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.
By ericmcer 2026-02-1919:44 Unfortunately the big players are pretty entrenched so the degraded quality that appears once AI fails to replace laid off workers will have minimal impact on their bottom line. And the bar for government is literally as low as "Is this such bad UX that it will cause a revolution?".
So why would they care whether its Covid, AI or a Recession that gives them the excuse to do less and less. The system keeps on rolling, the rich get richer, normal peoples lives get incrementally shittier.
By rdtsc 2026-02-1921:05 > So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.
Managers' manager convinced them they should expect an AI Miracle. Now your job is to put on a show to pretend to create an AI Miracle so your manager and their manager can pat themselves on the back.
Under enough pressure to use AI people will just produce code as before but LLM-ize it with more comments and verbose crap to look like AI did it. "See boss, I am using AI, so happy you got us this tool".
However, if you do it too well the next step will be "we don't really need so and so, we'll just replace them with an AI agent since it was working out so well".
By AtheistOfFail 2026-02-1919:402 reply An LLM may take the interesting parts of my job but the parts that suck (dealing with people) will never be taken over by an LLM.
Indeed. Uber Eats now makes you talk to an AI bot among other customer-hostile issues. I've largely abandoned them. The last straw was a driver leaving the food at some random house I could not even identify from the picture. It made me wait 5 minutes before I could do anything at all. Then it made me talk to a bot.
When I eventually got it to issue a refund I realized they kept the service fees and driver tip. For an order I didn't even receive!
If that's the best they can do I'll just go pick it up myself.
By JohnTHaller 2026-02-235:48 Order directly from the restaurant. You'll get better and faster service. And it'll often be cheaper as they have to increase the price on middle men platforms to pay for the fees.
By hsbauauvhabzb 2026-02-1919:571 reply Phone and chat support has already happened, robotic law enforcement is the future. Now pick up that can citizen.
Notably that isn't an accurate reference. The Combine officer is not a robot, so no robotic law enforcement happened.
By hsbauauvhabzb 2026-02-202:26 There IS robot law enforcement as part of combine, so you’re not even a good neckbeard.
By newswasboring 2026-02-1920:173 reply The part I don't understand is why can't they wait for the efficiency gains to materialize before firing people? Better pay a few people for a few months extra than be wrong. If AI is going to bring in all this efficiency, this would be peanuts.
By mikkupikku 2026-02-1920:26 Its like the "throw him into the deep end" method of teaching kids to swim. (I don't endorse it, but it has worked for many people.)
By rmah 2026-02-1921:13 Because, for white collar jobs, that is so rare that it's reasonable to say that it never happens.
Everyday I am more and more pleased with our company's (or at least our company's tech department) to effectively ban AI.
My manager thinks if we give it a year or two, no one will write code by hand anymore, we will just generate everything from specifications in English.
By CamperBob2 2026-02-203:501 reply At the current rate of progress, that is a reasonable thing to expect. But I'd say give it two to three years, myself. This kind of wholesale paradigm shift tends to take longer than you think it will, and then, once it happens, it tends to happen faster than you think it will.
Except for things like hardware drivers, most of the code that will ever need to be written already has been. It will just need to be refactored and recast for new systems and applications, and current-gen LLMs are already extremely good at that.
The line that separates specifications and source code will get increasingly blurry over the next couple of years, eventually reaching a point where it's no longer worth arguing about.
I have plenty of reasons to think it's not going to happen. Not with the LLM-based generation of AI. So let's just agree to disagree :-)
By CamperBob2 2026-02-2015:52 What are some of your reasons? The usual ones don't seem to be holding up well but I'm interested in new insights, certainly. Obviously you disagree with your manager, but that could be due to any number of things.
Does this have anything to do with AI push? It is fairly straightforward that billionaire class cooperating with Trump admin dont want to pay taxes. Republicans want IRS incapable so that tax fraud flourish. Bonus point is that they will be able to pretend worry about it with minorities.
By kerblang 2026-02-1920:18 > Naturally, AI is expected to play a significant role in all this, making people better at their jobs and more end-user-focused, he said.
> However, Pandya said IRS leaders are telling employees that AI won't endanger their jobs.
Not much of trump supporter myself, but I check HN for tech news rather than politics
By tokyobreakfast 2026-02-1919:532 reply > Republicans want IRS incapable so that tax fraud flourish.
That's wildly hyperbolic.
By selectodude 2026-02-1919:59 They literally put a tax cheat as head of the IRS last year.
People considering speaking frankly about reality as hyperbolic is how we got here.
By astura 2026-02-1920:16 It's not hyperbolic, it's factual.
