AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time.
Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on the mismanagement and/or ridiculously over-engineered/over-complicated custom tech stacks companies run if they say "AI" anywhere in their reports.
The narrative "we don't need as many staff because of AI" is a labor disciplining device whether or not it is true. Remaining engineers, loaded up with more projects under the threat of layoffs and with no outside opportunities, work nights and weekends to get them done. Then it is literally true that we accomplished more with less. And in a sense it is even "because of AI." But not in the way that you're supposed to think they mean it.
This is so true. I'm not one of these people that think AI is not going to be revolutionary eventually, but the way I see upper management acting is basically exactly as you say. As a threat to discipline better labor.
There is plenty of companies already firing people due because of AI, or at least, that's why they proclaim.
There is also plenty of freelance / artistry type people who would of had work before (i.e creating Halloween, mothers day, Easter, etc) promotional material which is now just outsourced to AI. You see some of the biggest companies on Earth posting AI stuff for special event, etc.
Most aren't at the stage of using full AI "art" for advertisements (except maybe Coke) but some of these companies would already have full time artists, which they've bypassed. Their jobs are not forever and eventually will get killed.
> There is plenty of companies already firing people due because of AI, or at least, that's why they proclaim.
AI is clearly a scapegoat. If you are a CEO who is pressured to show results but can't improve revenue in this economy and can't downsize because of the red flags it represents to investors, AI represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a two-for-one special and both cut staff and portray themselves as leaders in the sector that's achieving massive efficiency gains.
Even FANGs are toning down their rah-rah AI propaganda, and Amazon goes as far as to ask their SDEs to stop with the AI bullshit and just try to use it purposefully.
> AI represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a two-for-one special and both cut staff and portray themselves as leaders in the sector that's achieving massive efficiency gains.
This is not what a scapegoat is. Definitionally, a scapegoat is innocent; here, however, AI is being used as a tool of disciplining labor.
Apparently there has been some AI-caused firing on companies that spent so much on AI that needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break. From the way people are talking, Facebook seems to be in that category.
There is probably some AI-caused firing coming soon on companies that vibe-coded so much that people abandon their products. I expect Microsoft start is on Github.
I have been repeating for months that AI hasn't caused any firing. But it doesn't seem to be technically correct anymore.
AI is absolutely responsible for executive suites dumping huge budgets that could be more productively elsewhere. There are extremely helpful tools out there but people are being too gullible when it comes to advertised ROIs and the blame inevitably falls on engineering, not management, when all the devs fail to 10x overnight.
A text generator can't be responsible for decisions that people make. You're giving them too much agency. Idk how they did it, but so many people seem to hate AI instead of people who are pushing it.
AI is absolutely directly responsible. Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer. Most people are taking credits, and internships are getting cancelled left and right.
> Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer
That's a bit like asking them to choose between AI credits and a visit to the dentist. No engineer has ever hosted an intern in the hopes of improving their project's velocity; people host interns because "it's the right thing to do" for the industry, because it's psychologically satisfying for many people, and to build cred and/or experience as a mentor. And companies nudge their employees to host interns to hopefully influence potentially-valuable-in-the-future smart youngsters to come back as a year or two later as full time employees.
> people host interns because "it's the right thing to do" for the industry
This is bullshit, assuming that we are talking about for-profit corporations.
In my experience, the reason why my teams have hired interns is to get a solid, multi-week preview of their potential quality and abilities. During the hiring phase for juniors, the signal-to-noise ratio isn't very good, but a good intern can get a lot done in one summer. You can easily pick the best one or two interns to hire when they graduate. Then you dramatically reduced junior engineer hiring risk. Also, if they suck or are disappointing, then the loss is minimal -- don't hire them. If they are really awful, then just throw shit work at them and don't waste time trying to mentor them. Really, it goes both ways.
Where I work, interns are hired to work on projects that a senior person could do and failure won't wreck us. And your last sentence is where we see the real payoff: the bright ones come back and become valued team members.
> And companies nudge their employees to host interns to hopefully influence potentially-valuable-in-the-future smart youngsters to come back as a year or two later as full time employees.
And there's less incentive to do this when you anticipate needing fewer employees.
His point is that the engineers wanting to opt for "not intern" isn't really a data point on whether interns are helpful. It may instead be a data point on the propensity for people to opt out of work when they have a good excuse.
Wouldn't it go the other way? Instead of working, you're "mentoring the intern" over a long lunch and telling them long meandering stories about company lore.
In my experience hosting an intern does not count much towards your review. So sure, but you also could have done nothing and your review would probably be the same as if you hosted an intern.
It’s possible somewhere does properly incentivize this, but the companies who were regarded as doing it the best still don’t in my experience (at least once the company gets bigger than a startup).
> Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer
My Brandolini's Law alarm is ringing loud and clear here. I would say the answer is both -- hire the intern and give them a bunch of AI credits. Ask them to work through the old backlog of shitty, low risk work that no one else wants to do.
> AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time.
I disagree. AI is often depicted as autonomous agents YOLOing features, but they excel at pattern matching from free form text and examples, and execute feedback loops. This means that they are particularly apt at small maintenance tasks spread across the project following clear high level guidance.
This is your typical junior task, the kind of task that is plausibly very boring and repetitive that is validation-heavy until it stumbles upon an unexpected turn and forces a senior to step in.
Once you offload these tasks to an agent running on a background, what exactly is left for a junior to do?
Juniors can arguably lean on AI coding agents to tackle more complex and more extensive work, but the truth if the matter is that they lack the skill and tools to effectively address this sort of work. They can get things to build but they fail to get things to make sense or be maintainable.
At the moment is the significant part, how long do we expect this to last now that AI is capable of generating novel ideas like solutions to Erdos conjectures?
LLMs enable a new kind of text search. It looks like reasoning and intelligence, but it is not.
For example, If you are not aware of Internet, you would consider a traditional internet search that comes up with a stackoverflow answer as a machine generating "novel ideas" and answers.
It is a clever marketing trick (touting Erdos solutions) employeed by AI companies.
Whatever LLMs are or are not, they've completely changed what I do for work. 9 months ago I was coding, today I prompt. Every line of code I commit is generated by LLMs. If you want to call it text search, be my guest. Doesn't change what it's done for the industry.
Sure, as I said, a better search can bring pretty dramatic change in how you work.
> Every line of code I commit is generated by LLMs...
Imagine if someone told you "Hey, this stackoverflow site is great. Everything I commit in my work is copy pasted from it!". What would you think about their work? Is that something worth bragging about?
No, no, you don't get it. See, it's just like a text search, if a text search could return text that never existed before, and that solves original math problems, and answer your emails for you, ... and ...
This "super intelligent" and "capable" thing cannot even understand that your ssh keys are private and should not be sent to randos. It can solve complex math, but does not understand basic security/privacy.
Ever heard of social engineering?
Also, models nowadays are way sharper than they were even a year ago. They’re not going to make stupid mistakes like that unless you basically ask them to. GPT-5.x for example would bend over backwards to avoid even reading your passwords into context.
Oh wait, I thought these things were super smart. I didn't expect "social engineering" to work on them.
> models nowadays are way sharper than they were even a year ago.
You are missing the point. If the thing can solve complex math problems and at the same time be so dumb as to fall for "social engineering", then that means that it is not "smartness" or "reasoning" that is helping it to solve those problems. Just some form of advanced, but yet dumb, search algorithm.
By "heard of social engineering?" I meant that humans are vulnerable to malicious input too. Prompt injection is basically a simplified form of social engineering for language models. It looks different because models operate over much smaller and more explicit contexts than humans do and are explicitly trained to follow instructions, but the general idea is similar: malicious input tries to manipulate how the system interprets trust and instructions. This is why we need protocols, permissions, and opsec for both agents and humans. That said, I’m not criticizing how you choose to use, or not use, these models, though.
>I meant that humans are vulnerable to malicious input too.
No they are not. Social engineering won't work on a human security expert who knows and understands the implications of the information they are giving away. Your analogy is pointless.
Sure they are, if the human expert follows instructions from a manager or a client, if they are of utility to anybody, then they are vulnerable to social engineering and malicious input. An attack may be easy or hard depending on the expert's training, but nobody is flawless.
> If the thing can solve complex math problems and at the same time be so dumb as to fall for "social engineering", then that means that it is not "smartness" or "reasoning" that is helping it to solve those problems. Just some form of advanced, but yet dumb, search algorithm.
I'm not just trying to be snarky, but I have no idea how to read this without taking the implication that humans are advanced, yet dumb, search algorithms.
A human being who states X (implying they know it to be true) will behave in a way that is consistent with X being true.
An LLM will happily say X and behaves in contradiction to X. Because it does not reason. Its behavior is not derived from things that it claim (or appears) to know.
But most of the stuff it returns existed before, and llm's parent company during their training part stole all that info, legal or not who cares right. The rest is combined in sort of least-resistance-path which can produce impressive results but its not what you wrote. Many people don't actually care much about morality in their lives only when its convenient for them, and this is a prime example of such tunnel vision.
Start with clean llm, no external previous ideas of humans inserted into it, and let it generate some wisdom on its own and then lets talk. (btw thats how I would expect we could get closer to AGI with these statistical models, but thats just my opinion)
Start with clean llm, no external previous ideas of humans inserted into it, and let it generate some wisdom on its own and then lets talk.
An LLM is about as likely to do that as you are. The ability to generate "wisdom" ab initio cannot possibly be a criterion for intelligent reasoning. The ability to arrive at novel mathematics proofs, on the other hand, is good enough for me.
Intelligence means making the most of the resources and information available, not the ability to speedrun the Big Bang. LLMs are certainly smarter than humans who dismiss them as "text searchers."
Reading comments like this is like watching an impaired pedestrian about to be run over by an approaching bus. You yell, you wave your arms, but they aren't paying attention. There's no way to warn them, so all you can do is... watch.
Reading comments like this is like watching someone who is absolutely convinced that they have a crystal ball in their lap when at best they have a foggy piece of plastic. You could be right you could be wrong, but don’t act like you have such certainty.
The foggy piece of plastic writes better code and better text than I do. I don't know about you, but that makes me sit up and stop waving my hands dismissively.
I really don't want to sound like an asshole, but I refuse the notion that an agent writes better code / prose than I do and I am concerned for anyone who does think that.
Is it _faster_? sure! That is NOT better.
Before you ask, I write code w/ agents daily, I find it useful, but it's not better than I am purely on quality.
> There's no way to warn them, so all you can do is... watch
…and then wake up from the nightmare wishing the stress from the job is lower.
I can only laugh that some people truly believe that developers, one of the most ardent group at automating the tedious part of their job, would refuse to use an effective tool. You only need to look at the open source world to see people litterally scratching their own hitch everywhere.
What if I don't want to automate away the part of my job that I actually like doing? What if, in my job as a programmer, I actually want to do programming?
That’s fair. I do think, however, that the software industry may become a bit like the clothing industry: there will still be an artisanal market for people who want human-made software, but to be honest I wouldn’t expect it to remain the mainstream option.
Sure, and I don’t disagree, but goods and services still need to scale to billions of people. Most people aren’t going to start knitting their own clothes, or have the time to, just like most companies probably won’t rely on fully hand-written software if cheaper automated alternatives are good enough. What you want or enjoy is one thing; the reality of society is another.
People who demand programmers start using LLMs in their work don't understand that it is essentially like asking programmers to start doing accounting or HR. Something fundamentally different from what they love to do..
Actually they are asking programmers to become managers in addition to programmers. Because when the LLMs stops working, they are expected to take over.
So I think programmers who are asked to use LLMs should demand their job descriptions to be changed to that of managers, and should ever deny responsibility if the LLM stops to make progress. Thus let the organization be responsible to actually find a version of AI that works, just like how it was responsible to find competent programmers to work under the managers before.
The most difficult and time consuming tasks in my job as a software developer is talking to customers and figuring out what they need coupled with getting them to understand what is realistic and what is not. This is a process which takes months if not years, and requires aligning internal goals and tasks with external ones. LLMs can definitely help here, but I feel that the current mode of use where the users have to explicitly manage the tiny - relative to a human brain - context window is an obstacle. I don't know if what we need is a new architecture or just more clever context engineering, but I don't see an LLM actually taking over this type of work as things are now.
The problem, of course, is that generating a one time solution to a problem is a much easier problem space than a many-input task with human product concerns
Synthesizing a ton of inputs to help clarify a decision or set of options is exactly one of the easiest and most powerful use cases for AI agents right now.
I don't think that part is true, either. The average human could be trained to use an agent to synthesize information in their job to help make product decisions. The average human could not be trained to evaluate whether a reasoning model produced a correct proof in research-level mathematics. To be sure: reviewing a candidate proof at this level written by AI is significantly easier and faster than writing and creating it from scratch. But it's still not something hardly any humans could credibly do.
The answer is just to use Picaridin instead of DEET, or perhaps a combination of both. Picaridin is sold as "Off - Clean Feel" or in Sawyer products in the USA.
The exact mechanism is not completely understood, but it's thought that DEET works because it interfere's with mosquitos ability to locate their prey. It is not thought to discourage bites as "they don't like the taste", just by interfering with sensing.
A newer repellent, Picaridin, not only interferes with locating prey, but actively deters mosquitos like pepper spray mace. It's an engineered molecule, derived from a compound called piperine, a substance found in black pepper plants.
Studies show that "Picaridin is as effective as DEET", but my personal experience is it is about twice as effective as DEET.
I spend an enormous amount of my free time outdoors and I can attest that Picaridin is far more effective than DEET for both mosquitos and ticks (we have two main species in the Kansas/Missouri/Arkansas region, others are present but less common).
As a personal data point, I had a friend trip on a hike this spring and fall into a grassy/bushy area. He did not put any repellent on. When we stood up, he was _covered_ in ticks. We got back to the truck and started peeling them off him, probably 15+ plus we flicked off or crushed. Unfortunately, we kept finding more, so we tried spraying Picaridin after the damn things hated that stuff so bad they jumped or fell off instantly.
You do not want to get Picaridin in your eyes or mouth, holy shit, that stuff is like bear mace. Also make sure you're downwind when you're spraying, your friends with appreciate that.
The other advantage of Picaridin is that it does not melt certain plastics. If you have life saving gear made of certain plastics, DEET can melt many times of plastics! (Notably some PVCs, polycarbonates, acrylics, acetates, and elastics).
That’s interesting! As I’m researching this (for my family) I have questions :)
- have you tried entomol? How does it compare?
- is it advisable with for young kids, if it’s irritant?
- how long does it stay on?
- what do you do when you get so many ticks on yourself? Watch if you get spots after 30 days?
I can't comment on the safety factor, but to me it smells like cotton candy, so your kids will probably be more willing to put it on than DEET. (I don't know if this is how the chemical inherently smells or just the brand that I have though)
> if it’s irritant?
You definitely don't want to get it in your eyes or mouth, but I have pretty sensitive skin and I've never felt anything when putting it on before, so it's not that irritating in my experience.
> how long does it stay on?
I seem to remember that the bottle says 12 hours, which is a bit optimistic, but not too far off. I think that I've only ever needed to reapply it once, whereas I've sometimes had to reapply DEET multiple times in a day.
Never tried Entomol. But I've found any of the essential oils simply don't work more than 10-20mins after application. I'd be very skeptical, but I'll try it if I can find an EPA/FDA approved spray.
Picaridin is safe for everyone, but follow all label instructions. Also use the 20% concentration. I find that 10%-15% is about as effective as DEET, 20% is about twice as effective (in my completely uncontrolled, unscientific, testing).
The parent comment was clearly not intended to replace DEET, only to add an oil that provides the missing repellent odor if this were to become a real issue. For all I care, the oil could intentionally be altogether useless for killing bugs. After all, even if DEET doesn't repel bugs, it still is intended to kill the bugs that intake it.
Also, the oils in question work reasonably for bug control, just for a lesser duration, requiring more routine reapplication. When you say they do not work, that's true only for the gap between how long the oils work versus how long ≥35% DEET works. And the concentration matters acutely for both.
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