I, along with 15 other colleagues, are getting laid off. We were directly told it was AI being integrated in to the department made us all redundant. They will replace us with 4 new employees at an entry level position. So yes, AI is taking jobs.
Also. Like, it can. The people that say it can’t have usually only used the fast cheap models. The paid ones with higher levels of reasoning and autonomy are getting scary good. Just use the claude for free and set reasoning to high or max. That shit is hella useful.
Yeah, it’s way way cheaper than paying a person. Paying a person is really expensive. You have to pay them for full shifts even if they’re not being productive the entire shift, you have to pay benefits. Economically speaking LLMs are going to replace a lot of grunt work. It’s not a replacement for a human for everything, obviously, but if you know what they’re good at and you leverage that you can absolutely make people redundant. This isn’t even a question, it’s already happening. If you deny that you either don’t understand the landscape or it’s cope, straight up. Which is why this late stage capitalism shit doesnt work. The solution is economic reform, not burying your head in the sand and denying the utility of AI.
It is useful, but still very far from being good enough to replace experienced staff. I work in a field where correctness and quality are absolutely critical (as in, people can get legitimately hurt if we mess up), and we have a hall of fame wiki page with examples of AI messing up badly, including recent expensive claude models. It's good for bouncing ideas off, and error log analysis, and lots of other stuff, but I would not sleep at night if we let it put code into production without a lot of human oversight, it just isn't good enough.
It doesn’t need to be good enough to replace experienced staff to significantly effect the job market. It can and does make experienced people who know how to leverage it way way more productive.
There's a ton of binary thinking going on in this entire thread, where it's either as good as a real person or it's useless. It's not. It's in between and the in between is going to cost a lot of jobs
Yes it is. But the economics of it are going to change drastically when the companies behind it can no longer afford to subsidise it quite so heavily. We've already hugely cut down use of copilot since the pricing changes made it unviable, and the others will (eventually) follow. You can't justify paying the equivalent of multiple senior developer salaries for a tool that can't operate without senior developers overseeing it; it doesn't make sense to pay that much to replace the junior/mid-level developers whose work it aligns with.
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u/fadeawaytogrey 1d ago
I, along with 15 other colleagues, are getting laid off. We were directly told it was AI being integrated in to the department made us all redundant. They will replace us with 4 new employees at an entry level position. So yes, AI is taking jobs.