Fable Took My Job: When AI Isn't Better, Just Cheaper

Capital and Labor have always had a tense relationship, each one uneasy about the necessity of depending on the other. Unfortunately, Capital’s acquisition of power in the modern Western world has not been accompanied by a commensurate acquisition of confidence. In fact, as Capital’s power has increased, so has its sense of its precarity, becoming so acute as to tip over into paranoia. The moment AI achieved the barest shred of plausibility in its promise to replace Labor, it became an article of faith that Capital feverishly believes in and aggressively acts on.

All of this is to say that we have a case of “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” on steroids; Capital is going to fight like its life depends on it to stay irrationally convinced in their belief that AI can replace Labor.

If you can direct AI and produce more value per $/time spent then a non software engineer directing AI to develop software then you still can produce a lot of value.

This should be the case now for anything that is not a prototype. The job has changed from "writing code" to "shipping software". A technical lead.

As AI gets more intelligent and the tooling around it develops and organizations figure out how to get it access to the data, the level of involvement needed for software engineers will decrease. Since the cost of developing software is plummeting, the amount of software being used is going to expand greatly- that will keep the technical lead positions available longer and also create more opportunities for consultant engagements.

Although someone can use AI to rewrite every software dependency and every paid piece of software, its still not worthwhile for them for most software, especially if the price of the software is low compared to the complexity it hides.

Users of a paid software product still need a human to be responsible for it.

As you develop your skills with AI, you now have the ability to develop your own software products. So there's an opportunity to become a small business owner. You didn't want to do these non-technical roles, but now you can continue to direct AI to automate all the aspects of the business.

Remembering when I lost people to offshoring in the mid 00s. I made the case, with metrics, that the quality was nowhere near as good and the spec overhead was non-trivial.

Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.

This is a lesson I learned a long time ago, no matter how good you are, you could be obsolete and replaceable any day and the companies/corporations don't care. Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.

This post is so sad it makes me wonder how many suicide notes Amodei and Altman had on their doormats, or will in the future.

"These models lack the taste that makes for effective product decision making."

This sentence, whenever I see it, makes me chuckle now.

Surely the leopards won't eat my face. I have taste and you can't get that from a machine.

If the higher-ups don't care about the quality of your code when they compel you to tokenmaxx, what on earth gives you the impression they have a clue about your taste? It's not the AI that is going to fire you, it's that arsehole Brad who you made the grave mistake of beating too comprehensively at Catan.

> I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans

I do.

You don't need any sort of fancy harness as claimed.

All you need to do is type vague ideas into a text box. Then you need some UX taste to pick good concepts.

The building of the software happens trivially now. You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.

What you need next is someone with time and patience to QA test the software and provide feedback for the AI.

I guess ideally the same person, with the UX taste.

Give it a few weeks and the product is done, without the need for a team of 5-10. All it takes is one competent human.

I know that many here vehemently disagree and raise concerns about the viability and maintainability of the software.

I believe not a single one of them has made that experience, these concerns are based on their imagination of what they think would happen. Usually they tell you that they essentially review every line of code in their projects.

All the while Karpathy talking about how only a fraction of people understand the capability of (frontier) AI models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50047422.

As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.

AI is now management's favorite excuse. But how many software engineers are actually losing their jobs due to the rise of AI and not due to the end of zero interest rates?

In other words, would those people have kept their jobs at current interest rates if there was no AI?

I think most wouldn't and leadership would be saying something else.