Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

It's no surprise to me that devs who are accustomed to working on one thing at a time due to fast feedback loops have not learned to adapt to paralellizing their work (something that has been demonized at agile style organizations) and sit and wait on agents and start watching YouTube instead, as the study found (productivity hits were due to the participants looking at fun non-work stuff instead of attempting to parallelize any work).

The study reflects usage of emergent tools without training, and with regressive training on previous generation sequential processes, so I would expect these results. If there is any merit in coordinating multiple agents on slower feedback work, this study would not find it.

They are not great if your tasks are not well defined. Sometimes, they suprise you with great solutions, sometimes they produce mess that just wastes your time and deviates from your mission.

To, me LLMs have been great accelerants when you know what you want, and can define it well. Otherwise, they can waste your time by creating a lot of code slop, that you will have to re-write anyways.

One huge positive sideffect, is that sometimes, when you create a component, (i.e. UI, feature, etc), often you need a setup to test, view controllers, data, which is very boring and annoying / time wasting to deal. LLM can do that for you within seconds (even creating mock data), and since this is mostly test code, it doesn't matter if the code quality is not great, it just matters to get something in the screen to test the real functionality. AI/LLMs have been a huge time savers for this part.

Writing code is a bit crazy, maybe writing tedious test case variations.

But asking an LLM questions about a well established domain you're not expert in is a fantastic use case. And very relevant for making software. In practice, most software requires you to understand the domain your aiming to serve.

I use LLMs every day. They are useful to me (quite useful), but I don’t really use them for coding. I use them as a “fast reference” source, an editor, or as a teacher.

I’ve been at this since 1983, so I’ve weathered a couple of sea changes.

That’s a massive overstatement of what the study found. One big caveat is this: “our developers typically only use Cursor for a few dozen hours before and during the study.” In other words, the 19% slowdown could simply be a learning curve effect.

> one has to be really early in their career to benefit from their usage.

I have decades of experience, and find them very beneficial. But as with any tool, it helps to understand what they are and aren’t good at, and hope to use them effectively. That knowledge comes with experience.

Be careful of dismissing a new tool just because you haven’t figured out how to use it effectively.

Seems about right when trying to tell an LLM what to code. But flipping the script, letting the LLM tell you what to code, productivity gains seem much greater. Like most programmers will tell you: Writing code isn't the part of software development that is the bottleneck.

LLMs are a just a simple tool, if people misuse it it's on them.

1. Converting exported data into a suitable import format based on a known schema 2. Creating syntax highlighting rules for language not natively support in a Typst report

Both situations didn't have an existing solution, and while the outputs were not exactly correct, they only needed minor adjustments.

Any other situation, I'd generally prefer to learn how to do the thing, since understanding how to do something can sometimes be as important as the result.

> The contest between the capitalist and the wage-labourer dates back to the very origin of capital. It raged on throughout the whole manufacturing period. [112] But only since the introduction of machinery has the workman fought against the instrument of labour itself, the material embodiment of capital. He revolts against this particular form of the means of production, as being the material basis of the capitalist mode of production.

> [...]

> The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself. [116] The self-expansion of capital by means of machinery is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of livelihood have been destroyed by that machinery. The whole system of capitalist production is based on the fact that the workman sells his labour-power as a commodity. Division of labour specialises this labour-power, by reducing it to skill in handling a particular tool. So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment.

Karl Marx, The Capital, Book I Chapter 15.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm

why not fire everyone in between the top-most manager and the actual "worker" doing the work, as the report could be generated with the correct level of summary?

(This isn’t unique to IT; this cyclical underinvest-shortage-panic pattern happens in a lot of industries.)

They are just round tripping the cash that was sitting in their accounts through investments that make their way back through advertising channels or compute channels.

Once you see the bigger picture, you'll realise its all just a Fugazi post covid

Traditionally, you wouldn't look at the release of a productivity tool coinciding with a hiring slowdown and assume that it's automation causing the hiring slowdown, your first instinct would be that the sector is not doing well.

If you can find a workable way to put the family in the improvements loop, the AI eulogy could be far better at expressing the family’s sentiment about grandma. (I’m not going to want to go 3 rounds of edits over 2-3 days with a human to get it just right, but going 8 rounds of tweaking/perfecting with an AI in a 20-30 minute sitting is appealing and would give a better result in a lot of cases.)

Under those conditions, how much more am I willing to pay for a human-written eulogy? $0 at most, and probably a negative amount.