[tunesmith]

I think it doesn't prove much that it hasn't happened yet. Companies might just be moving slower than you think, and are still planning on doing it. And, in many corners, "don't manually write code" is being joined by "don't manually read code" as an attractive principle.

[roughly]

> in many corners, "don't manually write code" is being joined by "don't manually read code" as an attractive principle.

I'm pretty sure I know where the failure case on that one is. The reason we're still manually reading code is to catch the failures and edge cases that the LLM fails to; not reading the code doesn't magically make the code good.

[goatlover]

The Yale economist Pascual Restrepo, who is well regarded researcher in automation, doesn't think it will happen for most jobs.

https://fortune.com/2026/04/04/ai-jobs-future-not-important-...

[throwaway27448]

Sure but there's also little reason to think we'll be able to replace xyz role entirely with software next month, or year, or decade. It's easy to disprove claims about the future; it's quite difficult to make believable ones.

[Imustaskforhelp]

you might have to think the way through though and these companies are already being caught up with the huge token costs at the same time.

There was an interesting comment during the cloudflare layoffs (partially driven by the fact that the company was bleeding money also because of its token costs from one estimate being 5* million$ per month (I feel so silly that I accidentally had written/meant 500 and had kentonv do the stats on that part :-( Sorry kentonv!), don't quote me on that though)

The part was that there is only an enough marketshare in the first place. Cloudflare was doing some crazy experiments like operating matrix on cf workers and wordpress alternative and fediverse and so much stuff.

So they basically spent 10x the amount of token (and the token costs) and I imagine as such the reading code of that part was getting sidelined as the attractive principle you are talking about.

Yet the market can't bring an actual demand 10x times though. These are things which nudge a user slightly but the actual impact on user growth isn't 10x or even justifiable within some cases given the costs.

Yet at the same time driving up the people who actually know their stuff and firing them because of the token costs. The people who have actually mitigated some of the largest DDOS attacks and are the backbone behind cf cash-cow (enterprise payments) is the fact that they have had the experience and entreprise knowledge about these things, yet they are literally removing that by firing workers and oh replacing them with interns. (They got 1111 interns and fired 1100 employees or something iirc)

It's weird and I have talked to some people about it but there is a disconnect between what management is hearing about AI and the ground reality of things. Reviewing code is becoming the bottleneck but if you don't review code and are shipping things to production, then you can get fired as I have talked about in some of my other comments sharing a story about how a guy shipped code to prod and the response was "but claude generated it" and got fired because the company basically said, look we basically don't care if it was generated by claude but the responsibility was on you to check it (review) and because the commit was done by you, you are gonna be treated responsible and he got fired from his job.

Yet this was the same company which was asking its employee to play around with claude at their free time, the manager of the employee I talked to being the most automatable person, the company employees working till 1 AM because they were saying to management that things were fine but they were being burried under the technical debt,that employee that I talked to got honest with the management and told reality and the management treated them as a person who didn't know AI or were the odd one out.

Sooo I don't know actually to be honest.

TLDR: reviewing code is being treated as the bottleneck but it is also the only thing stopping your company from imploding under technical debt, actual debt because of token costs etc. I remain skeptical if we should treat it as a bottleneck or as a safeguard mechanism. After all, if nobody's in the loop then whose responsible?

Reviewing code isn't a bottleneck so much so its a safeguard mechanism in my opinion. Also things differ in corporate land and hobby land and I would prefer corporate to not be using the practices that I do with how I do things for fun in my hobby time.

Side note: Even more so, I think I am a LiteLLM security working group maintainer and I have seen first hand on how much damage it can do in supply chain even when things were done right from LiteLLM side and the fault was within the side of ironically a security product that they used called Trivy.

There are things which you can do to be better prone to supply chain attacks in general but there is no full bullet proof way of doing so and in such.

Caution (should) be taken when dealing with corporate systems and as such I sweat a little when anyone suggests code review to be completely eliminated. Things (are/can be) different in hobby/prototyping world though.

[kentonv]

> (partially driven by the fact that the company was bleeding money also because of its token costs from one estimate being 500 million$ per month, don't quote me on that though)

Cloudflare had 5000 employees (pre-layoff), so you are suggesting that every single one of them (eng, HR, legal, finance, receptionists) was using $100k tokens per month (that's $1.2M annualized, per employee), for a total of 3x gross revenue going to AI spend.

Let's imagine that this isn't absurd on its face. If true, then you'd expect Cloudflare's Q1 earnings to show a massive, massive net loss. In fact Cloudflare was cash flow positive in Q1.

The rest of your post is more qualitative, so harder to disprove, but from what I can tell, it seems equally made up.

(I work at Cloudflare.)

[Imustaskforhelp]

Sorry kentonv! , I apologize :-(

I had mistakenly written 500 million when it was around 5 million dollars so I messed up its 5 million per month[See Source], not 500 million. I wish to have a genuine discussion while you are here though because i can be wrong, I usually am and I would love to have a good faith discussion, thanks in advance!

I will try to back up a lot of it with hackernews comments from the thread when cloudflare layoffs were suggested so that I don't accidentally mis-represent anything and My suggestion wasn't a critique of cloudflare and please don't take it as such. The question was simply of the AI token costs associated.

and this was the comment that I was referencing to[0] which states the following:

> There was an recent article on X with an interesting take - it could be that companies are doing layoffs not because AI is making them more productive but because it hasn't. Their costs have gone up paying for expensive AI but haven't seen any revenue benefits to offset it.

An child comment of it talks about the coinbase layoffs which had happened around the same time[1]:

> (..) In 2023, their "Technology and Development" line item shows $1.32bn going out, and by 2025 it'd ballooned to $1.67bn. This is despite headcount actually contracting by almost a thousand people between those two statements.

Regarding this: > Let's imagine that this isn't absurd on its face. If true, then you'd expect Cloudflare's Q1 earnings to show a massive, massive net loss. In fact Cloudflare was cash flow positive in Q1.

We might be forgetting that (from my understanding, Cloudflare has never had profits) (positive annual net income) with an astronomically large P/E ratio.

There was a comment which I had read which talks about this in more detail (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060393):

> > The fact so many orgs opt for immediate greed over long-term growth really is its own canary that leadership and governance both has failed the marshmallow test.

> Why do you think it's greed? The company's stock is down and they just missed expectations on their last earnings report (unheard of in big tech in the last 2 years).

> It seems more like a traditional layoff scenario

Another comment [from the Layoff thread][2] which might summarize some things:

"Their AI costs have increased 600% but this hasn't translated into actual revenue. Also they are probably projecting AI costs to keep growing. They've done the math and at some point it is going to affect their bottom line. Reducing or limiting AI usage would be inconceivable given Cloudflare itself has invested on AI and is selling AI services. Instead they've opted for reducing about 20% of their head count."

I genuinely wish if we can have a good faith discussion about it. I appreciate cloudflare as a product myself and actively use cf tunnels, which is why I care about it as well and I wish to have a good faith discussion about it hopefully as well :-D

> The rest of your post is more qualitative, so harder to disprove, but from what I can tell, it seems equally made up.

I can be wrong, I usually am and if I am wrong, I wish to learn from it and I wish to improve as a person too!

I have learnt from this discussion (up until now) that I should mostly try to provide sources whenever talking on a public place/ on the internet so that I can be more accurate and I sincerely wish to have a good faith discussion once again, thanks and have a good day @kentonv :-D

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055149

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055413

[2]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48056124

[Source]: https://lowendtalk.com/post/quote/217055/Comment_4789235