The impact of AI on jobs
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I doubt many coders feel safe now. Not sure where he's getting his impression. At best coders are lumping other white collar jobs in with their own, as jobs at risk of AI disruption.
As I write this post, ChatGPT is generating some code it would have taken me an hour to write. Generating it in multiple languages.
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We have an engineer retiring in May. We just requested a job rec for his replacement, and one of the senior executives who has to give authorization asked whether his job could be replaced by an AI.
To be honest, at this point I suspect it would probably be easier to swap out the executive for AI.
I was only joking
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I never pursued much in the way of technical expertise in coding because everything changed so fast with languages and libraries that I didn't have the energy or motivation to keep up. Now I see I didn't zoom out enough. Coding itself, in all of its forms, was the thing that was going to become obsolete.
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We have an engineer retiring in May. We just requested a job rec for his replacement, and one of the senior executives who has to give authorization asked whether his job could be replaced by an AI.
To be honest, at this point I suspect it would probably be easier to swap out the executive for AI.
@Doctor-Phibes said in The impact of AI on jobs:
To be honest, at this point I suspect it would probably be easier to swap out the executive for AI.
SAys the manager who uses AI to write his employee reviews.
The whole reason we call them illegal aliens is because they’re subject to our laws.
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I for one doubt that good programmers will be out of jobs anytime soon.
For once, only programmers can write specifications that are precise enough that AIs can generate code from it.
Of course programmers need to learn how to use LLMs to boost their productivity. But we'll also have a much higher demand for software. It's a kind of self-correcting system.
What we won't need much anymore are programmers that perform boring repetitive work.
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Vibe coding will advance more and more in line with the promise of its name. What % of professional programmers work from spec currently anyway? I bet most.
I see it as imminent that product owners will get together in a meeting room and create an app by talking an AI through it in real time.
Education is extremely important.
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Humanities academic and public intellectual Yascha Mounk on his experience prompting Claude to write a political theory paper fit for publication in top journals. Spoiler, it took two hours and Yascha thinks it's publishable.
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Vibe coding will advance more and more in line with the promise of its name. What % of professional programmers work from spec currently anyway? I bet most.
I see it as imminent that product owners will get together in a meeting room and create an app by talking an AI through it in real time.
@Horace said in The impact of AI on jobs:
Vibe coding will advance more and more in line with the promise of its name. What % of professional programmers work from spec currently anyway? I bet most.
I see it as imminent that product owners will get together in a meeting room and create an app by talking an AI through it in real time.
Anthropic had this impressive breakthrough recently where they let 10 Claude agents simultaneously produce code for a C compiler - which is insanely impressive, but if you look at the details you'll see that the "prompt" contained, among other things, thousands of test cases (which is part of the spec).
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@Doctor-Phibes said in The impact of AI on jobs:
To be honest, at this point I suspect it would probably be easier to swap out the executive for AI.
SAys the manager who uses AI to write his employee reviews.
@jon-nyc said in The impact of AI on jobs:
@Doctor-Phibes said in The impact of AI on jobs:
To be honest, at this point I suspect it would probably be easier to swap out the executive for AI.
SAys the manager who uses AI to write his employee reviews.
Strictly speaking, I use it to re-write them in the language of corporate wank, rather than the plain English I typically employ.
What it was:
"John has had a good first year, and it is hoped that he will continue to develop his career."
What it became:
"John has had a highly successful first year, and stakeholders are optimistic that he will continue to leverage his strengths, expand his skill set, and accelerate his professional growth."
If I keep talking like this, they'll be forced to promote me into an even more pointless position than the one I quietly retired from two years ago.
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@Horace said in The impact of AI on jobs:
Vibe coding will advance more and more in line with the promise of its name. What % of professional programmers work from spec currently anyway? I bet most.
I see it as imminent that product owners will get together in a meeting room and create an app by talking an AI through it in real time.
Anthropic had this impressive breakthrough recently where they let 10 Claude agents simultaneously produce code for a C compiler - which is insanely impressive, but if you look at the details you'll see that the "prompt" contained, among other things, thousands of test cases (which is part of the spec).
@Klaus said in The impact of AI on jobs:
@Horace said in The impact of AI on jobs:
Vibe coding will advance more and more in line with the promise of its name. What % of professional programmers work from spec currently anyway? I bet most.
I see it as imminent that product owners will get together in a meeting room and create an app by talking an AI through it in real time.
Anthropic had this impressive breakthrough recently where they let 10 Claude agents simultaneously produce code for a C compiler - which is insanely impressive, but if you look at the details you'll see that the "prompt" contained, among other things, thousands of test cases (which is part of the spec).
Agentic AIs will build their own test cases, and so on and so on. I'm a bull on the power of this technology, given where it is, at such a young age.
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Vibe coding will advance more and more in line with the promise of its name. What % of professional programmers work from spec currently anyway? I bet most.
I see it as imminent that product owners will get together in a meeting room and create an app by talking an AI through it in real time.
@Horace said in The impact of AI on jobs:
Vibe coding will advance more and more in line with the promise of its name. What % of professional programmers work from spec currently anyway? I bet most.
I see it as imminent that product owners will get together in a meeting room and create an app by talking an AI through it in real time.
Agreed. It's not that far from it now. Testing will still be needed and reviewing results. No doubt a lot of that can be automated, but it will still exist.
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@taiwan_girl said in The impact of AI on jobs:
That's hilarious. That being said, I know some people who might have answered the same way. Some of them are in senior management, with the emphasis being strongly on 'senior'.
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For a programmer, it's a good time to have most of your career behind you.
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
Excerpt:
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect.
I'm not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn't just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter.
