alt Hacker NewsI've been told the past four years that AI is coming for my job. And thats just not true. Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.
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It is the lament of every generation of humans to think that they are the pinnacle of everything that has come before, we are just at the start of the so-called AI era, many very smart people coming up still haven’t really got their hands on all of the material available from a hardware and software standpoint. We are still at the early stages.
I am very optimistic. I just wish I was younger to take advantage like Junior high, high school age with my current resources damn… The oldest lament in the books.
I was the same opinion till Claude code was relased. its a lot closer now.
I'm not sure how anyone would know if it's closer or not. There's been a lot of progress in LLMs over the last four years.
> Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.
There are people and companies out there releasing entire vibe coded projects and for some upwards of 80% of the code they develop is AI-assisted/generated. Since around the end of 2025 and models like Opus 4.6, the SOTA has gotten good enough to work agentically on all sorts of dev tasks with pretty good degrees of success (harnesses and how you use them still matters, ofc).
I mean this is just fingers-in-your-ears "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!" stuff.
I still have a job so AI hasn't taken that yet. But the suggestion it's "no closer" is ridiculous. At least in my life/career/office this last 12 months seems to have been a real inflection point in how AI is being used for software development.
It feels its just around the corner. But when you turn 20th corner and its still behind the next one, maybe things are a bit different than they seem / clueless emotions make us believe.
Long term its bleak, but short/medium term - not so much, if I get fired it won't be llm replacing me but rather company politics, budget changes etc. Which was the only real (very real) risk for past 15 years too, consistently. But it helps to not work for US company.
Ask some juniors how their job search is going. In five years, ask the seniors.
I surely have seen jobs around me being replaced by AI tooling, it is getting closer in corporate consulting.