Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ReptileMan 906 days ago
Just talked with a friend from VMWare they are to be laid off soon after the acquisition. It went like this - they prohibited usage of chatgpt, but we continue to use it at my team - because the AI won't take my job, but the programmer using AI will do.

It is a tremendous force multiplier. It will take time to run trough organization - but if you are not the steamroller you will be the asphalt. And it will destroy a lot of the white collar bullshit jobs.
3 comments
spaceman_2020 906 days ago
This is what it is: a massive force multiplier. It speeds things up like nothing before it. Cookie cutter code that you would have to otherwise write can be offloaded to AI flawlessly. Boring stuff like writing unit tests is easily AI’s domain.

Among small startups and entrepreneurs, it can also increase speed of execution. Instead of handing off instructions to a designer (IF you have one already - otherwise you have to find one) and waiting for the results, you can tinker around with prompts and get what you want within hours. More than the cost, it eliminates another source of friction.

link
skepticATX 906 days ago
> but the programmer using AI will do.

Where exactly will these magical programmers come from, if not the existing pool? That is the fundamental flaw with this argument - there are not tens of thousands of people with not enough skill to be currently employed, but enough skill to out-compete current programmers as long as they can use GenAI.

If these tools get orders of magnitude more powerful then maybe we can have a real discussion about the number of programming jobs diminishing, but that hasn't been the case yet.

The reality is that for a typical software developer, you're looking at a single digit increase in productivity if you use Copilot. ChatGPT provides even less productivity increase right now.

link
baby_souffle 906 days ago
Sure , existing pool.

But if I and co pilot can do double the work per unit time compared to just me, suddenly the pool is twice as large as it needs to be.

Am I 2x productive? Depends on what I’m doing. But at almost no point since adopting copilot have I become 0 percent more productive so the pool is somewhere between 1 and 50 percent bigger than needed.

link
pylua 906 days ago
The U.S. tax base may implode if that is the case.
link