I don't think the metaphor works because a job is an agreement to exchange labor for money, not a service or a product that you purchase. But for the sake of argument, let's grant it. If a restaurant gives you a peanut butter sandwich instead of a steak, you can go to another restaurant that provides better service. Similarly, if an employee doesn't like the terms set by their employer, they can move to a different company, or start their own company on their own terms.
I'm curious if there are specific examples of the kind of thing that motivated this post. What comments or articles are suggesting that it's not ok to enjoy programming?
I think this is basically the right attitude. The focus should be on what you really value intrinsically, and what changes you want to see in the world. Those determine the goals you set, which determine how you choose what to learn, what to work on, and what tools to use. The metaphor of a "career path" was always questionable, but even more so now. The most important skills are dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity and being able to adapt to new circumstances.
I think you're concluding too much and too little from this statistic at the same time. Just because current AI systems can't automate manual labor doesn't mean that's not coming with a future generation of robotics and ML models. And just because AI performs well on a benchmark doesn't mean it's "taking the jobs". You still need humans to decide what's important to work on and to do the high-level system design and engineering. You might need fewer human employees at one company to do the same amount of work, but this creates an enormous opportunity for teams to do more and for more people to start companies.
I think AI is more effective as a tutor than as a teacher. The student sets the curriculum and does the work up front (e.g. writing up LaTeX notes) then the AI checks it and answers questions with the notes as context. I've had some success with this approach for theoretical physics, but it is clunky and maybe there's a better solution.
What exactly about the parent comment is wrong? Apple has always been good at making hardware that people are willing to pay a premium to use. I can easily imagine them playing a similar role in local LLMs to the role they played in personal computing in the 1980s or smartphones in the 2010s.
I think the idea that a certain percent of jobs should be "manufacturing jobs" or "blue collar" is a fallacy rooted in nostalgia. The problem is that we talk politically about "jobs" like they're a product consumed by workers, which is false. A job is a position in an organization created naturally by market demand. When there's no demand for that job anymore, it goes away and there's no reason to prop it up artificially. It's like saying we need to keep producing fax machines or VHS players because wouldn't it be a shame if we didn't make those anymore.
Is there any evidence that we aren't doing that? For example, U.S. steel manufacturing is down 40% from the peak in 1973, but we still manufacture 80-90 Mt/yr domestically, which is more than enough for national security purposes. That's roughly the same level we had during the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War.
A lot of academics are bad writers, philosophers included. In my opinion, philosophy is actually far from the worst offender. If you read philosophers who are good at writing and actually have something to say (e.g. Bertrand Russell, Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf) they can be short and illuminating.
By the way, there's a big divide between continental (European) and analytic (Anglosphere) philosophy. The Calvin and Hobbes joke is poking fun at postmodern continental philosophy (or literary criticism or gender studies) but most analytic philosophy is not like that.
We did lose manufacturing jobs, but not because we "sold" them, it's because productivity has increased so much. This happens to all mature economies, where services and knowledge work become a larger percent of GDP as productivity, education, and living standards increase. It's a sign of progress that we have more people working in offices and fewer people working in hazardous conditions for low pay.
I think the point would be that it's the private company's responsibility to provide a minimum level of security, even if their job is just for deterrence, documentation, and notifying police in a timely manner. Even if it's mostly "theatre" it still serves a purpose.
Judging by comments on HN over the past month, a lot of people do fall into black/white thinking about AI. I frequently see a kneejerk rejection of the idea that AI could be useful in any context ever. I also see the opposite extreme, refusing to acknowledge any downsides or limitations of AI. It's a case of vocal minorities drowning out the silent majority. I interpreted the parent as referring specifically to the highly vocal, highly online anti-AI crowd, and not just anybody who has targeted criticisms of AI.
I don't think it's clear that it was an analogy at all. It sounded like a forecast of the collapse of civilization. Even if the claim is narrower, what you're saying is a prediction that can be tested against reality. It doesn't seem likely that a project like Linux, with strong leadership and expert eyes on every change, will fail because of a few AI commits. I suspect reality is a lot less catastrophic and a lot more mundane, and we see a small productivity increase while the project continues more or less as usual.
It's not really clear what this response has to do with the parent comment, or even what point you're making. Are you saying that if we use AI in core infrastructure projects that it's going to cause the downfall of civilization?
Technically, I guess you could say that a pull request is not a part of a version control system. GitHub has pull requests, but they're not a primitive in git, they're built on top of branches, commits, and merge/rebase. That said, I would expect a version control system built around agentic workflows to have something like it as a core feature.
Russia lashing out beyond Ukraine is a sign of desperation, not of strength. They've destroyed their economy and have little chance of making more progress in Ukraine, and they know it. The predictions of escalation into WW3 don't seem credible to me.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like the obvious solution is to have human accountability on the API design and tests, not on line-by-line source code. If the human writes an appropriately-scoped API and the code passes human-reviewed tests, then the implementation details don't matter so much (depending, of course, on project-specific requirements around performance and security).
What you're saying is probably correct for some percent of readers, but I'm not sure how big the effect actually is. Personally, I listen to books that I never would have sat down to read in the first place, and the time it takes up isn't competing with reading (doing chores, driving, etc.).
We keep hearing versions of your comment, despite recent breakthroughs in hundreds of open problems that mathematicians have been trying to solve for the past century. Skepticism is good up to a point, but it needs to be amenable to new evidence. You need to keep your mental model up to date with reality.
Don't trust me, experimenting is cheap; get a $20 subscription at Anthropic or OpenAI, download Codex or Claude Code, and try the heaviest model on a project that you estimate will take you around a week to complete without AI. I was a skeptic until I did exactly that and it shifted my perspective by quite a lot.
I suspect a lot of people wouldn't use AI if they had to pay per token at current rates. Yes, it's technically a different discussion, but "just write your own harness" isn't really an answer for the vast majority of us riding on the investor-subsidized subscription plans.
Different benefits will show up at different rates. We don't need to wait for cancer cures and fusion reactors. It's already easier than ever to start a small business and use AI for things that would have been prohibitively expensive or time-consuming before. The technology is transforming how scientific research is done, how engineering is done, etc.
I don't see much evidence in the economic data that AI is disrupting livelihoods. Unemployment has been stable around 4% for a while and productivity growth has been at historically normal rates for the past 5 years. I think a more likely explanation is that AI is increasing uncertainty in some industries, which are seeing higher employee turnover, and many of those people are moving laterally into other jobs where their skills are more likely to be useful.
I don't think anyone in this thread has argued against mitigating harms. The OP was about current capabilities and the perceived lack of benefits for the average person.
I don't think his point is that everyone should be using AI, it's that if you haven't used the agentic tools with a frontier model in the past month or so, you have no frame of reference for the current level of capabilities. Most people only use the chat interface with the free-tier models and based on that experience they're making strong conclusions about where AI is headed (it's still just fancy autocomplete, the whole thing is a scam or a bubble, etc.).
It's not true that everything is more expensive. Nominal prices are higher, but incomes have risen faster than inflation. Purchasing power of the average person in 2026 is higher than it was in 2016.
As for things getting worse, I guess it depends on the domain. In hardware, things have gotten a lot better; my desktop computer is orders of magnitude more powerful than I would have expected 10 or 20 years ago. In software, I do see a lot of bloated software being written, but I don't feel that the software that I personally use has gotten worse.
I agree with you, but those examples are going to fall on deaf ears. The pessimistic mindset will say that smartphones were a terrible invention that's ripping society apart, Uber is an unethical company exploiting workers, etc.
Is it reasonable to expect AI improvements to filter into all of those aspects of life that quickly? It's only in the past month or so that we've started to see major breakthroughs in mathematics. It might take several years for that level of research capability to reach areas like engineering and medicine, at least in a way that affects the average person's quality of life. But at this point it looks very likely that it will happen eventually.
Your pessimistic view doesn't hold up against the data. For a lot of the problems you mentioned, we're in a better place today than almost any other time in history. Of course, things can always be improved and we should never grow complacent or accept injustice. But by most objective metrics, there's never been a better time to be alive.