Summarizer

I use agentic tools daily and SOTA models have certainly improved a lot in the last year. But still in a linear, "they don't light my repo on fire as often when they get a confusing compiler error" kind of way, not a "I would now trust Opus 4.6 to respond to every work email and hands-off manage my banking and investment portfolio" kind of way. They're still afflicted by the same fundamental problems that hold LLMs back from being a truly autonomous "drop-in human replacement" that would enable an entire new world of use cases. And finally live up to the hype/dreams many of us couldn't help but feeling was right around in the corner circa 2022/3 when things really started taking off.

I agree completely. I think we're in alignment with Elon Musk who says that AI will bypass coding entirely and create the binary directly. It's going to be an exciting year.

> I feel like most of human endeavor will soon be just about trying to continuously show that AI's don't have AGI. I think you overestimate how much your average person-on-the-street cares about LLM benchmarks. They already treat ChatGPT or whichever as generally intelligent (including to their own detriment), are frustrated about their social media feeds filling up with slop and, maybe, if they're white-collar, worry about their jobs disappearing due to AI. Apart from a tiny minority in some specific field, people already know themselves to be less intelligent along any measurable axis than someone somewhere.

Soon they can drop the bioweapon to welcome our replacement.

Yes, LLMs have become extremely good at coding (not software engineer though). But try using them for anything original that cannot be adapted from GitHub and Stack Overflow. I haven't seen much improvement at all at such tasks.

Actually faster and worse is a very common characterization of a LOT of automation.

That's true. The problem is that if the automation breaks at any point, the entire system fails. And programming automations are extremely sensitive to minor errors (i.e. a missing semicolon). AI does have an interesting feature though, it tends to self-healing in a way, when given tools access and a feedback loop. The only problem is that self-healing can incorrectly heal errors, then the final reault will be wrong in hard-to-detect ways. So the more wuch hidden bugs there are, the nore unexpectedly the automations will perform. I still don't trust current AI for any tasks more than data parsing/classification/translation and very strict tool usage. I don't beleive in the full-assistant/clawdbot usage safety and reliability at this time (it might be good enough but the end of the year, but then the SWE bench should be at 100%).

Its really weird how you all are begging to be replaced by llms, you think if agentic workflows get good enough you're going to keep your job? Or not have your salary reduced by 50%? If Agents get good enough it's not going to build some profitable startup for you (or whatever people think they're doing with the llm slot machines) because that implies that anyone else with access to that agent can just copy you, its what they're designed to do... launder IP/Copyright. Its weird to see people get excited for this technology. None of this good. We are simply going to have our workforces replaced by assets owned by Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. We'll all be fighting for the same barista jobs, or miserable factory jobs. Take note on how all these CEOs are trying to make it sound cool to "go to trade school" or how we need "strong American workers to work in factories".

> Its really weird how you all are begging to be replaced by llms, you think if agentic workflows get good enough you're going to keep your job? Or not have your salary reduced by 50%? The computer industry (including SW) has been in the business of replacing jobs for decades - since the 70's. It's only fitting that SW engineers finally become the target.

Is that really true? Software created an incredible amount of new types of jobs and markets.

The most gullible workforce ever (FOSS), but seeing Youtube, half the planet is braindead for handing over their craft on a platter for mere dollars.

I think a lot of people assume they will become highly paid Agent orchestrators or some such. I don't think anyone really knows where things are heading.

Why would someone get paid well for this skill? Its not valuable at all.

Highly valuable right now with how high leverage it can make a good engineer. Who knows for how long.

Most folks don't seem to think that far down the line, or they haven't caught on to the reality that the people who actually make decisions will make the obvious kind of decisions (ex: fire the humans, cut the pay, etc) that they already make.

they think they're going to be the person making that decision but forgot there's likely someone above them making exactly the same one about them

I agree with you and have similar thoughts (maybe, unfortunately for me). I personally know people who outsource not just their work, but also their life to LLMs, and reading their exciting comments makes me feel a mix of cringe, fomo and dread. But what is the engame for me and you likes, when we finally would be evicted from our own craft? Stash money while we still can, watching 'world crash and burn', and then go and try to ascend in some other, not yet automated craft?

Yeah, that's a good question that I can't stop thinking about. I don't really enjoy much else other than building software, its genuinely my favorite thing to do. Maybe there will be a world where we aren't completely replaced, we have handmade clothes still after all that are highly coveted. I just worry its going to uproot more than just software engineering, theoretically it shouldn't be hard to replace all low hanging fruit in the realm of anything that deals with computer I/O. Previous generations of automation have created new opportunities for humans, but this seems mostly just as a means of replacement. The advent of mass transportation/vehicles created machines who needed mechanics (and eventually software), I don't see that happening in this new paradigm. I don't think that's going to make society very pleasant if everyone's fighting over the few remaining ways to make livelihood. People need to work to eat. I certainly don't see the capitalist class giving everyone UBI and letting us garden or paint for the rest of our lives. I worry we're likely going to end up in trenches or purged through some other means.

If you want to know where it's headed, look at factory workers 40 years ago. Lots of people still work at factories today, they just aren't in the same places they were 40 years ago and now req an entirely different skill set. The largest ongoing expense of every company is labor and software devs are some of the highest paid labor on the planet. AI will eventually drive down wages for this class of workers most likely by shipping these jobs to people in other countries where labor is much cheaper. Just like factory work did. Enjoy the good times while they last (or get a job at an AI company).

I’m someone who’d like to deploy a lot more workers than I want to manage. Put another way, I’m on the capital side of the conversation. The good news for labor that has experience and creativity is that it just started costing 1/100,000 what it used to to get on that side of the equation.

If LLMs truly cause widespread replacement of labor, you’re screwed just as much as anyone else. If we hit say 40% unemployment do you think people will care you own your home or not? Do you think people will care you have currency or not? The best case outcome will be universal income and a pseudo utopia where everyone does ok. The “bad” scenario is widespread war. I am one of the “haves” and am not looking forward to the instability this may bring. Literally no one should.

> I am one of the “haves” and am not looking forward to the instability this may bring. Literally no one should. these people always forget capitalism is permitted to exist by consent of the people if there's 40% unemployment it won't continue to exist, regardless of what the TV/tiktok/chatgpt says

Well he also thinks $10.00 in LLM tokens is equivalent to a $1mm labor budget. These are the same people who were grifting during the NFTs days, claiming they were the future of art.

lmao, you are an idealistic moron. If llms can replace labor at 1/100k of the cost (lmfao) why are you looking to "deploy" more workers? So are you trying to say if I have $100.00 in tokens I have the equivalent of $10mm in labor potential.... What kind of statement is this? This is truly the dumbest statement I've ever seen on this site for too many reasons to list. You people sound like NFT people in 2021 telling people that they're creating and redefining art. Oh look [email protected] is a "web3" guy. Its all the same grifters from the NFT days behaving the same way.

But the head honchos on ted.com said AI will create more jobs.

You don't hate AI, you hate capitalism. All the problems you have listed are not AI issues, its this crappy system where efficiency gains always end up with the capital owners.

AI will kill SaaS moats and thus revenue. Anyone can build new SaaS quickly. Lots of competition will lead to marginal profits. AI will kill advertising. Whatever sits at the top "pane of glass" will be able to filter ads out. Personal agents and bots will filter ads out. AI will kill social media. The internet will fill with spam. AI models will become commodity. Unless singularity, no frontier model will stay in the lead. There's competition from all angles. They're easy to build, just capital intensive (though this is only because of speed). All this leaves is infrastructure.

Not following some of the jumps here. Advertising, how will they kill ads any better than the current cat and mouse games with ad blockers? Social Media, how will they kill social media? Probably 80% of the LinkedIn posts are touched by AI (lots of people spend time crafting them, so even if AI doesn't write the whole thing you know they ran the long ones through one) but I'm still reading (ok maybe skimming) the posts.

> Advertising, how will they kill ads any better than the current cat and mouse games with ad blockers? The Ad Blocker cat and mouse game relies on human-written metaheuristics and rules. It's annoying for humans to keep up. It's difficult to install. Agents/Bots or super slim detection models will easily be able to train on ads and nuke them whatever form they come in: javascript, inline DOM, text content, video content. Train an anti-Ad model and it will cleanse the web of ads. You just need a place to run it from the top. You wouldn't even have to embed this into a browser. It could run in memory with permissions to overwrite the memory of other applications. > Social Media, how will they kill social media? MoltClawd was only the beginning. Soon the signal will become so noisy it will be intolerable. Just this week, X's Nikita Bier suggested we have less than six months before he sees no solution. Speaking of X, they just took down Higgsfield's (valued at $1.3B) main account because they were doing it across a molt bot army, and they're not the only ones. Extreme measures were the only thing they could do. For the distributed spam army, there will be no fix. People are already getting phone calls from this stuff.

> AI will kill SaaS moats and thus revenue. Anyone can build new SaaS quickly. I'm LLM-positive but for me this is a stretch. Seeing it pop up all over media in the past couple weeks also makes me suspect astrofurfing. Like a few years back when there were a zillion articles saying voice search was the future and nobody used regular web search any more.

AI models will simply build the ads into the responses, seamlessly. How do you filter out ads when you search for suggestions for products, and the AI companies suggest paid products in the responses? Based on current laws, does this even have to be disclosed? Will laws be passed to require disclosure?

What happens if oil companies can't make money? They will restructure society so they can. That's the essence of capitalism, the willingness to restructure society to chase growth. Obviously this tech is profitable in some world. Car companies can't make money if we live in walking distance and people walk on roads.

I think I'm finally realizing that my job probably won't exist in 3-5. Things are moving so fast now that the LLMs are basically writing themselves. I think the earlier iterations moved slower because they were limited by human ability and productivity limitations.