Sadly, I'm still disagreeing while crypto kiddies are driving past me in lambo's. If its the future of money, yes we'll get there eventually, but like every technology shift, there's a lot of money to be made in the transition, not after. *
* I sold all crypto a few years ago and I'm a happier person :D
I agree with the conclusion but not with the premise. The conclusion is, "I don't have to be an early adopter," but the premise seems to be "there is zero utility in getting in on anything early."
> Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.
I'm upvoting because it's useful to see and debate this viewpoint — shared by many engineers I know
I do think it's a bad take though. Not all new trends are the same: the metaverse was an obvious flop and crypto hasn't found practical applications. AI isn't like those because it's already practically changed the way I get my job done.
It takes time to learn skills, and getting started earlier will means more time to use them in your working life.
There are real productivity gains by using these tools right now. Instead of doing 1x your normal work, you can do 5x while still maintaining quality. This is like an accountant sticking to pen and paper because calculators are big and clunky.
Feels like a false equivalency. It's just my experience, but I've completely ignored crypto and the metaverse, and I don't get the sense I'm missing out on much.
In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose, but I'm really enjoying it so far.
In general, a good strategy is just staying a little bit behind. Let the new fads play themselves out. Some have staying power. Bitcoin never did turn into a usable currency, just another speculator's toy. Luckily I am - so far - in a position where I can watch the AI thing from the sidelines to see how it plays out.
You're trying to make the point using BitCoin, but in the early 2000s I had just over 14,000 of them, so I can quite clearly see a point in getting in early.
Crypto isn't bad because it failed to make early adopters rich — it did make them rich. It's bad because it has horrible externalities in scams, war crimes / sanctions evasion, organised crime — which most of those early adopters were well aware of.
Agree with the message, coding since 1986, I have learned to not suffer from FOMO and wait for the dust to settle.
Ironically one might even get projects to fix the mess left behind, as the magpies focus their attention into something else.
In the case of AI, the fallacy is thinking that even if ridding the wave, everyone is allowed to stay around, now that the team can deliver more with less people.
Maybe rushing out to the AI frontline won't bring in the interests that one is hoping for.
EDIT: To make the point even clearer, with SaaS and iPaaS products, serverless, managed clouds, many projects now require a team that is rather small, versus having to develop everything from scratch on-prem. AI based development reduces even further the team size.
Yeah, everyone is in panic mode - "they're killing all the horses", but one really needs to consider the similar historical events.
When ATMs were rolled out in the 70s, everyone assumed tellers were on their way out. What actually happened was counterintuitive: the number of bank tellers increased for the next few decades. ATMs lowered the cost of operating a branch, so banks opened more branches, which required more tellers. The teller's job also shifted from cash handling toward relationship-building. The predicted elimination took 40+ years to materialize, and even then it was gradual.
"Paperless office" in another example. Around 1970s futurists confidently predicted - computers would eliminate paper. Companies restructured workflows around that assumption. What happened, really? Paper consumption actually increased dramatically - laser printers and desktop publishing created more paper demand, not less. The prediction wasn't wrong, just half a century early.
US horse population peaked around 21 million in 1915 and crashed to roughly 3 million by 1950. The tragedy wasn't that people prematurely killed off horses - it's that the infrastructure around horses (farriers, feed suppliers, carriage makers, stable hands) was devastated faster than those workers could adapt, but that also took decades.
Imagine if in 1910, someone sold all their horses expecting automobiles to arrive in their rural county within two years, and then cars didn't reach reliable rural infrastructure until 1940. That's what it feels to me when companies lay off thousands of programmers because of AI.
Yes, AI may replace programmers, but what would probably happen is that the meaning of "programmer" would change. Yet that won't happen within a year or two. Even with the unseen advancements in the AI research.
It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no.
So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or trying to switch careers?
I went to get a flat tire fixed yesterday and the whole time I was envious of the cheerful guy working on my car. A flat tire is a flat tire, no matter whether a recession is going on or whether LLMs are causing chaos in white collar work. If I had no debt and a little bit saved up I might just content myself with a humble moat like that.
I'm maybe less pessimistic, but I expect in the next decade or two, I'm going to spend a lot of time fixing apps that people who were moderately technical vibe-coded years before. They seemed to work well enough until they didn't, and at some point, they became central to the business.
MS Access and so many more "you won't need a programmer again" dev tools over the decades blazed the trail.
Green is always greener on the other side. You can always work on that, get an apprenticeship and work on it. Why don't you do it? Because you know not everything's so rosy. These are hard jobs, not super well paid.
The kid who showed his work in detail in math class is doing better in life 9/10 times than the kids that only knew how to use a calculator. Now consider how well the people who think you just need to know how to yell at the calculator are going to do?
When Maps apps came around, people totally lost the brain muscle for being able to navigate. Using LLMs is no different, people over reliant on these tools are simply ngmi. They are going to be totally reliant on their favorite billionaire being willing to sell them competency via their thinking machines.
I would caution everyone to consider if the Billionaires who are screaming that you're going to be left behind, laid off and redundant if you don't (pay them to) use their brain nerfing machine, whether or not they have your best interest at heart.
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours.
Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state.
It is safe to assume that the tech will continue to improve in both ways: productivity gains will increase, onboarding will get easier. I think it will also become easier to choose a particular suite of products to use too. Waiting is not a bad idea.
i thought so too. but now we are onboarding project managers in non-tech fields to Claude Code and they are crushing it. on a terminal. vs code. the first thirty min is the hard part, after that the feedback loop kicks in. they ask for what they really want, they get it.
Some might be getting into AI in order to sell AI. As OpenClaw has shown, there is opportunity in this space to be a trailblazer. There are no doubt companies that are not tech-aligned that someone could help set up local LLMs for…
For me though, I'm dabbling in AI because it fascinates me. Bitcoin was like, I don't know, Herbalife? —never interesting to me at all.
But IMO the most fruitful thing for an engineering org to do RIGHT NOW is learn the tools well enough to see where they can be best applied.
Claude Code and its ilk can turn "maybe one day" internal projects into live features after a single hour of work. You really, honestly, and truly are missing out if you're not looking for valuable things like that!
Not advocating for crypto here, but the ROI evaluations here are a bit incongruous.
The risk of getting in early on crypto is you lose a little money. The risk of not is missing out on money. You can't simply replay that later, the way that you could invest the time to catch up on how git works.
This is in an excellent characterization of the kind of marketing tactic I see all over social media right now and that I find absolutely disgusting.
The keyword here is fear. Despite faux-positive veneer, the messaging around certain technologies (especially GenAI) is clearly designed to induce anxiety and fear, rather than inspire genuine optimism or pique curiosity. This is significant, because fear is one of the most powerful tools to shut down rational thinking.
The subliminal (although not very subtle) message there is something very primitive. "If you don't join our group, you will soon starve to death." This is radically different from how most transformative technologies were promoted in the past.
It seems that the emotional rhetorical range in general has been stunted to just fear. Politicians seem to be the worst at it. They used to be able to give actually inspiring speeches. Now they just mash the fear button for everything to get what they want and then wonder why there are problems of despair in society.
I don't understand the rush to be "the first". Facebook isn't the first social media, Google isn't the first search engine, iPhone is not the first smart phone, Microsoft is not the first OS, the list goes on.
Clearly there's an advantage for being an early adopter, but the advantage is often overblown, and the cost to get it is often underestimated.
151 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 96.1 ms ] threadWhat jobs aren’t requiring usage of these tools by now?
Sadly, I'm still disagreeing while crypto kiddies are driving past me in lambo's. If its the future of money, yes we'll get there eventually, but like every technology shift, there's a lot of money to be made in the transition, not after. *
* I sold all crypto a few years ago and I'm a happier person :D
Why not simply evaluate things instead of ignoring them until its too late?
Sure, we don't have infinity time, but the fact that OP mentions these two things, means the pattern showed up enough.
> Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.
I do think it's a bad take though. Not all new trends are the same: the metaverse was an obvious flop and crypto hasn't found practical applications. AI isn't like those because it's already practically changed the way I get my job done.
It takes time to learn skills, and getting started earlier will means more time to use them in your working life.
This is the lazy guy path, is not the wise one.
You're trying to make the point using BitCoin, but in the early 2000s I had just over 14,000 of them, so I can quite clearly see a point in getting in early.
IMO it reads a little desperate and very much like the hype bros but from opposite side. Take a look at the articles if you don't believe.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/ai/
- I'm OK being left behind, thanks!
- Unstructured Data and the Joy of having Something Else think for you
- This time is different
- How close are we to a vision for 2010?
- AI is a NAND Maximiser
- Reputation Scores for GitHub Accounts
- Agentic AI is brilliant because I loath my family
- Stop crawling my HTML you dickheads - use the API!
- Removing "/Subtype /Watermark" images from a PDF using Linux
- LLMs are still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks
- Books will soon be obsolete in school
- Winners don't use ChatGPT
- Grinding down open source maintainers with AI
- Why do people have such dramatically different experiences using AI?
- Large Language Models and Pareidolia
- How to Dismantle Knowledge of an Atomic Bomb
- GitHub's Copilot lies about its own documentation. So why would I trust it with my code?
- LLMs are good for coding because your documentation is shit
Ironically one might even get projects to fix the mess left behind, as the magpies focus their attention into something else.
In the case of AI, the fallacy is thinking that even if ridding the wave, everyone is allowed to stay around, now that the team can deliver more with less people.
Maybe rushing out to the AI frontline won't bring in the interests that one is hoping for.
EDIT: To make the point even clearer, with SaaS and iPaaS products, serverless, managed clouds, many projects now require a team that is rather small, versus having to develop everything from scratch on-prem. AI based development reduces even further the team size.
Yeah, everyone is in panic mode - "they're killing all the horses", but one really needs to consider the similar historical events.
When ATMs were rolled out in the 70s, everyone assumed tellers were on their way out. What actually happened was counterintuitive: the number of bank tellers increased for the next few decades. ATMs lowered the cost of operating a branch, so banks opened more branches, which required more tellers. The teller's job also shifted from cash handling toward relationship-building. The predicted elimination took 40+ years to materialize, and even then it was gradual.
"Paperless office" in another example. Around 1970s futurists confidently predicted - computers would eliminate paper. Companies restructured workflows around that assumption. What happened, really? Paper consumption actually increased dramatically - laser printers and desktop publishing created more paper demand, not less. The prediction wasn't wrong, just half a century early.
US horse population peaked around 21 million in 1915 and crashed to roughly 3 million by 1950. The tragedy wasn't that people prematurely killed off horses - it's that the infrastructure around horses (farriers, feed suppliers, carriage makers, stable hands) was devastated faster than those workers could adapt, but that also took decades.
Imagine if in 1910, someone sold all their horses expecting automobiles to arrive in their rural county within two years, and then cars didn't reach reliable rural infrastructure until 1940. That's what it feels to me when companies lay off thousands of programmers because of AI.
Yes, AI may replace programmers, but what would probably happen is that the meaning of "programmer" would change. Yet that won't happen within a year or two. Even with the unseen advancements in the AI research.
So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or trying to switch careers?
I went to get a flat tire fixed yesterday and the whole time I was envious of the cheerful guy working on my car. A flat tire is a flat tire, no matter whether a recession is going on or whether LLMs are causing chaos in white collar work. If I had no debt and a little bit saved up I might just content myself with a humble moat like that.
MS Access and so many more "you won't need a programmer again" dev tools over the decades blazed the trail.
But well, I feel like you too.
When Maps apps came around, people totally lost the brain muscle for being able to navigate. Using LLMs is no different, people over reliant on these tools are simply ngmi. They are going to be totally reliant on their favorite billionaire being willing to sell them competency via their thinking machines.
I would caution everyone to consider if the Billionaires who are screaming that you're going to be left behind, laid off and redundant if you don't (pay them to) use their brain nerfing machine, whether or not they have your best interest at heart.
You're not going to be left behind.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state.
It is safe to assume that the tech will continue to improve in both ways: productivity gains will increase, onboarding will get easier. I think it will also become easier to choose a particular suite of products to use too. Waiting is not a bad idea.
For me though, I'm dabbling in AI because it fascinates me. Bitcoin was like, I don't know, Herbalife? —never interesting to me at all.
But IMO the most fruitful thing for an engineering org to do RIGHT NOW is learn the tools well enough to see where they can be best applied.
Claude Code and its ilk can turn "maybe one day" internal projects into live features after a single hour of work. You really, honestly, and truly are missing out if you're not looking for valuable things like that!
The risk of getting in early on crypto is you lose a little money. The risk of not is missing out on money. You can't simply replay that later, the way that you could invest the time to catch up on how git works.
This is in an excellent characterization of the kind of marketing tactic I see all over social media right now and that I find absolutely disgusting.
The keyword here is fear. Despite faux-positive veneer, the messaging around certain technologies (especially GenAI) is clearly designed to induce anxiety and fear, rather than inspire genuine optimism or pique curiosity. This is significant, because fear is one of the most powerful tools to shut down rational thinking.
The subliminal (although not very subtle) message there is something very primitive. "If you don't join our group, you will soon starve to death." This is radically different from how most transformative technologies were promoted in the past.
Clearly there's an advantage for being an early adopter, but the advantage is often overblown, and the cost to get it is often underestimated.