The AI is taking our jerbs thread

mid_gen

mid_gen

mid_gen

Soldato
Joined
20 Dec 2004
Posts
16,679
Since my 2025 bum thread is being consistently derailed by talk of AI and it's impact on the job market, how's about a thread for it here, since it's a hot topic.

My take : People in tech need to understand the technology at least, even if you disapprove/don't want to use it, you are going to get asked about it and be expected to have an opinion, if you're in the job market.
 
D.P. said:
in general it is horrific at programming anything much more than Hello World.
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It's pretty decent at most things I ask of it. Even qwen-2.5-coder:1.5b or 7b produces decent C++.

It's not there yet with the high level architecture side of it, but loads of models out there can knock out really good code to do specific tasks.

Done quite a few useful powershell and VBA things at in the last year, saves so much time not having to refresh myself on the languages, just ask Copilot and bosh, working script is done in a few minutes.
 
A future where AI does all the work and people can just live, is not going to happen until after a massive revolution where the rentier billionaire class is destroyed.

No way the oligarchs are giving up a world where they control all the wealth. Better hope they get put down before they have a robot army big enough to subjugate everyone.

*maybe

Of course it's possible the tech bros will be benevolent dictators and will ensure everyone on the planet gets a good basic standard of living....yep that will definitely happen!
 
Well, as mentioned in my other thread about finding work, I'm considering jumping with a new fintech startup that is making extensive use of cutting edge AI systems. I've spent a couple of days looking into it, and frankly, there a massive warning klaxons going off about what is coming in terms of employment. Don't think I can pass up the opportunity to skill up on it, because the things that are in the pipeline are going to be a massive paradigm shift, particularly in services.

Just reading up around AI agents and seeing what is being done with it, it's just like, yikes. So many jobs are gonna be disappearing.
 
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jaybee said:
Realistically that honestly is not happening for a long, long time. Interfacing with a robot that turns up at your door; "Hi I'm here to rewire your house".
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Sure you can pick and choose some extremely complex cases like that are going to take a while.....but it will get there. Lots of simpler problems to solve that will get automated in the near future.
 
Mesai said:
That's pretty broad though.
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That's kinda the point. You can just put the agent in front any web app and it can figure out what to do.
Mesai said:
It's good for relatively simple and well understood tasks, with some level of human oversight.
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There are a LOT of people working in jobs that involve mainly simple and well understood tasks, that require some level of additional human oversight.
Mesai said:
Hopefully there's equal effort getting it into the medical and legal space. Could massively reduce costs and wait times; whether that gets passed on to the general public is another story.
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Oh I'm sure it is. The economics of having an agent do a job unsupervised 24/7 versus a human that wants holidays, sick days and pensions and all that....is going to be irresistable.
 
Well, I've been spending this week re-engineering a React application that the CEO of the startup I joined managed to build entirely using Claude.

It's definitely super powerful in that he was able to pull something together without any coding knowledge, sufficient to put a pitch together and get funding. Now it needs a software engineer to tidy it up. I have deleted a LOT of stuff :p

On the other hand, I've not touched javascript or UIs for over a decade, but using Gemini 2.5Pro and Continue I've been able to get up and fully productive in a couple of days, and part of that was building a linux VM to work in. Genuine timesaver.

I'm going to build out the context docs so the LLM adheres to the patterns I've been implementing, pretty confident I can make it so CEO can adjust things without it totally ****ing the bed in future.
 
Azza said:
CEO...

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Yes that has done the rounds on social media a few times.

A sensible person uses AI to make rapid prototypes/demos etc, then hires a software enginneer to convert it to production standard code, which is what I'm doing atm.
 
Been making extensive use of Cascade in Windsurf the past few days. Starting to get a feel of what it's good and not so good for, trying out different models as well.

One thing it is absolutely brilliant for is refactoring. This application I'm working on had everything just smooshed into one big config file with a proper rats nest of includes all over the place. I just told it how I wanted the code split up and where I wanted the files and folders putting, and it just smashed it out in a few seconds, makes the new files, move the code, updates references.

Magic I tell thee. Saved me hours.
 
jon86 said:
Both Windsurf and Cursor are mostly just using Anthropic's Claude LLM models under the covers, so we have Anthropic to thank for making such a powerful LLM. :D

I personally use Cursor Pro, although some some folks in my company do use and like Windsurf. I've read that Cursor and Windsurf are very similar tools, although Cursor tends to come out with new features a bit faster than Windsurf. I haven't dug into using Cursor Rules yet, but that's next on my list.
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I'm switching between models, using Gemini 2.5 Pro at the moment. I was actually using the Cascade Base free version for a while and it's not bad at all.
 
Been using Windsurf on this new AI startup stuff for a week or so now. Already I don't think I could go back to coding without it. Installed the Windsurf plugin on Jetbrains Rider to give it a whirl on my Unreal projects yesterday evening.

I set Claude 3.7 (thinking) to implementing a feature I'd banged my head against for a few days previously.

It smashed it out in 5 minutes with a couple of prompts. I then got it to bosh out a load of refactoring and tidying, documentation etc I'd been putting off.

If this startup goes **** up I think I'm just going to start publishing my own games, it was already feasible to be a one-man developer if you slogged away at it, but with smart use of AI tools a solo developer will be able to smash stuff out really quick now.
 
jon86 said:
@mid_gen I just tried Windsurf and I found that Windsurf's performance was much slower and the experience more laborious than I have with Cursor.

For me, Cursor's significant speed advantage and "terseness" in its output makes it a big winner over Windsurf. I really wish that Cursor would build a Jetbrains IDE extension, but it's obvious from their docs that they have no desire to do that, so I'll have to keep switching back and forth between Cursor and Jetbrains as needed.
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Haven't tried Cursor, but it's going to depend a bit on what model you want to use. I'm using GPT-4.1 at the mo for most tasks as it's discounted.

If you want it to be more terse, then just give it a memory telling it to be more terse!

can you add a memory please, to make your replies less verbose. I don't need the justifications for your changes and offer to help more, I will take that as implied.

Memory added: replies will now be concise and direct, with no extra justifications or offers of further help unless you ask.
Feedback submitted

Auto-generated memory was updated
Created "USER prefers concise, non-verbose replies" memory.
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malachi said:
It's good if you are confident on the results it's giving you. But for people who are not and will take what Chatgpt gives them which could not be correct, different story.
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Confidence in the results from AI is simply a matter of time. They will inherently by their nature improve the more they are used.

Anyone betting that AI won’t be good enough to do their job is going to have a rude awakening.
 
Mesai said:
They also inherently make up information, so while it will improve, without a confidence score/filter, there will always be doubt.

Obviously won’t matter for the large majority of people as they won’t bother to second guess it, but still matters in terms of industry applications.
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You don't do away with all the same usual processes and guardrails you have to prevent mistakes, just the same as with any critical work, you don't rely on one single decision-maker.

Except now, the checking can be done by other agentic AI systems. I'm already working like this, using AI systems to create code, which is then pushed to other agentic systems to review it and send it back for review to the first AI. Breaking systems down into networks of agents that have very narrow and focused domains with strong guardrails, and generally knowing how to use LLMs and build a proper context for them to work in, this is the future. I've been an software engineering manager for a long time, and frankly, I just don't need a team of people to manage any more, I have AI agents do the work, and I oversee it.

Just tapping in a one line command to ChatGPT is so far away from the cutting edge of how these systems are being built and deployed right now.
 
Mesai said:
What I mean is that you still require human interaction. It also heavily relies on the languages that you're using and the general complexity of the work that you're doing.

LLM's don't run out of answers, and I've had more than one situation where, and this is across a variety of models, that it'll just loop between the same 2 or 3 broken solutions, or keep putting forward old code. It might work for your specific use case but that doesn't mean it can work generally. They're all trained on the same data so if the data is rubbish then they all give you rubbish answers just in a different format.
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All software engineering is an exercise in taking big problems and breaking them down into small solutions. It’s no different now AI is doing much of the work.

The models are being trained all the time and are continually improving. Sitting and declaring they aren’t perfect while they are advancing at the rate isn’t going to keep you in a job.
 
malachi said:
That's what I mean.

All this talk about "AI taking our jobs" we really haven't see that in action. But we still see companies moving teams to cheaper countries and not moving them towards AI to reduced costs.
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They definitely are.

Take call centres as the most obvious example. It's already much cheaper and easier to just have AI agents dealing with customers, so that's what companies are moving to.
 
Ayahuasca said:
If anyone gets a chance to use Claude 4 Opus + Claude Code you'll be in for a nice surprise if you've only used some of the free older models to test how good AI is at this stuff.
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Haven’t got it accessible in Windsurf yet, still on 3.7.

I’ve completely rebuilt a whole application which was vibe coded with Claude, this week. It was a mess, just had a non programmer directing it.

I would never have been able to do a clean rebuild in this timeframe without the AI though. I’ve got really strong context prompts that make sure it sticks to patterns etc. Really amazingly powerful.
 
I think I would genuinely find it archaic and painfully slow to go back to actually typing out code now, after having been working with Windsurf for a month or so.

It takes time to learn how to get the most out of it, what rules to use, how to prompt it. You absolutely 100% need to understand what it is doing and review everything, same as you would any coder, but just having basically an entire programming team at your beckon call to just get **** done is incredible.

In the time it would take me to walk over to another coder's desk and start explaining to them what I want done, Cascade has already done it. And it's made sure it has full test coverage. And updated all the documentation.
 
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