Half of my job is now done with AI, mostly PowerShell scripting and creating PowerPoints / reports. I just play videogames or cook or clean for half of the workday now.
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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I think quite the opposite AI is making each tech worker more efficient at the simple tasks that ai is capable of handling while leaving the complex high skill tasks to humans.
I think that people see human output as a zero sum game and that if ai takes a job then a human must lose a job I disagree. Their are always more things to do more science more education more products more services more planets more stars more possibilities for us as a species.
Horses got replaces by cars cos a horse can't invent more things to do with itself. A horse can't get into the road building industry or the drive through industry etc.
There are so many more things to do. Nowadays, we’re just barely doing what really needs to be done. Pretty much everything else gets ignored.
The horse analogy is actually pretty good. Back in the horsy days, you would not travel to the nearest city unless it was really important. You would rely on the products and services you had in your town. If something wasn’t available, tough luck. If it was super important, you might undertake the journey to the nearest city where you could buy that one thing.
Nowadays though, you totally can drive 20 minutes to get stuff done. Even better than that, logistics don’t depend on horses any more, so you can have obscure stuff shipped to your home, no problem.
This applies to all sorts of things too. Once AI is ready to take on more tasks… some really creepy and nasty stuff will probably happen, but it might almost be worth it. I think it should be possible to do many tasks that simply get ignored today.
Like, who will pick up the trash today? Nobody. The trash guy will show up on Thursday, so deal with it. Who will organize the warehouse? Nobody. It’s not a complete disaster just yet. We can manage for the time being. We’ll fix it when production is about to stop because we can’t find stuff in the warehouse any more. Examples like this can be found everywhere.
There is definitely a market pressure not being fulfilled that I think does accommodate much more effective tech workers.
At least in the spaces I frequent the cap isn't as much the volume of work you have to do, it's how much of it you can't get to because the people you do have run out of time.
The real question is whether at the corporate level there will be a competitive pressure to keep the budget where it is and increase output versus cut down on available capacity and keep shipping what you're shipping. I genuinely don't know where that lands in the long term.
If smaller startups are able to meet the output of shrunk-down massive corpos and start chipping away at them maybe it's fine and what we get is more output from the same people. If that's not the case and we keep the current per-segment monopoly/oligarchy... then maybe it's just a fast forward button on enshittification. I don't think anybody knows.
But also, either way the improvements are probably way more incremental and less earth-shattering than either the shills/AIbros or the haters/doomers are implying, so...
I think we're still deeply into the "shove it everywhere we can" hype era of AI and it'll eventually die down a bit, as it with any new major technological leap. The same fears and thoughts were present when computers came along, then affordable home computers, and affordable Internet access.
AI can be useful it used correctly but right now we're trying to put it everywhere for rather dubious gains. I've seen coworkers mess with AI until it generates the right code for much longer than it would take to hand write it.
I've seen it being used quite successfully in the tech support field, because an AI is perfectly good at asking the customer if they've tried turning it off and then back on again, and make sure it's plugged in. People would hate it I'm sure on principle, but the amount of repetitive "the user can't figure out something super basic" is very common in tech support and would let them focus a lot of their time on actual problems. It's actually smarter than many T1 techs I've worked with, because at least the AI won't sent the Windows instructions to a Mac user and then accuse them of not wanting to try the troubleshooting steps (yes, I've actually seen that happen). But you'll still need humans for anything that's not a canned answer or known issue.
One big problem is when the AI won't work can be somewhat unpredictable especially if you're not yourself fairly knowledgeable of how the AIs actually work. So something you think would normally take you say 4 hours and you expect done in 2 with AI might end up being an 8h task anyway. It's the eternal layoff/hires cycle in tech: oh we have React Native now, we can just have the web team do the mobile apps and fire the iOS and Android teams. And then they end up hiring another iOS and Android team because it's a pain in the ass to maintain and make work anyway and you still need the special knowledge.
We're still quite some ways out from being able to remove the human pilot in front. It's easy to miss how much an experienced worker implicitly guides the AI the right direction. "Rewrite this with the XYZ algorithm" still needs the human worker to have experience with it and enough knowledge to know it's the better solution. Putting inexperienced people at the helm with AI works for a while but eventually it's gonna be a massive clusterfuck only the best will be able to undo. It's still just going to be a useful tool to have for a while.
It's a convenient cover for their over hiring during covid. When it came out it felt like and continues to feel like what spell check was to writers/editors.
I still haven't really figured out why they did so much over hiring during covid. It seemed to be everywhere and with no particular reason. Almost a "because everyone else is doing it" kind of thing.
I work for a web development agency. My coworkers create mobile apps, they start off with AI building the app skeleton, then they refine things manually.
I work with PHP and some JavaScript and AI supports me optimizing my code.
Right now AI is an automatization tool that helps developers save time for better code and it might reduce the size of development teams in the near future. But I don't see it yet, and I certainly don't see it replacing developers completely.
Without saying too much, my company implemented innovative “AI” applications to reduce time wasted by certain workflows. I think I don’t have to worry about job security for the next decade…