Ask HN: Why won't you be replaced by AI?

[atleastoptimal]

AI models are rapidly getting better. The general public still hasn't seen the capabilities of Anthropic's Mythos model, which is already 4 months old at this point.

I've seen many arguments about why certain jobs will always need a "human in the loop", or that certain skills aren't replaceable by LLM's, but I am skeptical of this notion. It seems that if the general intelligence of these models continues to increase, then every job is just a matter of feeding in the right context, designing the right structures for agents to collaborate, having the right verification loops, etc, all of which are difficult to create, but not impossible.

If the improvements in models continue at the pace they have over the next 3 years (reminder, 3 years ago the best model was GPT-4), do you really believe that what you do now will not be done better by a system of LLM-driven agentic harnesses?

[andrei_says_]

Interesting how we’re using passive language here.

LLMs do not replace jobs, managers constantly try to increase profit. Managers and business owners try to replace people’s jobs via automation.

LLM companies actively try to convince managers and business owners that LLMs are capable of replacing humans in white collar jobs.

An LLM/AI will not replace you, or me.

A business owner or manager might. They also might use an LLM to make decisions.

But let’s not use language which anctively obscures the decision makers in this process.

[nicbou]

I am self-employed and AI is taking my job. Or at least its owners are capturing the value of my work now.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai

[andrei_says_]

All about Berlin is a work of love, thank you for creating it.

LLMs stealing content and regurgitating it for money is an illegal extraction of informational value. The fact that our governments have not taken steps to seek balance of rewards for the authors is unforgivable.

[taurath]

Only chumps believe them when they say there’s not a choice. I haven’t seen a single manager take a pay cut for doing a layoff after their decisions.

[ex-aws-dude]

Even if we assume extreme case where coding is only done by 99% LLMs in the future

Who is the best possible person you could hire to operate the LLM?

Who has a good mental model of what its doing underneath and has the best expertise to direct/guide it?

IMO no one is better positioned to use these tools than software engineers

[atleastoptimal]

What if the best "person" to operate an LLM is an LLM itself, or more precisely an agentic loop driven by an LLM? DO you believe this won't be the case?

[ex-aws-dude]

The CEO of the company is not going to be directing the LLM

At minimum you at least need CEO -> product person -> LLM

There can any number of agents/loops after that but someone has to translate the requirements to the LLM and monitor/verify the results.

What I'm saying is in the extreme case the SE evolves to become the product person.

If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-fi

[atleastoptimal]

> The CEO of the company is not going to be directing the LLM Why not? Many CEOs are prompting LLMs and coding agents directly. What happens when the CEO -> LLM interaction is more efficient than CEO -> product person -> LLM?

> If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-fi

Why couldn't a software company be completely automated with sufficiently powerful LLM-run agents? What fundamentally is the barrier, if the models are intelligent enough?

[bdangubic]

https://noqta.tn/en/news/polsia-ai-autonomous-company-30m-fu...

:-)

[ex-aws-dude]

Because then you're just describing AGI not LLMs, which in the short term is obviously not happening

Long term maybe but its not a very interesting conversation to talk about things that far out.

[atleastoptimal]

what are your definitions of “long term” and “short term” with respect to number of years

[mejutoco]

The barrier is who gets legally liable if things go wrong. An llm cannot go to prison.

[Copemaxxing]

"IMO no one is better positioned to use these tools than software engineers"

Yes.1 where there used to be 1000.And they are the cream of the crop.Their time is precious because their skills are equally so.

Are you out coding the LLM's even now, or do they already do what took you weeks, in hours?

While you are scoping out the scene and hesitating whether to tell the boss you will have it in two or three weeks, LLM got it done 5 minutes ago.

Now off to the other massive LLM Super Code Reviewer.

The off to the Mega Brain Ultra talented human coding team of one or a handful for the human touch.

Are you the cream of the crop?

If not, start making contingencies ...or cope harder.

Wake up!

[8b16380d]

My goal is to cope until retirement

[ex-aws-dude]

Lol where can I read this sci-fi book?

But seriously my whole team is using LLM tools and not a single person has been layed off.

Productivity doesn't even feel that much higher in terms of number of features shipped.

I think the reason is Amdahl's Law

Probably 40% of my job is actually writing code, so even if you speed that up by double its still a fraction of a fraction.

[torben-friis]

LLMs will probably get to a point where anyone who provides a well explained, fully detailed account of what they want can get it.

My job is safe.

[atleastoptimal]

Is the implication that currently it is rare to get a well-explained, fully detailed account of what someone wants, necessitating you as a "translator" of poorly specified requirements to features that actually solve the problems people are having?

My question is, is that thing which you are doing, ascertaining the subtle concerns, soliciting requirements, etc. truly out of the range of what an LLM or LLM-guided system could do?

[lelele]

In my experience, yes. AFAICS, LLMs never think out of the box, and are heavily influenced by the way you ask questions.

[mrothroc]

Let me ask you this: would people accept a nuclear power plant whose safety control software is vibe coded? Would a CFO of a public company sign off on financial statements created entirely by AI?

I'm fully into agentic coding, and I'm actively studying agent reliability. I can make all kinds of deterministic guarantees about agentically produced code, but no, I would not accept either of these, or many other examples.

We write code (or we used to, before AI), so we naturally value that. But the code is one small part of a deployed system, and this has always been the case. Numerous studies have shown that writing the code is actually the cheapest part.

All the most important things that you need to know about what makes the code correct, both before it is written and after it is deployed, are not in the specs. They come from walking around and talking to people. Looking them in the eye, sussing out what their real requirements are, and figuring out how to address their concerns with empathy.

Until LLMs can do that, I'm not worried. Let them write the code, that's the least important part.

[atleastoptimal]

> They come from walking around and talking to people. Looking them in the eye, sussing out what their real requirements are, and figuring out how to address their concerns with empathy.

This claim depends on humans remaining the bottleneck to high-leverage information, necessitating a human<->human interfacing role that solicits requirements, ascertains intent, etc.

I don't deny that that is very important and cannot be done by AI now. However, my concern is that AI will be much better at any domain of information processing, and organizations that gate important decisions being made by a network of barriers and information silos dependent on "talking to people" will be outcompeted by largely autonomously run AI agent organizations, which have, by their very design, far higher throughput, auditing, memory, parallelization, etc.

It's kind of like saying that machines could never make fabric because it is impossible for a robot to replicate the complicated motion of a human threading a needle. The industrial revolution was prompted by creating machines which redesigned the entire process to account for machine limitations, and allowed the superior speed and scale of machines to drive higher productivity, delegating humans to a role of maintenance and simply feeding the machines their needed input.

[mrothroc]

Yes, at some point AI will be fully integrated into society so that there are entire autonomous sections. But society doesn't move at the same pace as technology.

The output of agents has to have economic value, and for the foreseeable future this means someone is going to have to buy something.

Right now, it is humans who ultimately make the economic decision. Even if you have fully autonomous agentic organizations selling to each other, there are one or more humans at the end of the of the chain who agree to exchange money for value.

Science Fiction writers have envisioned futures where some currency other than money is used to track value, but so far as I can tell we are nowhere near moving to anything like that.

[nicbou]

I write guides for immigrants moving to Germany. I focus on the undocumented and unpredictable parts of German bureaucracy.

The stuff I document is happening offline behind closed doors. I create tools and leverage my contacts and audience to surface that information.

Then LLMs suck up that information and serves it to users without attribution or consent, and that is destroying the economics of doing my job.

But the job still needs to be done.

[the__alchemist]

Hi! I'm a mammal. I am very complex, and contain multitudes of cells, bacteria etc. Honed to very a very robust system over hundreds of millions of years. Anthropic's Mythos is a token. A pair of words which is scattered through threads on Hacker news.

Please report back when your God can fart.

[byoung2]

Stepping back from LLMs, look at other jobs that could have been fully automated using technology, but haven't. Some jobs, like a grocery cashier could be automated with self check, or waiters could be replaced with phone ordering. We still have humans in these roles, decades after they could have been replaced.

[atleastoptimal]

I think many of the jobs which aren't completely automated, but could be automated based on a explicit reading of their job requirements, are due to many implicit requirements being part of the job.

For cashiers, beyond simply ringing up customers, they serve the function of:

1. Validating IDs

2. Preventing theft

3. Creating a positive atmosphere

4. Helping customers bag groceries

5. Resolving issues/questions about products/the store

For waiters, likewise they have the job of

1. Creating a positive atmosphere

2. Physically bringing food to the table and setting the meal

3. Upselling items, providing recommendations, catering to specific unusual guest needs

etc. Basically all these jobs have a huge soft-skills dependent interface which no technology currently can replicate what humans can do.

I don't think that every job can be trivially automated by a large language model, but any job where the inputs/outputs are entirely via a computer, LLM's are approaching the point where they are equivalently enabled to a human, and there is no "real human body in-person" soft-skills interface.

[byoung2]

When I worked at Disney, there were some jobs where people's entire jobs were compiling reports and following up with various departments. Like taking lists of security vulnerabilities from scans and getting commitment dates to fix them. They would take the data out of one system and put it in a spreadsheet. Then they would reach out and create Jira tickets for the teams responsible and then schedule meetings if necessary to discuss. These roles are definitely at risk.

[adampunk]

Even in the US which lags behind in this area it would be obscene to claim that grocery cashiers aren't being actively replaced. That's just not connected to reality. Most grocery stores I've been in have essentially 1 open lane with a human where there used to be a half dozen. You might as well say that airline ticket agents haven't been replaced.

[byoung2]

My exact wording was "fully automated". Yes actively replaced, but cashiers have not been fully automated. That would mean no more cashiers at any grocery store, convenience store, because all they have are self checkout machines. That has not happened except at Amazon Go, and they closed all those stores. So my claim is accurate.

[qsera]

Because I am a human and I have motivation, incentive to not mess up.

[sairali123]

im a bug bounty hunter and ai is taking over my job i think within 5 years there will be no manual hacking and i will meet you gyz at a bar or at a masjid

[erminpour]

"AI models are rapidly getting better." How many times are we going to keep hearing this? Give the horse the dang carrot!

I'm so tired of hearing about AI.

[atleastoptimal]

>How many times are we going to keep hearing this?

Until it's no longer true

[balefulboy]

I still don't know why people are saying this. I don't really code but from what I've heard on here the models haven't improved since Opus 4.5

[andrei_says_]

AI models are rapidly getting better… at creating an unstoppable tide of hype about AI models rapidly getting better.

[comparedge]

ppl said same thing about cloud, smartphones, n the internet dude the signal is usually hidden inside the hype

[jlengrand]

Depends a lot on how expensive they are to run

[cyanydeez]

programming is the side car to a professional license which is domain knowledge + active ethically required professional license.

[blinkbat]

No. The only defense is societal.

[comparedge]

a single LLM isn't the threat, a thousand coordinated ones are

[andsoitis]

... because I'm not defined solely by "intelligence".

[atleastoptimal]

What is your job?

[pbkompasz]

TC?