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This has mirrored what I've seen in my company. People in the data science/ML part of the company are super excited about AI and are always giving presentation

by ike2792 5mo ago

This has mirrored what I've seen in my company. People in the data science/ML part of the company are super excited about AI and are always giving presentations on it and evangelizing it. Most engineers in other areas, though, are generally underwhelmed every time they try using it. It's being heavily pushed by AI "experts" and senior leaders, but the enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises that the "experts" keep making. Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle. You can only fool people for so long.

grebc 5mo ago
Underwhelmed is the absolute correct word to use here. Absolutely everyone raves about this but other than a few basic computer related tasks I’ve not seen compelling use cases that justify the billions being lit on fire trying to pursue it. My cynical take is the crypto bro’s needed something to do with their useless GPU’s after the crash and found the perfect answer in LLM’s.
- Wissenschafter 5mo ago
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  - pesus 5mo ago
    Blindly dismissing everyone not impressed by the AI hype only serves to further delegitimize the AI hype.
    - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - vor_ 5mo ago
        You've been complaining about Hacker News for years.
        deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - AlexandrB 5mo ago
        Totally right! The folks who were very recently telling us we were all going to be trading NFTs in the metaverse are the clear eyed optimists not motivated by anything but rational consideration for the truth.
        Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        Finding people on HN that think NFTs are a joke and don't understand their utility, mind blowing. This place is fucking dead.
        jjulius 5mo ago
        >This place is fucking dead. The door is right over there, feel free to see yourself out at any time. :)
      - elzbardico 5mo ago
        It seems like you get personally offended by people using their critical reasoning abilities. I know a folk who did a PhD in the area, and work at one of those frontier labs as a researcher, and privately he is as sceptical as the most "stubborn" HN denizen you mention. Unbounded enthusiasm for AI without any reservations is something that can only be born out of minds utterly deprived of imagination and creativity.
        Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        "It seems like you get personally offended by people not using their critical reasoning abilities." ftfy
  - mortalapeman 5mo ago
    As a senior dev who has been using these tools to their fullest effectiveness in production environments, until AI can reduce the entropy of a codebase while still adding capability I will continue to be underwhelmed.
    - woah 5mo ago
      Did you ever ask it to do that?
      - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        "They Don't Think It Be Like It Is But It Do", is all I can think. The simple truth is, these senior devs have no idea how to use these new tools to their capabilities. It's a simple case of PEBCAK; ironic considering most of them would be the ones throwing that term around 20 years ago.
        elzbardico 5mo ago
        Or more likely you don't have the knowledge and the skills they do. They are judging things in a level that you don't have any idea it exists.
        Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        Sure, I hear that all the time here; I used to think that myself. It's all bullshit. You're all a bunch of ignorant old men yelling at literal cloud servers. I'm done with this place. /g/ and /r/accelerate are the only places left not filled with idiots anymore.
        elzbardico 5mo ago
        I sometimes wonder if AI overly enthusiastic cheerleaders are all suffering some kind of LLM induced psychosis.
  - jjulius 5mo ago
    tl;dr - "I will dismiss this because of the time I've been spending in a pro-AI bubble".
    - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
      I never needed to be in a pro-AI bubble to dismiss bullshit; I wrote my capstone Philosophy paper on AI and Existentialism back in 2014. I am dismissing the neo-luddites because they are stupid and wrong, not because I am in a pro-AI bubble.
      - jjulius 5mo ago
        There is emotional bias and stubbornness in nearly all of your responses in this thread, the very same traits you lambasted HN broadly for in another comment. Rather than calling people, "stupid and wrong", why don't you make your case? If you don't want to be bothered to argue your points, and this place truly chaps your ass to the degree it does, why even waste your time commenting at all when, according to you, there's a more fun place with bigger brains that-a-way, as far as you're concerned? points I mean, it takes more energy and effort to be angry and annoyed than to just move on and leave us luddites in the dust.
        Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        It is pretty emotional seeing a place with people you respected and learned from for so long, where you could rely on for the place to find the newest and most interesting things happening in tech, where people in the know discussed the technical aspects; to now neo-luddites everywhere bashing shit they don't understand, ON A FUCKING TECH FORUM; like THE tech forum. I feel like I'm living in some kind of bizzarro world now when I read anything AI related on HN. It's insane.
        troupo 5mo ago
        > bashing shit they don't understand, ON A FUCKING TECH FORUM; like THE tech forum. Or: they actually understand the tech, and see its limitations. Unlike wide-eyed neophytes and zealots. Tech forum doesn't mean "uncritically accept and love any and all technology". Oh, and they don't find the need to sling insults like monkey sling feces just because someone doesn't agree with them.
  - abcde666777 5mo ago
    The same could have been said to someone who had yet to encounter generative AI. "Wait until you try it, you won't be underwhelmed for long". But here we are. Over time and usage the limitations of a thing become apparent.
  - austin-cheney 5mo ago
    It’s primarily about confidence and motivations. People with high confidence at what they do are supremely unmotivated to use something like AI to solve problems they don’t have. People with low confidence will be super excited for AI because it solves problems they weren’t even thinking about. Executives that don’t write code are super excited about AI because hopefully it means they can continue to high low confidence people, which are plentiful and cost less. I am sitting on the sidelines watching in disbelief. I don’t use AI and don’t plan to. I used to write JavaScript for a living and still get JavaScript job alerts from a lot of job boards. The compensation for JavaScript work is starting to shoot through the roof as employers are moving away from garbage like React and Angular. The recent jobs are becoming fewer and are more reliant upon people with tons of experience that can actually program. Clearly AI is not replacing positions for higher talent with greater than 8-12 years experience.
    - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
      "I refuse to pick up the magic hammer that nails things in by me just thinking about it while holding it in my hand; nosiree, give me that old fashioned hammer so I can sit here and nail some nails into a 2x4 while the guy using the other tool is building whole slop neighborhoods. Ha, that guy is so dumb and I'm too cool because I won't ever use that hammer." I don't get it. Proudly saying you don't plan to use better tools is not some 'cool' look or the brag you think it is. You're just making yourself less valuable and being ignorant on purpose. Cool.
      - austin-cheney 5mo ago
        Yes. You don’t get it. I am not seeking your affirmation. There is no vanity in this for me. I am not bragging to you or anyone else.
        Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        Yeah, I'm sure I'm the one who doesn't get it, not the guy refusing to use the paradigm changing tools, "because". You sound like my Grandmother who refused to even look at a computer screen. Literally the same. It's amazing it's coming from so called tech-literate people in the field. Sad.
  - jandrese 5mo ago
    Always fun to see the article happen live in the comments section.
  - 0x3f 5mo ago
    This place actually hates all technology after the invention of Lisp. And there's the common online incentive to dunk on things that also exists here. Hence the infamous Dropbox comment and others. But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on. I would therefore not in a million years expect it to be pro-LLM, and this is so obvious to me that I'm a bit suspicious of your motives for acting confused about it, as if it was ever any different.
    - scottyah 5mo ago
      It's the same as the sad drunk man talking bad about the King at a dirty bar. It makes them feel better to compare or say they're better in some way.
    - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
      It's literally unbearable now. I don't know how the place that once used to be exciting and deep in the know; is now old-man-yells-at-clouds ignorant of what is happening. It's actually really sad. /g/ and /r/accelerate seem like the last bastions of actual intelligent people discussing these things.
      - vor_ 5mo ago
        [dead]
    - vor_ 5mo ago
      > But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on. It was never any of these things, and you're misremembering if you think it was. There's never been a mono-opinion held by some all-encompassing hivemind.
      - 0x3f 5mo ago
        I'm not misremembering. You can easily find monoculturey threads about all of these things. Just because there's a small slice of counter views, doesn't mean the average HN positions on these things isn't or wasn't decidedly negative.
  - troupo 5mo ago
    > You won't be 'underwhelmed' long. "Yes, it sucks now, but believe me it won't be for long" spiel has been hyped for several years now. Oh, don't get me wrong, these tools are amazing. But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer [1]. So yeah, senior engineers especially use these tools daily, and keep being completely honest about their issues and shortcomings. Unlike the hype and scam artists. [1] Oh, sorry. I meant to say skills, context engineering and management, memory, prompt engineering.
    - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
      " But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer." Get better rituals. PEBCAK.
      - troupo 5mo ago
        Yeah yeah. There exists some secret ritual known only to the selected elite that make these tools perfect, no mistakes. (The only people who say that are scammers and peddlers, and the only people who believe that are juniors or don't know how to code at all)
        Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        I'm a senior at a F200, I'm actually tired of listening to you assholes here. I always thought people here knew more than me; it's not fucking true. I'm not some starry eyed junior; I have built multi-modal agents being used in production on government contract work in the field, right this second. You all can go fuck yourselves, you neo-luddites will be the first out the door. Good riddance.
        AlexeyBelov 5mo ago
        Least deranged AI booster.
  - ua709 5mo ago
    Is it just me or is there a growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone…
    - troupo 5mo ago
      There are no "AI-insiders". "AI-insiders" are trying to market their tools to you. See Anthropic's continuous lithany of "all programmers will be replaced in 6 months" while they struggle to make their TUI API wrapper consume less than 2-4 GB of RAM (they brought it down from 68 GB[1]), or have a decent uptime. [1] Yes, you read it right. They had to buy a team of actual engineers to do the job: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
  - Herbstluft 5mo ago
    > You won't be 'underwhelmed' long. This has been your constant mantra for 3 years now and is part of the reason people are underwhelmed.
  - surgical_fire 5mo ago
    > When did Hacker news start becoming a luddite, bad takes everywhere I look, feels like everyone is '50 year old burnt out guy' that has no idea what is going on vibe? Much to the opposite, I think healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity. The overeager embracing of hype cycles is extremely cringe. > I just got back from a SAIRS conference at UCLA and talked directly with some of the presenters and engineers at Google. Cringe, as I was saying. Conferences are just mutual fart smelling, swagger, and expensing trips on company momey. I am not against it, but treating your participation in some conference as a sign of the future is very silly. Every conference I participated always overhyped every current bullshit.
  - grebc 5mo ago
    It’s always been this way. It’s an online community.
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5mo ago
    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And even staying within the comfort of AI enthusiasm: Google wasn't exactly leading in this race. If you have this much confidence in what those presenters and engineers at Google told you, you now have some opportunities to make a lot of money.
    - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
      https://github.com/gca-americas/way-back-home https://github.com/gca-americas/way-back-home Anyone here who is currently 'underwhelmed'; please get through all 5 levels here and then say the same thing. This is just the beginning. I seriously can't believe this place turned into neo-boomerism ideology on tech. I honestly don't get it, just makes me think everyone here talking about being seniors and architecture and blah blah; don't actually know shit, and aren't actually good at what they do.
      - grebc 5mo ago
        Levels 2,3,4,5 all say coming soon. Did you have AI Agent summarise this for you?
        Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        Funny how it says that, yet I finished the whole thing. Maybe you should try reading a bit more. https://codelabs.developers.google.com/way-back-home-level-5/instructions#0 https://codelabs.developers.google.com/way-back-home-level-5... That is the completed instructions for the fifth level, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to actually read more and find the rest of the steps on their own. I spent some time chatting with Google engineer who put this together, Ayo Adedeji, at UCLA's SAIRS conference.
        grebc 5mo ago
        Cool story brother.
  - vor_ 5mo ago
    When you use the term "luddite" in the way you do, you reveal that you aren't aware of who the Luddites actually were. Luddites weren't anti-technology; many of them were experts at using advanced machinery. What they opposed was the poor quality output of automated factories and the use of machinery to circumvent apprenticeships and decent wages. As for your promise of a great leap at some vague point in the future, that's such a widely-mocked AI industry trope at this point that it's a little embarrassing you went there.
    - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
      The only thing that will be embarrassing is how badly your comments, and those like yours will age. I don't know what happened to this place, but it went from actual young people sharing information on the newest things in tech, tech philosophy, interesting stuff; to now old men yelling at the clouds about the new tech.
      - jjulius 5mo ago
        >The only thing that will be embarrassing is how badly your comments, and those like yours will age Hubris.
        deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - antonvs 5mo ago
        I agree with your basic point, but it’s not just an age thing. There are plenty of older people enthusiastically using AI for software development now. Just as an example, Steve Yegge, who vibe-coded the Beads and Gas Town AI projects, is around 57. I’m a bit older than him, and I’m working with Claude, Gemini, and Codex on a daily basis, having great fun and learning tons. What we seem to be seeing with AI is that the prospect of completely changing the way you work is threatening for a lot of people, and of course so is the prospect of losing your job. When people are faced with something threatening, a common reaction is to criticize it in every possible way - you can’t admit anything about it is good because that risks encouraging the threat. It’s not exactly rational, but it’s what people often do. HN has never been exempt from that, it’s just that AI is a big change that brings out this instinct in many more people.
  - elzbardico 5mo ago
    Even SOTA models when used in agents in simple NLP tasks such as text classification still fail more times than acceptable when evaluated against a realistic evaluation dataset with sufficient example variety and with some adversarial prompts included. Improving such uses cases is mostly an artisanal endeavor, sometimes a few-shot prompt improves things, sometimes it improves things at the expense of kind of overfitting it, sometimes structured reasoning works, sometimes it doesn't, or sometimes it works and then the latency and token explodes, etc etc.... And yet a lot of teams don't see this problem because they don't care much about evaluations, and will only find this issues in production a few months after deployment. Are those who care about evaluation luddites?
taurath 5mo ago
For mine it’s worse because we have new leadership who believes in it to a far larger extent than it can deliver. Now a massive amount of our workforce is building up proofs of concepts and spitting out tons of effectively useless output to look good because of how strongly they’ve signaled it’s good for careers here to fully embrace it. It’s a massive mess and there’s nobody to clean it up, and the voices advocating for rigor or good engineering practices are being sidelined. It’s full out mania. As someone raised in and who escaped a cult, I am having to use every tool in my very large toolbox to stay sane while I wait for this to pass and die down or make my move towards a place that still cares whether their product works.
- Wissenschafter 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - decimalenough 5mo ago
    AI isn't going away, but leadership expectations to (say) increase "efficiency" by 50% in the next 6 months through "AI" will. Eventually. After lots of fudging of numbers and general reluctance to admit that the Emperor's clothes are looking awfully translucent.
    - suttontom 5mo ago
      I've been waiting so long for it to become commonplace for people to equate AI with The Emperor's New Clothes. Hopefully it gains steam.
  - taurath 5mo ago
    If LOC and tokenmaxxing is the future, nobody will have a job. I use AI all day every day, I’m not a luddite, I’m someone who has seen people take the same shitty shortcuts to working systems they are now. They’re wasting tons of money and smarter competitors who can actually think clearly about the benefits and costs are gonna eat their lunch.
- partyficial 5mo ago
baxtr 5mo ago
What about karpathy though?
- psychoslave 5mo ago
  What's that?
  - hackable_sand 5mo ago
    Villain from ghost busters 2
- rooftopzen 5mo ago
  Smart guy phoning it in now - realized a few weeks ago that he “notices” something interesting to share, but is really paraphrasing a recently released paper that found it - without giving paper credit.
- elzbardico 5mo ago
  Wasn't Karpathy the guy who used to work for tesla and that tried to convince everyone that you only need cameras for self-driving and that by 2025 there wouldn't be anymore cars without self-driving capabilities to sell?
FloorEgg 5mo ago
How can the AI be lacking in results and also at the same time responsible for layoffs and slowing of hiring? Wouldn't it be one or the other?
- pesus 5mo ago
  Executives don't need actual results or data to lay people off.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- cosmic_cheese 5mo ago
  It can be both if for the majority of layoffs, AI is just a scapegoat to act as cover for cuts made for financial reasons or offshoring and not the actual cause.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    But then you’d expect the trend to self correct in the long run. AI actually does seem to replacing customer-service and CS jobs effectively.
    - cosmic_cheese 5mo ago
      From what I've seen many efforts to replace roles such as customer service with AI are being rolled back or downscaled due to intolerably high error rates and general incapability. While these segments won't come out unscathed I don't think the actual impact will end up being as severe as feared.
      - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        I believe that too. Broadly, I’m agreeing with the parent comment—AI can’t be causing long-run layoffs and be worthless.
mghackerlady 5mo ago
I feel like the junior problem contributes more heavily than people might think. The people on top see juniors as replaceable since they view them as cheap menial labor, whereas most seniors at least acknowledge the human element as part of the benefit
- bayindirh 5mo ago
  Today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors, or more importantly today's seniors' yesterday. They do the dirty, repetitive work, learn the systems inside out, take note of the flaws, and fix them if they are motivated and the system/process allows. Thinking them as replaceable, worthless gears is allowing your organization rot from inside. I can't believe people can't see it.
  - JohnMakin 5mo ago
    Plenty of people see it - but, to a hiring team, a junior is an extremely risky investment. They demand a high cost relative to when they can start contributing actual value, may not work out, or may hop ship the moment they become competent. It is rational for a business to want to eliminate this risk. It's possible that everyone is acting rationally here, knowing it will lead to a result that is not favorable down the line - because the immediate benefit is too great to consider the latter. In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line. And that risk may be overblown - people are still hiring some juniors, it's not like it has stopped entirely - so future seniors will likely just be worth more than they are currently. To some, that may be worth the risk, especially if you believe AI will continue to get stronger. I am not saying I agree with this decision making, more pointing out the thought process. We have had to have similar discussions where I am but are still hiring juniors, FYI. That's basically all we're hiring right now, actually, because the market for strong juniors is very good right now.
    - bayindirh 5mo ago
      > In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line. I mean, writing the code which makes mon^H^H^H^H provides value for minimum cost is the ultimate goal of a software company, but any competent CS grad or anyone with basic algorithms knowledge knows that greedy algorithms can't solve all problems. Sometimes the company needs to look ahead, try, fail and backtrack. Nerdy analogies aside, self-sabotaging whole sector with greedy shortsightedness is a pretty monumental misstep. It's painful yet unbelievably hilarious at the same time. Pure dark comedy.
woah 5mo ago
There's this weird unspoken assumption in a lot of these HN posts that any layoffs or lack of hiring is due to companies shirking on providing the cushy jobs they owe software engineers. Actually, they hire engineers to get stuff done. If it's true that AI is just a big 'ol scam and it doesn't even work, then I guess we'll see the companies that insist on nothing but the finest artisanily hand-typed organic code rocket to the top of the charts on app downloads, sales, revenue, and market cap.
- galvatron9k 5mo ago
  I imagine the reality lies somewhere in between the two extreme takes that you present here.
- hilariously 5mo ago
  This is basically how most engineers talk to their managers, politely implying - "can you see how this decision has a short term payoff but a long term consequence?" Before LLMs I only worked at one place that "only hired seniors and above" and now its the most commonplace thing in the world. Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.
  - 0x3f 5mo ago
    > Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance. Seems a bit like asking where the bread will come from, if no-one is forced to bake it.
    - sumeno 5mo ago
      More like where the bread will come from if nobody learns how to bake it and the knowledge of how to bake it is lost.
      - 5mo ago
bayindirh 5mo ago
I have a similar experience. I seldom use it to test to see its current state, and it generally (85% of the time) gives wrong answers. Then I discuss this with a couple of friends: Me: I tried $AI recently, I asked $question, it hallucinated. Them: But it sucks at that. Me: Then what's good at? It's useful if it helps me out of a ditch. Them: It depends on the domain... These guys are not evangelists or anything, but colleagues who want to reduce their workloads. If it can't help with what I need, then how can it help me at all? At the end of the day, I don't plan to use this at daily capacity, but with all the resources poured into this, it's still underwhelming.
- RajT88 5mo ago
  A friend of mine has copilot integrated with his storage appliance that all the business docs are hosted on for his firm. He says it's amazing. My company uses Sharepoint, and can digest all of the documents I have access to on that, one drive, teams, outlooks, etc. across my tenant. Most of the time, it's pretty useless. There must be some reason for these two disparate experiences. It's the same product offering. I couldn't tell you.
  - matwood 5mo ago
    I mean, anything with Sharepoint will be terrible. No amount of AI can fix that mess.
    - RajT88 5mo ago
      I too feel this way.
  - ofjcihen 5mo ago
    Reminds me of a bounty I received recently. Someone essentially exposed a bedrock agent that had access to the companies internal documents to the internet unauthenticated. They actually had the reports and notes for other bug bounties that had been reported to them as well.
- scottyah 5mo ago
tedsanders 5mo ago
> Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle. According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again. What data source are you looking at? [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
- latchkey 5mo ago
  Separately, I'm curious how that URL (IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE) is encoded.
  - treetalker 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - variety8675 5mo ago
    IHL (Indeed Hiring Lab) + IDX (Index) + US (country) + TP (topic) + SOFTDEVE (software development)
- layer8 5mo ago
  The companies doing the layoffs are themselves stating AI as a reason; that’s the news people are responding to. The parent didn’t claim that it’s based on reality, but it informs public opinion.
  - daveguy 5mo ago
    Quite a convenient excuse, isn't it? I hope no one figures out that AI is still just kinda meh.
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
    “I’ll take a CEO’s very calculated word for something if it supports my existing worldview” is intellectually dishonest.
hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
Your statement is a bit contradictory. That is, the article about "the growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone else" pretty clearly states that "everyone else" is scared about job losses and the extreme inequality they see advanced AI causing. This is in line with your second to last sentence. But the first part of your comment is basically saying "AI insiders think the tech is super awesome and powerful, while other engineers think it doesn't stand up to the hype." Well, if the AI is indeed not as good a tech as its boosters are saying, well, this would be great news for everyone scared about job losses and widening inequality if AI turned out to be a nothing burger.
- sph 5mo ago
  No and it has been said already elsewhere in this thread: decision makers are not entirely rational, they might fire entire departments even if the AI revolution isn’t here quite yet
junofan 5mo ago
I feel like this will change as people move around. It’s definitely a skill.
skippyboxedhero 5mo ago
The use-cases for data science and other engineers are different. AI is not uniformly good at all kinds of development. There is an issue with execs pushing it though. You have people at the top of the company with little to no idea how people work attempting to micromanage tool usage. It is as if you had a group of execs determining what IDEs people could use. No-one is getting fired because of AI. The start of this year is the start of companies beginning to use AI. The reason layoffs are happening is because of the massive overhiring after Covid.
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  > overhiring after Covid How long after COVID are we going to be able to keep using this excuse? This is starting to feel like the politician blaming his predecessor even though he's been in office for years. In the year 2033, Company X lays off another 10,000, just as it did each year since 2023, again blaming massive over-hiring during COVID, ten years ago.
  - bdangubic 5mo ago
    > How long after COVID are we going to be able to keep using this excuse? I am with you but if you look what happened after COVID it is a big line going waaaaay up. COVID was a significant event and there is no way around it, no? the OPs comment is invalid because we below the pre-COVID (by miles) but COVID should be taken into account (everyone seems to use it to further some agenda by looking at just one particular aspect of what happened post-COVID)
- andrekandre 5mo ago
  > It is as if you had a group of execs determining what IDEs people could use. its worse than that; its more like determining what ide you use and also mandating how much time you spend in it, and then chewing you out at review time because you used jira and confluence too much instead of writing md files in the blessed ide of their choice
- noobermin 5mo ago
  Covid was six years ago man. Don't insult people's intelligence.
gerdesj 5mo ago
I totally understand where you are coming from and my personal take is LLMs are to "stuff" as a drill driver is to a screw driver. They are a tool, just a tool. ... bear with ... I over floored several rooms in my house (UK, '20s build) with plywood before laying insulation, heating mats and laminate floor boards for the final finish. I don't have a staple gun so I screwed the boards down at roughly 600mm c/c across the floorboards and 300mm along them. What the blazes has that got to do with LLMs? Well, I used a nearly inappropriate method for a job and blasted through it nearly as fast as the best method! If I had used a manual screwdriver I would have been at it nearly forever and ended up with a very limp wrist. I do own an old school ratchet screwdriver and that would have speeded things up but still been slow. I did use yellow passivated screws with sharp threads and a notch to initiate biting into the wood - rather more expensive than a staple or a nail. So I burned through my tokens (screws instead of nails/staples) faster than if I had used a pneumatic nail/staple gun. Anyway. LLMs are tools. They can be good tools in the right hands or rip your fingers off in the wrong hands.
- socialcommenter 5mo ago
  Running with this analogy, the two sides of the AI argument are the people who think they can fire their plumber and electrician now that they have a drill driver, and the people who know it doesn't work that way...
  - gerdesj 5mo ago
    Quite. My larger drill driver will wrench your wrist unless you know how to set the speed/mode/etc correctly and know how to brace yourself correctly. At the moment, I think that a LLM needs skilled hands too. Have a casual chat - that's fine but for work ... be aware. I recently dumped a wikimedia (our knowledge base is a wiki) formatted table into a LLM (on prem) and asked it to sort the list on the first column. It lost a few rows for some reason. No problem - I know how my tools work but it was a bit odd!
rconti 5mo ago
Shocking that people who are in data science/ML are excited about data science/ML, and people in jobs not interested in that area are not interested in it. It's like a programmer being surprised that a worker in $random_job wants to keep doing their job, and not learn how to be a programmer instead.
ggregoire 5mo ago
> but the enthusiasm on the ground is lacking Using claude and friends takes all the fun out of the job, so I'm not surprised engineers are not enthusiastic. It's cool for 1 month then you realize we went from solving problems and implementing algos and optimizing slow code and fixing security issues and other fun stuff, to writing prompts all day long.
- dboreham 5mo ago
  Not a universal view: Claude has added all the fun back into my job.
  - archagon 5mo ago
    Many engineers want nothing more than to eventually become managers. So this is not surprising. But your job is not what it was before.
    - keeda 5mo ago
      Not really managers, I would put the new role more in the senior engineer / architect category. Those still have to deal with deeply technical things like design, architecture, problem decomposition, research, domain expertise, code review, collaborating with technical peers -- all of which (people) managers don't typically do. If you ever wanted to climb the senior technical ladder, this is now the quickest way to experience it. Except instead of other people you get to work with agents which, while a very different experience, requires largely the same skills. So yes, your job is not what it was before, but with career growth it typically was not anyway.
  - kakacik 5mo ago
    ... but a very common one. There are always exceptions to every rule
    - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
      Oh yeah? The way that you feel is the norm, and if anyone feels differently, they’re the exception? And that’s just based on… vibes?
nickstinemates 5mo ago
That's likely because it takes an entirely different approach to make it work. Augmenting your existing flow with "sophisticated auto complete" isn't as interesting and isn't actually using the tools how they were designed to be used. I'm not going to pass judgement either way; we'll see how it all shakes out. I just know for me, personally, I love computers and making them do what I want and in the AI era I am somehow using them even more and doing even more.
crubier 5mo ago
I get it, but as a "AI expert and senior leader" myself in my 1,000 people organization (in relative terms), the disconnect I have is: A lot of what non-believers say matches "enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises". They would then say they need 2 weeks to work on a specific project, the good old way, maybe with some light AI use along the way. But then I'm like "hmm actually let me try this real quick" and I prompt Claude for 3 minutes, and 30 minutes later it has one-shotted the whole "two weeks project". It then gets reviewed and merged by the "non-believers". This happens repeatedly. So overall, I think the lack of enthusiasm is largely a skill issue. Not having the skill is fine, but not being willing to learn the skill is the real issue. I see things changing, as "non-believers" eventually start to realize that they need to evolve or be toast. But it's slower than I imagined.
- shiveenp 5mo ago
  Unsure of this really tracks tho. How are you evaluating for the bias that they’re not merging it because you’re “their leader of 1000 people org” and not because you’re actually an engineer deep in the trenches that knows the second or third order effects of slop? This is a genuine question btw, I see plenty of instances of this in my own org.
  - crubier 5mo ago
    I see your point, but 1. I am also on the receiving end of this. My boss often codes and vibecodes, and no one feels like they have to merge their stuff. We only merge it if it meets the high quality standard we have. And there is no drama for blocking a PR in our culture. 2. I am fairly deep in the trenches myself and I know when my PRs are high quality and when they are not. And that does not correlate with use of AI in my experience.
- raducu 5mo ago
  I am a strong believer and selected as power user because of AI usage metrics, but I also see perverse incentives -- a colleague was desperately searching for me on the Claude token usage leaderboard (I was part of a different group he did not have access to) -- it was clear he was actively trying to climb that leaderboard. Meanehile our average PR loc balooned to ~2000loc -- generated with Claude, reviewed with copilot but colleagues also review it with Claude because it gives valid nitpicks that bump up your github stats, while missing glaring functional/architectural issues, overenginerring issues. No way this doesn't blow up down the road with the massive bloat we're creating while getting high on the "good progress" we're making. Yes, your 3 minutes prompt got merged. So was my friends(ex-programmer now manager) non-ai generated PR that a technical TL got stuckstuck on for 2 weeks. Different perspective? Survivor bias? High authority?
elzbardico 5mo ago
Funny, I was supposed to be the expert in my company, but I was run over by the demo folks, while I was uselessly preaching about evaluation, safeguards, guardrails, observability.

by ike2792 5mo ago

grebc 5mo ago

Underwhelmed is the absolute correct word to use here. Absolutely everyone raves about this but other than a few basic computer related tasks I’ve not seen compelling use cases that justify the billions being lit on fire trying to pursue it. My cynical take is the crypto bro’s needed something to do with their useless GPU’s after the crash and found the perfect answer in LLM’s.

Wissenschafter 5mo ago
[flagged]
- pesus 5mo ago
  Blindly dismissing everyone not impressed by the AI hype only serves to further delegitimize the AI hype.
  - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - vor_ 5mo ago
      You've been complaining about Hacker News for years.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - AlexandrB 5mo ago
      Totally right! The folks who were very recently telling us we were all going to be trading NFTs in the metaverse are the clear eyed optimists not motivated by anything but rational consideration for the truth.
      - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        Finding people on HN that think NFTs are a joke and don't understand their utility, mind blowing. This place is fucking dead.
        jjulius 5mo ago
        >This place is fucking dead. The door is right over there, feel free to see yourself out at any time. :)
    - elzbardico 5mo ago
      It seems like you get personally offended by people using their critical reasoning abilities. I know a folk who did a PhD in the area, and work at one of those frontier labs as a researcher, and privately he is as sceptical as the most "stubborn" HN denizen you mention. Unbounded enthusiasm for AI without any reservations is something that can only be born out of minds utterly deprived of imagination and creativity.
      - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        "It seems like you get personally offended by people not using their critical reasoning abilities." ftfy
- mortalapeman 5mo ago
  As a senior dev who has been using these tools to their fullest effectiveness in production environments, until AI can reduce the entropy of a codebase while still adding capability I will continue to be underwhelmed.
  - woah 5mo ago
    Did you ever ask it to do that?
    - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
      "They Don't Think It Be Like It Is But It Do", is all I can think. The simple truth is, these senior devs have no idea how to use these new tools to their capabilities. It's a simple case of PEBCAK; ironic considering most of them would be the ones throwing that term around 20 years ago.
      - elzbardico 5mo ago
        Or more likely you don't have the knowledge and the skills they do. They are judging things in a level that you don't have any idea it exists.
        Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        Sure, I hear that all the time here; I used to think that myself. It's all bullshit. You're all a bunch of ignorant old men yelling at literal cloud servers. I'm done with this place. /g/ and /r/accelerate are the only places left not filled with idiots anymore.
        elzbardico 5mo ago
        I sometimes wonder if AI overly enthusiastic cheerleaders are all suffering some kind of LLM induced psychosis.
- jjulius 5mo ago
  tl;dr - "I will dismiss this because of the time I've been spending in a pro-AI bubble".
  - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
    I never needed to be in a pro-AI bubble to dismiss bullshit; I wrote my capstone Philosophy paper on AI and Existentialism back in 2014. I am dismissing the neo-luddites because they are stupid and wrong, not because I am in a pro-AI bubble.
    - jjulius 5mo ago
      There is emotional bias and stubbornness in nearly all of your responses in this thread, the very same traits you lambasted HN broadly for in another comment. Rather than calling people, "stupid and wrong", why don't you make your case? If you don't want to be bothered to argue your points, and this place truly chaps your ass to the degree it does, why even waste your time commenting at all when, according to you, there's a more fun place with bigger brains that-a-way, as far as you're concerned? points I mean, it takes more energy and effort to be angry and annoyed than to just move on and leave us luddites in the dust.
      - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        It is pretty emotional seeing a place with people you respected and learned from for so long, where you could rely on for the place to find the newest and most interesting things happening in tech, where people in the know discussed the technical aspects; to now neo-luddites everywhere bashing shit they don't understand, ON A FUCKING TECH FORUM; like THE tech forum. I feel like I'm living in some kind of bizzarro world now when I read anything AI related on HN. It's insane.
        troupo 5mo ago
        > bashing shit they don't understand, ON A FUCKING TECH FORUM; like THE tech forum. Or: they actually understand the tech, and see its limitations. Unlike wide-eyed neophytes and zealots. Tech forum doesn't mean "uncritically accept and love any and all technology". Oh, and they don't find the need to sling insults like monkey sling feces just because someone doesn't agree with them.
- abcde666777 5mo ago
  The same could have been said to someone who had yet to encounter generative AI. "Wait until you try it, you won't be underwhelmed for long". But here we are. Over time and usage the limitations of a thing become apparent.
- austin-cheney 5mo ago
  It’s primarily about confidence and motivations. People with high confidence at what they do are supremely unmotivated to use something like AI to solve problems they don’t have. People with low confidence will be super excited for AI because it solves problems they weren’t even thinking about. Executives that don’t write code are super excited about AI because hopefully it means they can continue to high low confidence people, which are plentiful and cost less. I am sitting on the sidelines watching in disbelief. I don’t use AI and don’t plan to. I used to write JavaScript for a living and still get JavaScript job alerts from a lot of job boards. The compensation for JavaScript work is starting to shoot through the roof as employers are moving away from garbage like React and Angular. The recent jobs are becoming fewer and are more reliant upon people with tons of experience that can actually program. Clearly AI is not replacing positions for higher talent with greater than 8-12 years experience.
  - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
    "I refuse to pick up the magic hammer that nails things in by me just thinking about it while holding it in my hand; nosiree, give me that old fashioned hammer so I can sit here and nail some nails into a 2x4 while the guy using the other tool is building whole slop neighborhoods. Ha, that guy is so dumb and I'm too cool because I won't ever use that hammer." I don't get it. Proudly saying you don't plan to use better tools is not some 'cool' look or the brag you think it is. You're just making yourself less valuable and being ignorant on purpose. Cool.
    - austin-cheney 5mo ago
      Yes. You don’t get it. I am not seeking your affirmation. There is no vanity in this for me. I am not bragging to you or anyone else.
      - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        Yeah, I'm sure I'm the one who doesn't get it, not the guy refusing to use the paradigm changing tools, "because". You sound like my Grandmother who refused to even look at a computer screen. Literally the same. It's amazing it's coming from so called tech-literate people in the field. Sad.
- jandrese 5mo ago
  Always fun to see the article happen live in the comments section.
- 0x3f 5mo ago
  This place actually hates all technology after the invention of Lisp. And there's the common online incentive to dunk on things that also exists here. Hence the infamous Dropbox comment and others. But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on. I would therefore not in a million years expect it to be pro-LLM, and this is so obvious to me that I'm a bit suspicious of your motives for acting confused about it, as if it was ever any different.
  - scottyah 5mo ago
    It's the same as the sad drunk man talking bad about the King at a dirty bar. It makes them feel better to compare or say they're better in some way.
  - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
    It's literally unbearable now. I don't know how the place that once used to be exciting and deep in the know; is now old-man-yells-at-clouds ignorant of what is happening. It's actually really sad. /g/ and /r/accelerate seem like the last bastions of actual intelligent people discussing these things.
    - vor_ 5mo ago
      [dead]
  - vor_ 5mo ago
    > But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on. It was never any of these things, and you're misremembering if you think it was. There's never been a mono-opinion held by some all-encompassing hivemind.
    - 0x3f 5mo ago
      I'm not misremembering. You can easily find monoculturey threads about all of these things. Just because there's a small slice of counter views, doesn't mean the average HN positions on these things isn't or wasn't decidedly negative.
- troupo 5mo ago
  > You won't be 'underwhelmed' long. "Yes, it sucks now, but believe me it won't be for long" spiel has been hyped for several years now. Oh, don't get me wrong, these tools are amazing. But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer [1]. So yeah, senior engineers especially use these tools daily, and keep being completely honest about their issues and shortcomings. Unlike the hype and scam artists. [1] Oh, sorry. I meant to say skills, context engineering and management, memory, prompt engineering.
  - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
    " But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer." Get better rituals. PEBCAK.
    - troupo 5mo ago
      Yeah yeah. There exists some secret ritual known only to the selected elite that make these tools perfect, no mistakes. (The only people who say that are scammers and peddlers, and the only people who believe that are juniors or don't know how to code at all)
      - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        I'm a senior at a F200, I'm actually tired of listening to you assholes here. I always thought people here knew more than me; it's not fucking true. I'm not some starry eyed junior; I have built multi-modal agents being used in production on government contract work in the field, right this second. You all can go fuck yourselves, you neo-luddites will be the first out the door. Good riddance.
        AlexeyBelov 5mo ago
        Least deranged AI booster.
- ua709 5mo ago
  Is it just me or is there a growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone…
  - troupo 5mo ago
    There are no "AI-insiders". "AI-insiders" are trying to market their tools to you. See Anthropic's continuous lithany of "all programmers will be replaced in 6 months" while they struggle to make their TUI API wrapper consume less than 2-4 GB of RAM (they brought it down from 68 GB[1]), or have a decent uptime. [1] Yes, you read it right. They had to buy a team of actual engineers to do the job: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
- Herbstluft 5mo ago
  > You won't be 'underwhelmed' long. This has been your constant mantra for 3 years now and is part of the reason people are underwhelmed.
- surgical_fire 5mo ago
  > When did Hacker news start becoming a luddite, bad takes everywhere I look, feels like everyone is '50 year old burnt out guy' that has no idea what is going on vibe? Much to the opposite, I think healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity. The overeager embracing of hype cycles is extremely cringe. > I just got back from a SAIRS conference at UCLA and talked directly with some of the presenters and engineers at Google. Cringe, as I was saying. Conferences are just mutual fart smelling, swagger, and expensing trips on company momey. I am not against it, but treating your participation in some conference as a sign of the future is very silly. Every conference I participated always overhyped every current bullshit.
- grebc 5mo ago
  It’s always been this way. It’s an online community.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5mo ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And even staying within the comfort of AI enthusiasm: Google wasn't exactly leading in this race. If you have this much confidence in what those presenters and engineers at Google told you, you now have some opportunities to make a lot of money.
  - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
    https://github.com/gca-americas/way-back-home https://github.com/gca-americas/way-back-home Anyone here who is currently 'underwhelmed'; please get through all 5 levels here and then say the same thing. This is just the beginning. I seriously can't believe this place turned into neo-boomerism ideology on tech. I honestly don't get it, just makes me think everyone here talking about being seniors and architecture and blah blah; don't actually know shit, and aren't actually good at what they do.
    - grebc 5mo ago
      Levels 2,3,4,5 all say coming soon. Did you have AI Agent summarise this for you?
      - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
        Funny how it says that, yet I finished the whole thing. Maybe you should try reading a bit more. https://codelabs.developers.google.com/way-back-home-level-5/instructions#0 https://codelabs.developers.google.com/way-back-home-level-5... That is the completed instructions for the fifth level, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to actually read more and find the rest of the steps on their own. I spent some time chatting with Google engineer who put this together, Ayo Adedeji, at UCLA's SAIRS conference.
        grebc 5mo ago
        Cool story brother.
- vor_ 5mo ago
  When you use the term "luddite" in the way you do, you reveal that you aren't aware of who the Luddites actually were. Luddites weren't anti-technology; many of them were experts at using advanced machinery. What they opposed was the poor quality output of automated factories and the use of machinery to circumvent apprenticeships and decent wages. As for your promise of a great leap at some vague point in the future, that's such a widely-mocked AI industry trope at this point that it's a little embarrassing you went there.
  - Wissenschafter 5mo ago
    The only thing that will be embarrassing is how badly your comments, and those like yours will age. I don't know what happened to this place, but it went from actual young people sharing information on the newest things in tech, tech philosophy, interesting stuff; to now old men yelling at the clouds about the new tech.
    - jjulius 5mo ago
      >The only thing that will be embarrassing is how badly your comments, and those like yours will age Hubris.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - antonvs 5mo ago
      I agree with your basic point, but it’s not just an age thing. There are plenty of older people enthusiastically using AI for software development now. Just as an example, Steve Yegge, who vibe-coded the Beads and Gas Town AI projects, is around 57. I’m a bit older than him, and I’m working with Claude, Gemini, and Codex on a daily basis, having great fun and learning tons. What we seem to be seeing with AI is that the prospect of completely changing the way you work is threatening for a lot of people, and of course so is the prospect of losing your job. When people are faced with something threatening, a common reaction is to criticize it in every possible way - you can’t admit anything about it is good because that risks encouraging the threat. It’s not exactly rational, but it’s what people often do. HN has never been exempt from that, it’s just that AI is a big change that brings out this instinct in many more people.
- elzbardico 5mo ago
  Even SOTA models when used in agents in simple NLP tasks such as text classification still fail more times than acceptable when evaluated against a realistic evaluation dataset with sufficient example variety and with some adversarial prompts included. Improving such uses cases is mostly an artisanal endeavor, sometimes a few-shot prompt improves things, sometimes it improves things at the expense of kind of overfitting it, sometimes structured reasoning works, sometimes it doesn't, or sometimes it works and then the latency and token explodes, etc etc.... And yet a lot of teams don't see this problem because they don't care much about evaluations, and will only find this issues in production a few months after deployment. Are those who care about evaluation luddites?

taurath 5mo ago

For mine it’s worse because we have new leadership who believes in it to a far larger extent than it can deliver. Now a massive amount of our workforce is building up proofs of concepts and spitting out tons of effectively useless output to look good because of how strongly they’ve signaled it’s good for careers here to fully embrace it. It’s a massive mess and there’s nobody to clean it up, and the voices advocating for rigor or good engineering practices are being sidelined. It’s full out mania. As someone raised in and who escaped a cult, I am having to use every tool in my very large toolbox to stay sane while I wait for this to pass and die down or make my move towards a place that still cares whether their product works.

Wissenschafter 5mo ago
[flagged]
- decimalenough 5mo ago
  AI isn't going away, but leadership expectations to (say) increase "efficiency" by 50% in the next 6 months through "AI" will. Eventually. After lots of fudging of numbers and general reluctance to admit that the Emperor's clothes are looking awfully translucent.
  - suttontom 5mo ago
    I've been waiting so long for it to become commonplace for people to equate AI with The Emperor's New Clothes. Hopefully it gains steam.
- taurath 5mo ago
  If LOC and tokenmaxxing is the future, nobody will have a job. I use AI all day every day, I’m not a luddite, I’m someone who has seen people take the same shitty shortcuts to working systems they are now. They’re wasting tons of money and smarter competitors who can actually think clearly about the benefits and costs are gonna eat their lunch.
partyficial 5mo ago

baxtr 5mo ago

What about karpathy though?

psychoslave 5mo ago
What's that?
- hackable_sand 5mo ago
  Villain from ghost busters 2
rooftopzen 5mo ago
Smart guy phoning it in now - realized a few weeks ago that he “notices” something interesting to share, but is really paraphrasing a recently released paper that found it - without giving paper credit.
elzbardico 5mo ago
Wasn't Karpathy the guy who used to work for tesla and that tried to convince everyone that you only need cameras for self-driving and that by 2025 there wouldn't be anymore cars without self-driving capabilities to sell?

FloorEgg 5mo ago

How can the AI be lacking in results and also at the same time responsible for layoffs and slowing of hiring? Wouldn't it be one or the other?

pesus 5mo ago
Executives don't need actual results or data to lay people off.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
cosmic_cheese 5mo ago
It can be both if for the majority of layoffs, AI is just a scapegoat to act as cover for cuts made for financial reasons or offshoring and not the actual cause.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  But then you’d expect the trend to self correct in the long run. AI actually does seem to replacing customer-service and CS jobs effectively.
  - cosmic_cheese 5mo ago
    From what I've seen many efforts to replace roles such as customer service with AI are being rolled back or downscaled due to intolerably high error rates and general incapability. While these segments won't come out unscathed I don't think the actual impact will end up being as severe as feared.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      I believe that too. Broadly, I’m agreeing with the parent comment—AI can’t be causing long-run layoffs and be worthless.

mghackerlady 5mo ago

I feel like the junior problem contributes more heavily than people might think. The people on top see juniors as replaceable since they view them as cheap menial labor, whereas most seniors at least acknowledge the human element as part of the benefit

bayindirh 5mo ago
Today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors, or more importantly today's seniors' yesterday. They do the dirty, repetitive work, learn the systems inside out, take note of the flaws, and fix them if they are motivated and the system/process allows. Thinking them as replaceable, worthless gears is allowing your organization rot from inside. I can't believe people can't see it.
- JohnMakin 5mo ago
  Plenty of people see it - but, to a hiring team, a junior is an extremely risky investment. They demand a high cost relative to when they can start contributing actual value, may not work out, or may hop ship the moment they become competent. It is rational for a business to want to eliminate this risk. It's possible that everyone is acting rationally here, knowing it will lead to a result that is not favorable down the line - because the immediate benefit is too great to consider the latter. In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line. And that risk may be overblown - people are still hiring some juniors, it's not like it has stopped entirely - so future seniors will likely just be worth more than they are currently. To some, that may be worth the risk, especially if you believe AI will continue to get stronger. I am not saying I agree with this decision making, more pointing out the thought process. We have had to have similar discussions where I am but are still hiring juniors, FYI. That's basically all we're hiring right now, actually, because the market for strong juniors is very good right now.
  - bayindirh 5mo ago
    > In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line. I mean, writing the code which makes mon^H^H^H^H provides value for minimum cost is the ultimate goal of a software company, but any competent CS grad or anyone with basic algorithms knowledge knows that greedy algorithms can't solve all problems. Sometimes the company needs to look ahead, try, fail and backtrack. Nerdy analogies aside, self-sabotaging whole sector with greedy shortsightedness is a pretty monumental misstep. It's painful yet unbelievably hilarious at the same time. Pure dark comedy.

woah 5mo ago

There's this weird unspoken assumption in a lot of these HN posts that any layoffs or lack of hiring is due to companies shirking on providing the cushy jobs they owe software engineers. Actually, they hire engineers to get stuff done. If it's true that AI is just a big 'ol scam and it doesn't even work, then I guess we'll see the companies that insist on nothing but the finest artisanily hand-typed organic code rocket to the top of the charts on app downloads, sales, revenue, and market cap.

galvatron9k 5mo ago
I imagine the reality lies somewhere in between the two extreme takes that you present here.
hilariously 5mo ago
This is basically how most engineers talk to their managers, politely implying - "can you see how this decision has a short term payoff but a long term consequence?" Before LLMs I only worked at one place that "only hired seniors and above" and now its the most commonplace thing in the world. Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.
- 0x3f 5mo ago
  > Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance. Seems a bit like asking where the bread will come from, if no-one is forced to bake it.
  - sumeno 5mo ago
    More like where the bread will come from if nobody learns how to bake it and the knowledge of how to bake it is lost.
    - 5mo ago

bayindirh 5mo ago

I have a similar experience. I seldom use it to test to see its current state, and it generally (85% of the time) gives wrong answers. Then I discuss this with a couple of friends: Me: I tried $AI recently, I asked $question, it hallucinated. Them: But it sucks at that. Me: Then what's good at? It's useful if it helps me out of a ditch. Them: It depends on the domain... These guys are not evangelists or anything, but colleagues who want to reduce their workloads. If it can't help with what I need, then how can it help me at all? At the end of the day, I don't plan to use this at daily capacity, but with all the resources poured into this, it's still underwhelming.

RajT88 5mo ago
A friend of mine has copilot integrated with his storage appliance that all the business docs are hosted on for his firm. He says it's amazing. My company uses Sharepoint, and can digest all of the documents I have access to on that, one drive, teams, outlooks, etc. across my tenant. Most of the time, it's pretty useless. There must be some reason for these two disparate experiences. It's the same product offering. I couldn't tell you.
- matwood 5mo ago
  I mean, anything with Sharepoint will be terrible. No amount of AI can fix that mess.
  - RajT88 5mo ago
    I too feel this way.
- ofjcihen 5mo ago
  Reminds me of a bounty I received recently. Someone essentially exposed a bedrock agent that had access to the companies internal documents to the internet unauthenticated. They actually had the reports and notes for other bug bounties that had been reported to them as well.
scottyah 5mo ago

tedsanders 5mo ago

> Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle. According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again. What data source are you looking at? [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

latchkey 5mo ago
Separately, I'm curious how that URL (IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE) is encoded.
- treetalker 5mo ago
  [dead]
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- variety8675 5mo ago
  IHL (Indeed Hiring Lab) + IDX (Index) + US (country) + TP (topic) + SOFTDEVE (software development)
layer8 5mo ago
The companies doing the layoffs are themselves stating AI as a reason; that’s the news people are responding to. The parent didn’t claim that it’s based on reality, but it informs public opinion.
- daveguy 5mo ago
  Quite a convenient excuse, isn't it? I hope no one figures out that AI is still just kinda meh.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
  “I’ll take a CEO’s very calculated word for something if it supports my existing worldview” is intellectually dishonest.

hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago

Your statement is a bit contradictory. That is, the article about "the growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone else" pretty clearly states that "everyone else" is scared about job losses and the extreme inequality they see advanced AI causing. This is in line with your second to last sentence. But the first part of your comment is basically saying "AI insiders think the tech is super awesome and powerful, while other engineers think it doesn't stand up to the hype." Well, if the AI is indeed not as good a tech as its boosters are saying, well, this would be great news for everyone scared about job losses and widening inequality if AI turned out to be a nothing burger.

sph 5mo ago
No and it has been said already elsewhere in this thread: decision makers are not entirely rational, they might fire entire departments even if the AI revolution isn’t here quite yet

junofan 5mo ago

I feel like this will change as people move around. It’s definitely a skill.

skippyboxedhero 5mo ago

The use-cases for data science and other engineers are different. AI is not uniformly good at all kinds of development. There is an issue with execs pushing it though. You have people at the top of the company with little to no idea how people work attempting to micromanage tool usage. It is as if you had a group of execs determining what IDEs people could use. No-one is getting fired because of AI. The start of this year is the start of companies beginning to use AI. The reason layoffs are happening is because of the massive overhiring after Covid.

ryandrake 5mo ago
> overhiring after Covid How long after COVID are we going to be able to keep using this excuse? This is starting to feel like the politician blaming his predecessor even though he's been in office for years. In the year 2033, Company X lays off another 10,000, just as it did each year since 2023, again blaming massive over-hiring during COVID, ten years ago.
- bdangubic 5mo ago
  > How long after COVID are we going to be able to keep using this excuse? I am with you but if you look what happened after COVID it is a big line going waaaaay up. COVID was a significant event and there is no way around it, no? the OPs comment is invalid because we below the pre-COVID (by miles) but COVID should be taken into account (everyone seems to use it to further some agenda by looking at just one particular aspect of what happened post-COVID)
andrekandre 5mo ago
> It is as if you had a group of execs determining what IDEs people could use. its worse than that; its more like determining what ide you use and also mandating how much time you spend in it, and then chewing you out at review time because you used jira and confluence too much instead of writing md files in the blessed ide of their choice
noobermin 5mo ago
Covid was six years ago man. Don't insult people's intelligence.

gerdesj 5mo ago

I totally understand where you are coming from and my personal take is LLMs are to "stuff" as a drill driver is to a screw driver. They are a tool, just a tool. ... bear with ... I over floored several rooms in my house (UK, '20s build) with plywood before laying insulation, heating mats and laminate floor boards for the final finish. I don't have a staple gun so I screwed the boards down at roughly 600mm c/c across the floorboards and 300mm along them. What the blazes has that got to do with LLMs? Well, I used a nearly inappropriate method for a job and blasted through it nearly as fast as the best method! If I had used a manual screwdriver I would have been at it nearly forever and ended up with a very limp wrist. I do own an old school ratchet screwdriver and that would have speeded things up but still been slow. I did use yellow passivated screws with sharp threads and a notch to initiate biting into the wood - rather more expensive than a staple or a nail. So I burned through my tokens (screws instead of nails/staples) faster than if I had used a pneumatic nail/staple gun. Anyway. LLMs are tools. They can be good tools in the right hands or rip your fingers off in the wrong hands.

socialcommenter 5mo ago
Running with this analogy, the two sides of the AI argument are the people who think they can fire their plumber and electrician now that they have a drill driver, and the people who know it doesn't work that way...
- gerdesj 5mo ago
  Quite. My larger drill driver will wrench your wrist unless you know how to set the speed/mode/etc correctly and know how to brace yourself correctly. At the moment, I think that a LLM needs skilled hands too. Have a casual chat - that's fine but for work ... be aware. I recently dumped a wikimedia (our knowledge base is a wiki) formatted table into a LLM (on prem) and asked it to sort the list on the first column. It lost a few rows for some reason. No problem - I know how my tools work but it was a bit odd!

rconti 5mo ago

Shocking that people who are in data science/ML are excited about data science/ML, and people in jobs not interested in that area are not interested in it. It's like a programmer being surprised that a worker in $random_job wants to keep doing their job, and not learn how to be a programmer instead.

ggregoire 5mo ago

> but the enthusiasm on the ground is lacking Using claude and friends takes all the fun out of the job, so I'm not surprised engineers are not enthusiastic. It's cool for 1 month then you realize we went from solving problems and implementing algos and optimizing slow code and fixing security issues and other fun stuff, to writing prompts all day long.

dboreham 5mo ago
Not a universal view: Claude has added all the fun back into my job.
- archagon 5mo ago
  Many engineers want nothing more than to eventually become managers. So this is not surprising. But your job is not what it was before.
  - keeda 5mo ago
    Not really managers, I would put the new role more in the senior engineer / architect category. Those still have to deal with deeply technical things like design, architecture, problem decomposition, research, domain expertise, code review, collaborating with technical peers -- all of which (people) managers don't typically do. If you ever wanted to climb the senior technical ladder, this is now the quickest way to experience it. Except instead of other people you get to work with agents which, while a very different experience, requires largely the same skills. So yes, your job is not what it was before, but with career growth it typically was not anyway.
- kakacik 5mo ago
  ... but a very common one. There are always exceptions to every rule
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
    Oh yeah? The way that you feel is the norm, and if anyone feels differently, they’re the exception? And that’s just based on… vibes?

nickstinemates 5mo ago

That's likely because it takes an entirely different approach to make it work. Augmenting your existing flow with "sophisticated auto complete" isn't as interesting and isn't actually using the tools how they were designed to be used. I'm not going to pass judgement either way; we'll see how it all shakes out. I just know for me, personally, I love computers and making them do what I want and in the AI era I am somehow using them even more and doing even more.

crubier 5mo ago

I get it, but as a "AI expert and senior leader" myself in my 1,000 people organization (in relative terms), the disconnect I have is: A lot of what non-believers say matches "enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises". They would then say they need 2 weeks to work on a specific project, the good old way, maybe with some light AI use along the way. But then I'm like "hmm actually let me try this real quick" and I prompt Claude for 3 minutes, and 30 minutes later it has one-shotted the whole "two weeks project". It then gets reviewed and merged by the "non-believers". This happens repeatedly. So overall, I think the lack of enthusiasm is largely a skill issue. Not having the skill is fine, but not being willing to learn the skill is the real issue. I see things changing, as "non-believers" eventually start to realize that they need to evolve or be toast. But it's slower than I imagined.

shiveenp 5mo ago
Unsure of this really tracks tho. How are you evaluating for the bias that they’re not merging it because you’re “their leader of 1000 people org” and not because you’re actually an engineer deep in the trenches that knows the second or third order effects of slop? This is a genuine question btw, I see plenty of instances of this in my own org.
- crubier 5mo ago
  I see your point, but 1. I am also on the receiving end of this. My boss often codes and vibecodes, and no one feels like they have to merge their stuff. We only merge it if it meets the high quality standard we have. And there is no drama for blocking a PR in our culture. 2. I am fairly deep in the trenches myself and I know when my PRs are high quality and when they are not. And that does not correlate with use of AI in my experience.
raducu 5mo ago
I am a strong believer and selected as power user because of AI usage metrics, but I also see perverse incentives -- a colleague was desperately searching for me on the Claude token usage leaderboard (I was part of a different group he did not have access to) -- it was clear he was actively trying to climb that leaderboard. Meanehile our average PR loc balooned to ~2000loc -- generated with Claude, reviewed with copilot but colleagues also review it with Claude because it gives valid nitpicks that bump up your github stats, while missing glaring functional/architectural issues, overenginerring issues. No way this doesn't blow up down the road with the massive bloat we're creating while getting high on the "good progress" we're making. Yes, your 3 minutes prompt got merged. So was my friends(ex-programmer now manager) non-ai generated PR that a technical TL got stuckstuck on for 2 weeks. Different perspective? Survivor bias? High authority?

elzbardico 5mo ago

Funny, I was supposed to be the expert in my company, but I was run over by the demo folks, while I was uselessly preaching about evaluation, safeguards, guardrails, observability.