I love it that there's a "Read AI-generated summary" button on their post about their new AI.
I can only expect that the next step is something like "Have your AI read our AI's auto-generated summary", and so forth until we are all the way at Douglas Adams's Electric Monk:
> The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself; video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself. Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
There was another comic where one worker uses AI to turn their prompt in to a verbose email, then on the receiver side they use AI to turn the verbose email in to a short summary.
This one isn't a joke. 90% of documents produced at work are now AI generated, and nobody can keep up with the volume so they just summarise them with AI.
I'm afraid they will finish "The Salmon of Doubt" with AI and sell it to the future generations with a very small disclaimer, stating it's inspired by Douglas Adams.
The possibility was already a topic in the series "Mozart in the jungle" where they made a robot which supposedly finished the Requiem piece by Mozart.
Not sure what you mean here, but the only real jobs at risk from AI right now are middle/upper management.
Not a single engineer has ever been laid off because of AI. Any company claiming this is the case is trying to cover up bad decisions.
"Were automating with AI" sounds better to investors than "We over hired and now need to downsize" or "We made some bad market bets, now need to free up cash flow"
> Not sure what you mean here, but the only real jobs at risk from AI right now are middle/upper management.
> Not a single engineer has ever been laid off because of AI. Any company claiming this is the case is trying to cover up bad decisions.
I don't suppose these assertions are based on anything. If "AI" reduces the amount of time an engineer spends writing crud, boilerplate, test cases, random scripts, etc., and they have 5% more time to do other things, then all else being equal a project can be done with 5% fewer engineers.
Does AI result in greater productivity for engineers, and does greater productivity per person mean demand can be satisfied with fewer people?
> Does AI result in greater productivity for engineers, and does greater productivity per person mean demand can be satisfied with fewer people?
Between the disagreements regarding performance metrics, the fact that AI will happily increase its own scope of work as well as facilitate increasing any task, sprint, or projects scope of work, and Jevons Paradox, the world may never know the answer to either of these questions.
It does improve productivity, just like a good IDE. But engineers didn't get replaced by IDEs and they haven't yet been replaced by AI.
By the time its good enough to replace actual engineers, any job done in front of a computer will be at risk. I'm hoping that will happen at the same time as AI embodiment in robots, then every job will be automated, not just computer based ones.
Your assertion was not that "an engineer has never been replaced by AI". It is that no engineer has been laid off because of AI.
You agree AI improves engineer productivity. So last remaining question is, does greater productivity mean that fewer people are required to satisfy a given demand?
The answer is yes of course. So at this point, supporting the assertion requires handwaving about shortages and induced demand and demand for engineers to develop and support AI and so on. Which are all reasonable, but it should become pretty apparent that you can't be confident in an assertion like that. I would say it's pretty likely that AI has resulted in engineers being laid off in specific instances if not the net numbers.
That's because of overhiring and other non-ai related reasons (i.e. Higher interest rates means less VC funding available).
In reality, getting AI to do actual human work, as of the moment, takes much more effort and cost than you get back in cost savings. These companies will claim they are using AI, even if its just a few engineers using Windsurf.
The companies claim AI is the reason they laid off engineers to make it look like they're innovating, not downsizing, which makes them look better in the eyes of investors and shareholders.
in my own experience, using Claude gives me about 5-10% productivity increase because it's really good at writing boiler code or surgically modifying some code I didn't write.
But not because of AI, they only use that as pretext for normal layoffs. Sometimes they also use it to hire cheaper workers fresh from school or a cheaper country, so just replacing expensive seniors.
From what I'm seeing, it's become more and more difficult for fresh grads to get hired over the last year. If anything, I see that the preference for experienced devs is now even stronger. If you have any evidence to the contrary, I'd appreciate it.
The Shopify and Cloudflare intern thing is interesting: both companies have committed to hiring way more interns, on the basis that an intern armed with AI-assistance can get productive way faster (plus they are more likely to be "AI-native" than older engineers.)
I can only expect that the next step is something like "Have your AI read our AI's auto-generated summary", and so forth until we are all the way at Douglas Adams's Electric Monk:
> The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself; video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself. Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
- from "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"