Do you believe we're in an AI bubble?

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Well stated! I agree. But there is another way to debunk the AI hype and that is by looking at the revenues for AI software companies. They are very small, much much smaller than the revenues for the internet back at the peak of the bubble in 1999. I present a lot of that data in this article for market watch. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai-bubble-is-looking-worse-than-the-dot-com-bubble-heres-why-f688e11d. Why are the revenues so small? Because companies won't pay much for the things you describe.

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truebastard@reddit

I wouldn't exactly call it a scam because the use cases for LLMs are very real. People are using it and getting real efficiency gains which were not possible before.

But the overhyping and overinvestment is the potential bubble (or "scam") and just like what happened with initial Internet overhyping leading up to the dot com crash could happen with LLMs. Progress towards could be slower than expected but still be real.

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symbiatch@reddit

But the thing is that only specific people are getting the gains. LLMs are pushed as helpful to all in all situations. They’re not.

They mostly help lower experience devs and/or boilerplate/copypaste coding in the most common languages. That’s it.

Yes, I’ve tried them many times. Yes they claim to help me. No they don’t actually help. They give wrong answers, just go “interesting question!”, provide wrong code, when they do something wrong they just write more and more vomit instead of actually knowing what to do.

If you don’t believe me I’ll be happy to have someone show how an LLM writes Hamiltonian path algorithm with given constraints so it runs in sub-second time for a large network, or planarizes non-planar polygons, or…

They defo give out code and answers but they don’t work. And some of us work in a bit more important and/or complicated stuff than “hey add a suggestion box to my simple React app.”

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Are we in a bubble? Yes

Is it like the blockchain bubble? IMO, No.

I think it is probably more like the 2000 era DotCom bubble. VCs throwing money at shit left and right. Startups galore. Crazy utopian visions. Darn stupid uses of technology.

But out of that bursting bubble, a whole ton of useful and successful technologies and companies emerged.

A lot died in the bursting bubble, though.

I think history will show that this iteration of "AI" -- basically, modern LLMs -- will have a similar pattern.

I'm not even gonna try to guess who will be the winners or losers though.

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Wide-Pop6050@reddit

Okay I buy this. There are some actual uses but no where near as how many uses people think there are.

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king_yagni@reddit

there are a lot of actual uses, this tech is genuinely revolutionary.

…and it’s still true that there are nowhere near as many uses as a lot of people think there are.

it’s insanely useful and insanely overhyped at the same time.

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_Meds_@reddit

There are a lot of uses but they’re not really revolutionary. It will replace the areas we already replaced with tech, mostly web forms and initial point of contact. We’ve already replaced these with forms and algorithms, and we’ll do it again with a new form of algorithm.

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ZealousidealPace8444@reddit

I’ve noticed that too, some folks chase titles or trendy roles, but the ones who build lasting careers focus on mastering the fundamentals and delivering real value. In startups, especially, titles don’t build products, execution does.

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alex88-@reddit

The winners will be the tech giants this time around.

They weren’t really giants yet back in 2000

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StatusObligation4624@reddit

Microsoft was literally a monopoly in 2000 and currently has the largest stake in OpenAI.

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My point is just that the tech industry today is a lot different than where tech was at in 2000.

How can you compete with Meta in AI when they have enough money to offer $100 mil salaries to researchers?

And training models is very compute intensive. Only companies like Meta/Amazon have the necessary capital and infrastructure to do it currently. Smaller players just won’t be able to compete in core AI services.

The tech giants will very much have a moat in this area, just like Amazon/Microsoft have a moat on cloud services atm.

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poolpog@reddit

I think the previous comment was probably thinking of Google, only. Because of course, you are absolutely correct.

But also, Microsoft didn't get huge from the dot com bubble. They got huge on DOS, Windows and Office. And anti-competitive extending and extinguishing.

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Calm-Procedure5979@reddit

Well said. Absolutely in a bubble. Its a really really annoying bubble because of all of the hype, fodder, and absolute bullshit coming from the CEOs.

Meanwhile im like "well its better than a Google search". Who knows who will win or lose

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Informal_Butterfly@reddit

I feel the same way. There's a lot of value in the current AI revolution, but as with every new tech, it is overhyped right now.

Speaking in terms of the Gartner Hype Cycle, we are currently near the "Peak of Inflated Expectations". Ultimately, the hype will die down and we will come down to have more realistic expectations from the technology.

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Sensitive_Peak_8204@reddit

Eh kinda. The only winner out of this will be Google with a better search product. That’s it.

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fuka123@reddit

Go try Claude Code on your codebase and have it implement a new feature or refactor a test suite, then update your thesis

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No-Rush-Hour-2422@reddit (OP)

Yes, it's very very good at predictive text. But it's not actually intelligent. That was my thesis

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Adventurous-War1187@reddit

Developer from respectable languages, Ruby, JS, Python, PHP etc are using claude code. Even the creators of the most popular web frameworks tell that claude code is amazing.

puts all their code on AWS and/or GitHub 🙄

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bupkizz@reddit

It’s a handy tool. It’s also absolute dog shite at actually programming.

I worry about the pipeline of devs because Sr devs will be on ever higher demand… and you dont get to be sr if we replace all the jr’s with ai.

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ruddet@reddit

It's easy to generate dogshit with just prompting AI, but if you set up your rules, context and instructions in such a way then the new models are generating really good code.

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BigBootyWholes@reddit

Check out Claude code, with 30 mins I installed Postgres, setup a db, tables, models, react app w/ backend crud and analytics, and a deploy script to a cheap linode vps all with a few prompts in the terminal. I had to prompt like a knowledgeable engineer, so I don’t think a non coder could get as far as I did so quickly. Claude code blows cursor out of the water

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Accomplished_Rip8854@reddit

I keep hearing the same things and I find that a telltale sign that nobody is being reasonable about this.

“AI is only in its infancy” - the ideas on how this works is like 30 years old.

“It will only get better” - how do you know that this is not as good as it gets? I ‘m not an expert by any means, but I don’t see any major breakthroughs coming anytime soon

And worst of all, the generated code is most of the times badly written and I sometimes lose patience and just write it myself.

I like it for SQL, but I don’t see it replacing anyone.

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Oh I've read this for sure. it's littered with good points, really harmful ideas (working for fly must be an exercises in cognitive dissonance) and ridiculous opinions that I can relate to but also not enjoy. It reads like someone toked 100g of weed and went off lol.

The Agent argument rooting around your good and magically being good only works for startups with simpler codebases. This guy cites credentials all the time but maybe fly has a really nice clean codebase. I don't know about you, but an ecommerce site with millions of dependencies, monolithic tendencies, integrations with 3rd party payment platforms, etc., etc. is not going to see that benefit (as me how I know)

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Just to touch on this, I don't agree with you banning the use of something like copilot. When the nailgun was invented, would you force your workers to use hammers? AI is a great productivity boost for me. Your workers may be using an LLM on the side anyways.

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Wiyry@reddit

My guy, we have had multiple massive security breaches and the quality of code has actively gone down since LLM’s from my perspective. I’ve nearly had all my startups data snatched because of a hidden prompt injection in one of our emails. LLM’s have been nothing but a headache in every experience I’ve had with them.

Sometimes, using older methods and tools leads to a better product/outcome. Did you know that we still use draft horses in certain places because they are superior to vehicles. Draft horses are mostly still used in lumber work because they can handle certain terrain much more easily than vehicles, are environmentally friendly, and are sometimes more cost effective.

This idea that technology is just a one-way linear progression (like it’s some kind of tech tree in a strategy game) has led to so many issues in the modern world. You need to research and study to find the best way forward and from my studying: I’ve found that LLM tech is nowhere near mature enough to rely on. I’m not gonna use a nailgun that has a random chance of blowing up in my face.

I’d rather release a quality product and be “behind the times” then to barrel forward into immature and untested tech that will most likely lead me into spending more to untangle the mess it’s left in its wake.

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NoOrganization6671@reddit

Fair enough, and I'm sorry to hear about your data breach. However, and I hesitate to continue the hammer analogy but here we go, sometimes you use a hammer and sometimes you use a nailgun -- it depends on the situation.

I'm not arguing to exclusively vibecode your way forward 100% of the time. But, I do think you are arguing to solely code by hand. To me, a Sr. SRE at a large tech company, LLMs have been a great boon to my speed in understanding a novel problem, new section of the codebase, write tests, translate my English into Bash, etc. I still prune most of what is generated, and I often do not use the first or even 5th response. However I do find it a very useful tool which has certainly improved(!) my code quality and speed, not lowered them.

Anywho, I probably won't change your mind on this, it sounds like you've been bitten and I can understand why you've taken a somewhat drastic, in my eyes, ban on the technology for now. I'm just putting forward my POV and I wish you the best :).

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256BitChris@reddit

Clear skill issue, which is pretty common in most AI Deniers.

Claude Code is amazing!

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Noblesseux@reddit

right now people think the AI progression chart is straight up when it's a sigmoid that's already starting to flatten

Yeah I think this is one of the interesting things with some of the tech boosters on Reddit in particular. They're under the impression that it'll just linearly improve forever, not really understanding that that's incredibly rare as a paradigm in real life.

A lot of the "if it's this good this year it'll be replacing x next year" talk relies on the misunderstanding that there's some guarantee that any given approach to AI has unbounded improvement potential. As opposed to what actually normally happens which is that something gets hyped for a while and then people eventually find the limits/downsides of it and start treating it as a normal tool instead of just a cure-all for every problem.

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lurkin_arounnd@reddit

It has and will, however, have some incredible impacts on medicine and education.

Alphafold really is a paradigm shift

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“Man with vested interest in specific outcome suggests outcome highly likely!”

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Low_Level_Enjoyer@reddit

And yet OpenAI’s CEO is claiming exactly that:

The guy who'll make 29939229 gazillion dollars if he can convience everyone he achieved AGI is trying to convince people he can achieve AGI? Crazy.

SamA just vagueposts all day.

Zero papers have come out from OpenAI (or anyone else) explaining a theory on how to scale modern LLMs to AGI.

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DatDawg-InMe@reddit

His word means literally nothing.

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Grounds4TheSubstain@reddit

OpenAI shipped a hell of a lot on his watch, man.

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DatDawg-InMe@reddit

So? That doesn't mean he's telling the truth here. OpenAI bleeds money, and they have a history of lying too.

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Sam Altman is like straight up known in-industry as a massive fabulist almost on par with Elon lmao. Like he's notorious for lying because it induces investors with fomo to give him money.

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sheebery@reddit

Wow, businessmen in the AI space are making outlandish claims about the capabilities of AI in years to come?! Color me surprised!

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eaton@reddit

But that’s been the idea for the last several breakthroughs, and the generative AI boom, while interesting and full of novel innovations, shows no evidence of being The Breakthrough That Finally Singularities, or something like that.

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eaton@reddit

It’s particularly interesting given that sigmoid curve has been part of every AI “boom” since AI was first coined as a term. It’s been around for more than 75 years at this point, and the incremental improvements and evolutionary jumps are impressive — but every single time, the latest breakthrough (expert systems, machine learning, neural networks, LLMs…) have been heralded as the One That Will Finally Solve All The Problems And Replace All The People.

The UK government famously attempted to build an expert system to codify its immigration laws in the 80s, and that project ground to a halt after years of just-around-the-corner. The underlying tech is now all over the place, but the we still struggle to automate tangly, context-rich tasks in ways that boosters continue to underestimate.

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Goducks91@reddit

I'm at the point where if it's going to replace software development it's going to replace A LOT of other careers as well. At that point there is not a lot of work until it's replacing Blue Collar jobs as well and we'll for sure need some sort of UBI.

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YouGoJoe@reddit

I always think about the analogy from the industrial revolution: that cars were going to put the horse industry out of business. Which, they mostly did, but also they created the automotive sector. I'm very skeptical about anything resulting in mass unemployment.

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YetAnotherRCG@reddit

Just because something has happened in the past doesn’t mean it will continue.

Cars require mechanics sales people massive infrastructure projects all of which exists in the real world and is relatively low skill.

Sure it’s a firmly established pattern but it’s not like one of the laws of physics. It shouldn’t just be assumed that an arbitrarily large number of jobs will always exist.

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Glock99bodies@reddit

This is just centrism. You think right now, at this time is history, is the most important. People thought the same when Caesar conquered Rome. The same when hitler invaded.

It’s this same shit everyday. WW3 is coming. AI will replace us. I’m tired of it.

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YetAnotherRCG@reddit

Like political centrism? Because I really don't see what you mean by that.

Also the present time is by definition the only time where actions can be taken. When Caesar conquered Rome they were correct to think it was the most important moment in history because it was the present. What a stupid argument.

And for the record WW3 probably isn't coming, "AI" is a marketing term but will cost an immense number of peoples jobs while creating very very few jobs.

There was a lot of work that people would have loved to do (or to have be done by someone else) in the industrial revolution that they couldn't because they had to spend almost all human energy on producing food so everyone didn't starve.

As basic survival was made easier by technological innovation people were able to move into the other work they already knew existed. Assuming this pattern which has only lasted a couple hundred years is going to infinitely repeat forever is as stupid as our ancestors who assumed they could never deforest .

There is no reason to assume there is boundless numbers of hidden jobs just waiting to reveal themselves.

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Glock99bodies@reddit

Centrism in that everyone thinks when they are alive is the most important time in history.

In 5000 years they will see this era the same as the invention of the cotton gin.

Just not that long ago people viewed the atomic bomb as the end of society. See dr strange love.

I get that some people are worried about their own jobs but as a whole society will just keep on chugging along. It’s all just fear and uncertainty. But it’s almost a certainty that society will keep moving forward.

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YetAnotherRCG@reddit

I can't find any mention of this this definition for centrism where did you come across this?

And I must continue to stress that all historical figures who thought the time they lived was the most important were correct as are we are to think the same thing. Action can only be taken in the present moment it is always the most important time and history is composed of present moments.

Further picking out a specific moment as the most important in history is equally odd and pointless since it depends wholly upon how the definitions are setup for most important.

Moving past that to the main point, I really don't see how this assumption that there are infinite numbers of possible jobs to replace existing ones lost to automation. Its certainly possible this is true, but what I would like to see is a logical chain of arguments that explains why that would be instead of a vague gesturing to an (admittedly reliable) pattern without any argument for why this is the case.

Because to my mind this pattern is equally well explained by there simply being a very large yet finite number of jobs that we simply haven't fully explored yet due to higher priority jobs out compensating them. In that case the pattern will actually terminate at some point.

And it is my experience that things aren't usually infinite on the finitely sized planet earth. And that people going around thinking about things that aren't infinite like they are has caused a whole hell of a lot of problems for our species.

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FakeBonaparte@reddit

Exactly this - not all inventions make life better.

Inventing agriculture led to longer working days and shorter lives and we didn’t make up the shortfall for 10,000 years.

Inventing the stirrup gave nomadic armies a huge advantage that led to waves of depopulation and mini dark ages in the civilised worlds.

Etc, etc.

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Goducks91@reddit

I’d argue the dream is mass unemployment and have robots do the hard/boring stuff so we can just enjoy life and do what we want to do. Of course people are way too selfish and work is too tied to our identities right now for that to be the case. Then you also have the moral dilemma of basically creating sentient machine slaves 🤷‍♂️

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CodyEngel@reddit

If we don't work then we don't earn money and you need money for food.

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Goducks91@reddit

The whole point is that basic necessities + more would be covered by the government because humans no longer need to produce economic output because robots/AI have gotten so productive.

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DaRadioman@reddit

The problem is that falls apart financially. You have to have the means of the production willing to just give away the profits. That doesn't work with capitalism.

The only viable path there is complete socialism/communism but that fails when people get involved.

So unless we let AI rule we are probably in for a real bad time.

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Goducks91@reddit

Exactly. It's a pipedream utopia that's not going to happen. Funny thing is complete socialism/communism actually makes sense if we get to this point but the connotations are so negative and the rich are so powerful that it'll never happen.

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Fair_Atmosphere_5185@reddit

It's not the rich or powerful. It's every day people. People need work to feel useful and valuable. Without it - people just spiral and don't know what to do with themselves. You'll end up with massive substance abuse issue and general nihilism.

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Brawldud@reddit

People need work to feel useful and valuable. Without it - people just spiral and don't know what to do with themselves. You'll end up with massive substance abuse issue and general nihilism.

Are you sure about that? The retired folks I know are having a great time. They're skiing and playing pickleball and doing triathlons and biking around town and joining book clubs and learning to crochet. There's so much to do that doesn't need to be anchored in the idea of producing economic value. All you really need is time and access to those things.

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Fair_Atmosphere_5185@reddit

Retired folks have their needs met and have no need to prove themselves

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Brawldud@reddit

"Having your needs met" is an economic resource allocation problem and "needing to prove yourself", and particularly feeling the need to do that by means of performing work for a private employer, is a you problem.

I have no need to prove myself but I do need healthcare, a roof over my head, foot to eat and a bike to ride.

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Fair_Atmosphere_5185@reddit

"needs" can be nebulous.

Young people have a need to compete, gather resources, and generally evaluate themselves against others to see where they are in the pecking order.

And that order influences so so so much.

The retired know where they are in the pecking order and no longer have a need to compete or prove themselves.

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Brawldud@reddit

Young people have a need to compete, gather resources, and generally evaluate themselves against others to see where they are in the pecking order.

Ok... and before we make people do it by giving up most of their waking hours to afford basic necessities, young people accomplish that just as well in a soccer league or a debate club or musical theater.

We don't need a whole orphan crushing machine just so hypercompetitive people can measure their dicks against each other.

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Fair_Atmosphere_5185@reddit

SmartassRemarks@reddit

Your arguments here show a serious lack of understanding about humanity. Most humans want to just chill and have friends and spend time with their children. A small percentage are deeply greedy and will never be satisfied no matter what. This is not new. This is not unique to capitalism either. Human history is filled with conquerors, and they existed before recorded history as well.

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Brawldud@reddit

I think human history is filled with unstable equilibria, failed experiments, and moments of incredible technological and societal change that redefine what is possible. Call me an optimist; I think human society ought to operate as a project to reduce scarcity and poverty and violence. We should draw lessons from history in the pursuit of a more connected, more humane, more prosperous society but I think if we draw the conclusion that that pursuit is futile then we have erred in our thinking and need to re-evaluate.

Whether you think humanity requires some kind of hierarchy is not really relevant to whether humanity requires scarcity and poverty; chess.com, soccer leagues and WoW guilds all operate on some kind of hierarchy. I think the notion that economic/military domination is the inevitable outlet of choice for the ambition of "conquerers" is not categorically true. I think that all of these perfectly human impulses, when subjected to societies of different structures or values, will manifest differently.

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SmartassRemarks@reddit

Is there a single society of any scale on earth that functions the way you want it to today, or has there ever been? I doubt it. If so, how long did it last?

Are there any social animals that don’t compete for social and sexual dominance? Are there any primates that don’t?

Humans are just animals. Animals built for advanced social activity. Animals evolved according to natural selection and sexual selection. Let’s not forget it. There are many inescapable things about this: the 7 sins are a good quick way to sum it up.

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Brawldud@reddit

I don't think any of these actually address anything I said; I've thought about how to reply and each reply to each point is just, verbatim, what I already said in my previous comment. None of anything you've said has anything to do with whether scarcity and poverty are necessary. You are just gesturing vaguely in the direction of "people want to compete with each other" as some flimsy pretext for why people should starve if they do not produce economic output.

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SmartassRemarks@reddit

I'm not the guy arguing that poverty and scarcity are necessary. I was only reacting to your comments that seem to believe in a utopian future of communism or something like communism, which would be enabled by a post-scarcity world.

On the other hand, do we need poverty and scarcity to have meaning in life? That's what the other guy was getting at, more or less. I don't think we do. I think that poverty and scarcity are a dangling fear that keeps the populace afraid, which in turn motivates them to join groups and systems that make them feel secure. But these are not the only such motivators for this behavior. Others include violence, feeling alone, feeling unheard, feeling rejected or outcast, etc.

Hence, I don't think that a uptopian future of distributed resources and harmony is possible. The few bad apples ruin it for everyone else. This is consistently the case for all of human history, written or otherwise. This is why humans (and our primate cousins) go to war. This is why men are larger than women on average. This is why groups have hierarchies, which involve groups of people falling in line under a shared belief system that makes them feel secure.

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Brawldud@reddit

I think we are in agreement on the second paragraph so I'll go to the third one.

Hence, I don't think that a uptopian future of distributed resources and harmony is possible. The few bad apples ruin it for everyone else. This is consistently the case for all of human history, written or otherwise. This is why humans (and our primate cousins) go to war. This is why men are larger than women on average. This is why groups have hierarchies, which involve groups of people falling in line under a shared belief system that makes them feel secure.

I do think this is not a solved problem. In the world we inhabit today you can see how an increasingly insular and insane group of ultrawealthy people have accumulated a level of power and wealth that distorts our ability to have a functioning democracy or an economy that can function without a permanent underclass of people who are homeless or one missed paycheck away from becoming homeless. It's a tremendous problem that wreaks unfathomable harm in the day to day lives of ordinary people.

Given how thorny and relevant the problem is under our current system I just don't think of it as a compelling reason to abandon the idea of a prosperous postscarcity society, particularly as technology makes the math on this increasingly workable; if it is sufficient reason to discard alternatives to our current system it should be sufficient reason to discard our current system as well. I think this problem is solvable, or mitigible or compartmentalizable. Wars, bigotry, insecurity about our place in social strata are all downstream of emotions and impulses that are normal parts of the human condition. I think there is some solution for society to channel these emotions and impulses in healthy ways that do not lead to violence and suffering. And I noodle around with what I think these might look like but I don't think it's absolutely essential for me to have a single, fully-formed, unassailable answer at this stage.

The other thing is that if we discard this notion then what direction do we want society to move in? How and why would we deal with having an economy and level of technological progress that can support postscarcity while rejecting the idea that we should actually have postscarcity? The future is coming, regardless of whether we think proactively about how to shape it or not.

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Fair_Atmosphere_5185@reddit

I'm saying that the human brain is unable to comprehend and live in a world of abundance. We require suffering and hardship to be happy. A life a leisure and abundance is directly contrary to our entire evolutionary history. I'd actually argue that society today is too abundant and it is too easy to meet one's needs with minimal work and effort.

Artificial scarcity forces a competitive mindset, that in my opinion, is ultimately beneficial for society. Hard work and competition is the crucible that forges better men.

None of this is driven by advertisers or consumption really. I don't use social media outside of reddit - and I only use this because it's anonymous. My vacations are trips into the outdoors to hunt, backpack, and otherwise do things off grid. My days are largely working for sunrise to sundown for the benefit of my family. When I get a day off - I spend it hiking for 12+ hours.

I am driven by money because it affords my family a bett to and better quality of life. I can pay for tutors and other academic help for my children. I can pay for their college in full and they don't have to take out loans. I can buy them their first homes. My interests are working out, hiking, backpacking, biking, and spending time outside. They really aren't that expensive

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Brawldud@reddit

I'm saying that the human brain is unable to comprehend and live in a world of abundance. We require suffering and hardship to be happy.

You know, I enjoy riding a bike up a really long, steep hill, miles long at 8+% grade. Even if it's a hot and humid day, even if it takes me forever, even if I'm suffering dearly in the moment. In some sense, doing the climb successfully - or giving it my best shot - is a tremendous reward in and of itself and is immensely good for my self-improvement, but the really nice thing about climbing uphill is getting to take the same grade back down and enjoy the spoils of my work.

That's not a metaphor. It's just a form of suffering that I seek out, one that allows me to improve my skill and perform my talents, and one that has no connection whatsoever to economic production. I believe very strongly that, absent economic pressures, we'd all make do in terms of finding our own challenges to struggle with, grow from, and structure our personal narratives around. In fact I believe the freedom from arbitrary scarcity is exactly the freedom to self-actualize through struggles that are personally meaningful. When I look around in my community and see people who are struggling to find work or pay bills and getting kicked into survival mode, that's actually debilitating to their personal growth, their ability to focus on the things that matter to them and their ability to connect more deeply to the people around them.

You do plainly state that you value money as a means of achieving a bigger house, nicer car and sexual partners who better meet your standard of desirability. Perhaps it is important to you to have this individualistic notion that the world demands you acquire the modern trappings of success and provide materially for your people - and you take the narrow view that this means your partner and children - and that if you can provide, you've shown your worth and earned your place. But this really is just a thing you choose for yourself, something you choose structure your life narrative around, and not some kind of iron law of humanity or something everyone else needs to imitate. I think it's strange to project that onto other people and assert that other people would be lost without society demanding they do the same, and reject the idea that satisfaction can come from analogous struggles that do not have existential stakes.

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Fair_Atmosphere_5185@reddit

You seek out long bike rides. I seek out grueling trips in the back country. I live a life of abundance and I go out of my way to subject myself to the most absolutely miserable conditions I can. The actual trip itself is usually suffer dear - but that is what gives me the greatest pleasure and joy in the world, at least afterwards.

We currently live in the richest, most prosperous, and most comfortable time in human history. We already should be at this Eden you think will come. I don't see it and I frankly think the sickness at the core of society will only get worse as abundance becomes more prevalent.

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Brawldud@reddit

We currently live in the richest, most prosperous, and most comfortable time in human history. We already should be at this Eden you think will come. I don't see it and I frankly think the sickness at the core of society will only get worse as abundance becomes more prevalent.

Why would that bolded statement be true? We have nothing remotely approaching an equitable distribution of resources and we have an economic system that actively funnels resources away from working people and toward people who have orders of magnitude more resources than they could ever truly want or need. We have politicians who are complicit in accelerating this process and breaking the systems that should be serving people in need.

It seems pretty patently obvious to me how this contradiction could exist - that technology has advanced so far and yet society could never seem bleaker - and it's got everything to do with how we organize and allocate wealth.

You yourself assert that poverty must exist and is good. I claim that arbitrary, needless cruelty, such as the enforced poverty and precarity that exists on such a huge swath of the human population, is causing incredible amounts of social harm and instability.

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Fair_Atmosphere_5185@reddit

Perhaps such social harm and instability is necessary? Perhaps humans are not meant to live in idyllic peace and we need conflict and struggle to justify our exist once. It's easier when to accept the struggle when it's against an external other. It's harder to accept when the object of our struggles is ourselves.

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teslas_love_pigeon@reddit

It's always a pathetic mindset I see from people that are completely alienated from their friends, family, and community.

Brawldud@reddit

During my last bout of funemployment I got really fit from weights and biking, started doing yoga and took up playing piano again. It was really nice. I ended up jettisoning the yoga and piano once my days got super busy again but if I could have all that time back that I spend at work, I’d be unstoppable.

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ogmo0n@reddit

I love this so much. I just wonder how we will have the things. Like I can’t see it all the way to the end. Is gas free? Are my tacos free? The whole world economic model would have to change and there would be less of a need for our government if they didn’t have to fight fake wars for the elites.

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Brawldud@reddit

Well, you know like, I can't see our current system to the end either - eventually a tiny sliver of people have all the money in the world, 95% of the population is unemployed and can't afford anything, the planet is depleted of resources and the climate is fucked? - so I feel there should be grace for not being able to conceptualize the whole thing front-to-end in your head.

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teslas_love_pigeon@reddit

I bet you would really enjoy the work of Rutger Bregman. He wrote a great book called Utopia for Realists.

To answer your question, we can absolutely have all these things. We just have to collectively decide them.

Always remember that our entire species was built on collaboration with others, for 100s of thousands of years. Always have solidarity for your fellow workers.

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Goducks91@reddit

I don’t think so. People need work to feel useful because they have to work to live. Take away the have to part of work and people with find their own joy. I’d argue that substance abuse issues would decrease drastically because poverty would essentially be eliminated.

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Fair_Atmosphere_5185@reddit

I don't think people will find their own joy.

Yourdataisunclean@reddit

If this actually happens at a fast pace. Congrats. You're now an Alignment Engineer. You've been invited to work on the semi-governmental Toilet Paper Production Partnership (Pronounced T-P's) where you help develop and oversee the AI that makes toilet paper for all of humanity while preventing it developing an alien ethics system and turning the entire earths ecosystem into a massive white sog (TP version of grey goo).

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BudgetMight9270@reddit

Wild that you think TP will be relevant by then. Team bidet babay.

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Lubs@reddit

Crazy you think bidets will still be relevant.

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FakeBonaparte@reddit

That’s a limited sample size. How about the invention of agriculture? It extended work days and shortened life expectancy and we didn’t make up the shortfall until about 10,000 years later.

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maximumdownvote@reddit

A lot of claims to base your argument on.

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FakeBonaparte@reddit

Not at all, it’s a single, well-known topic in academic pre-historical study. “Why did humans adopt agriculture en masse given that it seems to have made life worse?”.

But if you prefer, rather than introducing new information here I could just edit my comment down to “source?”. I’m not the one making the extraordinary claims here.

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sleepahol@reddit

Unless we're the horses in this analogy.

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maximumdownvote@reddit

I think we are the ai in this example.

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MCFRESH01@reddit

There will be a lot of people who need to pivot their careers. I'm a self taught dev. I have a great career but the minute I get asked to do AI related things other than use an API I'm pretty much screwed. Luckily I have a marketing degree and some practical experience, I can probably pivot to product fairly easily.

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crazyeddie123@reddit

but the minute I get asked to do AI related things other than use an API I'm pretty much screwed.

PoopsCodeAllTheTime@reddit

If it's not good at that then what is it good at, yk

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DaRadioman@reddit

That's something AI is decent at...

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Kardif@reddit

Don't worry, you won't be asked to do that stuff, or if you do, it'll be in the service of someone else with the necessary qualifications. A masters/PhD in the field is basically required at this point, this shit is hard and even understanding how it's working requires a decently solid level of mathematics most people don't have

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dbxp@reddit

Back then they were really crying out for a solution to the horse problem due to the amount of waste they created: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/

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Goducks91@reddit

My view is nothing is getting replaced. But if AI becomes good enough where it does replace it’s going to replace a lot of things. I don’t think that happens until AI is sentient.

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Own-Chemist2228@reddit

if it's going to replace software development it's going to replace A LOT of other careers as well

I wonder why the media is emphasizes how it can replace software engineers but never seems to mention that is just as likely to replace doctors and lawyers. Of course these professions require formal credentials, and the public would never accept literally replacing a surgeon or courtroom lawyer with AI. But medicine and law are otherwise perfect candidates for AI: They both require making decisions using large amounts of data. There are lots of lawyers and doctors working behind the scene" doing research, and these people do not technically need to be credentialed to do this work. In fact they don't even need to be people.

I don't see AI replacing SW engineers one-for-one, an AI is not going to be attending daily standup. But it could reduce workload and possibly headcount in some roles. But that is true with many professions, including some lucrative ones like medicine and law.

The difference is that AI will also create demand for SW engineers and we don't ultimately know how the market will balance out.

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Pikaea@reddit

Finance its going to destroy, all those associates spending all their time on excel and creating powerpoints with update PE ratios? Goodbye.

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Repulsive-Hurry8172@reddit

The reason why other white collar professions (especially those in business/ finance) are still happy with AI is because they think they are irreplaceable by AI, even though a lot of them already use AI consistently.

I work with actuaries and already they want our team replaced (by them, with AI) yet they still cannot produce software without us. They threaten and question our output/ efficiency because AI is supposed to work for devs too... Only it does not because AI can't cross organizational inefficiencies.

To me it's more like the dot com bubble. Think there will be some kind of correction in the market, but it's still going to change society in the long term.

Whether that means it can replace programmers or not in the future I don't know. I find ChatGPT pretty useful when I'm stuck, but had to turn off Co pilot auto complete after a few days as it was more distracting than helpful

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corny_horse@reddit

I'm not a crypto enthusiast by any stretch of the imagination, but infinitely useless is an undersell. Its utility is not particularly relevant to the "1st world," but there are many countries in which the banking system is quite unreliable and/or currencies are in wild value fluctuation, it can provide stability and reduce transaction friction in a way that can be difficult to emulate. This is particularly true as Western countries, which could provide a reasonable alternative currency, are often antagonistic towards the countries that would need this the most.

That isn't to say they do this well or that a better system couldn't be adopted that doesn't burn carbon for dubious return value (although some currencies have attempted to solve for that with proof of stake, which radically decarbonises the process).

drcforbin@reddit

Just wait until LLM-based agents can buy drugs from terrorists for you with cryptocurrency while hallucinating your tax returns.

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shared_ptr@reddit

Problem is what AI can do already even if it stops improving right now is still really disruptive. The industry as a whole has not learned how to use these tools effectively yet, systems that leverage the latest models are still mostly under development and not yet hit the market, but those systems are going to be very transformative.

Already, the idea of a junior engineer is very different now than it was a year ago. Most of the work you’d get a junior to do can now be done with AI, so that’s a big change for the industry to figure out (you can effectively buy a junior engineer for 1/1000th of a price now, which does impact the economics of the role).

This is all assuming the models don’t improve at all too, which seems unlikely even if I’d personally be very happy if we have hit a limit on progression for this stuff.

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chunkypenguion1991@reddit

I think a better analogy is the dot-com bubble. The underlying tech(World Wide Web) was solid but the speculation about its possibility took 10-15 more years the be fully realized. Soon AI will go through the trough of disillusionment and companies will need to set more realistic goals for what AI can achieve.

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Atupis@reddit

This, if you develop agents, it is more than obvious that tech is not product-ready yet, but same time it is just magical and wonderful.

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Constant-Listen834@reddit

Agreed. The blockchain analogy is terrible. Blockchain never had many use cases. Meanwhile every single dev at my company is using AI and seeing efficiency gains . My teacher friend uses it to grade papers. My accounting friend uses it to double check work, etc.

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Wiyry@reddit

This is a portion of the reason why I’m not pivoting my start up into AI. I used to be terrified that AI would make me obsolete…until I actually took a look around and did some research. The more I actually learned about LLM’s and the more I studied its progression: the less I viewed it as this all consuming technology.

Hell, even in my own use and experiments: current AI fluctuates in quality and reliability almost daily and it seems to struggle to code any better than a fresh grad junior at times.

This isn’t to say the tech isn’t possibly useful but that we are still a long ways away from this all encompassing miracle machine.

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the_fresh_cucumber@reddit

Infinity divided by zero

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Tricky_Acanthaceae39@reddit

The difference is that peak hype for AI is complete replacement of people and also singularity. Each of these is so high that it seems reasonable that we will land somewhere between where we are and those points.

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SketchySeaBeast@reddit

Well, sure, but if I were to say I'm headed to the moon the second story of my house would be considered "landing somewhere between where I am and that point".

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Tricky_Acanthaceae39@reddit

That’s not the point and it’s a poor metaphor. Singularity with AI would be more like travel to the moon is possible today and peak hype would be terraforming entire solar systems.

Jobs are being replaced by AI as we speak. Tools like MS Copilot do a lot of the work jr devs used to do and we are seeing similar in legal, hr, and acct/finance and creative work too. It just remains to be seen how much further the technology can actually be deployed.right now it’s a multiplier not a full replacement I’m not convinced it will fully replace teams but it will shrink them considerably.

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Historical_Owl_1635@reddit

but that's because blockchain had no practical use.

Back then people genuinely thought it would become a usable currency.

I literally implemented it in software used by banks worldwide as a selling point because the banks were practically demanding it to stay with relevant.

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StatusObligation4624@reddit

Usauble decentralized currency. Once government started to regulate it, it lost a lot of its value.

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quentech@reddit

Once governments started to regulate it, it lost a lot of its value.

lmfao seriously?

But with no regulation, you had sht like Mt. Gox or FTX happen

Hmm.. what was the value of a Bitcoin in the Mt. Gox day? $100? $200? $1000, tops.

What's the value of a Bitcoin today? Hmm... over $100,000.

Remind me, which number is bigger - $1000 or $100,000?

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Historical_Owl_1635@reddit

It was interesting watching it all unfold in realtime.

Initially the idea of an unregulated currency seemed great, then as hacks kept hacking and people realised they had no protections they suddenly started wanting regulation and protections.

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cbusmatty@reddit

There are already miracles though. It isn’t even in near final state and miracles are happening around testing, documentation, time savings, problem solving. Not even actually implementing a single thing there are already miracles that have changed how we do work forever.

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PoopsCodeAllTheTime@reddit

People are like "now I'm 20% faster", well some of us already type 20% faster than most, that's not a miracle, just a marginal improvement

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cbusmatty@reddit

I’m not talking 20% we have things that could legally never have been built being built securely

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SketchySeaBeast@reddit

things that could legally never have been built

Ugh, OK, sure, we'll keep sliding that goalpost to wherever you want.

Just an observation, but you started with clear thoughts and complete sentence and have become sloppier as time goes on. It's as if you're caught up in some increasingly incoherent AI fugue state, determined to spread the good word of the LLM.

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cbusmatty@reddit

You drove a 2000 Camry and said that cars aren’t really that fast. No one is moving goalposts loo

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SketchySeaBeast@reddit

"loo" indeed.

That's actually an apt metaphor. The 2000 Camry is around and still kicking, doing its job of getting us from place to place, while the shiny new mustang is going to end up wrapped around a light pole.

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Historical_Owl_1635@reddit

It isn’t even in near final state

AI research constantly stagnates.

2 years ago we were a few months away from AGI, now people have started realising we’re actually nowhere near AGI.

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cbusmatty@reddit

You are talking about ai companies hyping and marketing I’m talking about developers making software, we are no where close to the peak

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Noblesseux@reddit

Except you're not, the way you just described that is almost exactly the opposite of what's really happening. You're talking about the hype and they're talking about the reality that is very obvious if you're actually a developer.

AI does in fact constantly have boom bust cycles where a thing will get super popular and basically become a buzz word for a few years and then eventually people settle down and it reverts to just being a normal tool.

Also like none of the things you described are "miracles" and a lot of time they're not even really solving problems or even saving much time. A huge number of posts on this subreddit are people being forced to use AI coding tools for work and being annoyed because it isn't practically saving them much of any time.

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MistSecurity@reddit

Could blockchain not be used fairly effectively for things like voting, public records keeping, and MAYBE for transferring other types of currency other than crypto?

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unreliablenarwhal@reddit

Blockchain actually has tons of uses and is a pretty valuable technology. Medical record anonymization, sharing proof of work (e.g diploma verification, automatic contract fulfillment, etc) But aside from using it to mediate currency, not many of those uses ended up particularly lucrative or worth investment.

I also saw a demo of a person buying products by talking to an LLM. The LLM would ask question and recommend products from the catalog based on the inputs.

Yes, we are. But that doesn't mean it's not useful (certainly way more than blockchain).

Anytime something is hyped, they want you to believe that things will change drastically overnight, like "all software engineers will lose their jobs by 2030!! 😱"

What do you think the answer is?

4InchesOfury@reddit

I'm finding that most roles being "replaced" by AI are actually being replaced by offshore/nearshore. I'm not actively looking (currently employed) but every time I check out the job board of a company that looks interesting there are very few US roles available but lots in India, LatAm, and Eastern Europe. Humans aren't being replaced, just Americans.

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non3type@reddit

At best AI just saves us some time so these posts always seem so odd to me. It never seems like enough time savings to cut an FTE position. At worst I see time lines getting tighter. Any company that tries to cut developers with AI is going to lose market share to a company that tries to do more with AI and their current head count.

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Lazy-Past1391@reddit

Been unemployed for nearly a year, hold onto that job!

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SketchySeaBeast@reddit

I'm finding that most roles being "replaced" by AI are actually being replaced by offshore/nearshore.

BorderKeeper@reddit

My company is actively "consolidating" teams which makes sense, but since most teams hold majority in EU this effectively turns into offshoring. Eastern/Central Europe has quality engineering personel for half the price so it's a no brainer.

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subma-fuckin-rine@reddit

yea my last job, any backfills had to be out of the country. they mostly let people quit on their own terms but did lay off a few with good severance. but still not ideal overall

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forbiddenknowledg3@reddit

Yeah I have no problems getting interviews in ANZ. We're paid 3-5x less than Americans. Those fat salaries never made sense to me.

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sawser@reddit

I've recently gotten two offshore "backups" who I've been tasked to train ASAP to "help me with my duties" as I've been working without a backup for a few years.

I'm absolutely going to be laid off as soon as they think they're caught up and so I'm sorta just coasting and looking for new jobs and not finding anything.

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Goducks91@reddit

This has been happening for years.

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OpenJolt@reddit

It’s happening more now since we aren’t in ZIRP

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Complete-Equipment90@reddit

Yes. Offshoring and automation. It’s been going on for decades. AI is useful technically. It’s also useful for companies to advertise as a reason for restructuring, regardless of how much they are actually leveraging AI.

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AffectionateTune9251@reddit

Yes, and AI is definitely being used as an accelerant there.

Imagine an “American-ify” LLM that takes an offshore dev’s choppy English and converts it to perfect business English.

Or an LLM that can clean up sloppy code (common complaint with offshore devs).

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Yes and no.

Yes, because biz dev folks don’t understand how to capitalize it, leading to a ton of wasted start up money.

No, because it’s better suited to enhance developer productivity and should be the new normal of writing code. LLMs do the donkey work I hate doing as an engineer.

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JimDabell@reddit

I remember when the blockchain came out

There are vast numbers of people who believed in blockchain because they didn’t understand it and fell for hype. These people are now doing the same thing with AI.

There are also vast numbers of people who blindly hated blockchain because they didn’t understand it and saw it as a tribal war. These people are now doing the same thing with AI.

Meanwhile, for the people that understand how these things work, blockchain and AI are very, very different. Blockchain is mostly a solution in search of a problem. There are some interesting use cases, but they are extremely rare. Same goes for cryptocurrencies. Same goes for NFTs. Same goes for VR. You’ll see the same people jumping on the hype train and the same people hating the hype train, and the same lack of understanding in both.

Whereas when generative AI became mainstream with ChatGPT, it was immediately valuable with lots of obvious use-cases across many industries. It is clearly not the same type of thing. And you can see that with its proponents. A huge number of people calling cryptocurrencies, blockchain, NFTs, VR, etc. bullshit are nevertheless strong advocates of AI. A huge number of domain experts are saying AI is extremely valuable.

If you think AI is like blockchain, then you’re firmly placing yourself in the blind hater category. They are not only very different, but obviously so. Huge numbers of reasonable people – including domain experts – can see the difference; why can’t you?

So there's really no intelligence involved whatsoever, and recent studies like the one done by Apple have proven this. So calling it intelligence is false advertising.

Recent studies have not proven this, the Apple study was blown out of all proportion, and “intelligence” is a perfectly reasonable word to describe what is happening.

The biggest difference between AI and something like blockchain is that corporate executives can't play with blockchain and use it, but they can play with AI.

No, the biggest difference is that domain experts can use it and say “this is useful; this helps solve some of my problems; I will spend money on this”.

You are using “corporate executives” as a thought-terminating cliché; a placeholder that means “stupid person you should ignore” that prevents you from asking why people want it. Replace “corporate executives” with “principal engineer with 25 years experience” and your point fails to work. And yes, there’s plenty of those people about.

Rather than admit that they've made a mistake and hired too much, they're saying that they're optimizing their workforce by using AI

Very few of them are doing this. This is what low-information influencers and bloggers masquerading as journalists speculate whenever any layoff happens these days, but the companies themselves often either don’t comment on the situation or they give other reasons (like “flattening org structure”).

And this includes CEOs of tech companies like Google, who are so far removed from actual technical work by now that even they are being fooled.

There are plenty of experienced developers doing hands-on work who are saying that AI is great. Here are some examples:

How I program with Agents – David Crawshaw (Tailscale co-founder and CTO)
AI Changes Everything – Armin Ronacher (creator of Flask)
Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code – Simon Willison (co-creator of Django, creator of Datasette)
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts – Thomas Ptacek (prominent security researcher)
AI writes code – Kenton Varda (principal engineer at Cloudflare)
Slot Machines for Programmers: How Peter Builds Apps 20x Faster with AI – Peter Steinberger (prominent iOS developer)

it's only a matter of time before the scam is revealed

At this point if you are going to call AI “a scam” like you are, then the onus is on you to explain why all of these experts are either lying or deluded.

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No-Rush-Hour-2422@reddit (OP)

Those are all good points, and I'm going to read all those links so I can see if I can use AI better, so thank you very much.

I do think that your point about AI having clear use cases is not 100% correct though. I can see how some people are finding ways to use it, but I don't know if the use case are clear to everyone. It has been my personal experience that people are saying "our product needs AI" and then trying to invent a use case to shoehorn it in, because that's what investors want. New tech shouldn't have to be forced, it should just naturally make sense to use it.

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cloudsquall8888@reddit

You are mistaken if you think high-standing members of huge companies don't know that AI is bs. They just partake i to the theatrics, with the sole purpose of devaluing your work.

There is honestly NOTHING else really going on with AI. Just the promise that developers' cost will go away.

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No-Rush-Hour-2422@reddit (OP)

That's a really good point

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hippydipster@reddit

I've been programming since the mid 80s, and been a professional programmer since the mid 90s. I have not been "constantly told that AI is going to replace me". What is that? Some sort of weird revisionism? Are we digging up randos for this? It's only since GPT-4 that such a thing has really be talked about.

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No-Rush-Hour-2422@reddit (OP)

I guess I should have added "recently". As in since GPT-4

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airoscar@reddit

LLM is very useful as a knowledge retrieval tool, and solves a big problem across many industries: unstructured information querying.

But it does not have good enough reasoning to replace human workers, ML researchers today are even debating if LLM is doing any actual reasoning at all or just piecing together information from its trained examples to appear so.

For that reason I think it has huge potential to how work is being done. Some services will evolve and make good use of LLM’s unparalleled ability to surface information from unstructured data, while others will become redundant or obsolete and die. As a result, it will affect workers employed by those services. But at the end of the day, there will always be people.

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Crypto is stuck in an infinite loop, constantly oscillating between peak of inflated expectations and trough of disillusionment.

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MINIMAN10001@reddit

Crypto is being driven by a speculative market as opposed to market forces demanding usage for crypto.

It has it's uses in some third world countries but not to the extent that investors are buying

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syklemil@reddit

I think blockchains & nfts actually found their niche, and actually have kind of stabilized as a grifter tool. As long as there's a good enough supply of suckers that'll part with their money for that shit, there'll be people taking their money. It's kind of the inverse of the xkcd about today's lucky 10000.

Appreciate you going against the grain. But there is no evidence to suggest that what you are saying is and/or will happen.

The thing I don’t like about the productivity argument (I.e. you saying that it will force hiring and wages down) is that development of software is extremely slow. Painfully slow. Goes at a snails pace. Which is to say, the business roadmap at any tech company outpaces the rate of the development process exponentially.

Companies don’t cap the number of engineers based on a saturated road map. It’s capped by operational expense limitations.

Meaning if you 2x’d your engineering orgs productivity - the demand would remain constant. And, assuming the product roadmaps were well done, it would bring in more capital and ultimately allow the org to hire more engineers (increasing overall demand).

What’s interesting to me is that before the AI hype this was a commonly understood phenomenon. Just ask your PM what ideas they want to implement :)

As for the juniors side of your statement - again, not clear AI is playing a role at all. Google’s best estimate is that they see a 10% productivity boost. And they have a fleet of infrastructure and AI research at their disposal - and they have a pretty strong incentive to put out their most attractive numbers.

What seems more likely to me is that we are in the recovery phase from the COVID / boot camp / overhiring era. And I think the data correlates. (Interest rates / inflation / job openings / etc.)

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meevis_kahuna@reddit

My comment wasn’t solely about software development, it’s about broader economic displacement across white-collar roles as AI capabilities and cost incentives advance. Agentic AI is already replacing operational roles in fast food and logistics, and more industries are likely to follow. This isn’t about hype, it’s about structural incentives and early signals pointing toward labor substitution. I don't disagree that broader economic conditions are also a factor.

It’s so weird that people think this is the plateau 😆

It’s like people seeing the power of a Pentium 1 and go ”surely we cannot go faster than this!”.

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meevis_kahuna@reddit

Yes, exactly. Its like those news articles saying the Internet fad is over in 1998.

It's copium. A future with advanced AI is incredibly uncertain and has a real risk of economic displacement. Is it coming next year? Maybe, maybe not. But it's coming, major changes seem inevitable in the next 5-10 years.

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MsonC118@reddit

I'll bite.

My thought process has that our job has a much higher impact and skill ceiling. Tiny errors can cost companies millions. Also, it's much more structured than something like an email or report. Out of all the jobs that could be replaced, it'd be from the bottom up. Therefore, jobs with a lower skill barrier are more likely to be entirely replaced than those with a higher skill barrier. This leads me to my conclusion, which is that if junior developers are getting replaced, then developers should be the last people to worry. LLMs are much more likely to replace all the other junior jobs in nearly every field (white-collar work specifically). Accounting, law, IT, customer service, etc...

I believe this is all a classic "shift the blame" situation. When you look who also benefits from the "AI is replacing software developers" narrative, it starts make sense. Why would big tech shoot itself in the foot? If I were them, I'd say AI has replaced as many people as possible. It's all about money, and survival at its core. Just look at how the stock market is rewarding big tech for the layoffs marked as "AI-driven layoffs". Ask yourself with a simple thought experiment, what would happen if big tech came out and said, "These are just regular layoffs. LLMs have improved productivity by 20%, but we're cutting costs by more than that to improve our profitability". That doesn't fit the narrative that "AI is replacing people". When you start to dissect who would benefit from that narrative, and what the benefits of that are, I believe it will give you some clarity.

One last point. Just because it's a bubble, doesn't mean it doesn't provide value. I've talked to quite a few people about LLMs and this bubble. Nearly every time I mention that it's a bubble, I receive pushback on how it's providing value. It's a bubble due to financials, not technological advancements. The valuation and grandiose views from VCs, Wall Street, Tech bro's, and more are not in line with the value that LLMs provide. That's the point I'm getting at. Look at how much value OpenAI provides, but they're losing billions annually and keep having to raise money. Imagine how much a subscription would *actually* cost even for OpenAI to break even? The point being, sure, maybe this works out, but history is usually doomed to repeat itself. Simply because humans are humans, it's the same pattern of conflicts like war.

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Napolean_BonerFarte@reddit

So, isn't it more efficient to lay off a large number of people from every department? Why software developers?

Software developers are one of the few roles at whose entire purpose is to produce tangible output. Additionally they are very much viewed as a cost center at companies where tech is not viewed as the primary business. Most other roles are very nebulously defined, and differ in scope and responsibility hugely from company to company, and even in the same organization. Its much harder to imagine replacing, for example, an Operations Analyst because most people cannot even define what that person actually does at any given company. In the minds of most people developers write code all day, which is just text after all. Therefor LLM's can do it faster.

Also, so many roles really do only exist to increase the headcount of some upper manager's fiefdom. They have no interest in replacing those roles with AI because the entire point of those roles really is to be able to say that you manage an organization of X headcount successfully, therefor I deserve to be promoted to COO.

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meevis_kahuna@reddit

I suppose it's fair to say that the dot com bubble didn't invalidate the utility of the web tech stack.

With that said, a company's debt alone doesn't determine it's share price. Netflix and Twitter lost money for decades yet they retain huge market cap.

There's probably some middle ground here in which we can agree that the hype around AI is overblown but the technology is nevertheless disruptive and likely here to stay.

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s0urpeech@reddit

Thank you for speaking up. I find any time this topic comes up there is no nuance from other devs.

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meevis_kahuna@reddit

I'm an AI/ML engineer. (Don't shoot the messenger.) My job includes these discussions.

I think there is rightfully a lot of defensiveness in the dev community especially with some outlandish comments made by Zuckerber and Musk about using AI to replace mid-level devs in 2025. There is clearly a discrepancy between the hype and the reality. On that I'm fully agreed.

That doesn't make the situation a bubble. Yes, the hype is a over inflated. But there won't be a "bust," the functionality will catch up to the hype very soon.

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Don't take my word for it, go look over at the Claude subreddit, it's full of similar stories unlike the Cursor subreddit which is more reflective of how things used to be.

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NoleMercy05@reddit

They just dont know

That’s a good point. Honestly, I don’t know.

But I think people will switch to LLMs because in the short term it’s much better than the ad infested internet with all the sponsored links and so on.

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verzac05@reddit

Forums and search engines don't have to go hand-in-hand, so it's very much possible that search engines' use cases could be replaced by LLMs, with forums still maintaining its relevance.

You'll still have people discussing over problems in forums (my favourite being Github repos' Issues), because humans are social creatures that love to collectively problem-solve (or whinge about an issue hehe).

On the other hand, people will still use search engines to discover communities, but they'll likely switch to using LLMs to solve problems (so way less "how do I make an omelette when I do not have milk" queries on Google Search).

To put it simply, information exchange will most likely change like so: 1. Collective problem-solving <-- still exist in forums and forum-like platforms 2. Discovering facts <-- still stays in Google, e.g. what year is the Honda CX5 created 3. Getting solutions to a specific problem <-- mostly moved to LLMs, especially for things that can be easily verified through a surface knowledge of the subject matter (e.g. if you're a home-cook you can probably verify a recipe outputted by ChatGPT). 4. Verifying critical solutions <-- might still need Google Search for this (just to discover official documentations and whatnot).

If I recall correctly, LLM trainings are still heavily supervised as their input data is curated, hence why it's less likely to spew out garbage than, say, a random Google Search. On the other hand, anyone can list their content on Google Search without much moderation. But I'm not sure if the current method of LLM supervision is financially sustainable or scalable...

Disclaimer: I wouldn't call myself an expert in developing LLMs.

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DrXaos@reddit

Good quality data will be removed from open internet. You will have to pay for an AI which is trained on good stuff. The free AIs will be trained on garbage.

Already the major LLM companies are paying people from their investor's money to create proprietary data. At some point the investors will stop subsidizing (like they stopped subsidizing Uber and fares tripled) and you will have to buy it expensively.

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I see a lot of conmen selling to small b2b with low code ai

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Cool_As_Your_Dad@reddit

Yip. Then you get vibe coding too. So much wrong with it but yet people think its the way to go.

Its crazy

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bluemage-loves-tacos@reddit

I'm kinda having some fun doing vibe coding (at home, not a production codebase) right now. It's frustrating to get things right, and if I didn't keep course correcting things it would be unusable already, but it's currently interesting to learn about what the AI can actually do. I'm seeing what rules I can put in place to get it to follow the "right" patterns as I'd like to see just how much complexity I can force out of it without a complete dumpster fire.

I really do agree that it's the wrong way to go, but since people keep doing it, may as well understand it properly to have a comeback for *why* it sucks and why it's banned from production code

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whisperwrongwords@reddit

Duct tape, good intentions is already what's mostly holding up the house of cards that is software. This is just going to tip it all over the edge.

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Trust my toilet paper bro

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Irtexx@reddit

I'm not a fan of the "next word predictor" reductionist argument. Yes, that's part of it, but emergent behaviors exist.

Some videos worth watching:

A well-respected AI researcher/engineer (worked on the back propagation algorithm, the process used to train most neural networks, including LLMS, for the past few decades) describes current multimodal chatbots as having "subjective experiences". He also believes they do "think", but also believes that our understanding of what "thinking" is isn't useful. It is different between AI and humans, but that doesn't make it any lesser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giT0ytynSqg&t=3663s&ab_channel=TheDiaryOfACEO

A deep dive into how LLMs work. You can see that the next token prediction is only the final step. The stuff that happens before that is much more impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M&list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi&index=6&t=925s&ab_channel=3Blue1Brown

For a balanced argument, here's someone who also sometimes uses the "next word predictor" reductionist argument. But even in this video, she highlights some interpretability studies that show circuits emerge that resemble reasoning that humans do. (This is different from "reasoning" models like O3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMwiQE8Nsjc&ab_channel=AlbertaTech

The Apple "Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models" is just about these "reasoning" models - the ones that essentially self-prompt themselves a few times to produce a better answer. It doesn't prove that there's "no intelligence involved whatsoever," as you say. Also, Apple are very behind on LLM tech, so they have a bias to make it sound less impressive.

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FinestObligations@reddit

Yes and no.

Unlike Blockchain it actually has merit and does something generally useful.

It will settle down a bit though and just be something we use regularly like search engines.

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WorldyBridges33@reddit

"LLMs are just advanced auto complete. They are given huge amounts of written words, and they use that data to guess what the next word should be when it's writing out it's answers."

- Isn't that what we do as humans when we learn languages? As babies, we are given huge amounts of spoken words as input. Our brains pick-up the patterns of these words, and then when we are 3, we can speak the language because our brains accurately predict what the next word in a sentence should be to convey meaning..

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YamahaFourFifty@reddit

AI is meant to replace low level jobs.

I mean the lower workforce people are kind of scarey at the lack of problem solving skills they have.

That’s the workforce ‘AI’ will replace in 1-3 years. McDonald’s and Dunkin is already replacing people who take orders inside are now just kiosks, a form of low level AI.

And AI will be used to improve efficiency- it’s going to make teams shrink a lot which is why we have seen a lot of layoffs in tech sectors.

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Icy_Computer@reddit

The biggest difference between AI and something like blockchain is that corporate executives can't play with blockchain and use it, but they can play with AI. But because they don't understand how it's working, they think it's real. And this includes CEOs of tech companies like Google, who are so far removed from actual technical work by now that even they are being fooled.

This is what concerns me the most. We have people who do not understand what the technology can and cannot do thinking it has actual intelligence. We've already seen cases of inappropriate denial of care by AI. What happens when they allow AI control of drones and then hallucinate and think a school is a tank?

The sooner this bubble bursts, the better. At least then attention will shift to what LLMs can actually do instead of overhyped claims of AGI.

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certainlynotunique@reddit

Yes, this is obvious to anyone on the ground. I have worked and seen "AI projects" that are in no way anchored to reality because decision makers don't understand the technology, and they end up being a complete waste of time and money. When things calm down, we'll have some really cool tech, but also billions of dollars lost by clueless executives throwing money at a hype train.

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thegreatcerebral@reddit

So you are 100% correct that "AI" is an incorrect term. That's why when I read the buzz articles about "AI threatened to tell on husband to wife about affair when he threatened to turn off AI"... I just don't buy it. What I buy is that people that are extremely passionate about AI or it being THEIR PRODUCT find ways to stay MORE relevant.

Right now AI is basically the digital half of that thing that everyone wants, a personal assistant. Take a simple task of looking up a phone number. If we can just ask something else to do that for us it frees us up from that task and we have our number. This is the sweet spot for AI for the masses as I see it. I think maybe Apple sees it also but the problem with Apple is well... Apple.

If each family could have their own personal LLM/AI and in that was everything they do, all their emails, all their receipts, all their accounts, all their EVERYTHING so that at any time you can ask "when was the last time we bought milk?" while you are driving to the grocery store is prime. Being able to pull up photos and ask actual questions like "find me all the pictures of Billy at baseball" and it can actually SEE the pictures and having already done that can figure out that DSC001000102.jpg and DSC48317.jpg and DSC04875923.dcim or whatever are all baseball pictures so you don't have to sort through thousands of photos is amazing to think of.

Right now, I can't even get Alexa to reliably run the routine "Turn off the lamps" which I have tied to all of my lamps and right now there is about a 40% chance that I will get "Hmmm there are things that share the name lamps, which are you asking about?" why? NO CLUE! Or my wife was literally inches away from the Alexa Show and said "Alexa set a timer for one hour" and nothing. Does it again and faintly we hear from across the house two rooms over "A second one hour timer has been set on..." like COME ON. I check the app and it just says "Audio not intended for this device". I can't even tell Alexa "Alexa turn off the kitchen light, the bedroom light, and the hallway light". There is a 0% chance all of them turn off, 80% chance one of them turns off, 40% that two of them turn off, and about 20% chance I'll get a "Hmmmm I don't understand..." or similar return.

For the businesses, taking written word, and lots of it and being able to relate or have information collected to be able to let a human correlate information will be huge. I really want to setup a RAG. We are in Manufacturing and have been around for 50 years so we have seen shit. It would be great to ask an AI, we are using this Horizontal CNC and working with this material with this bit, we are having this issue, have we seen this before? And letting AI become the equivalent of that old guy who used to work here since inception who remembers everything and will say "yea, we did and we solved it by running 200rpm more on the spindle for 20 pieces then we could slow it down 100rpm for the remaining" is almost priceless.

As far as straight automation and such, we aren't there. Those that have been working with AI can tell you how easy it is to get stuck in loops with it. "I have 4 apples how can I Cut them to feed 8 people" returns "give them each an apple" and then you go "I told you I only have 4 apples"... "Oh that's right I'm sorry. Thank you for reminding me in that case let me come up with a way to use 4 apples to feed 8 people. So we will want to take 8 apples..." /facepalm No it will not tell you that for something simple like that but you can get in loops real quickly like that and you have to bounce out to a new chat. This is why I fear for people that use it for coding and rely on it too much.

For those sasquatch videos and the Cowboy fans videos... it's perfect and should not be "improved" any further lol.

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creaturefeature16@reddit

Seems like it, but the pace is pretty staggering. I guess we'll find out in a year or two. Maybe we're all just drunk on our own hubris and software/coding/development really isn't all that hard to effectively automate, and clean code with consistent design patterns is kind of a waste of time. If so...oh well, I suppose?

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ap0phis@reddit

“Clean code with consistent design patterns is kind of a waste of time” is one of those sentences that people are afraid to say out loud but man does it seem true.

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creaturefeature16@reddit

If it compiles, if it runs, if it's able to be optimized...does it matter how it looks? And if making changes to it can be done with AI, does it matter even less?

Or perhaps: if it gets results, why should a company care?

This is the grand experiment that we're embarking on.

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teslas_love_pigeon@reddit

A company should care because their workers will care. There's a reason why certain industries struggle to find devs and often rely on poorly implemented low-code solutions.

Devs don't like working on poorly designed systems. Systems that are designed well are extremely easy to understand, modify, and delete.

We aren't experimenting with anything, acting like we as workers have a choice in what gets implemented at the company level isn't occurring. Often the actions that do get chosen are done to the detriment of their own workforces.

You have to stop seeing business owners, which is what all the leadership at big tech are, as these smart beings that know more about the world than you.

Its a bubble, the hype is pulling in investors and its giving tech companies an excuse to dump labor. Keeping and stealing high performers and forcing everyone below a senior in talent out. Long run this is a disaster. Short term it gives space for needed automation systems to kick in for business survival but the hype has many CEOs basically lobtomizing the company of its trade secrets.

Many companies are escaping the US and this is just a guise. Its not a bad thing its just dishonest allowing people with share options to collect extra cash.

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DigThatData@reddit

Then along came AI, and companies found their excuse. Rather than admit that they've made a mistake and hired too much, they're saying that they're optimizing their workforce by using AI, in order to spin layoffs as a positive for investors.

you're basically right, but the reason they hired too much was because of the trump 2017 tax breaks which let companies treat all of their engineering head count as a tax write off. In 2022, that tax break expired and all of that headcount flipped from being a write-off to a liability.

basically an economic time bomb.

https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2022/nov/amortizing-r-e-expenditures-under-tcja/

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CroakerBC@reddit

As a slight aside, the repeal of the R&D tax break has just itself been repealed, so that could be a fun one.

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We are in an AI bubble until C suite executives pushing this realize what AI is actually good at is C-suite level stuff: Abstract thinking with lofty goals that have no basis in factual reality. Oftentimes arguing with my CTO is arguing with AI.

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Shadowys@reddit

We are but not in a way you think.

Alot of work is being done to turn workflows touchless. The common expectation is to remove the human from the loop, and millions of funding are pouring into the area.

However, LLMs are clearly flawed in that you need a good long, rich crafted prompt, along with an army of validations and special techniques to acheive a zero shot response that is comparable or better than humans. However this performance rapidly decays after the second or third responses, which is why successful enterprise implementations always focus on using LLMs as a zero shot transformer than a chatbot. This is captured in Microsoft research as well, showing 39% decreases in cognitive abilities after sixth gen.

If its a zero shot transformation, then its likely a problem of unstructured data that could already have been a program. This is just the old digitalisation push, not some new paradigm.

For chatbots that uses a longer conversation and context, like programming tools, then you definitely need a human in the loop. We need to focus on AI increasing the value of humans, not replacing humans.

https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2025/06/agentic-ai-is-a-bubble-but-im-still-trying-to-make-it-work

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BlossomingBeelz@reddit

I think AI (with its abundant problems) will stick because it raises the floor for less apt people. No one is going to want to give up that superpower.

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dinosaurkiller@reddit

I see the limitations of LLMs but also see many use cases that don’t require it to be actual AI. The question is, will the rate of advancement beyond LLMs be as predicted? The AI providers obviously say yes. I honestly don’t know.

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Doesn't need to go anywhere, just needs to be evaluated realistically.

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ITGSeniorMember@reddit

So there’s definitely an AI bubble but I think it more closely correlates to the dot-com bubble of the nineties. I think AI will fundamentally change a tremendous amount of how we work and live in the same way as the explosion of commercial websites did in the nineties. Certain professions will see a similar decline to brick and mortar retail but they won’t go away entirely. Versions of those things will pivot.

On the flip side, the investment boom into AI startups is very similar to the investment strategy of the late nineties and (while it might take a few more years) that will pop. A small subset of businesses will survive to suck up the market share to become the next YouTube’s/facebook/etc.

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MarimbaMan07@reddit

The only people saying AI will replace software engineers are AI CEOs and people that "vibe code" small projects.

Once your code base hits thousands of lines of code these AI tools quickly stop working well. I work at a company that has existed for decades and has repositories with millions of lines of code. No AI tools I've tried have a clue what is going on in these large repos.

I'm sure eventually these tools will be better but I don't see them replacing us in our lifetime. At best I think it's just another tool in the tool box.

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STunstall72@reddit

If coding agents such as Claude Opus (apparently the most cutting edge "AI") are still LLMs at heart, with zero actual intelligence behind them (and let's be honest, if there was intelligence behind them we'd actually have AGI, no?) then that means they are going to make mistakes as they are using pattern matching to suggest code that "fits" gaps. Plenty of mistakes.

I'm personally finding that AI like Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 etc keeps writing code that doesn't fit my needs. Its actually becoming a nuisance. This is despite my prompts being as specific as I can make them. Despite having an editorconfig file which defines my (very high) coding standards. Despite a readme.md which I instruct the AIs to read before doing anything, per session.

I can't imagine Claude Opus 4 being light years ahead of that.

We as devs should keep highlighting that these "AIs" are nothing but fancy code completion, to try to bring companies to their senses before they sack the only people that can save their business.

So yes, I think we're in a bubble. And I also think we're being lied to on the daily.

Altman, Musk, Huang et al know there's a dead end coming soon but them pesky shareholders, eh?

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Equivalent_Lead4052@reddit

Even if it’s a bubble, how does it help me to know it’s just speculation and nothing more? People are being laid off, standards are way higher, you’re being forced to do training after training and deliver at who knows how many times the speed.

The employees are the ones who suffer at the moment and it’s useless to say “AI is not so spectacular”, because no one listens.

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HatersTheRapper@reddit

No I see a lot of manual labor jobs being replaced by robots already, drywall, roofing, painting, harvesting etc. we are still in early early days of AI when it actually develops into real intelligence it will be 10,000X what it is now.

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sodbrennerr@reddit

100% but I don't think the burst will affect us as much. At least the majority of us.

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SuccessfulTell6943@reddit

I am going to go against the grain and say we are NOT in a bubble, but a lot of the focus of AI being used to replace people is misguided.

AI replaces tasks not people, machines replaced the tasks that horses did, both directly and indirectly (e.g. nobody needed a horse breeder/stud horses anymore) I think we focus so much on our jobs being ourselves that we forget that our jobs are just a loose collection of tasks that we do for money. There are other tasks to do even if the AI replaces the majority of the tasks that a dev would do. The concept of a dev changes, the processes of achieving the same goals changes. That's not replacement, just augmentation.

AI will stay and be useful, it will change our lives for better or for worse, but so long as there are problems that humans need solving, we will still do so.

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LeDYoM@reddit

well, I heard COBOL was going to make programmers unnecessary because in comparison with assembly or C, any bussiness man could code in it because it was "almost english". Just saying.

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It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future.

I've been though a few tech hype cycles and one thing that is different about this one is that it seems very forced. It's a push vs a pull.

During the dot com bubble consumers, developers, businesses ... everybody wanted to use the internet in every way possible.

The AI bubble seems to have much more pressure from big players forcing onto a skeptical user base.

In the late 90s, people wanted to shop online, today nobody wants to talk to an AI customer service agent.

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MsonC118@reddit

Agreed. It's actually pushed me away from even trying certain tools. I keep seeing Google's ads on TV shows like Shark Tank LOL. It's like an advertisement infestation. I do like to try new things, but having t pushed infront of my face constantly turns me off from even wanting to try it.

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forbiddenknowledg3@reddit

AI is simultaneously impressive but also way overhyped.

People losing their jobs? Yeah they are, but AI is also not solving that companies problems or saving projects. So IMO they're losing their jobs for other reasons. Microsoft is a great example; if AI was so great, why does Windows 11 and their games still suck ass?

Yes it has improved over the past few years, but IMO it's more the tooling/integration. Going from ChatGPT to Claude Code myself, the AI still makes the same fundamental mistakes and need someone experienced in the loop. We won't be replaced unless there's another breakthrough in the actual AI bit.

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jacobissimus@reddit

Yeah eventually business folks will realize that if they replace all the juniors with ai, then they’ll run out of senior

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MsonC118@reddit

This. I'm senior+ with a solid resume. I currently run my own software companies these days, but if I ever have to go back to corporate, this is precisely what I'm looking forward to. Enrollment is already dropping for CS (if I'm not mistaken, please correct me if I'm wrong). The fear will only help us in the long term.

ColumbaPacis@reddit

No, it won’t.

A peogramming language allows you to be precise. Sure, it is an abstraction, but at the end of the day, there is a finite amount of errors a compiler could make. Which a human could resolve, so the language becomes fully ”exact” when translated to binnary.

But LLMs are black boxes. They are inherently chaotic and unpredictable. That is not even close to what a compiler is.

So an LLM can NEVER replace a compiler, to create some “natural language” abstraction layer. Which is what everyone is marketing them as.

Well either that, or going a step further and promising an agentic tool, to replace the human from the loop completely.

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rayred@reddit

+1 natural language is a terrible abstraction for computers. We learned this decades ago lol.

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We should count how many businesses still run their operations on excel vs having dedicated code to their problems. If AI really is genuinely reducing the cost of code, there will be a lot more work out there.

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Alarming-Nothing-593@reddit

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ahspaghett69@reddit

We are in a bubble, yes. AI is useful but it's not magic or the huge leap forward that was promised. Branding what we have as AI is disingenuous, frankly.

2 years ago people said copilot was going to take all software developer jobs. Now the same people say that copilot sucks, actually Claude code is what's going to take all those jobs. Now people are starting to say actually it's not Claude code it's Claude with locally hosted MCP servers etc etc etc

The problem is that as soon as you try to use AI in production, for real use cases, it fails. Because it doesn't really understand anything, it's just predicting the next block of text, or pixels, given the previous block. "Reasoning" as it's currently implemented is basically just splitting up the blocks into smaller predictions, which tend to be more accurate, but then it fails to understand how the blocks relate to each other.

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DallasActual@reddit

100% this is an AI bubble.

AI is not replacing anyone. It will ease some use cases, but the only folks who think LLM is the last stop before AGI are the ones selling LLMs.

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Middle-Comparison607@reddit

I don’t believe AI is going to replace anything in the short term, but it will more more transformative than any of the tech you mentioned. I compare AI to the birth of internet and later the apps in smartphones revolution. The internet didn’t necessarily end anything but created new forms of business - eg Amazon, Netflix, etc. Apps on smartphones put the internet close to us all the time and things like mobile banking and instant messaging apps were created. Mobile banking didn’t kill bank branches but definitely reduced the need for them. Who misses going to a branch to pay their bills?

As for AI, it will replace the boring part of engineering pretty soon. Who wants to write another CRUD? Or the YAML of YAMLs (K8s, ArgoCD, Crossplane - I’m looking at you)… even terraform is quite boring to me. They are necessary tools (sometimes), but I absolutely hate having to deal with them when I just want to build My Next Cool Thing (tm). For me AI is helping me unlock my creativity when building software. I don’t see it replacing engineers because it cannot be creative, but it is definitely enabling me to do things I wouldn’t do before

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FunnyMustacheMan45@reddit

It's safer to assume everything that isn't at least 20 years old is a bubble...

I recall the days when NFTs were a thing. The job market was so hot you could get a job without any experience...

Now, I can't even find a single NFT or Crypto company from back then.

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Ahrivan@reddit

You know the bubble is at its peak once there is talks about quantum AI.

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nullstacks@reddit

I think it’s a lot about the right timing to be a scape goat for over-hiring mostly under qualified talent over the past few years, an unstable economy, and an unpredictable administration transition coming to a head.

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Revolutionizing tech ... by analogy, I started in tech just before the dot com era, I can say first-hand that it had a huge impact. Imagine working in tech without widespread internet access. It will be the same with AI/LLMs. You will have a hard time imagining working without it in a few years.

Changes to society overall ... I can attest that far, far more changes occurred with how we accessed information between 1996 and 2005 than between 1986 and 1995. That latter 10 years was a fundamental shift in information access. Add onto that, commerce. Imagine not having e-commerce. Just drive to a store and hope they have what you want.

But all the hype ... while AI will change a lot, what specifically it will change is largely an unknown. We aren't there yet to know how it plays out. And when people sense a change is coming and want to get involved with it, many will make crap up to get attention. Hence, all the "it will replace all SWE." Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but those saying they know are talking out of their rear-ends.

PS: it won't replace all SWEs :)

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funbike@reddit

Is the personal computer a bubble? Is the Internet a bubble? Is the smartphone a bubble?

In 1977 someone from DEC said "Nobody would ever want a computer in their home". In 1995 Newsweek had an article, "The Internet? Bah!". LOL!

talldean@reddit

Blockchain seemed like a pyramid scheme from as long as I can remember. Bitcoin is the best current use and is burning $130 of electricity per transaction, today. (1370.97 kWh per transaction run today, July 8th 2025. Yeah.)

AI has practical uses, and we're seeing a bunch of them already. Lawyers with less than two or three years of working experience... are already obsolete, except that we need them to get lawyers with 4+ years of experience. Even if we *never* get AGI, we're already seeing entry level white collar jobs - and customer support jobs - start to evaporate.

That said, I suspect AI replaces managers - or allows managers to manage far more reports - notably before it replaces a senior engineer.

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Constant-Listen834@reddit

If it was a bubble, I don’t think we’d see so many people on Reddit scared like this.

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codeprimate@reddit

So there's really no intelligence involved whatsoever

LOL. Analysis and comprehension capabilities are the reason I use it every day. I've literally pasted an error backtrace into Cursor and it automatically fixed a longstanding bug that no one else could resolve: watching the entire root cause analysis process, mitigation strategy proposal and revision, and implementation in real-time.

Why are we acting like writing instructions into a textbox is a skill programmers don't already have?

wutcnbrowndo4u@reddit

I remember when the blockchain came out, and it was going to change the world, and everyone had to include it in everything. Then people realized it's limits and got tired of hearing about it. Then VR came out, and it was going to change the world, and everyone had to include it in everything.

I've got a pretty strong disagreement with your recollection of these "hype" cycles. These technologies both never reached even close to the level of industry hype, nor did they create the amount of value/utility that AI already has, even according to the biggest pessimists. Blockchain hype was dominated by laypeople giddy about their speculative investments. VR didn't have much of a hype cycle at all: in fact, Meta was roundly mocked for their Metaverse bet![1]

LLMs are fantastic at doing an OK job at doing relatively simple and well documented asks. They are not good at solving problems.

The reality is, that is you are worried about AI taking your job, you should probably find a better job where you offer more than a brainless pattern matcher could replace you.

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Cheses100@reddit

I think here’s where the bubble maybe be different this time. I’m finding myself able to do a significant portion of my coding work using only LLMs. Currently I have to guide them using my knowledge of software engineering and our systems, but they’re able to do reasonably complex tasks within a certain scope. Sorta like the type of work maybe an intern could do but it’s done nearly instantly. Just from the efficiency gains there I do believe a single engineer is maybe 2x more efficient than before. I’ve certainly saved hours at a time from having LLMs write some code for me.

The broader thing here is if you follow a lot of the research, there’s a ton of new advances in reinforcement learning for training LLMs. Some are specifically focusing on agentic tasks, which eventually can lead to much better agents not just for coding but for doing broader tasks within your company that a swe might do.

There's a few overlapping issues:

- People being laid off is due to covid times ending, inflation, and interest rates normalizing. It happens on top of whatever other things people are talking about, and so often other effects are mistaken for this. So covid bubble deflates, and probably overdeflates considering how many people got hired in the golden years.

- There's two layers of bubble. The first is investment hype. Investors see opportunity, they all rush at the door, some of them will lose their money. It's inevitable that a lot of invested money is just wasted. Petsdotcom, not a terrible idea about how to use the internet, but they messed it up. So yes you will also see AI companies folding due to being badly run or just not winning the race they're in.

- The second is real changes to how people live. This is like the internet again. While the bubble popped, there were real effects on everyday life. You can see this already with AI, it has murdered SEO in a short time. People don't just do a search anymore, or at least when they do, they just read the Gemini summary and they're done. Or like us devs, we code in a different way than we used to. I just got Claude to code a fairly complex feature this morning. It would have taken me the whole week of doing donkey work debugging.

I don't think it's like blockchain. When did you last see anyone pay with a digital currency? There were articles and newsclips about people paying for pizzas with BTC. If it was going to take off that way, it would have. There's a speculative market that is growing, but it's not a massive everyday thing that affects us all.

So are we in a bubble? Certainly AI investments are a bubble, a lot of those firms are spending gigantic amounts of money on compute, and getting token amounts of money back for it. Consolidation will happen once we find some winners.

But the AI tech is here to stay. In ten years, vibe coding will still be a thing, for example. It's not like BTC where you won't be able to pay anyone for coffee anymore.

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jcm95@reddit

Devs won’t be replaced, but demand will keep plummeting

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BoBoBearDev@reddit

It is a bubble, but before it pops, it will rebubble. The concept of automation is not new and has been done for more than 5000 years. AI is just an evolution of automation and it will never stop and there is no limit to that either.

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Equal-Purple-4247@reddit

I think a lot of people are either unaware of or did not notice the cloud revolution.

It has become more than just vertical vs horizontal scaling. The modern tech stack, with infrastructure as code, containers, orchestrations, service discovery, telemetry, consensus protocols, distributed storage / systems etc. are all a result of, or highly influenced by the cloud. New jobs like dev ops and cloud engineers have sprung up, and existing jobs like software engineers and architects have changed.

I'm not a fan of AI in its current form, but I'm confident that big cloud i.e. Google / Microsoft / Amazon will force AI upon us. It's the reason we're all using Teams. Much better tooling (eg. MCP protocol, cursor) will emerge, and slowly but surely, Big AI will augment our job scope such that we play a "supporting" role to AI. Tech ops will change (just like devops), architecture will change (like how everything is a microservice), our favorite frameworks and languages will change (like how everything is a webapp and desktop apps are almost dead), and SWE will change.

Just look at how they've transformed the industry with their cloud certification programs. Blockchain (or at least bitcoin) reached enough critical mass that it's listed on the stock exchange and will possibly be with us forever. IoT devices are still everywhere. They haven't given up on voice assistants since the first Siri. IMO AI is closer to "cloud" than it is to "blockchain", and cloud is everywhere.

AI is endemic.

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guhcampos@reddit

We are always in some sort of bubble, AI being the current one. What "bubble" means here has some nuance though.

Right now there are thousands of AI startups around the World, many attempting similar goals, many chasing problems for solutions they provide, a few working in solutions to current problems.

From those thousands, a couple dozen will succeed and thousands will fail. If this is what a bubble burst looks like for you, be sure it will happen, and it will be relatively fast compared to other bubbles of this kind, because AI research costs are quite extreme. A normal software startup with a couple million USD in the bank might have 3 years runway if their team is small. If they want to heavily invest in AI, their cloud costs alone will eat this cash in a year.

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DesperateAdvantage76@reddit

LLMs are an excellent alternative to Google but I haven't seen them improve much since I started using them 3 years ago. I don't care what all the synthetic benchmarks say.

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ImYoric@reddit

We are absolutely in an AI bubble (assuming that AI means GenAI).

This does not mean that AI cannot be useful, or that AI doesn't threaten jobs, or that AI will never improve. But it does mean that AI companies are insanely overvalued, that the current possibilities of AI are overhyped, and that the current economic model is unsustainable.

I believe that pretty much none of the currently hyped AI-based technologies will exist in 10 years time. I also believe that several AI-based technologies that are currently passed over will cause considerable changes in the tech landscape and society. I am, of course, unable to predict which ones.

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Large_Carpenter_8459@reddit

GenAI sucks, but as a tool it is a massive productivity booster

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Fidodo@reddit

Yes, but not like with the block chain or vr, but like the Internet bubble. Unlike the Blockchain or vr, AI and the Internet both have real substance backing them, but we still had an Internet bubble. It's not that the Internet wasn't capable, but people were promising too much too soon and just like with ai, many people did not understand how it could be utilized. We eventually achieved the vision for the Internet, but it took much longer than promised and that vision was blurry at the start.

AI provides a real opportunity for a massive impact just like the Internet and just like the Internet a lot of companies will get it wrong. That will cause a bubble, but in the chaos, the companies that get it right have the opportunity to upturn the established order.

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tepfibo@reddit

Yes if electricity was a bubble. Or wheels a bubble.

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PhatOofxD@reddit

Unlike Blockchain AI is actually very useful for MOST companies.

How useful for most is over hyped yes, and the AI growth is honestly beginning to flatten out.

I wouldn't worry too much about it taking the career away. It'd take others far easily and every time in history this has happened it spawned a replacement industry

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agumonkey@reddit

Partly, I think the amount of people able to juggle with AI / LLMs for actual value are few. Most people around are excited to try setup things but it's shallow fiddling afaik and I see no real depth and ability to overcome issues when their new ai-based tool will start to have issues.

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Alive_Direction6123@reddit

AI will not replace software engineers. I do believe it will replace simple software developers and coders.

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Deaf_Playa@reddit

Yes. The notion that we don't know why GenAI is able to produce semi coherent thoughts is evidence. Until we figure out hallucinations, this bubble will remain.

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Im assuming we talk about LLMs, which is just subset of AI.

I think many companies will collapse surely. But also, I see another reason for potential collapse, apart from often problematic quality: LLM models are few in number, in comparison to humans. People have different experiences, biases, histories, thoughts. This is the main drive of variety of ideas. Be it books, movies, songs, products, business ideas, concepts...

With few number of LLMs that are trained in similar fashion and taking over more and more areas of life, I have impression diversity of ideas may collapse - if business goes too far.

But other than that, LLMs will stay as a tool.

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chaitanyathengdi@reddit

It's inflated for sure, but it'll have its uses. And no, I don't think this is the kind of AI that will lead to AGI and ASI one day. Those are totally different beasts.

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Crazyglue@reddit

I was (and mostly am) skeptical since this hype train started. Work gave me a free sub to cursor though and it's been an incredible speed up for me. It's still not good enough to notice specific nuance or to stop itself going down a really dumb rabbit hole. But for hammering out tests, boilerplate, and general structure it feels like a 10x increase

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donjulioanejo@reddit

And this includes CEOs of tech companies like Google, who are so far removed from actual technical work by now that even they are being fooled.

Let's be real, CEOs of companies like Google or Microsoft absolutely know the limits of AI.

But they're also selling shovels in the middle of a gold rush, so they're absolutely going to shill it and downplay any drawbacks.

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data-artist@reddit

Yes, but this is how the Tech scam works. You are most likely going to be replaced by an offshore developer before you will be replaced by AI.

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protomatterman@reddit

We are absolutely an in AI bubble. It’s like the dot com bubble of 2000. Everyone was sure the internet would be big, rightly, but not exactly sure how or when. Everything was .com even when it made no sense. It was terrible when the bubble burst. Maybe it won’t be so bad this time.

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Sheldor5@reddit

if you have to force a technology it's garbage

AI is big tech stealing money from big investors and lying to everybody to invest even more

all the big AI companies don't make any profit (income only covers 10-30% of the operation/development costs), they all rely on investments

and the term AI "Artificial Intelligence" is the biggest scam ever if you know its definition ...

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keyless-hieroglyphs@reddit

I am having similar disiullusionment, the more I hear and learn, the more I think so.

On the positive side, some advances have been made. Such as myself does best to take a minute of the calm reflection.
We don't properly know ourselves, so many would happily resort to lever pulling and receiving unnutrituos flavoured water. Others might use this "great tool" it in a way they would call judicious (90%). But on the flip side, see "Folger's crystals" (see c2), where both creator and reviewer don't care, real world benefit is generated (more time to coding), by not generating real world benefit (not really doing the other stuff).
The graphs will continue. An early discoverer might not know what they had, made a public spectacle of themselves and might not be recognized to this day, or spent time in an asylum because of such impossible delusions. Give it 30 years.
Maybe something has been done allowing us to sift through proteins better, to exploit more energy, to overcome troubles and avoid another setback. So which year will we have the superhuman intelligence? Breathlessly uttering a date 2 years ahead, safely buried in noise by then?
The technologies are such that we will have to use some particular version and stick with it. It does not transfer to the next. The smallest/largest types will see fastest/slowest incremental update, respectively. The greatest accellerator, may be desperation out of conflict or other trouble. Is it always in the shadows that things grow? Do our eager and greedy hands make a mockery out of everything?
On the negative side, there is news suggesting users brainrot themselves. Have we discovered a new "firewater"? Are we dreaming to dancing lights and receiving profound insights? Will we experience a new setback? One day too, this will happen. Our problems will not be solved by technology, rather, the medicine has always been known.

The day the company tells me "AI is no longer optional" (as one company is said to have done), I'll quit.

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MonochromeDinosaur@reddit

A bubble is only a bubble if it pops. Right mow regardless of whether there is one or not the prudent thing is to ride the wave and have a contingency plan for the pop.

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Crashed-Thought@reddit

Vr and blockchains arent things that most people touched. Even by now.

AI is something that every person i know used

I still think vr will have its time to shine but AI is here

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I think so. It's similar to the offshoring wave of the 2000s; eventually companies resumed hiring in Western countries. I think that as the market turns, companies will hire stateside again. The current AI stuff certainly helps and it's great tech, but it's no replacement for humans. Maybe when AGI is achieved and proven to work safely, but the jury is still out.

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Don’t fully agree with the “auto-complete” logic

We don’t fundamentally know how human brains work either, isn’t most thought/decision making just pattern recognition and prediction on some level? (Given the context (current situation and past experiences), make a decision)

I think its just going to replace the devs who do repetitive easy stuff. Its not a magical thing. As couple YouTubers pointed out, that the training data chatpgt or other models had was average or below average since thats most of the shared code online. I think its just going to fizzle out and be used in some niche things but only thing itll leave us is that it maybe be replace google for some questions such as why is x happened or formed etc since people just want to read the information asap instead of looking thru sites.

But i must say im very annoyed by all the ai code and ai generated images and sites that looks like the same cuz of ai generation

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justleave-mealone@reddit

Idk I think expectations need to be altered, it’s not like the NFT bubble which was utter rubbish.

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lab-gone-wrong@reddit

Sooner or later, the AI model/platform providers will have to stop subsidizing their customers and increase prices. That should pop the bubble, or at least let out a lot of its air, as underdeveloped prototypes and low value pet projects fizzle.

Absolutely a bubble but it can run as long as companies like Google and Microsoft have cash to throw at it. And that's potentially a long time.

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originalchronoguy@reddit

Anxiety is fueling the fear more than anything.

AI, current genAI, is more augmentation vs displacement. Sure, there are specific jobs at risks. Those jobs were inevitable for displacement through normal means of automation with or without AI.

But anxiety, overall, a bad thing. There is a general fear of upskilling / reskilling. A SWE can definitely upskill, outside of direct AI development, to be relevant. Running models in prod require infrastructure, data-ingestion, data-pipelines, HIL (human in the loop) iterative re-evaluation, and guard-railing. All those jobs are more relevant today. All those problems I just mentioned are real opportunities today in response to the AI uptick. Those workloads can't be augumented nor displaced.

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ZenithKing07@reddit

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