We need some kind of advocacy group / think tank / lobbying org with the express mission of driving policy conversations to ensure technology empowers people to work less. Right now we’re on the...
We need some kind of advocacy group / think tank / lobbying org with the express mission of driving policy conversations to ensure technology empowers people to work less. Right now we’re on the cusp of giant breakthroughs that could totally pave the way for a golden age of leisure and plenty. The elimination or reduction of our dependency on human toil. But we’ve already gotten all the market signals we need to know new productivity breakthroughs are always going to have the opposite effect. We’ve seen the pattern, going back to the Industrial Revolution. We know the playbook. We as a society must unite around the explicit goal of offloading human labor to technology — and not penalizing those who have done so by forcing them to replace it with more, different labor — or the cycle will keep accelerating.
We have a failure of political imagination. We can’t seem to conceive of a world where poor people aren’t spending their entire lives working, just to survive (let alone thrive). It’s just considered a given that humans must surrender their bodies and minds to the machinery of capitalism, unless they’re privileged enough to operate that machine and enrich themselves from its output. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. If AI isn’t liberating us, we’re doing it wrong.
We had an entire communist movement trying to ensure that our labor was properly compensated and every single person with any amount of power collectively squashed that shit. The United States...
We had an entire communist movement trying to ensure that our labor was properly compensated and every single person with any amount of power collectively squashed that shit. The United States basically genocide-d multiple countries squashing that shit.
I think we just don’t have the power we think we have. Its way too easy for them to just use their money to kill all of us.
Like a quarter of my genealogy was extinguished by said communist movement with no interference from anyone else, just self inflicted stupidity.
We had an entire communist movement trying to ensure that our labor was properly compensated and every single person with any amount of power collectively squashed that shit
Like a quarter of my genealogy was extinguished by said communist movement with no interference from anyone else, just self inflicted stupidity.
While no doubt part of it, you can tell from the differences between what Mao did and what Stalin did, or even how the modern CCP operates, to see how Mao was huffing his own paint. Stalin...
While no doubt part of it, you can tell from the differences between what Mao did and what Stalin did, or even how the modern CCP operates, to see how Mao was huffing his own paint.
Stalin manufactured a famine in Ukraine in order to crush dissent as well as maintain exports for foreign cash reserves. Mao manufactured a famine in China because of collective farming programs + the cultural revolution... for literally zero beneficial reasons.
He didn't face serious dissent, the famine was across his main power base even, he wasn't exporting the food people just sucked ass at collective farming and the food never was produced.
Mao was more disastrous than even Stalin because he did seem believe in what he peddled, and that cause numerous foot-gunning without even a purpose.
I honestly see no difference between a dictator who harms their own population to gain power for themselves and a dictator who harms their own population because they want to change society to fit...
I honestly see no difference between a dictator who harms their own population to gain power for themselves and a dictator who harms their own population because they want to change society to fit their perfect image. Its basically the same thing, both situations consolidate power to those in charge.
The difference is the what and why. Stalin did things to consolidate and grow his power. He made prison camps in order to kill two birds with one stones: get rid of dissidents and free labor for...
The difference is the what and why. Stalin did things to consolidate and grow his power. He made prison camps in order to kill two birds with one stones: get rid of dissidents and free labor for economic development. He engineered a famine in Ukraine to punish the area and maintain exports needed to get foreign currency also required for economic development.
Mao honest to god believed that collective farming would be an economic boon for the country. He actually believed that the cultural revolution wouldn't horrifically damage the country's infrastracture by putting all the people with skills to work in agriculture. He honestly believed that people with no training could farm well.
It does also go back to "absolute power corrupts absolutely", one of the fundamental issues with any kind of centrally planned economy. Whether a committee or an individual, if any number of fallible humans try to manage the economic output of millions of people, they will not only fail but they will become corrupt, without question.
I would counter that this is a bit like people who don't see value in participating in politics. The "invisible hand" of the market is not neutral - if we do not exercise control over a market...
Whether a committee or an individual, if any number of fallible humans try to manage the economic output of millions of people, they will not only fail but they will become corrupt, without question.
I would counter that this is a bit like people who don't see value in participating in politics. The "invisible hand" of the market is not neutral - if we do not exercise control over a market economy on a social level, some group of people will take the opportunity to do so.
Well, I think that part of the issue with communist movements is their ideological purity testing. I think most people outside of extremist fringes agree that a purely command economy is a bad...
Well, I think that part of the issue with communist movements is their ideological purity testing.
I think most people outside of extremist fringes agree that a purely command economy is a bad idea, just as a pure laissez-faire market economy is a bad idea. The issue with every communist movement is that those command economy extremists are the ones leading them, and ultimately running the countries which have had successful revolutions.
Communist societies often contrast themselves with capitalist ones as a way to highlight the downsides of market economies, but the countries they're criticizing are moderate; they don't have pure market economies, because outside of fringe anarcho-capitalists with zero political relevance, there's no significant movement that seriously advocates for zero control of market economies in capitalist countries.
The US still had social security, public schools and utilities and so on during the Cold War. There are a lot of northern and western European countries with strong welfare states and decent wealth distribution.
That's not good enough for communist movements though, it's either the means of production, and all of the means of production are owned by the people or nothing.
We've seen countless times that when these societies go from rigid ideological purity to softening, and implementing market economy reforms, the quality of life of their citizens almost universally improves. If that's not an indicator of the strengths of market versus command economies, I don't know what is.
Have actually existing communist movements had a good track record about properly compensating labor and not squashing exercises in collective power when in charge?
Have actually existing communist movements had a good track record about properly compensating labor and not squashing exercises in collective power when in charge?
I think it helps to shed some of the dependence on labels. Like, Finland or Denmark would likely consider themselves to be "capitalist" and probably also "socialist", and these countries have...
I think it helps to shed some of the dependence on labels. Like, Finland or Denmark would likely consider themselves to be "capitalist" and probably also "socialist", and these countries have aspects of both. Even the US isn't purely capitalist, and the Soviet Union certainly didn't toe the theoretical communist line. Vietnam is communist, but they actively participate in global markets and, by and large, life in Vietnam is pretty "normal".
Thinking of this as a kind of spectrum matches up with the real world a lot better than binary labels. So, while I agree that "real existing communism" has, on average, been... unimpressive, that doesn't mean its tenets and ideals need to be avoided entirely.
A specific economic or political system shouldn't be a goal, it's a means to an end. We should decide what kind of world we want to live in, and then choose the mixture of systems that produces that outcome.
These kind of discussions go off the rails quickly because people come in with different definitions of "socialist", "communist" and "capitalist". In my opinion socialism and capitalism are...
These kind of discussions go off the rails quickly because people come in with different definitions of "socialist", "communist" and "capitalist". In my opinion socialism and capitalism are entirely compatible because I define socialism as "the workers own the means of production" and capitalism as "free markets for goods, where owners reinvest capital gains back into the means of production". But someone else might hear socialism and think "command economy", which makes it incompatible with a free market definition of capitalism.
One interesting thing about Silicon Valley is that, at least for the higher paid tech workers, it's relatively socialist as it's standard to give employees equity in the companies they work for. Things could be better. I'd like to see startups here where employees own the majority of the equity, with founders and investors holding perhaps a decently sized chunk, but below 30% in total.
Your idea of capitalism is as much theoretical as is communism. In practice, capitalism is a system that rewards hoarding, monopolism, and dubious practices to hold power. The main goal of a...
Your idea of capitalism is as much theoretical as is communism. In practice, capitalism is a system that rewards hoarding, monopolism, and dubious practices to hold power. The main goal of a capitalist is to enrich themselves by exploring the workforce and customers while evading government attempts (when they care) to cut its power and hold them accountable.
I don't think my definition precludes those results from happening. A friend recently pointed out that the most important thing is that the system is uncorrupted. Communism has all of these ideals...
I don't think my definition precludes those results from happening. A friend recently pointed out that the most important thing is that the system is uncorrupted. Communism has all of these ideals about equality, but in practice you exchange power through money with power through political positions. Capitalism has ideals about meritocracy, until it's corrupted by nepotism, monopolies, etc. We have our preferences for what flavor we'd like to see, but the most important thing by far is that it's all done in good faith.
The thing about the traditional definition of socialism (the workers own the means of production) is that it's very binary. There are a lot of means of production, so what percentage of means of...
The thing about the traditional definition of socialism (the workers own the means of production) is that it's very binary. There are a lot of means of production, so what percentage of means of production owning does a society need to hit to be considered socialist? Because if it's any, every developed country in the world is socialist. If it's all, then the only way you're going to get there is with a strict authoritarian regime which makes it illegal for individuals to start businesses.
The thing is modern neoliberal governance has adopted a lot of the centralized planning elements of communist countries through complicated interventions around monetary policy, tax deferrals,...
The thing is modern neoliberal governance has adopted a lot of the centralized planning elements of communist countries through complicated interventions around monetary policy, tax deferrals, subsidies, strategic investments, regulatory compliance, etc.
So we basically do have the technology and knowhow now to get the best of centrally planned economic management and free markets. It’s not that we don’t know how to make the system work for us, it’s that there is no political will to do so and its’ largely driven by economic relationships at the company level. This is stuff we can fix collectively by just adopting the kinds of corporate governance structures we want, but people keep trying look up at the state to do it for us through some kind of world-changing revolutionary transformation that just bequeaths the better governance to us instead of building it.
I’d also add that much of what ails us politically is usually chalked up more to “crisis of meaning” type shit. Like the right wing backlash we’re under is being driven by upper-middle class sociopaths and Treatlerism rather than frustrations with the relative returns to labor vs. capital. So it’s possible that just being materially well off isn’t the be-all-end-all of having a healthy society full of prosperous and happy people.
You comment reminded that quote popularized by Mark Fisher in “Realist capitalism”: It's easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
You comment reminded that quote popularized by Mark Fisher in “Realist capitalism”: It's easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
Any capitalist systems that did so without involving bloodshed? I don't know why we blame the system so much as the natural tendency for any human system to fall into authoritarianism.
Any capitalist systems that did so without involving bloodshed?
I don't know why we blame the system so much as the natural tendency for any human system to fall into authoritarianism.
Exactly. It was a benevolent squashing. Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Pinochet, the Contras, and many, many others can all thank Uncle Sam for protecting the workers!
Exactly. It was a benevolent squashing. Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Pinochet, the Contras, and many, many others can all thank Uncle Sam for protecting the workers!
C'mon, man. At least Cuba, Vietnam, and Chile (and other countries, like Brazil, where I live) suffered a lot in XX century due to illegal interventions and/or embargos from the US. I'm pretty...
C'mon, man. At least Cuba, Vietnam, and Chile (and other countries, like Brazil, where I live) suffered a lot in XX century due to illegal interventions and/or embargos from the US. I'm pretty sure you can read more about this on Wikipedia.
Oh, my bad. Haha sometimes I forget that not everyone is a weirdo like me who remembers usernames and the broad political ideology behind them. My comment was 100% sarcasm and was intended to be a...
Oh, my bad. Haha sometimes I forget that not everyone is a weirdo like me who remembers usernames and the broad political ideology behind them.
My comment was 100% sarcasm and was intended to be a nod to the incredibly long list of communist/socialist movements that were crushed/overthrown by brutal US-backed pro-capitalist forces, or, as you pointed out, made to suffer by American sanctions and embargos.
It seemed to me all the movements which actually changed the governments were just people taking advantage of the movement + current weak government to grab control for themselves. The movement in...
It seemed to me all the movements which actually changed the governments were just people taking advantage of the movement + current weak government to grab control for themselves.
The movement in all semi stable societies was squashed and in the best of them became the labor party.
Well yeah ideologies behind movements don’t mean that much. Prevailing conditions create selective pressures for who gets power and then the people with power make decisions. If you create an...
Well yeah ideologies behind movements don’t mean that much. Prevailing conditions create selective pressures for who gets power and then the people with power make decisions.
If you create an environment that rewards violence and cutthroat competition you’re going to end up with people who have predilections for violence and backstabbing in charge.
If you create an environment that rewards bureaucratic maneuvering then careerist bureaucrats who are good at office politics get put in charge.
It's really hard to tell because of all of the conflicting issues, but I'd like to at least believe that people today are, on average, a little more knowledgeable and less gullible about things...
It's really hard to tell because of all of the conflicting issues, but I'd like to at least believe that people today are, on average, a little more knowledgeable and less gullible about things like socialism and communism and the plight of the working class.
In the 50s-80s the US brainwashed its own people into thinking the commies were going to nuke them in their sleep, and that it was literally the worst thing that could happen to a country. Obviously that's still happening, but I think the ratio of people who are falling for the propaganda is going down over time as the reality of the situation that the working class has been forced into is being realized. Nearly everyone under 40 understands they'll likely never be able to afford a home in a nice area, their costs of living compared to their wages is higher than its been in almost a century, and the mental health and standard of living for whole generations is rapidly declining.
It was a lot easier to convince the average person that capitalism was great and communism/socialism was bad, and there was no middle ground, when the nuclear family (a nice home, kids, 1 working spouse, etc) was an achievable dream for a large portion of the population. Now most couples need to BOTH work and still can't afford it, and its getting worse by the year. Debt is piling up, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening at an alarming pace, and people are struggling to do anything but work to survive.
And please, I know that there are still PLENTY of people being brainwashed by the ruling class with anger, hate, bigotry, and more. I don't need a reply to this comment reminding me of that. But I think the pyramid has just grown too top heavy for most sane people to bear. Leftist policies proposed by politicians like Mamdani and Sanders are more popular today than have ever been, even amongst people who would NEVER consider themselves a leftist. I want to believe that billionaires finally have gotten too greedy and information is finally accessible enough that they won't be able to get away with the same kind of propaganda campaign again.
We will not manage a 180 I’m afraid to say. It’s not going to be that easy. The real bill for this administrations fuck ups won’t be coming due until the course of another 3-6 years and if all the...
We will not manage a 180 I’m afraid to say. It’s not going to be that easy. The real bill for this administrations fuck ups won’t be coming due until the course of another 3-6 years and if all the messaging is going to revolve around vibes based slopulism then people will just vote out anyone requiring us to make the necessary sacrifices to right the ship. And the Republicans will just blame the Jews or whatever for “hoodwinking” Trump into being stupid and wash their hands of it while advancing whoever the new racist douchebag is gonna be.
Even now figures like Cory Booker are saying we should just eliminate all taxes on $75k or under with no concrete plan for offsetting the revenue elsewhere. It’s just unserious slop.
A 180 for me doesn’t necessarily mean socialism as a platform, a 180 at this point would be any person who actually understands how things work and has the knowledge and ability to start to fix...
A 180 for me doesn’t necessarily mean socialism as a platform, a 180 at this point would be any person who actually understands how things work and has the knowledge and ability to start to fix it.
A candidate I could get behind might have a plan matching the depth of Project 2025. They could cover things like how to encourage and support building families by providing healthcare and education resources, how to tie environmental funding to infrastructure spending, all the boring stuff like that.
I think basically none of that happens unless we relegate the Republican Party into the wilderness in the same was the Democrats were after the Civil War. We can take 1 step forward but we’ll be...
I think basically none of that happens unless we relegate the Republican Party into the wilderness in the same was the Democrats were after the Civil War. We can take 1 step forward but we’ll be two steps back again unless the forces of reaction are purged.
Yeah thats true a 180 candidate would have to come out strongly against basically all of the republican ideologies for me to take them seriously. No more of this two sides bullshit when one of the...
Yeah thats true a 180 candidate would have to come out strongly against basically all of the republican ideologies for me to take them seriously. No more of this two sides bullshit when one of the sides has real life nazis on it.
Wage growth has largely kept up with inflation since the stagflation era in the 70s and by 2023 we basically got back to the 1973 peak of purchasing power before the Trump administration...
costs of living compared to their wages is higher than its been in almost a century
Wage growth has largely kept up with inflation since the stagflation era in the 70s and by 2023 we basically got back to the 1973 peak of purchasing power before the Trump administration critically set us back.
Yeah housing and healthcare got more expensive but this was offset by food, clothing, and most other consumer products becoming dramatically cheaper. People have a rosy view of the past based on vintage media that selectively shows the lifestyles of unrepresentatively wealthy families.
The gains to productivity improvements almost entirely accrued to capital owners, that much is true. But it’s entirely false to say regular people got poorer. They stayed the same, the basis for comparison just shifted because the richest got way richer.
Collectively, yes, we have a lot of power, but they can divide and squish many of us individually all day every day. You're right of course we have to fight even if some of us wont make it.
Collectively, yes, we have a lot of power, but they can divide and squish many of us individually all day every day. You're right of course we have to fight even if some of us wont make it.
I think we'll always be on a treadmill. We could make it right now that we don't need much human labor to keep us alive and happy. The problem is humans findamenrally compete with one another and...
I think we'll always be on a treadmill. We could make it right now that we don't need much human labor to keep us alive and happy. The problem is humans findamenrally compete with one another and also compete to impose their will on others. It is in our nature and because of that we will always have to push for maximum output to compete or risk being owned or directed by another.
It would be my pipe dream that we could just through existence have a middle class lifestyle by doing nothing and then have to compete to get the best ever by working or all that. It would be nice if we didn't make it illegal to opt out of trying and also invested in keeping the people that can't or won't try to do stuff fed, housed and with entertainment available.
AI and robotics can actually free us from that, I believe. Will it actually do that is another question, because there are so many ways that can go seriously wrong. But the industrial revolution,...
I think we'll always be on a treadmill.
AI and robotics can actually free us from that, I believe. Will it actually do that is another question, because there are so many ways that can go seriously wrong.
But the industrial revolution, free markets and capitalism clearly brought us incredible wealth compared to what existed before them, and even though a lot of it has concentrated on the rich, a lot of it did actually spread to everyone.
Only someone who hasn't read any history could believe that is true in the long run. Increased productivity makes countries richer and the people in richer countries are obviously better off than...
Only someone who hasn't read any history could believe that is true in the long run. Increased productivity makes countries richer and the people in richer countries are obviously better off than those in poor ones.
But it is true that in gold rush conditions, people are going to be awfully busy.
Also being busy isn’t bad. Being locked in on doing something you enjoy is good! Being busy doing boring, tedious, dangerous work that you don’t have control over is bad.
Also being busy isn’t bad. Being locked in on doing something you enjoy is good! Being busy doing boring, tedious, dangerous work that you don’t have control over is bad.
Being busy can only be a good thing if you have autonomy to stop whenever you want. At least because there's no such thing as a thing that's good all the time, for as long as you're physically...
Being busy can only be a good thing if you have autonomy to stop whenever you want. At least because there's no such thing as a thing that's good all the time, for as long as you're physically able to exercise that thing.
I, as a technology worker, am spending way more time doing the fun, interesting, mentally demanding tasks than before AI. AI is helping reduce the time I spend doing boring, routine tasks. Is my...
I, as a technology worker, am spending way more time doing the fun, interesting, mentally demanding tasks than before AI.
AI is helping reduce the time I spend doing boring, routine tasks.
Is my productivity way up? Yes.
Is my work-day much more engaging than before? Yes.
Is my employer earning more money off what I do? Yes.
My experience over time has been that there have been several different major types of tech workers.
One of those types is those who work as few minutes during their working hours as possible
Another type is those who work intensely every moment of their working hours (and sometimes also work in their free time).
A third type are the folks who work intensely in periods, but also have breaks, sometimes alone, sometimes chatting with workers
Some folks avoid meetings, others try to sit in as many meetings as they can.
AI tools is changing how we work in the tech industry. How those changes manifest vary from type of tech worker to type of tech worker.
For some types, like me, suddenly my job is much more social, more collaborative, more engaging and it feels like I make more of a difference than before.
I struggle imagining how my workdays felt with the amount of time I used to spend writing meeting notes, reports, benchmark documentation etc. that were way, way too long and detailed because that's something that was demanded.
I struggle imagining how they actually had highly, highly paid folks take notes and transcribe things that were said or were recorded in audio/video. We used to do that ourselves, for hours every week!
Yes, many companies are using AI poorly, but those who're using language models to perform language tasks are making work better for many workers. Bad management with AI tools is still bad management.
I think a lot of office working folks have forgotten that many, many other jobs require you pay attention and perform job tasks all the time you're being paid for your time.
I feel the opposite. I’ve slowly grown less outrightly anti-AI, but as it’s been forced on my team at work, I feel like I spend more and more time either waiting for the LLM to do something or...
I feel the opposite. I’ve slowly grown less outrightly anti-AI, but as it’s been forced on my team at work, I feel like I spend more and more time either waiting for the LLM to do something or reviewing code… so the two worst parts of software development. Beforehand, I would spend time thinking about design decisions or how to implement something, but now I’m expected to tell the LLM what I want and let it guide that process with me just making the highest level of decisions.
E: and regardless of its productivity impacts, it still looks like a bubble to me. These companies are spending ungodly amounts of money and going into debt to build these models, data centers, etc., and one day they'll have to turn it around. The difference from Uber et al. is that those companies never spent anywhere near this much. We've already seen tools like Claude repeatedly restricting usage. What happens when everyone has to pay much more for the same tools they're using now?
Finally besides that, I still think there are moral, ethical, and environmental concerns that I'm not really sure there is a way to address.
I do like having an LLM hooked up to Confluence, Slack, and assorted other sources of documentation and institutional knowledge. It cuts down on research time, and finds Confluence pages better...
I do like having an LLM hooked up to Confluence, Slack, and assorted other sources of documentation and institutional knowledge. It cuts down on research time, and finds Confluence pages better than Confluence's search.
They're better than Google these days for quickly looking up random aquatics while you're working.
I still think generating and using code longer than a few trivial lines is professional malpractice.
And there's going to be a copyright reckoning sooner or later. The Supreme Court already declined to hear an appeal on the ruling that AI outputs do not meet the legal requirements for copyright to apply (insufficient human authorship), and I don't anticipate most of the world agreeing to throw out the Berne Convention to make a few billionaires more powerful...so we're eventually going to have compliance issues where LLM code will have to be tracked and labeled and kept under a certain percentage to keep products from becoming public domain. If you think SOX, PCI, GDPR compliance is a pain, just wait!
I also suspect there will be a high profile case, sooner or later, where someone tries to copyright-launder the wrong company and get nailed to the wall for illegally replicating their product from a decompilation or source leak.
It's wild to hear how different companies and individuals are using AI. I understand we are still in the wild west period and go honestly, no-one knows how to use it "correctly" but it's crazy to...
It's wild to hear how different companies and individuals are using AI. I understand we are still in the wild west period and go honestly, no-one knows how to use it "correctly" but it's crazy to see in the same thread how useful it is to one person and how damaging it is to another.
My design process goes something like this: (1) ask the coding agent to investigate what code needs to change for a new feature. (2) ask more questions about anything I’m skeptical about (3) ask...
My design process goes something like this: (1) ask the coding agent to investigate what code needs to change for a new feature. (2) ask more questions about anything I’m skeptical about (3) ask it to write a design doc (4) maybe ask more questions or ask it to change things (5) start a new session and ask the coding agent to review it, ask questions, and make suggestions. Only then do i ask it to implement anything.
I’m not writing the words in the design doc, but I feel like I’m fairly involved?
But since I’m retired and just coding for fun, I can do what I like. I don’t multitask while coding anymore. I take a break and do something else for a while.
A decade ago, I used to spend a lot of time waiting for code reviews, so I’d work on multiple changes at a time, and I didn’t like multitasking all that much. Similarly, with coding agents, it seems like people attempting to maximize productivity keep a lot of plates spinning?
As a project manager I feel like this stuff enables doing the job of actually managing projects and heading off problems rather than filling out reports and attending to janitorial tasks with...
As a project manager I feel like this stuff enables doing the job of actually managing projects and heading off problems rather than filling out reports and attending to janitorial tasks with documentation. In theory all of these rituals and documentation tasks were meant to ensure some kind of underlying analysis or decision making was being done, but we’ve reified the rituals and documentation as outputs in themselves. I think this happens because you feel busy and productive because you’re doing things because it’s visible and quantifiable work you can report and it gives senior managers a sense of visibility and control over stuff they don’t actually interact with.
But it mostly serves to occupy the brainspace you’d have been using to actually understand the technical details, identify risks, or making sure people are committing to decisions instead of just kicking the can. It knocks down so much of the yak shaving bullshit we use to procrastinate away the tough stuff like having to talk to some asshole to resolve a disagreement.
Frankly the specific type of burnout it’s talking about is quite common once you hit middle management or above even before AI. It’s a different type of discipline to force yourself to prioritize what actually needs to get done and is value additive versus just engaging in activity for the sake of feeling active. When you’re in a role where you have to drive progress and bring in business there is basically always stuff you can be doing or improving. People need to train themselves to just accept that there will be stuff lying around out there that isn’t the best it can be, and may even suck, and is within your power to fix for which you are the responsible party and still just not fix it.
It's fine until you're a tech worker confronted with figuring out how to use AI to replace the project manager who's been shielding you from all that. I've done PM work and implementation at the...
It's fine until you're a tech worker confronted with figuring out how to use AI to replace the project manager who's been shielding you from all that.
I've done PM work and implementation at the same time before, and combining those roles is a relentless road to burnout. My fave PM has just ascended to better things, and there will be no replacement (because AI!). We're expected to seamlessly assume all those tasks on top of the regular workload. Which is proprietary, high touch, and very, very difficult to automate using off-the-shelf LLMs.
Any tips you've got would be welcome, but otherwise it's "let the enshittification commence".
Realistically, the only way to show business that it's not viable to not replace a key employee is to not break yourselves attempting to cover for that loss. You've got to let it fail and point to...
Realistically, the only way to show business that it's not viable to not replace a key employee is to not break yourselves attempting to cover for that loss. You've got to let it fail and point to the business trying to cost cut by exploiting the remaining staff or they will just keep squeezing more out of you.
That's my opinion at least, though I am heavily biased having been chewed up and spit out by the corporate machine.
I've been chewed up and spit out by the machine before as well (see above re: trying to wear all the hats). Unfortunately, it's healthcare tech, and it causes me moral injury to just let things...
I've been chewed up and spit out by the machine before as well (see above re: trying to wear all the hats). Unfortunately, it's healthcare tech, and it causes me moral injury to just let things break given the potential consequences for the users. The business counts on that conscientiousness, of course.
Yeah I don’t really know. I am well aware that people who don’t know what PMs actually do that underlies the work outputs PMs formally deliver are going to see an LLM that can create passable...
Yeah I don’t really know. I am well aware that people who don’t know what PMs actually do that underlies the work outputs PMs formally deliver are going to see an LLM that can create passable outputs and assume the underlying activity is still happening. I think this will be a crucial mistake and people are going to learn that the hard way, but I am not looking forward to being unemployed while people learn that lesson. I’m trying to pivot to AI implementation types of product development or consulting in the hopes of shielding myself from that and also steering things in non-stupid directions but haven’t had a whole lot of luck so far.
For me it's opposite. New tech for you - just use AI managers told you. Let's make all devs full stack and DevOps specialists of any tech. Just use AI. No need to spend time verifying...
For me it's opposite. New tech for you - just use AI managers told you. Let's make all devs full stack and DevOps specialists of any tech. Just use AI. No need to spend time verifying implementation, documentation, just use AI.
And don't worry, if anything is wrong it's your personal issue, because you just used AI in a wrong way.
My nail on the head has been 3+ years of rampant layoffs and uncertainty for whoever is left. Anyone benefitting from AI are the ones who got to sell the snake oil themselves.
My nail on the head has been 3+ years of rampant layoffs and uncertainty for whoever is left. Anyone benefitting from AI are the ones who got to sell the snake oil themselves.
I'm very much the third type of person you've listed above. I work in bursts of energy and take breaks by just messing around and browsing the web (like Tildes) during my workday. My view on AI at...
I'm very much the third type of person you've listed above. I work in bursts of energy and take breaks by just messing around and browsing the web (like Tildes) during my workday. My view on AI at work is biased as my performance (and therefore employment) relies on it but I still think AI is doing more good than harm in my day-to-day. I agree with pretty much everything you've said. I haven't let AI completely replace me but I have let it do the more boring, routine work as I focus on other things. I am grateful that my manager has been extremely on top of making sure we as engineers manage our workload to avoid burnout. Before AI, it wasn't common for engineers on our team/org to be working on more than 1-2 projects at a time on top of usual up-keep and monitoring of our systems. However, now I see engineers routinely working on like 3-5 projects at a time. The company is certainly profiting more from the extra work being done than the engineers are earning from doing the extra work, but as you mentioned, when used right, AI does let you focus more on the high level engineering work. Another big benefit with the push for AI is people are finally documenting things thoroughly. I find myself benefiting from the CLAUDE.md files polluting our codebase as much as Claude benefits from them.
I agree. For software engineers, I also see the long term of this being three groups of people. Current engineers who embrace AI and find a way to fit it into their work flow. I suspect the...
I agree.
For software engineers, I also see the long term of this being three groups of people.
Current engineers who embrace AI and find a way to fit it into their work flow. I suspect the majority of the current set of engineers though I have a feeling only a subset of them will be extremely effective (though that's the same as software engineers have always been!)
New engineers who lacked the interest, time or just found writing code difficult, but really excel with AI tools and other software engineering skills. I think there will be a huge group here. And I think some of them will be extremely effective... A lot will be completely useless.
Current engineers who refuse or simply can't fit the tools into their workflow. I suspect a minority, but good number, of current engineers who really enjoy writing code and find the technical details interesting. The engineer who hates going to planning meetings because they'd rather just get given the next ticket to do and left alone. I'd be shocked if this brand of engineer didn't become hobby only, or maybe a consultant position. Either way, this engineer won't be getting a 9 to 5 with Google or Microsoft.
I’d say to turn your eyes up at what types of work people will be paying for. Right now a lot of how software/technology is being applied to solve business problems is happening through SaaS...
I’d say to turn your eyes up at what types of work people will be paying for.
Right now a lot of how software/technology is being applied to solve business problems is happening through SaaS products. A business has a need and the most straightforward way to solve it is to go out and buy some kind of product that will solve it. These products are “one size fits all” for a whole class of problems and, to get the most out of it, the business has to design its processes to work with the tools. This may mean things like having to hire people who have 3 years of Salesforce or Lexis or Informatica or whatever experience as a baseline.
It works out this way because making software is expensive and the people who can do it are kind of rare. There’s lots of people who can glue APIs together but comparatively fewer who can design and architect something scalable to solve a business problem well. Since those skills are rare and require a lot of process and capital infrastructure to support, as well as sales staff to find a market, the skill ends up concentrating in the form of some kind of B2B or B2C SaaS subscription.
If individual developers or even just generically smart technologists can become dramatically more efficient though, then the accounting math changes. What if a developer who understands how to build an enterprise grade application suite no longer needs a small army of gluecoders to take care of a bunch of scut work? It might actually become practical for companies to hire a crack team (in house or consultants) of like 3-5 people to build and support bespoke tools for them that are designed around their specific business. For the business this is valuable because they can have tools designed for how they work instead of needing to change how they work to get their money’s worth out of their tools. They didn’t used to be able to hire software folks to do a good job before because they make some sort of widget and just don’t understand what it takes to make good software. So they hire Deloitte to tell them which SaaS to buy. But if you just have your special projects team of 6 people who can solve it in house, and end up with potential to get a competitive edge and differentiate your widgets from the competition.
In light of this where things will go has less to do with skills around using AI assisted tools. Professionals who care about doing a good job will be able to figure that part out. What will actually set people apart is being able to work well in a small team that’s able to talk with customers and translate their needs into a technical fix that’s competently architected and addresses the real problem (so shepherd the AI to not do stupid shit or solve a problem different from what the customer actually wanted).
Currently a lot of these skills live in job descriptions like “business analyst” or “product manager” rather than SWE. So I think these jobs and skills will converge with engineers learning the organization and people skills and analysts/PMs becoming more adept at building stuff directly.
Yeah, I agree, I can completely see that being the normal in the not too distant future too (though it could go a lot of ways let's be honest) However, I think my point still stands. There will be...
Yeah, I agree, I can completely see that being the normal in the not too distant future too (though it could go a lot of ways let's be honest)
However, I think my point still stands. There will be engineers today who will refuse to take on that new type of role. They enjoy writing code, not actually doing software engineering or architecture. Never mind learning anything remotely close to a product person. They'll just refuse to learn AI tools and the new skills needed for the role.
There will be engineers who are happy to learn. I'm personally keen. I really enjoy that side of the software engineering job and I do a little product owner stuff which I like. I could see it being quite a fun job.
And then I suspect we'll have a wave of new blood who are extremely into their AI tooling/workflows and have a wildly wide range of skill in actually designing software and/or product skills. Some will be shit and some will be extremely effective.
Thank you for your post, I feel the exact same way. I love working with AI. It helps me grow, it helps me be more efficient with my time, I am producing work that impresses me every day. There are...
Thank you for your post, I feel the exact same way. I love working with AI. It helps me grow, it helps me be more efficient with my time, I am producing work that impresses me every day.
There are a lot of tech workers/tildes posts that I cannot have a conversation with because "anything AI is awful".
Thank you for this article. I have been using LLMs to automate things for myself (self-employed so I capture the production) without knowing how to code by explaining how the data should move in...
Thank you for this article. I have been using LLMs to automate things for myself (self-employed so I capture the production) without knowing how to code by explaining how the data should move in English and having the machine write the code.
But I did not realize the burnout trap I was falling into. Sure, I have more leisure time, but I also think about work all the time too and how I can automate the next thing because it’s so addictive. l feel like there is a day soon where I have all the systems in place that I need, but maybe that day will never actually arrive.
Exactly. People think being able to move faster is a blessing. But if you don’t slow down to think about where you’re going you might just dig a really deep hole.
Exactly. People think being able to move faster is a blessing. But if you don’t slow down to think about where you’re going you might just dig a really deep hole.
Theres a kind of hustle culture in software development where if you have the capacity to work two jobs, do that and retire at 40. So many of my blue collar friends have a new app they want my...
Theres a kind of hustle culture in software development where if you have the capacity to work two jobs, do that and retire at 40.
So many of my blue collar friends have a new app they want my opinion on. So many of my product designer friends have a new business they want me to join.
So many devs at my company vibe coded our way to production so that we could launch in three months and now my life is full of major architecture changes and their accompanying migration needs.
I know I’m bias because this is my life but it seems the only thing we accomplished is wasting everyones time with tech debt.
I think there's such a pervasive attitude in certain business circles of "it's not my problem if it's a problem X months/years down the line"; maximise results now irrespective of the harm that...
I think there's such a pervasive attitude in certain business circles of "it's not my problem if it's a problem X months/years down the line"; maximise results now irrespective of the harm that might cause as long as you've moved on before it causes problems. It's such a terrible mindset to employ, and I don't know how businesses can avoid it. As an employee you've basically got to want to sacrifice results for 'doing things right', whether that's from an ethical, compulsive, or moral motivation, and business kind of ends up naturally selecting against that.
I don't think they can, if they accept either loans or are public? For the former, you have literal monetary debt that needs to be paid down today, so aiming for a hypothetical future gain is...
It's such a terrible mindset to employ, and I don't know how businesses can avoid it.
I don't think they can, if they accept either loans or are public? For the former, you have literal monetary debt that needs to be paid down today, so aiming for a hypothetical future gain is disincentivized vs. real money tomorrow. For the latter, quarterly growth is the only metric that matters: your company's board of directors is primarily compensated through shares -- oftentimes, gated by stock price targets -- so they're only focused on ~four months from now.
So I dunno. I think it's a fantastic mindset for the economic machine that we've collectively voted for and agreed with for the past century or so. It just so happens to be a terrible mindset for a real, human civilization that wants to exist in another hundred years.
As an employee you've basically got to want to sacrifice results for 'doing things right', whether that's from an ethical, compulsive, or moral motivation, and business kind of ends up naturally selecting against that.
Eh. If you're talking about any other industry, I'd alternatively propose finding a way to collectively bargain: you're still trading your labour for compensation, so your interests are more aligned with the general population's than your execs', so you're more likely to "do the right thing" so to speak. Grouping up allows your individual voices to become loud enough to rival your boss'; individual sacrifice just feeds you into the meat grinder same as everyone else -- setting yourself on fire only serves to keep the furnace lit.
If you're in software development, please imagine a thirty second laugh track, overlaid by an booming voice announcing "I told you so". Huge swathes of the industry has found cooperation revolting for forty years (see: hop in a time machine, and ask most devs why they think OSS exists, and what their opinion on the AGPL is), and now it is reaping the fruits of its individualism and apathy. Turns out your skillset isn't so unique afterall, and no position is unassailable! Shoulda worked together after all, instead of relying on how you're clearly the smartest person in the room, in every room, all the time.
As far as I can tell, the point of existence on this planet is to become a self-actualized creature that has food, shelter, great friends, a history of accomplishment, and deep philosophical...
As far as I can tell, the point of existence on this planet is to become a self-actualized creature that has food, shelter, great friends, a history of accomplishment, and deep philosophical knowledge.
I have not had a better programming teacher than current Anthropic models. The system is insanely good at delivering me knowledge and power -- the expert has infinite patience about any topic and deeply wants me to succeed.
But, well, it's not my job to think. My job is to write code, or more accurately, to watch it being written. The code agents produce requires more babysitting than anything else I've ever seen because when you present them with a problem, LLMs -- even current Anthropic models that make me feel like I'm learning and growing into my full potential -- turn into grimy little hackers not to be trusted. If I'm constantly afraid of the system falling over due to machine error, I can't have breaks.
Maybe in a long-term sense, my job is to keep the keyboard far away from Claude.
As always, productivity gains goes to the owner and overloads the remaining employees.
We need some kind of advocacy group / think tank / lobbying org with the express mission of driving policy conversations to ensure technology empowers people to work less. Right now we’re on the cusp of giant breakthroughs that could totally pave the way for a golden age of leisure and plenty. The elimination or reduction of our dependency on human toil. But we’ve already gotten all the market signals we need to know new productivity breakthroughs are always going to have the opposite effect. We’ve seen the pattern, going back to the Industrial Revolution. We know the playbook. We as a society must unite around the explicit goal of offloading human labor to technology — and not penalizing those who have done so by forcing them to replace it with more, different labor — or the cycle will keep accelerating.
We have a failure of political imagination. We can’t seem to conceive of a world where
poorpeople aren’t spending their entire lives working, just to survive (let alone thrive). It’s just considered a given that humans must surrender their bodies and minds to the machinery of capitalism, unless they’re privileged enough to operate that machine and enrich themselves from its output. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. If AI isn’t liberating us, we’re doing it wrong.We had an entire communist movement trying to ensure that our labor was properly compensated and every single person with any amount of power collectively squashed that shit. The United States basically genocide-d multiple countries squashing that shit.
I think we just don’t have the power we think we have. Its way too easy for them to just use their money to kill all of us.
Like a quarter of my genealogy was extinguished by said communist movement with no interference from anyone else, just self inflicted stupidity.
If it's any solace, Capitalism is eating itself in real time as well.
If you’re talking about Mao Zedong I think he just used the movement as an excuse to grab power for himself
While no doubt part of it, you can tell from the differences between what Mao did and what Stalin did, or even how the modern CCP operates, to see how Mao was huffing his own paint.
Stalin manufactured a famine in Ukraine in order to crush dissent as well as maintain exports for foreign cash reserves. Mao manufactured a famine in China because of collective farming programs + the cultural revolution... for literally zero beneficial reasons.
He didn't face serious dissent, the famine was across his main power base even, he wasn't exporting the food people just sucked ass at collective farming and the food never was produced.
Mao was more disastrous than even Stalin because he did seem believe in what he peddled, and that cause numerous foot-gunning without even a purpose.
I honestly see no difference between a dictator who harms their own population to gain power for themselves and a dictator who harms their own population because they want to change society to fit their perfect image. Its basically the same thing, both situations consolidate power to those in charge.
The difference is the what and why. Stalin did things to consolidate and grow his power. He made prison camps in order to kill two birds with one stones: get rid of dissidents and free labor for economic development. He engineered a famine in Ukraine to punish the area and maintain exports needed to get foreign currency also required for economic development.
Mao honest to god believed that collective farming would be an economic boon for the country. He actually believed that the cultural revolution wouldn't horrifically damage the country's infrastracture by putting all the people with skills to work in agriculture. He honestly believed that people with no training could farm well.
It does also go back to "absolute power corrupts absolutely", one of the fundamental issues with any kind of centrally planned economy. Whether a committee or an individual, if any number of fallible humans try to manage the economic output of millions of people, they will not only fail but they will become corrupt, without question.
I would counter that this is a bit like people who don't see value in participating in politics. The "invisible hand" of the market is not neutral - if we do not exercise control over a market economy on a social level, some group of people will take the opportunity to do so.
Well, I think that part of the issue with communist movements is their ideological purity testing.
I think most people outside of extremist fringes agree that a purely command economy is a bad idea, just as a pure laissez-faire market economy is a bad idea. The issue with every communist movement is that those command economy extremists are the ones leading them, and ultimately running the countries which have had successful revolutions.
Communist societies often contrast themselves with capitalist ones as a way to highlight the downsides of market economies, but the countries they're criticizing are moderate; they don't have pure market economies, because outside of fringe anarcho-capitalists with zero political relevance, there's no significant movement that seriously advocates for zero control of market economies in capitalist countries.
The US still had social security, public schools and utilities and so on during the Cold War. There are a lot of northern and western European countries with strong welfare states and decent wealth distribution.
That's not good enough for communist movements though, it's either the means of production, and all of the means of production are owned by the people or nothing.
We've seen countless times that when these societies go from rigid ideological purity to softening, and implementing market economy reforms, the quality of life of their citizens almost universally improves. If that's not an indicator of the strengths of market versus command economies, I don't know what is.
Have actually existing communist movements had a good track record about properly compensating labor and not squashing exercises in collective power when in charge?
I think it helps to shed some of the dependence on labels. Like, Finland or Denmark would likely consider themselves to be "capitalist" and probably also "socialist", and these countries have aspects of both. Even the US isn't purely capitalist, and the Soviet Union certainly didn't toe the theoretical communist line. Vietnam is communist, but they actively participate in global markets and, by and large, life in Vietnam is pretty "normal".
Thinking of this as a kind of spectrum matches up with the real world a lot better than binary labels. So, while I agree that "real existing communism" has, on average, been... unimpressive, that doesn't mean its tenets and ideals need to be avoided entirely.
A specific economic or political system shouldn't be a goal, it's a means to an end. We should decide what kind of world we want to live in, and then choose the mixture of systems that produces that outcome.
These kind of discussions go off the rails quickly because people come in with different definitions of "socialist", "communist" and "capitalist". In my opinion socialism and capitalism are entirely compatible because I define socialism as "the workers own the means of production" and capitalism as "free markets for goods, where owners reinvest capital gains back into the means of production". But someone else might hear socialism and think "command economy", which makes it incompatible with a free market definition of capitalism.
One interesting thing about Silicon Valley is that, at least for the higher paid tech workers, it's relatively socialist as it's standard to give employees equity in the companies they work for. Things could be better. I'd like to see startups here where employees own the majority of the equity, with founders and investors holding perhaps a decently sized chunk, but below 30% in total.
Your idea of capitalism is as much theoretical as is communism. In practice, capitalism is a system that rewards hoarding, monopolism, and dubious practices to hold power. The main goal of a capitalist is to enrich themselves by exploring the workforce and customers while evading government attempts (when they care) to cut its power and hold them accountable.
I don't think my definition precludes those results from happening. A friend recently pointed out that the most important thing is that the system is uncorrupted. Communism has all of these ideals about equality, but in practice you exchange power through money with power through political positions. Capitalism has ideals about meritocracy, until it's corrupted by nepotism, monopolies, etc. We have our preferences for what flavor we'd like to see, but the most important thing by far is that it's all done in good faith.
Agreed!
The thing about the traditional definition of socialism (the workers own the means of production) is that it's very binary. There are a lot of means of production, so what percentage of means of production owning does a society need to hit to be considered socialist? Because if it's any, every developed country in the world is socialist. If it's all, then the only way you're going to get there is with a strict authoritarian regime which makes it illegal for individuals to start businesses.
Yeah. 100 years ago it might've been reasonable to think that communism can fix this problem, but to think it today is a bit ludicrous.
The thing is modern neoliberal governance has adopted a lot of the centralized planning elements of communist countries through complicated interventions around monetary policy, tax deferrals, subsidies, strategic investments, regulatory compliance, etc.
So we basically do have the technology and knowhow now to get the best of centrally planned economic management and free markets. It’s not that we don’t know how to make the system work for us, it’s that there is no political will to do so and its’ largely driven by economic relationships at the company level. This is stuff we can fix collectively by just adopting the kinds of corporate governance structures we want, but people keep trying look up at the state to do it for us through some kind of world-changing revolutionary transformation that just bequeaths the better governance to us instead of building it.
I’d also add that much of what ails us politically is usually chalked up more to “crisis of meaning” type shit. Like the right wing backlash we’re under is being driven by upper-middle class sociopaths and Treatlerism rather than frustrations with the relative returns to labor vs. capital. So it’s possible that just being materially well off isn’t the be-all-end-all of having a healthy society full of prosperous and happy people.
You comment reminded that quote popularized by Mark Fisher in “Realist capitalism”: It's easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
Any capitalist systems that did so without involving bloodshed?
I don't know why we blame the system so much as the natural tendency for any human system to fall into authoritarianism.
Exactly. It was a benevolent squashing. Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Pinochet, the Contras, and many, many others can all thank Uncle Sam for protecting the workers!
C'mon, man. At least Cuba, Vietnam, and Chile (and other countries, like Brazil, where I live) suffered a lot in XX century due to illegal interventions and/or embargos from the US. I'm pretty sure you can read more about this on Wikipedia.
Oh, my bad. Haha sometimes I forget that not everyone is a weirdo like me who remembers usernames and the broad political ideology behind them.
My comment was 100% sarcasm and was intended to be a nod to the incredibly long list of communist/socialist movements that were crushed/overthrown by brutal US-backed pro-capitalist forces, or, as you pointed out, made to suffer by American sanctions and embargos.
Actually, my bad! Haven't noticed the sarcasm in a long chain of comments 🫣
It seemed to me all the movements which actually changed the governments were just people taking advantage of the movement + current weak government to grab control for themselves.
The movement in all semi stable societies was squashed and in the best of them became the labor party.
Well yeah ideologies behind movements don’t mean that much. Prevailing conditions create selective pressures for who gets power and then the people with power make decisions.
If you create an environment that rewards violence and cutthroat competition you’re going to end up with people who have predilections for violence and backstabbing in charge.
If you create an environment that rewards bureaucratic maneuvering then careerist bureaucrats who are good at office politics get put in charge.
It's really hard to tell because of all of the conflicting issues, but I'd like to at least believe that people today are, on average, a little more knowledgeable and less gullible about things like socialism and communism and the plight of the working class.
In the 50s-80s the US brainwashed its own people into thinking the commies were going to nuke them in their sleep, and that it was literally the worst thing that could happen to a country. Obviously that's still happening, but I think the ratio of people who are falling for the propaganda is going down over time as the reality of the situation that the working class has been forced into is being realized. Nearly everyone under 40 understands they'll likely never be able to afford a home in a nice area, their costs of living compared to their wages is higher than its been in almost a century, and the mental health and standard of living for whole generations is rapidly declining.
It was a lot easier to convince the average person that capitalism was great and communism/socialism was bad, and there was no middle ground, when the nuclear family (a nice home, kids, 1 working spouse, etc) was an achievable dream for a large portion of the population. Now most couples need to BOTH work and still can't afford it, and its getting worse by the year. Debt is piling up, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening at an alarming pace, and people are struggling to do anything but work to survive.
And please, I know that there are still PLENTY of people being brainwashed by the ruling class with anger, hate, bigotry, and more. I don't need a reply to this comment reminding me of that. But I think the pyramid has just grown too top heavy for most sane people to bear. Leftist policies proposed by politicians like Mamdani and Sanders are more popular today than have ever been, even amongst people who would NEVER consider themselves a leftist. I want to believe that billionaires finally have gotten too greedy and information is finally accessible enough that they won't be able to get away with the same kind of propaganda campaign again.
I’m holding out hope for the next president. If we cant manage to do a 180 right then we’ll never manage it.
We will not manage a 180 I’m afraid to say. It’s not going to be that easy. The real bill for this administrations fuck ups won’t be coming due until the course of another 3-6 years and if all the messaging is going to revolve around vibes based slopulism then people will just vote out anyone requiring us to make the necessary sacrifices to right the ship. And the Republicans will just blame the Jews or whatever for “hoodwinking” Trump into being stupid and wash their hands of it while advancing whoever the new racist douchebag is gonna be.
Even now figures like Cory Booker are saying we should just eliminate all taxes on $75k or under with no concrete plan for offsetting the revenue elsewhere. It’s just unserious slop.
A 180 for me doesn’t necessarily mean socialism as a platform, a 180 at this point would be any person who actually understands how things work and has the knowledge and ability to start to fix it.
A candidate I could get behind might have a plan matching the depth of Project 2025. They could cover things like how to encourage and support building families by providing healthcare and education resources, how to tie environmental funding to infrastructure spending, all the boring stuff like that.
Sadly the boring stuff doesn’t get votes.
I think basically none of that happens unless we relegate the Republican Party into the wilderness in the same was the Democrats were after the Civil War. We can take 1 step forward but we’ll be two steps back again unless the forces of reaction are purged.
Yeah thats true a 180 candidate would have to come out strongly against basically all of the republican ideologies for me to take them seriously. No more of this two sides bullshit when one of the sides has real life nazis on it.
Wage growth has largely kept up with inflation since the stagflation era in the 70s and by 2023 we basically got back to the 1973 peak of purchasing power before the Trump administration critically set us back.
Yeah housing and healthcare got more expensive but this was offset by food, clothing, and most other consumer products becoming dramatically cheaper. People have a rosy view of the past based on vintage media that selectively shows the lifestyles of unrepresentatively wealthy families.
The gains to productivity improvements almost entirely accrued to capital owners, that much is true. But it’s entirely false to say regular people got poorer. They stayed the same, the basis for comparison just shifted because the richest got way richer.
I think we underestimate the power we have. That's why they spend ao much time and money dividing us against our best interests.
Collectively, yes, we have a lot of power, but they can divide and squish many of us individually all day every day. You're right of course we have to fight even if some of us wont make it.
I view it like I view climate change, its something that seems like it should be possible to fix but we humans cannot cooperate on that level
I think we'll always be on a treadmill. We could make it right now that we don't need much human labor to keep us alive and happy. The problem is humans findamenrally compete with one another and also compete to impose their will on others. It is in our nature and because of that we will always have to push for maximum output to compete or risk being owned or directed by another.
It would be my pipe dream that we could just through existence have a middle class lifestyle by doing nothing and then have to compete to get the best ever by working or all that. It would be nice if we didn't make it illegal to opt out of trying and also invested in keeping the people that can't or won't try to do stuff fed, housed and with entertainment available.
AI and robotics can actually free us from that, I believe. Will it actually do that is another question, because there are so many ways that can go seriously wrong.
But the industrial revolution, free markets and capitalism clearly brought us incredible wealth compared to what existed before them, and even though a lot of it has concentrated on the rich, a lot of it did actually spread to everyone.
Only someone who hasn't read any history could believe that is true in the long run. Increased productivity makes countries richer and the people in richer countries are obviously better off than those in poor ones.
But it is true that in gold rush conditions, people are going to be awfully busy.
Also being busy isn’t bad. Being locked in on doing something you enjoy is good! Being busy doing boring, tedious, dangerous work that you don’t have control over is bad.
Being busy can only be a good thing if you have autonomy to stop whenever you want. At least because there's no such thing as a thing that's good all the time, for as long as you're physically able to exercise that thing.
I, as a technology worker, am spending way more time doing the fun, interesting, mentally demanding tasks than before AI.
AI is helping reduce the time I spend doing boring, routine tasks.
Is my productivity way up? Yes.
Is my work-day much more engaging than before? Yes.
Is my employer earning more money off what I do? Yes.
My experience over time has been that there have been several different major types of tech workers.
One of those types is those who work as few minutes during their working hours as possible
Another type is those who work intensely every moment of their working hours (and sometimes also work in their free time).
A third type are the folks who work intensely in periods, but also have breaks, sometimes alone, sometimes chatting with workers
Some folks avoid meetings, others try to sit in as many meetings as they can.
AI tools is changing how we work in the tech industry. How those changes manifest vary from type of tech worker to type of tech worker.
For some types, like me, suddenly my job is much more social, more collaborative, more engaging and it feels like I make more of a difference than before.
I struggle imagining how my workdays felt with the amount of time I used to spend writing meeting notes, reports, benchmark documentation etc. that were way, way too long and detailed because that's something that was demanded.
I struggle imagining how they actually had highly, highly paid folks take notes and transcribe things that were said or were recorded in audio/video. We used to do that ourselves, for hours every week!
Yes, many companies are using AI poorly, but those who're using language models to perform language tasks are making work better for many workers. Bad management with AI tools is still bad management.
I think a lot of office working folks have forgotten that many, many other jobs require you pay attention and perform job tasks all the time you're being paid for your time.
I feel the opposite. I’ve slowly grown less outrightly anti-AI, but as it’s been forced on my team at work, I feel like I spend more and more time either waiting for the LLM to do something or reviewing code… so the two worst parts of software development. Beforehand, I would spend time thinking about design decisions or how to implement something, but now I’m expected to tell the LLM what I want and let it guide that process with me just making the highest level of decisions.
E: and regardless of its productivity impacts, it still looks like a bubble to me. These companies are spending ungodly amounts of money and going into debt to build these models, data centers, etc., and one day they'll have to turn it around. The difference from Uber et al. is that those companies never spent anywhere near this much. We've already seen tools like Claude repeatedly restricting usage. What happens when everyone has to pay much more for the same tools they're using now?
Finally besides that, I still think there are moral, ethical, and environmental concerns that I'm not really sure there is a way to address.
I do like having an LLM hooked up to Confluence, Slack, and assorted other sources of documentation and institutional knowledge. It cuts down on research time, and finds Confluence pages better than Confluence's search.
They're better than Google these days for quickly looking up random aquatics while you're working.
I still think generating and using code longer than a few trivial lines is professional malpractice.
And there's going to be a copyright reckoning sooner or later. The Supreme Court already declined to hear an appeal on the ruling that AI outputs do not meet the legal requirements for copyright to apply (insufficient human authorship), and I don't anticipate most of the world agreeing to throw out the Berne Convention to make a few billionaires more powerful...so we're eventually going to have compliance issues where LLM code will have to be tracked and labeled and kept under a certain percentage to keep products from becoming public domain. If you think SOX, PCI, GDPR compliance is a pain, just wait!
I also suspect there will be a high profile case, sooner or later, where someone tries to copyright-launder the wrong company and get nailed to the wall for illegally replicating their product from a decompilation or source leak.
It's wild to hear how different companies and individuals are using AI. I understand we are still in the wild west period and go honestly, no-one knows how to use it "correctly" but it's crazy to see in the same thread how useful it is to one person and how damaging it is to another.
My design process goes something like this: (1) ask the coding agent to investigate what code needs to change for a new feature. (2) ask more questions about anything I’m skeptical about (3) ask it to write a design doc (4) maybe ask more questions or ask it to change things (5) start a new session and ask the coding agent to review it, ask questions, and make suggestions. Only then do i ask it to implement anything.
I’m not writing the words in the design doc, but I feel like I’m fairly involved?
But since I’m retired and just coding for fun, I can do what I like. I don’t multitask while coding anymore. I take a break and do something else for a while.
A decade ago, I used to spend a lot of time waiting for code reviews, so I’d work on multiple changes at a time, and I didn’t like multitasking all that much. Similarly, with coding agents, it seems like people attempting to maximize productivity keep a lot of plates spinning?
Why don’t you just write more of the code yourself?
As a project manager I feel like this stuff enables doing the job of actually managing projects and heading off problems rather than filling out reports and attending to janitorial tasks with documentation. In theory all of these rituals and documentation tasks were meant to ensure some kind of underlying analysis or decision making was being done, but we’ve reified the rituals and documentation as outputs in themselves. I think this happens because you feel busy and productive because you’re doing things because it’s visible and quantifiable work you can report and it gives senior managers a sense of visibility and control over stuff they don’t actually interact with.
But it mostly serves to occupy the brainspace you’d have been using to actually understand the technical details, identify risks, or making sure people are committing to decisions instead of just kicking the can. It knocks down so much of the yak shaving bullshit we use to procrastinate away the tough stuff like having to talk to some asshole to resolve a disagreement.
Frankly the specific type of burnout it’s talking about is quite common once you hit middle management or above even before AI. It’s a different type of discipline to force yourself to prioritize what actually needs to get done and is value additive versus just engaging in activity for the sake of feeling active. When you’re in a role where you have to drive progress and bring in business there is basically always stuff you can be doing or improving. People need to train themselves to just accept that there will be stuff lying around out there that isn’t the best it can be, and may even suck, and is within your power to fix for which you are the responsible party and still just not fix it.
It's fine until you're a tech worker confronted with figuring out how to use AI to replace the project manager who's been shielding you from all that.
I've done PM work and implementation at the same time before, and combining those roles is a relentless road to burnout. My fave PM has just ascended to better things, and there will be no replacement (because AI!). We're expected to seamlessly assume all those tasks on top of the regular workload. Which is proprietary, high touch, and very, very difficult to automate using off-the-shelf LLMs.
Any tips you've got would be welcome, but otherwise it's "let the enshittification commence".
Realistically, the only way to show business that it's not viable to not replace a key employee is to not break yourselves attempting to cover for that loss. You've got to let it fail and point to the business trying to cost cut by exploiting the remaining staff or they will just keep squeezing more out of you.
That's my opinion at least, though I am heavily biased having been chewed up and spit out by the corporate machine.
I've been chewed up and spit out by the machine before as well (see above re: trying to wear all the hats). Unfortunately, it's healthcare tech, and it causes me moral injury to just let things break given the potential consequences for the users. The business counts on that conscientiousness, of course.
Yeah I don’t really know. I am well aware that people who don’t know what PMs actually do that underlies the work outputs PMs formally deliver are going to see an LLM that can create passable outputs and assume the underlying activity is still happening. I think this will be a crucial mistake and people are going to learn that the hard way, but I am not looking forward to being unemployed while people learn that lesson. I’m trying to pivot to AI implementation types of product development or consulting in the hopes of shielding myself from that and also steering things in non-stupid directions but haven’t had a whole lot of luck so far.
Same here! I've noticed myself feeling burned out much less frequently since we've adopted AI technologies.
For me it's opposite. New tech for you - just use AI managers told you. Let's make all devs full stack and DevOps specialists of any tech. Just use AI. No need to spend time verifying implementation, documentation, just use AI.
And don't worry, if anything is wrong it's your personal issue, because you just used AI in a wrong way.
My nail on the head has been 3+ years of rampant layoffs and uncertainty for whoever is left. Anyone benefitting from AI are the ones who got to sell the snake oil themselves.
I'm very much the third type of person you've listed above. I work in bursts of energy and take breaks by just messing around and browsing the web (like Tildes) during my workday. My view on AI at work is biased as my performance (and therefore employment) relies on it but I still think AI is doing more good than harm in my day-to-day. I agree with pretty much everything you've said. I haven't let AI completely replace me but I have let it do the more boring, routine work as I focus on other things. I am grateful that my manager has been extremely on top of making sure we as engineers manage our workload to avoid burnout. Before AI, it wasn't common for engineers on our team/org to be working on more than 1-2 projects at a time on top of usual up-keep and monitoring of our systems. However, now I see engineers routinely working on like 3-5 projects at a time. The company is certainly profiting more from the extra work being done than the engineers are earning from doing the extra work, but as you mentioned, when used right, AI does let you focus more on the high level engineering work. Another big benefit with the push for AI is people are finally documenting things thoroughly. I find myself benefiting from the CLAUDE.md files polluting our codebase as much as Claude benefits from them.
I agree.
For software engineers, I also see the long term of this being three groups of people.
I’d say to turn your eyes up at what types of work people will be paying for.
Right now a lot of how software/technology is being applied to solve business problems is happening through SaaS products. A business has a need and the most straightforward way to solve it is to go out and buy some kind of product that will solve it. These products are “one size fits all” for a whole class of problems and, to get the most out of it, the business has to design its processes to work with the tools. This may mean things like having to hire people who have 3 years of Salesforce or Lexis or Informatica or whatever experience as a baseline.
It works out this way because making software is expensive and the people who can do it are kind of rare. There’s lots of people who can glue APIs together but comparatively fewer who can design and architect something scalable to solve a business problem well. Since those skills are rare and require a lot of process and capital infrastructure to support, as well as sales staff to find a market, the skill ends up concentrating in the form of some kind of B2B or B2C SaaS subscription.
If individual developers or even just generically smart technologists can become dramatically more efficient though, then the accounting math changes. What if a developer who understands how to build an enterprise grade application suite no longer needs a small army of gluecoders to take care of a bunch of scut work? It might actually become practical for companies to hire a crack team (in house or consultants) of like 3-5 people to build and support bespoke tools for them that are designed around their specific business. For the business this is valuable because they can have tools designed for how they work instead of needing to change how they work to get their money’s worth out of their tools. They didn’t used to be able to hire software folks to do a good job before because they make some sort of widget and just don’t understand what it takes to make good software. So they hire Deloitte to tell them which SaaS to buy. But if you just have your special projects team of 6 people who can solve it in house, and end up with potential to get a competitive edge and differentiate your widgets from the competition.
In light of this where things will go has less to do with skills around using AI assisted tools. Professionals who care about doing a good job will be able to figure that part out. What will actually set people apart is being able to work well in a small team that’s able to talk with customers and translate their needs into a technical fix that’s competently architected and addresses the real problem (so shepherd the AI to not do stupid shit or solve a problem different from what the customer actually wanted).
Currently a lot of these skills live in job descriptions like “business analyst” or “product manager” rather than SWE. So I think these jobs and skills will converge with engineers learning the organization and people skills and analysts/PMs becoming more adept at building stuff directly.
Yeah, I agree, I can completely see that being the normal in the not too distant future too (though it could go a lot of ways let's be honest)
However, I think my point still stands. There will be engineers today who will refuse to take on that new type of role. They enjoy writing code, not actually doing software engineering or architecture. Never mind learning anything remotely close to a product person. They'll just refuse to learn AI tools and the new skills needed for the role.
There will be engineers who are happy to learn. I'm personally keen. I really enjoy that side of the software engineering job and I do a little product owner stuff which I like. I could see it being quite a fun job.
And then I suspect we'll have a wave of new blood who are extremely into their AI tooling/workflows and have a wildly wide range of skill in actually designing software and/or product skills. Some will be shit and some will be extremely effective.
Thank you for your post, I feel the exact same way. I love working with AI. It helps me grow, it helps me be more efficient with my time, I am producing work that impresses me every day.
There are a lot of tech workers/tildes posts that I cannot have a conversation with because "anything AI is awful".
Thank you for this article. I have been using LLMs to automate things for myself (self-employed so I capture the production) without knowing how to code by explaining how the data should move in English and having the machine write the code.
But I did not realize the burnout trap I was falling into. Sure, I have more leisure time, but I also think about work all the time too and how I can automate the next thing because it’s so addictive. l feel like there is a day soon where I have all the systems in place that I need, but maybe that day will never actually arrive.
The more you do, the more opportunity you will see. You've got to stay cognisant of scope creep because it is so easy to let it overrun you.
Exactly. People think being able to move faster is a blessing. But if you don’t slow down to think about where you’re going you might just dig a really deep hole.
Theres a kind of hustle culture in software development where if you have the capacity to work two jobs, do that and retire at 40.
So many of my blue collar friends have a new app they want my opinion on. So many of my product designer friends have a new business they want me to join.
So many devs at my company vibe coded our way to production so that we could launch in three months and now my life is full of major architecture changes and their accompanying migration needs.
I know I’m bias because this is my life but it seems the only thing we accomplished is wasting everyones time with tech debt.
I think there's such a pervasive attitude in certain business circles of "it's not my problem if it's a problem X months/years down the line"; maximise results now irrespective of the harm that might cause as long as you've moved on before it causes problems. It's such a terrible mindset to employ, and I don't know how businesses can avoid it. As an employee you've basically got to want to sacrifice results for 'doing things right', whether that's from an ethical, compulsive, or moral motivation, and business kind of ends up naturally selecting against that.
I don't think they can, if they accept either loans or are public? For the former, you have literal monetary debt that needs to be paid down today, so aiming for a hypothetical future gain is disincentivized vs. real money tomorrow. For the latter, quarterly growth is the only metric that matters: your company's board of directors is primarily compensated through shares -- oftentimes, gated by stock price targets -- so they're only focused on ~four months from now.
So I dunno. I think it's a fantastic mindset for the economic machine that we've collectively voted for and agreed with for the past century or so. It just so happens to be a terrible mindset for a real, human civilization that wants to exist in another hundred years.
Eh. If you're talking about any other industry, I'd alternatively propose finding a way to collectively bargain: you're still trading your labour for compensation, so your interests are more aligned with the general population's than your execs', so you're more likely to "do the right thing" so to speak. Grouping up allows your individual voices to become loud enough to rival your boss'; individual sacrifice just feeds you into the meat grinder same as everyone else -- setting yourself on fire only serves to keep the furnace lit.
If you're in software development, please imagine a thirty second laugh track, overlaid by an booming voice announcing "I told you so". Huge swathes of the industry has found cooperation revolting for forty years (see: hop in a time machine, and ask most devs why they think OSS exists, and what their opinion on the AGPL is), and now it is reaping the fruits of its individualism and apathy. Turns out your skillset isn't so unique afterall, and no position is unassailable! Shoulda worked together after all, instead of relying on how you're clearly the smartest person in the room, in every room, all the time.
As far as I can tell, the point of existence on this planet is to become a self-actualized creature that has food, shelter, great friends, a history of accomplishment, and deep philosophical knowledge.
I have not had a better programming teacher than current Anthropic models. The system is insanely good at delivering me knowledge and power -- the expert has infinite patience about any topic and deeply wants me to succeed.
But, well, it's not my job to think. My job is to write code, or more accurately, to watch it being written. The code agents produce requires more babysitting than anything else I've ever seen because when you present them with a problem, LLMs -- even current Anthropic models that make me feel like I'm learning and growing into my full potential -- turn into grimy little hackers not to be trusted. If I'm constantly afraid of the system falling over due to machine error, I can't have breaks.
Maybe in a long-term sense, my job is to keep the keyboard far away from Claude.