That's how the whole industry feels now. The only investment money is flowing into AI, and so companies with any tech presence are touting their AI whatevers at every possible moment (including during layoffs) just to get some capital. Without that, I wonder if we'd be seeing even harsher layoffs than we already are.
That's so not true. Of the 23 companies we reviewed last year maybe 3 had significant AI in their workflow, the rest were just solid businesses delivering stuff that people actually need. I have no doubt that that proportion will grow significantly, and that this growth will probably happen this year but to suggest that outside of AI there is no investment is just not compatible with real world observations.
Another trend - and this surprised us - is a much stronger presence of really hard tech and associated industries and finally - for obvious reasons, so not really surprising - more parties active in defense.
It's also why so much of AI is targeting software, specifically SAAS. A SaaS company with ~0 headcount driven by AI is basically 100% profit margin. A truly perfect conception of capitalism.
Meanwhile I think AI actually has a decent shot at "curing" cancer. AI-assisted radiology means screening could be come significantly cheaper, happen a lot more often, and catch cancers very early, which is extremely important as everyone knows to surviving it. The cure for cancer might actually just involve much earlier detection. But pfft what are the profit margins on _that_?
What I don't know is, say the industry normalizes to roughly what people make in other engineering fields. Then does everything else normalize around that? i.e. does cost of living go down proportionally in SF and Seattle? Or does all the tech money get further sucked up and consolidated into VC pockets and parked in vacant houses, while we and our trite "cancer research" and such get shepherded off to Doobersville?
For a brief time with big tech, it seemed like intellectual prowess could allow you to jump the social strata. But that arrangement need not exist. It’s perfectly possible, indeed likely that we will revert to the old aristocratic ways. The old boys’s network ways.
Re cancer: I wonder how significant is the cost of reading the results vs. the logistics of actually running the test
The best part? Bots don't get cancer, so that problem is solved too!
When you remember that profit is the measure of unrealized benefit, and look at how profitable capitalists have become, its not clear if, approximately speaking, anyone actually has the "money" to buy any goods now.
In other words, I am not sure this matters. Big business is already effectively working for free, with no realistic way to ever actually derive the benefit that has been promised to it. In theory those promises could be called, but what are the people going to give back in return?
We have so much wealth that wealth accumulation itself has become a type of positional good as opposed to the utility of the wealth.
When people in the developed world talk about the economy they are largely talking about their prestige and social standing as opposed to their level of warmth and hunger. Unfortunately, we haven't separated these ideas philosophically so it leads to all kinds of nonsense thinking when it comes to "the economy".
I am sure it is equally obvious that if I take your promise to give back in kind later when I give you my sandwich, but never collect on it, that I ultimately gave you my sandwich for free.
If you keep collecting more and more IOUs from the people you trade your goods with, realistically you are never going to be able to convert those IOUs into something real. Which is something that the capitalists already contend with. Apple, for example, has umpteen billions of dollars worth of promises that they have no idea how to collect on. In theory they can, but in practice it is never going to happen. What don't they already have? Like when I offered you my sandwich, that is many billions of dollars worth of value that they have given away for free.
Given that Apple, to continue to use it as an example, have been quite happy effectively giving away many billions of dollars worth of value, why not trillions? Is it really going to matter? Money seems like something that matters to peons like us because we need to clear the debt to make sure we are well fed and kept warm, but for capitalists operating at scales that are hard for us to fathom, they are already giving stuff away for free. If they no longer have the cost of labor, they can give even more stuff away for free. Who — from their perspective — cares?
Even if they never spend that wealth on luxury, they use it to direct the flow of human effort and raw materials. Giving it away for free would mean surrendering their remote control over global resources. At this scale, it is not about wanting more stuff. It is about the ability to organize the world. Whether those most efficient at accumulating capital should hold such concentrated power remains the central tension between growth and equality.
This is the way. I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver the mail once all the jobs are gone.
If/when AI wipes out the white collar "knowledge worker" jobs who is going to be able to afford going to the coffee shop?
Those are even easier to automate or have already been most of the way.
Who says I don't? What I do has nothing to do with the market.
> Why even speak at all on this subject that you are not familiar with?
You're not familiar with it. Living in your own world is not being familiar. The market is huge. Again what you and I do is NOT the market.
> Not every thought that enters your mind needs to be written out.
Exactly. I can go to coffee shops but still acknowledge other things exist. Unlike your reply.
Please keep us posted. I'm thinking of becoming a small time farmer/zoo keeper.
You can also use cursor which is essentially vs code with these features baked in.
Its hard (or at least in my experience) to find people to change career - more so in their mid-thirties. I'm the opposite -- software developer career, now in mid 30s, and the AI crap gets me thinking about backup plans career-wise.
If a task before would take you ten hours to think through the thing, translate that into an implementation approach, implement it, and test it, and at the end of the ten hours you're 100% there and you've got a good implementation which you understand and can explain to colleagues in detail later if needed. Your code was written by a human expert with intention, and you reviewed it as you wrote it and as you planned the work out.
With an LLM, you spend the same amount of time figuring out what you're going to do, plus more time writing detailed prompts and making the requisite files and context available for the LLM, then you press a button and tada, five minutes later you have a whole bunch of code. And it sorta seems to work. This gives you a big burst of dopamine due to the randomness of the result. So now, with your dopamine levels high and your work seemingly basically done, your brain registers that work as having been done in those five minutes.
But you now (if you're doing work people are willing to pay you for), you probably have to actually verify that it didn't break things or cause huge security holes, and clean up the redundant code and other exceedingly verbose garbage it generated. This is not the same process as verifying your own code. First, LLM output is meant to look as correct as possible, and it will do some REALLY incorrect things that no sane person would do that are not easy to spot in the same way you'd spot them if it were human-written. You also don't really know what all of this shit is - it almost always has a ton of redundant code, or just exceedingly verbose nonsense that ends up being technical debt and more tokens in the context for the next session. So now you have to carefully review it. You have to test things you wouldn't have had to test, with much more care, and you have to look for things that are hard to spot, like redundant code or regressions with other features it shouldn't have touched. And you have to actually make sure it did what you told it to, because sometimes it says it did, and it just didn't. This is a whole process. You're far from done here, and this (to me at least) can only be done by a professional. It's not hard - it's tedious and boring, but it does require your learned expertise.
Sadly people do not care about redundant and verbose code. If that was a concern, we wouldn't have 100+mb of apps, nor 5mb web app bundles. Multibillion b2b apps shipping a 10mb json file just for searching emojis and no one blinks an eye.
...
3. profit
4. bro down
Is a webshop a CRUD app? Is an employee shift tracking site? I could go on, but I feel 'CRUD' app is about as meaningful a moniker as 'desktop app'
- You rarely write loops at work
- Every performance issue is either too many trips to the database or to some server
- You can write O(n^n) functions and nobody will ever notice
- The hardest technical problem anyone can remember was an N+1 query and it stuck around for like a year before enough people complained and you added an index
- You don't really ever have to make difficult engineering decisions, but if you do, you can make the wrong one most of the time and it'll be fine
- Nobody in the shop could explain: lock convoying, GC pauses, noisy neighbors, cache eviction cascades, one hot shard, correlating traces with scheduler behavior, connection pool saturation, thread starvation, backpressure propagation across multiple services, etc
I spent a few years in shops like this, if this is you, you must fight the urge to get comfortable because the vibe coders are coming for you.
The thing a lot of people who haven't lived it don't seem to recognize is that enterprise software is usually buggy and brittle, and that's both expected and accepted because most IT organizations have never paid for top technical talent. If you're creating apps for back office use, or even supply chain and sometimes customer facing stuff, frequently 95% availability is good enough, and things that only work about 90-95% of the time without bugs is also good enough. There's such an ingrained mentality in big business that "internal tools suck" that even if AI-generated tools also suck similarly it's still going to be good enough for most use cases.
It's important for readers in a place like HN to realize that the majority of software in the world is not created in our tech bubble, and most apps only have an audience ranging from dozens to several thousands of users.
So you’ll need some kind of humanistic hook if you want to get reliable customers
Expect there will be two worlds that are extremely different: the machine world of efficiency that most people live inside as gears of machine capitalism
The biological world where there’s no efficiencies and it’s primarily hunter gatherers with mystical rituals
The latter one is only barely still the majority worldwide (only 25-30% of humans aren’t on the internet)