alt Hacker News> The irony is that I haven't seen AI have nearly as large of an impact anywhere else.
We are in this pickle because programmers are good at making tools that help programmers. Programming is the tip of the spear, as far as AI's impact goes, but there's more to come.
Why pay an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts? Why pay an expensive lawyer to review your contract? Why pay a doctor, etc.
Short term, doing for lawyers, architects, civil engineers, doctors, etc what Claude Code has done for programmers is a winning business strategy. Long term, gaining expertise in any field of intellectual labor is setting yourself up to be replaced.
Replies
> Why pay an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts?
Will it? AI is getting good at some parts of programming because of RLVR. You can test architectural designs automatically to some extent but not entirely, because people tend to want unique buildings that stand out (if it weren't the case architects would have already become a niche profession due to everyone using prefabs all the time). At some point an architectural design has to be built and you can't currently simulate real building sites at high speed inside a datacenter. This use case feels marginal.
There's going to be a lot of cases like this. The safe jobs are ones where there's little training data available online, the job has a large component of unarticulated experience or intuition, and where you can't verify purely in software whether the work artifact is correct or not.
> Why pay an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts? Why pay an expensive lawyer to review your contract? Why pay a doctor, etc.
All of those jobs are mandated by law to done by accredited and liable humans.