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Comment by abustamam | Hacker News Reader

I think you're right that it is fear. But it's kind of a self fulfilling fear. Teams are requiring employees to use AI, probably because of this fear. Maybe it isn't directly taking my job, but it is necessary for me to use Ai to keep my job.

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I agree that it's self-fulfilling. I just feel that it's being used more as a tool for compliance than for direct productivity.

That certainly could be true for some teams. Personally I think AI has directly improved my productivity. There's certainly sharp edges and we definitely shot ourselves in the foot more than a few times in ways we wouldn't have without AI, but by and large we've built an internal app where no human wrote a single line of code. I don't think we'd have been able to build it in 2 months without AI. We could have gone faster but the bottleneck was product and user testing, not code.

You can always hang your shingle and work for clients directly.

Sure, in the same way I can always quit being an engineer and become a farmer. It can work for some, but not everyone.

FWIW I do client work on the side. Full time client work has always been more draining than just having a regular job IME. Maybe I just can't find the right clients, but that's not something I have to worry about when I work for a company.

I wasn’t talking to everyone I was talking to you. And becoming a contractor is a lot more viable than becoming a farmer.

Client work is hard, but you have to decide if the freedom to work the way you want is worth it.

Oh. Well personally I don't mind using AI, and I use AI when I do client work as well (they know and some clients who use AI apps like lovable expect it).

But I know not everyone is in my shoes which is where my comment is coming from.

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