No one is confused by this, though. “Work sucks” might be the most universally agreed to statement. It seems like you take talk of jobs too literally when most of the time people are excited not to starve, not excited to have their job.
Believe it or not, many people genuinely don't see an alternative to having a job. So when AI threatens jobs, rather than call for measures to ensure people can live without jobs, they call for jobs to be protected.
Your experiences must be much different from mine.
Three years ago, AI was barely able to provide sort-of reliable command completion.
Two years ago, it could extrapolate a single function from a docstring - but the docstring had to be so verbose that it wasn't practical to use in that way.
A year ago, I was tinkering with Devin to try to find a way to get it to reliably implement small, isolated features from verbose Jira tickets.
Six months ago, I started using AI to generate the majority of my code output. Most of my time was spent reviewing, and I was ecstatic to reach ~2x output because I could run the next task while reviewing the last.
Now, at work I'm managing a half dozen Claude Code instances, Devin sessions, and orchestrating a review loop between Claude, Devin, and CodeRabbit. It's not uncommon for me to be working on four or more discrete features at once. My output is approximately 15x my pre-AI baseline - and I've not sat down and written a line of code directly in six months.
At home I'm managing a Hermes agent that can spin up a whole fleet of purpose-tuned agents for whatever purpose I'd like. I've implemented spec-driven development a'la Acai, and extended it to the point that my agent creates specs from text or voice conversation, I review them, and it handles implementation end-to-end. The code itself is an almost disposable artifact - useful primarily to ensure no regressions have been introduced between rounds.
... I simply don't understand how you can assert that "it's been basically the same for 3 years". It absolutely has not.
It sounds like our experiences are different. My software work isn’t on products where code can be disposable, since it affects people’s lives in material ways. I’m not sure why you’re launching fleets of agents at home, either.
Cmon - cursor has been out for like 3.5 years at this point. AI was still in its infancy but it was definitely able to complete tasks, albeit smaller ones.
Not disputing the overall trajectory, yeah it’s gotten better. But it was definitely capable of more than just command completion 3 years ago.
I reach for it more frequently. But personally, it’s at the point of diminishing returns for my work. It’s capable enough now to handle most of the things I want to throw at it, sometimes it’s wrong, sometimes it’s right.
I’m not doing cutting edge deep tech work - and I also don’t have the motivation (or salary increase) to be 15X more productive, if that’s even measurable. We are so busy because the CEO hears these “15X” statements and then the pressure is on to match or exceed that, and I’m not playing that game.
This proposition boils down to a belief that there are 3 billion people who are interested in AI for free but aren’t currently paying $20, but who would pay $20 if that was the price.
The global median income is around $12k, so this would mean that there’s roughly be a global budget of 0.5% of everyone’s annual income going to chatbots.
If you’re off by half, the price doubles for each person.
I think you’d make a lot of money betting against the existence of 3 billion ghost customers
IRDC if the LLMs "understand" anything. They are being used here to produce outputs that are desirable. (Neglecting the real possibility that this "survey" is complete BS, as noted elsewhere.)
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