I suggest that the first ladder that got pulled up is the one on the ground.

No one wants to train new entrants to the field. Not training junior workers seems like a natural extension to that.

We can say that technological progress occurs when a new method is employed to deliver a product or service with some "more desirable" blend of qualities: it's created/delivered faster, cheaper, with a more desirable mix of resource inputs, and/or results in a more valuable/desired output.

Sometimes it's quite obvious when a technology is superior to another as almost all the qualities of it are advantageous: it's made faster, less expensively, and the result is better with such a gap between it and the old way that there's just no denying that the new way is better.

Sometimes the new technology is really a mix of qualities. Let's focus on the mix that generally gets the most attention: the new way is faster/cheaper but the output is not of a higher quality. Sometimes this new way of cheaper+faster but lower quality "wins out" and the consumer prefers it.

And now the crux of it: why is it so common that discussion concerning these shifts is rooted in everything except the consumer?

An imperfect and potentially flawed example: a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer. The old way of making a superior product still exists and some consumers still prefer it but most do not.

Fundamentally, this is a shift that is rooted in the perception, true or not, of the consumer that the new way is more desirable.

Some folks are not happy with the higher prices of the outputs of old ways of doing things or the effects that the new ways have on jobs, the economy, and/or society.

Fundamentally, this has to do with consumer preference and that's where any blame should be meted out.

The initial response was some grumbling about unionization of the doctor-class. But now they're just kinda going along with it while also complaining loudly. Profit Über alles.

Probably not, but job title inflation has made it so that apparently 5 years of experience is enough to be given a "senior" title. I've got like 15 but still feel like a medior at best. Yeah this is humblebragging, whatever it's a throwaway internet comment.

Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The universe doesn't owe us value on human-written software.

Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.

From a change leadership perspective, walking in the door with a shitty prototype beats pitching vaporware every day of the week and twice on Sundays. And the fact amateurs can deliver (basic, crappy) "things" without budget accelerates growth.

My first projects were 80% copied off Github and some intro tutorials. Know what? They still work. We banked seven figures off of them so far...

- using BSD/MIT licenses instead of GPL licenses

- accepting absolutely no liability for security holes or data loss

- accepting absolutely no responsibility for poorly performing software that contributes to climate change

- shipping 17,000 web frameworks, founding one more blockchain startup, founding one more wrapper service around an MIT open source project

We're gonna turn around and be like "but what about the security issues" now? We made this bed.

Stealing it...

* The tooling and integration stuff people complain about now ("the S in MCP") isn't really load-bearing yet, and a cottage industry of professional services and product work will go into giving it the same overcomplicated IAM guardrails everything else has; today, though, you just do security at a higher or lower level.

* LLM code generation is better at implementing rote best-practices and isn't incentivized to take shortcuts (in fact, it has some of the opposite incentives, to the consternation of programmers like me who prize DRY-ness). These shortcuts are where most security bugs live.

* LLMs can analyze code far faster than any human can, and vulnerabilities that can be discovered through pure pattern matching --- which is most vulnerabilities --- will be easy pickings. We've already had a post here with someone using o4 to find new remote kernel vulnerabilities, and that's a level of vuln research that is way, way more hardcore than what line-of-business software ordinarily sees.

* LLMs enable instrumentation and tooling that were cost-prohibitive previously: model checking, semantic grepping, static analysis. These tools all exist and work today, but very few projects seriously use them because keeping all the specs and definitions up to date and resolving all the warnings is too much time for not enough payoff. LLMs don't have that problem.

LLM-generated code (and LLM tooling) will inevitably create security vulnerabilities. We have not invented a way to create bug-free code; would have been big if true! Opponents of industry LLM use will point to these vulnerabilities and go "see, told you so". But each year we continue using these tools, I think the security argument is going to look weaker and weaker. If I had to make a bet, I'd say it ceases being colorable within 3 years.

What is the use of the right to repair, if we do not have the imagination to use it?

I patch my clothes

So the industrial revolution wasn't a conspiracy to put down the lower classes. The lower classes were in fact the biggest benefactors of the industrial revolution.

If software can go the same way, I'd say good riddance. The profession has always kept free from gatekeepers, and that's a good thing.

We're not talking about goods produced in bulk, but rather about a new intelligence that helps produce job shop type goods. That intelligence itself isn't a physical good though, and it can be copied freely and run elsewhere at almost no cost, and copyright won't save it. It's like toothpaste out of the tube once it's on the internet.

If we want to keep on track with the analogy to frame weaving machines, the difference is that capital and the availability of power were required to use those machines, which provided the moat required to protect profits.[Econ 101]

Models can be copied, and all of the investment in training used freely by anyone possessing a copy. This might have been how DeepSeek was trained, we'll never know. This is clearly different than in the case of weaving machines.

So instead of the cost of cloth, the cost of thought is going to drop considerably, and the quality of that artificial thought is (likely) at the lowest point it'll ever be. I can already run quantized versions of Deepseek on my CPU with 32 Gb of RAM. The future really doesn't seem to have an upper limit on what can be run locally.

With the ability to run models locally, the costs of running models will always have competition to lower prices. The other force is the capture of prompts and responses, whether covert or in the open, for other use, which must always be kept in mind.

The ability to build completely new things, will, I think, help to usher in a new era of innovation and allow anyone, anywhere, to start up companies to service the world.

[Econ 101] - In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.

If we do then we must ensure that we get the social benefits from new technologies, and we suppress the harm.

Does anyone still believe that "self interest" in the aggregate is what is best for society? I think it is clearly untrue

So we need to take collective action.

AI/LLMs are a "steam engine" moment. We can make life better for everyone. But we do need to change course, together, to get there

So the AI thing is happening, maybe its not with this particular tech we have today but they are on to something and we probably better embrace it.

Humans rolled the ladder up behind on so many things. Very few people will survive the planet Earth without the tools and abstractions we built over the many Millenia's and that's how we all live like kings. Any misery out there in the world is a result of our inability to manage it, not because the resources are scarce.

The Luddites, as explained in the article were indeed about the way tech is being adopted. All that tech eventually reached every corner of the world and not every place had Luddites.

Programming computers by hand is shitty anyway, good riddance. Finally we are about to have machines that can be programmed without thinking about the intricacies of programming that have nothing to do with the thing we want to achieve.

All the tech left behind still does have aficionados, maybe in 10 years we can watch someone program a computer using Java on the Primitive Technology channel.

  "A picture of two patches of wild grass bifurcated by a retaining pond"

Yes, we lose (or pidgeon-hole) artisans and craftsmen. But even in his "woe the times" example of AI kludging together two game properties into a painting, where the lighting isn't right and furry tail is not ideal, etc., etc... That $500 image is something no one could have created 20 years ago with a computer. This isn't centuries of artisan skills we are talking about. What about the artisan who would have been paid $500 to paint it with actual paints on an actual canvas? You can mourn progress in every direction if you like, but I don't think it changes a single thing about the trajectory of where we are going.

Now that AI is coming for my job as a programmer I'm not going to get twisted about it - my job didn't exist when I was a kid and it won't exist (certainly not in the same form) when my kid is an adult. And that's ok, it was a "job of opportunity". And that job has changed dramatically over 20 years. AI is just the continuation of that change.

I started in SE because it was fun to make computers do stuff. Programming has only ever been a tool to achieve that goal, and often a frustrating one. AI is just a better tool. If the job becomes "a guy that talks to the AI" that will still be programming because at the end of the day the computer can't do anything without someone telling it what to do.

...until SkyNet.

0. The people must take their governments back from corporate technofeudal overlords.

1. Society must shift away from lionizing unbounded capitalism.

2. Workers must form employee-owned co-ops for more stability and better morale and share profits of their labor more fairly rather than extracting maximum amounts for the ownership class that will fire them whenever it suits them.

It comes off as little other than thinly veiled contempt for the people that actually make the business function.

We've seen, most recently, Jassy come out and say "we're gonna need a lot less people", Zuckerberg doing his "replacing engineers" shtick on several occasions, all the commentary from the Anthropic CEO/Altman etc.

Even if none of this comes to pass, I've never witnessed such open "threats" in my lifetime.

I can't square this perspective with that of the LLM advocates that run to defend every legitimate criticism of LLM use--unless you're one of the aforementioned or in a similar position, why would you want to defend software that's primary purpose is to displace you?

They are literally telling you that's why they're investing in it. I don't get it.

What if you don't and they stay?

If you're sending the first say 12-months worth of experience work to india then local gang straight out of college end up with a pretty tangible gap. There are key formative experiences missing. The programming equivalent of fighting with manual array memory management. Or shooting yourself in foot with a pointer.

Worse they don't realise that they're missing pieces. By necessity you start them off at a higher level and their understanding ends up fuzzy for lack of better word. It's not their fault...to them it looks normal, to the previous gen it's all "how can you not know this"

...still the world keeps turning

Just as alchemists always dreamed of turning lead into gold, there is a dream that people have had for decades of writing less and less code: Open source. Scaffolds. Code generators. No-code tools. Coding Agent LLMs.

If vibe coding goes away, it will be because it has been replaced with something even more hands off. Perhaps vibe prompting. Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something. Maybe even take a genetic approach where you score the fitness of various software for a certain solution and AI will cross mutate the genes. This will be a change of that rivals our shift from hunter/gatherers to the agricultural revolution.

The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over the direction or use of AI. You are doomed to have your life disrupted and changed by it, with no input whatsoever. To quote the article, your six shillings a day can become six shillings a week, and you are left to just deal with it however you can. You are "free" to go find some other six shilling a week job. If you can.

And if you think, "Oh, every technology is like this, it's always been this way", you are right. You have always been at the whims of the owning class, and barring a change towards economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives, it likely always will be.

"It's just how things are."

"That's what generates profit."

"If that's what the market demands, who are we to judge?"

"Guess we do nothing."

We've all heard it before. We get it, so many HN and Tech folks have thrown in the towel and given up on changing anything within their own lives, or within the lives of others. So many more are content just "going along with the ride", abdicating all responsibility to an imagined god in various forms ("invisible hand of the free market" being most common among our peers).

For the rest of us who want to actually discuss the merits of the piece, we're sidelined by those who found reward in the path of libertarian ideals and seek to punish or discipline those of us who seek to make any sort of change or improvement beyond direct profit motives. Serious discussions of organization and direction are derailed in favor of blatant troll bait and bad-faith arguments.

This, I think, is also what Xe is trying to highlight: those in the position to enact the most positive change are staunchly refusing to do so, which in turn exacerbates the harms caused. Too few people with too much power and too much capital believe themselves to be more knowledgeable and intelligent than anyone else, denigrating any thoughts that may come from the slime beneath them on the ladder. When Xe said "Rolling the ladder up behind us", they make it very clear who they're speaking to:

> Look, CEOs, I'm one of you so I get it. We've seen the data teams suck up billions for decades and this is the only time that they can look like they're making a huge return on the investment.

They're basically shouting that "the call is coming from inside the house", and that the only place - right now - to address these harms are by and from the people inside said house. Nobody is coming to save us, but history books are filled with examples of what happens to those classes, those societies, those civilizations for whom greed becomes all consuming, standards of living collapse, and meaningful progress stagnates.

> Maybe the problem really is winner-take-all capitalism.

The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. Anyone that tries, will get driven out of business. Some clever folks will figure out how to do "slightly better" stuff, and charge more for it, but a good way to go out of business, is to focus on Quality as a principal axis.

That's basic market dynamics. It is what it is, and is neither evil, nor good.

It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.

I guess the saddest thing, is that I have really wanted to help teach my techniques to others, but have found that no one wants to learn, so I gave up on that, many years ago.

It is if you stay niche. It’s called market gardening. It will never equal farm automation for employment or revenue, but it’s a thing you can do as long as not too many people do it. The same happened to woodworking, and manufacturing. What you see are shops that can remanufacture parts that have either aged out of the manufacturer’s warehouse or where the material is the expensive part and reworking it is cheaper and almost as fast as ordering a new one.

The consumer base of these is smaller, so the supply has to be smaller as well, but not zero.

im ok with nothing. if software dev is nearly completely automated to the point there are effectively no dev jobs then there is a much more important economic condition to address

im a basic state-school student who learned the memorable bit about Keynes regarding automating labor which still hasnt come to pass. at the time i kind of found it unbelievable we continue to work so much when then point of automation is working less, but i was a college slacker so any excuse to avoid work seemed like a good point to me.

to conclude this preamble: i have a sinking sense of momentum and my circles of midwit friends stare at each other like deer in the headlights with no idea on whats next after jobs dry up

my question: are there movements to prepare the society for the impending mass automation and layoffs? people still seem to want jobs, because society demands it, but are there movements by significant political or idea leaders to finally get off the work treadmill and go toward a Keynes-style chill out? i dont know where to start and any direction is appreciated

* i understand ai layoffs is a media scapegoat for the real issues with taxable R&D and interest rates. mass automation of jobs and real workforce replacement by ai is probably on a timescale 2x to 5x of the 10 year runway im expecting

> Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.

Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?

That should be horrifying. It should be the red flag that spurs action against a gross system of exploitation and goal misalignment. For all the crowing about AI misalignment wiping out humanity, we have actual economic misalignment leaving humans homeless, starving, and dying of curable illness not from lack of supply or demand, but purely from placing profit above all.

To see defeatists and fatalists jump in comments and say "that's just how it is" while prostrating themselves in worship to the almighty share price should infuriate us as a species, for these are humans who willingly accept their own demise at the hands of others rather than doing anything of value for their own self-preservation, let alone preservation of the species.

Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA.

> and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time

Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to the expense of clothing.

Oh, wait, no I don't, because people still bought clothing and wore it regularly. They just also had economies around mending clothing, updating it, tailoring it, altering it, reusing and recycling it. Rather than building an economic system of destruction for the sake of a handful of profiteers, it was an economy of artisans who provided a staple resource at reasonable rates and quality to support themselves. Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear, people took care of it - and themselves - for longer periods of time. Techniques were used to keep articles sturdy for longer, rather than disposable machine stitches that fall apart in a washing machine.

Experts and artisans are not "gatekeepers", they are skilled craftspeople worthy of respect and deserving of compensation for their skills. To demand anyone be able to do anything of any complexity is to demand a complete elimination of anything that differentiates humans from one another, to create a homogenous mass of genetics with no incentive to grow and evolve.

Nobody is "gatekeeping" software developers, or Doctors, or plumbers, or weavers, or artists. Those all take skill, and people with a suitable level of skill can easily pass good credentials checks and tests.

This is all "perfectly spherical cow" economic theory which does not apply in reality. Do we really have a free and fair marketplace? Where's the competition that's shown up and been able to get any kind of substantial piece of the outsized profit of Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google?

And this wouldn't even be very difficult to enforce. Running SOTA models at useful speeds (which you'd need to actually compete - a local setup like you describe where time to first token is measured in minutes for a decent sized prompt is not going to cut it) requires a lot of compute. Which is to say, hardware, and energy to power it. Both things that can be tracked.

Things are cyclic, nothing new; the previous big scare was (is?) outsourcing, where for the same price as one developer in western / northern Europe or SF you can hire five from eastern Europe or India. But that hasn't affected employability of the one developer, as far as I'm aware.

I'm not even thinking of skill level, I'm sure that's comparable (but honestly I don't know / care enough), but both outsourcing and AI require the same things - requirements. I've grown up in this country (the Netherlands) and automatically have intrinsic knowledge of e.g. government, taxes, the energy sector, transportation, etc, so much that I'm not even consciously aware of a lot of things I know. If you spend a LOT of time and effort, you could - eventually - break that down into requirements and work orders or whatever that someone else could process. But it's much more efficient to do it yourself or just hire someone from around here.

Who owns MSFT? You, probably, through your 401k.

Nobody is stopping you from creating a coalition of similarly minded shareholders and effecting change.

Unless you stuff your cash under your mattress, you are the owning class.

Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day.

> economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives

History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.

For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.

Join a trade union!

It’s hilarious to read such defeatist takes on the current state of things on a site called Hacker News. The classical definition of a hacker was someone who wielded tech to circumvent power imbalances in whatever form.

Now I fear we have plenty of technologists that are happy to use tech to further cement and centralize existing power structures. IMO, this has been brewing for the past ten years or so, where technologists wrongly believe they have an in to this power just because they work for a FAANG.

You are labor. Where you work does not matter. So long as you need to work, you are labor. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Doctors are finding out this same lesson.

The way out is to build ventures that don’t involve the capital class. Autonomy and independence are worthy goals to strive for.

Not in the UK, due to a fragile supply chain.

https://news.sky.com/story/supply-crisis-catastrophic-panic-...

We saw it when the Evergiven closed the Suez. We see it whenever irational consumer behaviour caused unpredicable behaviour.

The Randian world you are so enamoured with is one of fragility, because buffers and margins reduces profit.

Or are those "unintended side effects"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis

I don't think the history here is as neat as you have laid out. To be clear: this is not a defense of central planning.