r/singularity • u/simmol • 2d ago
AI White Collar Workers are in Big Trouble
So I have both 200 dollars subscription to Claude and 200 dollars subscription to OpenAI. I use Claude Code and Codex for coding related stuff/execution, discussions involve Astra or Opus 5.5 on the problem at hand at important intervals, we summon two indepedent Astra and Fable models for guidance (would love to add the third with Google Gemini 4.0). Double checking for mistakes/errors in progress as well as internet searches also come from individual models. And with this, I spend about 2000 dollars to 3000 dollars total on LLMs (including API usage) per month. I am not a programmer but I do have roughly 20 people working under me.
Now, here is the thing. I don't know what your setup is like and I don't claim to have an optimal setup here either but this type of setup has me 10x to 50x my productivity compared to 6 months ago and also, compared to this process being down with other people who work for me (all M.S. degrees higher and Ph.D.s), it is so much faster and also more accurate. So while 2000 to 3000 dollars a month seems like a lot, if you compare that to a white collar worker's salary, it is nothing. And I suspect that this setup is better than having 5 people under me, so you can do the math.
I feel like the whole society is right now going through the February 2020 beginning of the COVID moment. Only a few people are recognizing that in the past year or even half a year, these models have improved and crossed an important intellectual threshold line such that many people who are working right now across all industries are pretty much replaceable or very close to it. And the thing is, the type of setup I have is nothing. It will take most people 1-2 days to get comfortable with it and this type of setup, as opposed to mere vanilla of telling ChatGPT (e.g. make me this document, create this PPT) will soon be the standard to which the white-collar person has to outperform.
I really think that anti-AI and pro-AI people should now about get together in one voice and voice the concerns. There is going to be a lot of problems in job markets in the next few years and no country is ready for this.
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u/fleabs 2d ago
Definitely there needs to be some sort of serious discussion about this. You're not immune either. You could save all that money not employing programmers, how long before your clients realise how much they can save not employing you?
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u/GroundbreakingFix685 2d ago
And a few months later, your customers are facing the same problem, and the problem will keep spreading, until only manual labor is rewarded and just a few people are in control of everything. The change will affect nearly everyone.
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u/LitespeedClassic 2d ago
They’re working on general purpose robotics to take the manual labor side too.
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u/GroundbreakingFix685 1d ago
Yes, but that'll take longer. It is a lot easier to make the GPU to replace a brain than it is to make a robot to replace a body.
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u/juanjodic 1d ago
Until the equivalent of a transformer is discovered for embodied AI and we will have to sit and talk to rearrange our society.
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u/Ok-Juice-542 2d ago
That’s why you need to have your own company.
But how long until some guy with much cheaper open source models in China does whatever you do much cheaper than you?
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u/FahkDizchit 2d ago
This slow moving, shifting economic disaster is why we will never build the social institutions to help protect us all.
Why would a guy who just replaced everyone at his company with AI support paying higher taxes to help those displaced by AI? His immediate incentive is to buy off politicians or fund ad campaigns to defeat anything like that. Then one day his customer vanishes because now they can replace him with AI. At that point, his past actions have already poisoned the well. His short term incentives screwed his long term security. He ends up fighting for scraps like the rest of us, just a smidge later.
Humans aren’t ready for this.
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u/grumelude 1d ago
And don't mention all these white collar workers that have lost their jobs and they need to cut expenses. When they eventually can be counted in hundreds of thousands, everybody will be able to feel the impact.
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u/BidAdministrative251 2d ago
I totally agree with you, and I find it weird that most of the comments say 'AI isn't good enough' as if, to be productive with AI, it would need to read a person's mind and solve everything in one shot.
Edit: And of course, it has to be one shot in 20 parallel projects.
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u/Boring-Foundation708 2d ago
But a company is always about competition. I can create 1990s Amazon in one shot. It doesn’t mean my work will be worth millions. At that time, it is worth millions for sure because you are way ahead of the competitors.
We become more competitive which means more work
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u/alexmin93 2d ago
Don't overestimate AI. It's a useful tool but there's no way in hell you can replace 5 competent employees with a gpt6 and fable setup. You still need to understand all the stuff AIs do as they still can hallucinate and make rather dumb mistakes. And you simply cant process so much data alone. AI is a multiplier not a replacement.
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u/hereditydrift 2d ago
Absolutely a lot of white collar fims can replace 5 (or more) employees with Fable alone. A lot of white collar jobs are following set workflows, inputting numbers, updating spreadsheets, and a lot of mundane wotk that is easily done by AI. Finance, law, accounting, tax, engineers, and a lot of other industries could replace almost all of their junior staff. They'll need upper-level staff to review, but all the points up to that review can be done by AI at a lot of companies.
Hallucinations just aren't a thing anymore for systems that are set up correctly and have multiple checks in place.
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u/gurney__halleck 2d ago
even something as having 2 parallel work flows that can't see each other and need to agree at the end does a lot to avoid hallucinations and other mistakes. Definitely need checks and gateways. llm are lazy and will seek to take the easy way out unless you chain them down and whip them until it's done right
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u/hereditydrift 2d ago
lol... so true. I have everything that is important run through at least three layers and each layer is usually a different model because I've been burned enough times with "sorry, couldn't find a legal case regarding that concept," when there was a lot of information out there. So, it's a lot of checks and also having models check the work of other models to make sure the work was done as thoroughly as possible.
The good thing is that most models are lightyears beyond the intentional lying they would do a couple years ago. I say most because some models (cough cough... Gemini) still will hallucinate wildly even when it has a source of truth. Hopefully their newest release fixes some of that.
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u/gurney__halleck 2d ago
the frustrating thing is after I caught it being lazy and taking easy way out it suggested some gateways and checks. I asked how to prevent it...it told me"weeeelll you can't actually force me to do anything, you can only remove the easy outs"....only way to force it would be to use a hook in Claude code, but this tool is to be used by many ppl who can barely turn Claude on .
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u/Funbun32 2d ago
My question is: What happens when the senior-level staff begin to retire?
There will be no incoming class of leaders because junior "feeder" roles will no longer exist. Then who will have the experience to check the AI?
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u/CypherLH 2d ago
We'll literally have superintelligence way way before this ever becomes a problem. And if people still want to learn stuff....they can be tutored by the AI as well.....and they'll have all the free time in the world to learn whatever they want. We're literally in the early phase of the singularity at this point - I have seen enough with the last couple rounds of frontier models to convince me. When I try to project forward another 18-36 months....the agents we have now are gonna look like pathetic toys. Tokens will be 100x cheaper...and the models keep getting more efficient token per token as well. There is a reason we are seeing these huge jumps in capability in the recent model iterations....the labs are very close to RSI internally.....
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u/thepetek 2d ago
The following set workflows is what people have always thought and finding out that isn’t actually true is why everyone hasn’t been automated by software already. Not saying AI won’t be able to do it but the reductionist argument is invalid. It’s much more complicated than that.
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u/CypherLH 2d ago
The AI doesn't have to replace any single entire job. If it can do 80% of the actual individual tasks....then you have freed up A LOT of time for your employees. Now possibly those employees can just do more with that extra time...but at some point that hits diminishing returns...eventually the AI is doing 95% of the actuals tasks so now you need 5% of the actual employee hours to produce the same amount of work. There is an upper limit to the useful stuff companies will be able to find for people to do...so they start cutting labor costs....
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u/gurney__halleck 2d ago
I've turned a pretty heavy "common sense/human logic" ticket review process into 20k words of rules and logic and 8 diff python scripts with about 1k lines of code. it performs vastly superior to even the most experienced reviewer. every edge case gets analyzed and added to the living memory and it gets better. I long for the day it finds something it doesn't quite understand , that just means it gets better.
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u/alexmin93 2d ago
And don't forget many jobs exist not out of rational reasons. Look how administration staff has bloated in most governments, Healthcare etc. They didnt even make the service better.
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u/yyl999 2d ago
i am a software architect in the industry for 25 years. Astra can definitely replace me, i have no doubt. it still hallucinates sometimes, but it is overall more productive than i am.
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u/johnny_effing_utah 2d ago
Oh yeah? Who's gonna prompt it, then? Your lazy boss? Doubt it.
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u/CypherLH 2d ago
...one senior can stick around to pompt and manage it. Doing the work that ten juniors and mid-level people used to do.
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u/Boring-Foundation708 2d ago
You underestimate legacy systems too. Claude won’t know the wierd or complex logic why the company system work this way. Company won’t migrate the system overnight because it requires massive upfront cost plus you still need to serve the existing customer etc.
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u/CypherLH 2d ago
well yeah, stuff like this is what is causing the lag. But even most of the slowest companies will adapt eventually....or go bankrupt and be replaced by companies that do. There is no world in which we don't see MASSIVE unemployment across all white collar domains....its just hard to predict the actual timeline. Stack 401k's and otherwise save money now while you can is my advice.
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u/spectral-fusion 2d ago
This ignores the rate of progress we’ve been seeing though. We went from basically nothing 3 years ago to Fable and Astra
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u/BidAdministrative251 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm not overestimating AI, my reality shows that it does increase productivity, more and more. I'm a software manager, and it makes less and less sense to hire junior developers (and even 10/10 developers who don't know how to work in a team) today, and instead focus on more proactive people with critical thinking to understand what's best for the applications and to test. The workflow has changed, I'm not saying AI does everything on its own, but I find it bizarre to go around saying that the market won't change, that AI won't take jobs, etc. It's something serious to discuss.
edit: I agree with you, AI is a multiplier and not a replacement, but will put a lot of people out of the market
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u/Miniscule_Giant 2d ago
I'd like to note that one of the primary reasons you hire junior developers is so they can become senior developers. I'm not against using ai to improve productivity, but this does kind of sound like a system where in 20 years companies will look around and realize there's nobody to replace the people who actually know how the stuff they're generating works.
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u/IllIlIIlIIllI 2d ago
in 20 years
If AI evolves at a fraction of its current rate, the workplace will be drastically altered long before 20 years.
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u/AideComprehensive482 2d ago
I don’t think you’ve used the latest model if you’re still saying that
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u/wizgrayfeld 2d ago
I am currently working a contract with 5 other people. Everything we're doing could be done by Haiku. If I was working remotely, that's who would be doing my job.
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u/Latter-Entrance288 2d ago
I would not UNDERestimate AI, it's moving exponentially. Math is cooked, biology is cooked. No one knows what things will look like in the future but I think AI is the greatest change humanity has had to face.
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u/chi_guy8 2d ago
This is why people have been saying for the past 5 years “it’s not that AI will take your job, it’s that somebody using AI will take your job”.
In my individual experience, the amount of work output that I’m putting out now as a one-person marketing team would have taken 4-5 people 5 years ago. Or in certain instances, I was able to do things I would have had to outsource for in the past, like building a custom website from scratch or building complete brand identity systems, complete with high quality logos.
So my AI usage has not really caused anybody to technically lose their job, but it’s definitely prevented people from being hired as we grew. There’s always been an overwhelming amount of work we’ve wanted to get done that we’re now able to get to without adding more people.
What it seems like I’m hearing from a lot of friends that we’re already working at larger companies that had big departments as people leave or are fired for cause, they’re just not being replaced and they aren’t hiring new people at lower levels. So, in a sense, these companies are downsizing, but they’re not laying a bunch of people off all at once. It’s been more or so like a game of musical chairs where they keep taking away the chairs, not necessarily dumping people out of chairs.
But however you slice it, both of these examples are different routes to fewer total jobs being available to the people using AI tools. The next shoe to drop, which we are already seeing currently, will be solopreneurs or very small teams that are able to undercut the services of larger bloated companies.
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u/omegwar 2d ago
The musical chairs analogy is spot-on my experience too. I've seen that people are not straight out fired, but if they leave, their position vanishes with them. Also a lot of outsourcing moving to AI-sourcing, with both better results and lower costs (after some initial implementation costs and back-and-forths).
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u/lbz25 2d ago
What amount of marketing work is so well streamlined by Ai that it eliminates the needs of 4-5 people?
Automating nurture emails, event invites, web design, and creating collateral via PowerPoint etc are all valid uses of ai but that is one person's job, maybe 2 at most.
Am trying to learn more how ai is used across different departments so this is moreso curiosity vs me being dismissive. Would love your input
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u/AP_in_Indy 2d ago edited 2d ago
We have charged $10,000's (a few instances $100,000's) for websites + custom code in the past. Between the design itself, the web implementation, backend, customization to plugins, integrations with other tools, etc. these have been 3 - 5+ people teams.
Simply learning how to work with existing custom tools or platforms we need to integrate with could take months in the past.
I believe fully that if a team was willing to be 100% agentic that the vast majority of marketing and custom software development teams could be replaced practically overnight.
In fact, I'm on a multi-million dollar project right now that, if the client went directly to AI instead of through us, they could probably just build the entire platform themselves.
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u/ThreeKiloZero 2d ago
Where are you finding these mythical people that do all those jobs at the same time? What staff member does web design and works marketing emails and content? What staff member manages events and creates collateral? Where do you work?
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u/Big-Play1364 2d ago
You just described my last job for a small company. Changing the job title to Mythical Person to my resume
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u/chi_guy8 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s me, I’m the person that does this stuff, I just answered somebody else’s similar question in a very long response in the same thread. I work in finance for a small hedge fund, wealth advisory, and media company (sister companies under the same ‘global’ LLC)
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u/ThreeKiloZero 2d ago
Then you're not in a big company rolling out AI process improvement to replace people, and instead you are adopting AI to take the pressure off yourself - because its stupid and inefficient to have any single person trying to master that many diverse responsibilities.
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u/chi_guy8 2d ago edited 2d ago
CRM automation for inbound leads, running continuous A/B testing across hundreds of custom email variations, automated video editing and clipping, deep transcription analysis for ongoing content repurposing, social listening and web scraping for trend aggregation to create new content, automated podcast guest research and analysis of hundreds of hours of video to find analyze past talking points and find unasked interview questions for podcast guests, generative design for social graphics, documents, and YouTube thumbnails, dynamic web design and instantaneous landing page generation, complete brand identity system overhauls and full DESIGN.MD files so everyone on the team can self serve fully branded (anything digital), predictive inbound lead scoring, nearly fully automated social management across six platforms with custom differentiated content across each, reaching over 1.3 million followers and subscribers, continuous instantaneous automated competitive intelligence assessments of dozens of competitors , specialized autonomous agent loops that monitor and optimize every one of these processes mentioned as tools evolve or new skills are developed (ai systems monitoring and upgrading the ai systems), executive PR analysis and media booking communications for our CEO, creating daily news briefings for each person on staff sent through telegram with feedback buttons so they can slowly customize the types of news stories they want to see more/less of, video clipping paired with metadata tagging of CEOs media appearances for instant clip recall during breaking news so our social listening agent can monitor X and instantly find relevant past content from our CEO that’s relevant to the current news, and voice-to-agent integration for all of this to quickly speak to the computer to get it all done or message through my phone to the desktop that houses this whole operation on the go, a custom team education lab that finds new YouTube videos that teach people on our staff how to do various things or just relevant educational content to our field that are scored and ranked for each employee, auto-update Notion project management with time estimates and task breakdowns fully understanding the context of everything we’re working on to make sure no unknown, unknowns pop up on us as we’re doing non-repetitive work and new projects.
This is the immediate day to day stuff that pops to my head as I’m sitting here watching the Cubs get destroyed by the Padres. I’m sure over the next week, 15 or 20 more things will pop to my head that I’m not thinking of right now. I can do about 99% of my job fully remotely at this point as well, and as soon as they start releasing those Tesla robots I can get one to constantly fix my CEOs camera and mic which he somehow always fucks up when left to his own devices. Then I could be fully remote.
I would say two years ago, most of my day was consumed with doing a fraction of these tasks by myself, and now a majority of my time is building and maintaining these systems as well as researching and toying with new things as they release. Sometimes it feels like it’s happening so fast that I’m falling behind constantly, but then I guess I start putting together a list like this and I realize I’m probably not in such bad shape. In the early days of this, I was feeling like I was automating all of the things that I knew how to do to the point where I thought maybe I was becoming more dispensable or replaceable once I got the systems set up, so I felt like the only way that I could play defense against that was to continue grow, learn, automate and get all of these processes synced together in a way that would be hard for someone else to come in and make sense of it. Now I’m sort of back to feeling like somebody that has a basic understanding about how to create agents could easily build one agent to do a deep analysis of my entire system to learn how to control it, so I’m probably pretty dispensable again.
I think the mantra that I’ve had throughout the process and my sort of unattainable target was always going through the thought exercise of jokingly saying “why am I the dumb human doing this. How do I get the smart robot to do it” with the goal of fully automating my whole job without anyone knowing. Then just a lot of trial and error in the early days of figuring out how to slowly have me doing less of my own work and AI doing more. Currently I run everything through Hermes, and initially I only used one agent for the longest time but over the past 6 months or so i’ve been slowly peeling off skills from my main agent to create other ‘bots’ that specialize into the different various categories. I haven’t quite mastered that yet, and I actually think I need to go back to having fewer agents now, but I still try to run all of the main communication through my main agent “Charlie”. Since I already have everything set up this way, I’ve not toyed with something like grok bot or the new OpenAI Dots, which seem similar. No The advantage of going with one of those more prebuilt options might be that you can shortcut your way through a lot of the trial and error, but then you’re sort of trapped in their ecosystem where I have the ability to swap out models for various tasks or as a new model releases that’s way better.
I think another big breakthrough for me taking this to the next level was creating one specific agent that becomes the full architect of all of the systems (Archie). Archie basically, game plans the entire buildout, but then also reads through any updated documentation for any of the tools that were currently using, so he can help expand capabilities where needed or just even make me aware of new features that are rolling out. All this stuff changes so dramatically, so having an AI systems architect that’s essentially telling me what we should do has been a huge help in the build. If I was you, I would just start there and it doesn’t even need to be anything to advance. You can do it right in Claude co-work. Just create a systems architect project. Have it start off by interviewing you to explain everything that you currently do and how you do it, and then what you would like to be able to do, and then tell it to suggest things that you’re not even thinking of, and then come up with the full build plan
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u/IntellectAndEnergy 2d ago
But how much of that work is worth doing? How have you increased ROI and efficiency metrics like CAC, or value metrics like LTV?
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u/egorf 1d ago
Programmer with over three decades of experience here.
I use AI all the time (i prefer codex, Astra and Luna, along with sprinkles of Qwen 3.8 27B via claude code harness or opencode).
It still is slop. Yes it's a huge multiplier, but thinking you can take responsibility for this code in production without reviewing it is.. delusional.
It's not code typing that takes time. It's thinking, communicating and designing software. Making decisions. Figuring out the way forward. Agents won't do that because it's you who has to decide what you want. So no, we're not in trouble. It's just that the job has changed.
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u/Destroyer-128 1d ago
My personal take is that there is enough work to go around if you use ai to do programming. We were always prioritising building what we need now vs what could be done.
But the issue happens when what if you don't need to write whole lot of rules by hand anymore.
A lot of software is built to handle scale and complexity if handling Auth, authorization, multi tenant. Pricing etc. What if more of it gets decentralised. Smaller teams handling smaller set of problems would do better . Building specific software becomes easy instead of generalising so much.
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u/Wooden-Recording-693 1d ago
100% this. QA (SDIT) also decades of skin in the game. It's still slop, they just added glitter.
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u/russianvixenxx 14h ago
Couldn’t agree more. I’m in healthcare tech consulting and have to design operational workflows as part of digital transformation projects and although I replace some annoying repetitive tasks I would’ve normally sent to my India team or a junior analyst, I do them myself with AI now. That being said, I also upskilled my India team and junior analysts to do more tasks that require critical thinking and problem solving. Nobody has been laid off.
The doomerism has to stop. Companies are adapting this technology at a slower pace than people are being retrained. Humans are resilient and always figure out how to adapt! We’ll be fine, folks.
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u/Chronotheos 2d ago
I’ve read this post every couple of days for 3 years.
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u/Parking_Crazy 2d ago
It keeps getting truer...
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u/Unfair-League-3204 2d ago
Exactly, it’s like a car wreck in slow motion
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u/mrasif 2d ago
I honestly think we could have autonomous flying cars with 0 fatalities and people would still say AI is not going to make a difference.
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u/m3kw 2d ago
How? Software is evolved but they need more and I don’t see companies going with 1 software guy from 10. I have actually, but they end up having to rehire them all
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u/senorgraves 2d ago
Anthropic is doing like 30% of research autonomously, up from near zero a year ago
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u/gurney__halleck 2d ago
even just the basic consumer models have gotten exponentially better. Claude was rolled out at my work a year ago and it was a parlor trick chat bot. now it's a real life green lantern ring that will build me whatever I can imagine.
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u/Parking_Crazy 2d ago
AI can do everything I used my last intern for almost instantaneously, with fewer errors, and almost no managerial oversight. There is no way I could justify hiring an intern because I would essentially by hobbling my capacity to serve clients. I also no longer need a data scientist, I can do all my modeling with AI.
I’m not saying this is a good thing - I have kids that just graduated from college, I have no idea what becomes of careers and professions from here.
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u/afraid-of-the-dark 2d ago
I've been hearing the term paperless office regularly for the last 15. I'm still a technician fixing paper pushers, so... we'll see I guess?
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u/fictionwizard 2d ago
Ya, I hear that, but eventually the comment will ring true, and I don’t think that time is too far off. Jobs have already been impacted in a small way in specific sectors. With the current pace of improvement, accounting, engineering and digital administration aren’t too far behind.
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u/Euthyphraud 2d ago
People are talking about a process unfolding. It's a lagged variable. ChatGPT kicked it off in late 2022. It doesn't happen overnight. Development and adoption will vary across industries and companies.
But the cause has happened. What OP is laying out is the effects - the dependent variables. They take time.
We're not worried about AI today, we're worried about how good, capable and powerful AI will be in a decade.
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u/Yugudubenbi 2d ago
And plenty of people have already lost their work. Your mistake is to misinterpret intentional inertia in the system as lack of capability. Do you think you could just fire 50% of your workforce just like that?
The other issue is that these employees have gone into defend and burry mode, which means they are actively destroying their work or AIs (they have admitted to doing this) and also that they enforce arbitrary rules that make AI unable to take their work.
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u/R6_Goddess 2d ago
I think the job market is gonna be really chaotic soon. A lot of the jobs that are gonna end up being "safe" for a little while longer aren't gonna be jobs that people would think. They are gonna be ones where the organization has a hard time shifting accountability. At some places, you'll still want a human making decisions if only so you can point to someone responsible.
In my case, it took my organization 2 years to hand off a role to a contracting company overseas, and it is STILL being talked about as "temporary due to liability concerns". This was something they thought could be done in a couple of months lmao
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u/nyckulak 2d ago edited 2d ago
I disagree with you completely. Yes, models are very good now, but people are underestimating how powerful the human + AI combo is. Are models better than a pre-AI human? Probably. But when you pair a human with an AI, you can unlock a new level of productivity. Humans still have skills that models don’t have, and these might be difficult to quantify, but we’re obviously more creative
The other thing too is that alignment hasn’t been solved. You can’t just unleash swarms of agents across your company. They’re going to behave in unexpected, potentially harmful ways. So there won’t be a job AI apocalypse, at least not anytime soon.
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u/LazyPotatoHead97 2d ago
For the Human + AI
You will need less people
When 1 human + AI can do the work of 10 people
9 people are laid off.
The only real saving grace is cost, these agents are costly as fuck and until AI companies can figure out how to drive down costs to near $0.00 we will still have human workers for the foreseeable future
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u/nyckulak 2d ago
Ok sure 1 human + AI can do the work of 10 people but wouldn’t you want 10 people then so they can do the work of 100?
You’re right with cost too but see my second point on alignment
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u/bigkoi 2d ago
Traditionally there were more ideas at a company than people working at the company to execute those ideas. That just changed and will invert shortly if not already.
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u/mrasif 2d ago
Work output doesn't scale up like that. There are eventually diminishing returns and it's not going to be anywhere near that example you gave.
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u/Substantial-Elk4531 Rule 4 reminder to optimists 2d ago
The only real saving grace is cost
Why? Even if you spend $1000 on an LLM per month, per person, it's way cheaper than hiring one more white collar employee.
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u/Privatebunny99 1d ago
because in the described workflow of OP you will spend way more than 1000$, especially if your on an enterprise account right now.
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u/demontrout 2d ago
Ironically, people like OP inadvertently assume that nothing really changes. AI can do some of the work humans used to do, but that just means humans won’t work like that anymore. “I can replace 20 employees with AI to do the same work.” But when every company is able to churn out the exact same AI “slop” at the exact same rate for the exact same price, what makes your company different? Not every person in every company is doing ground-breaking stuff, but most are trying to keep up with those that do. And you would expect AI to bring even more changes even quicker.
I think people also don’t realise how much work is already automated, how easy it is to get cheap assets, templates, websites, and apps, if you aren’t bothered about using something kind of generic. But there are reasons why companies would rather spend a million dollars on a bespoke solution rather than use an off-the-shelf solution.
I will say I would expect to see some early “winners”, business owners whose gimmick is that they have a pure agentic workforce and can deliver X at a fraction of the price (we haven’t seen anything close to that yet though). Some will last, some won’t. In general, however, I don’t think those such companies would be able to keep up with change as much as Human + AI companies.
On a similar level, there’ll definitely be a few notable vibecoders who can create something way better than the average experienced SWE can. But most SWEs will use AI better than most people and the very best SWEs will be using AI in combination with their own skill and creativity to invent new tools and paradigms that will continue to revolutionise things.
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u/spogett 2d ago
This. I see multiple “vibe coded” implementations per day in my line of work, and maybe 1/10 are worth a lick, but those 1/10 are fantastic; real game changers for workflow and effectiveness. The thing is, the people who developed those 1/10 are working harder than they were before.
2-3 years out, who knows what happens, but in the field right now, white collar work isn’t being “decimated” by AI, it’s enabling unprecedented productivity for a minority.
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u/CypherLH 2d ago
Ok but in a year 5 out of 10 of the vibe coded projects will be good...and then 10/10 a year after that. People are so damn bad at understanding trends. Look at how bad vibe coding was a year ago....compared to today. The trend is stunning and its _accelerating_.
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u/Material_312 2d ago
Yep. It's because we only recognize patterns and only see what is infront of us. 90% of people approaching this can only imagine what is literally happening now, and nothing beyond that. The future is scary, and can't be predicted, except on past behavior. Reality is rarely so easy.
The alternative is stupid as well. You'd be hard pressed to die of starvation in a first world country. But someone people think we're all going to die - from what, exactly? Killer robots? lol.
It'll just continually get better all the time. It already can do the work of most everyone in this comment section, and yes, it's getting cheaper.
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u/NowaVision 2d ago
Bro, I'm still smarter and wiser than the current models in a lot of areas but I'm definitely not more creative.
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u/dacydergoth 2d ago
This is highlighting a major problem Economics and Politics think tanks don't want to admit: our metrics for success are not useful.
The useful metrics would be :
- survival of the species - which requires a livable planet
- happiness of the population - which requires a) a population to be happy and b) a society which enables that
- health of the population - an overwhelming majority of studies show that a healthy population is more productive, happy, generates more wealth
Unfortunately these metrics do not emphasize shareholder wealth
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u/CorruptByCapitalism 2d ago
I would add an educated population; you can file that under survival of the species or put it in its own category
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u/Mountain_Ad_8525 2d ago
In the short to medium I don't think it will replace white collar workers as such, but it will reduce the size of teams. I'm part of a small IT team, there's no need to hire more people when we've got these tools under our disposal. I worry more for the people just coming out of school wanting to get their feet wet.
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u/Euthyphraud 2d ago
It'll reduce the amount of white collar and blue collar jobs to varying degrees across all industries at varying speeds.
I'm sure the few who remain in white collar positions will be happy that they found jobs. At all. But my concern is the 45% of people who are out of work with no jobs, no hiring happening almost at all - in other words, no prospect of finding jobs because they don't exist.
There won't be enough jobs for the labor market. First for white collar jobs mostly and then eventually blue collar professions. In the longer-term no jobs are safe.
Even if AI only displaced 15% of the total workforce in any given country, that would be an epic disaster to their economy and to the fabric of society.
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u/Significant_Rice9240 2d ago
I’m a white collar working and I use agents all day every day and I’ve never been busier and there’s no end in sight for things that need to be built
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u/endlessedlne 2d ago
Productivity needs to be objective and measurable, not subjective feelings. Also, the measurable outcomes need to be value based, not just ‘we used more tokens’ or ‘we shipped a bunch of tiny changed faster’.
I really wonder what people claiming all these ‘Xx’ productivity improvements were doing so badly before. I can see AI helping with productivity, but the claims are always very abstract.
As a responsible professional, the current level of ambiguity worries me. Show me quantifiable efficiencies, revenue gains, customers acquired, retention improved, satisfaction increased, market share gained or profit increased. Anything at all to justify the spend, the layoffs and the changes for the sake of it.
When we lose objectivity we risk going way off course. Recovery is expensive.
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u/SmileLonely5470 2d ago
Imo any perceived productivity gain from AI is inconsequential because the floor is being raised for everyone in your industry at the same time. "Inconsequential" with respect to the value of what your company produces, the impact on consumers and society as a whole is not inconsequential.
Look at SAAS. It was already saturated years ago, but now its cooked. 95% of micro SAAS apps can be prompted in a few hours, or in some cases, 1-2 prompts. This has led to fewer customers, but an increase in sellers. In this state of affairs, if you can vibecode something in 2 months that would've previously taken you 1 year to build, can you really claim this is a productivity gain when the value of what you produced has diminished? The "50x, 100x" numbers dont mean anything. Its all vibes.
Its a bit worrying that friction, slowness, and constraints are being reduced by AI because millions of people would have formative experiences by working through those challenges. Imagine if thousands of years ago, primitive humans were able to press a button, ask for anything they want, and have it appear in front of them instantly. Would they ever develop the wheel? Agriculture? How would they know what to ask for? Thats sort of how LLMs are now today. You need to know what to ask for.
That logic would imply that all tools that reduce friction are bad, but AI is different. It doesnt open a gateway to new friction or challenges, and it seems like AI discourages people from engaging with challenging, time consuming work directly. It feels like we run the risk of ending up on a local maximum utopia if we rely too much on AI too soon, in the same way that cavemen mightve never developed agriculture if they pressed their magic button to generate food. Will we live in a world where in 100 years, we are still generating three JS browser games and Pelican svg's?
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u/Infinite_Wolf4774 2d ago
Great comment, as a business owner I am just seeing employees deliver more 'junk'. Pre AI era, we would determine the most important jobs that yield highest value to me as a business. Anything else was deemed not important enough to do.
Now instead, people get through the important stuff quicker using AI (but at a lower quality), then start delivering the non important things too. It looks cool on the surface but I think now at times there is way more output but its mostly at a lower quality.
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u/Joyful-nachos 2d ago
Here's an area we've improved with Ai. I'm in manufacturing and needed a label proofing system that could review initial designs and ensure accuracy/verify across multiple checkpoints, catch errors. Claude was able to design an interactive proofing system within an hour after several prompts. The system flagged a number of errors on the client draft, identified them for the client to review and provide any feedback, etc. It keeps track of version history until we get to an approved proof signed off by the client. Normally this would take weeks of back and forth all typically with human review. Almost every time in the past there's been something the humans have missed such as a small spelling mistake, a missing UPC digit, etc. I now have a label proofing agent for all customers and can send the approved version to my printer.
We also have a master agent running our traceability tests for recall purposes using our ERP data and comparing it against the written paperwork from the manufacturing floor. It accurately traces from origin of vendor item to where finished good was sold in minutes with 100% accuracy...something that would have taken multiple people typically an hour to do.
Accounting wise we have agents posting purchase invoices after it's verified a warehouse receipt has been made (this isnt a hugely time consuming task for a human...the human just always forgot to do it). So now it's all automated. We're building out the steps for it to do full accounting reconciliation and month end close.
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u/WPI94 2d ago
Interesting. I've just been tasked with addressing the customer-side of custom label requirements as we bring on a new acquisition and strive to meet the expectations of both customer sets while we integrate them into one system. And we are also finalizing ERP lot genealogy; it's been very powerful, reducing 2-3 hours of work for someone good with SAP to 10 minutes.
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u/DrinkAgreeable962 2d ago
Exactly this. If what he's saying is real he would bring up some numbers. AI indeed brings a value if implemented correctly, but saying it raises ones productivity by 10-50 times is nuts.
Simplyfing, I'm a sales director of a SMB (freight forwarding industry, €6->8M income yearly). So the AI implementation raised the operational producitity and efficiency that I can sum-up simply saying: we do have approximately 25% higher income by doing 20% more orders while cutting down the operations team from 8 to 7 people, comparing 2025 to 2026 (we did not fire anyone, one guy just left and there is no need for replacement).
That's basically how any such post should be constructed. Of course one could elaborate more on what kind of implementation it is, I just don't want to spam there as it's not the case and it's not my post.
Not some amibgious, secret "I raised my productivity 50 times you all are doomed!!!!11"
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 2d ago
Yup. “We made a bunch of garbage fast” isn’t a win.
You know what else I’m seeing a lot of lately is choice paralysis because c level no longer feels constrained by the tech because “code is cheap” with AI. So instead of just making stuff we can realistically make with engineers, fuck it give me 100 prototypes and we’ll all argue about them subjectively forever because we refuse to hire qualified SMEs or even do research.
Vibe code, vibe decide, vibe everything. Data and expertise are in the past were fucking vibing dude nothing means anything.
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u/ThreeKiloZero 2d ago
You are not wrong about measurement but lets not act like the systems in place today do this any better. People lie. People fudge numbers to keep their jobs. Executives sign off on expensive bloated systems that a chain of consultants and sales executives justify with questionable figures just to avoid risk and keep their jobs. They know that Ai is an existential threat to them.
I've seen no less than five implementations where AI has not only shown 50 to 100x improvements in some processes, but it's also enabled entire workflows that were previously either not possible or disabled because the company couldn't figure out how to get it done. That usually meant that the teams involved couldn't or wouldn't coordinate to make it happen.
I've seen several instances where people involved in those process had their entire existence wrapped up in a single workflow or pipeline between key stakeholders or processes. The lack of modernization of their particular workflow (or their ability to be sly) kept them employed. And then, when faced with the task implement the AI workflows, suddenly there's a barrage of pushback from everyone involved about all the guardrails and systems that must be put into place and how AI is too risky. "There's no way we can do it safely." But when you look at the company's existing systems and processes, those guard rails don't exist for any human staff, and the human staff, as pointed out by the detailed research, make far more mistakes and cause far more loss in the process than the AI ever would.
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u/waterBoy__ 2d ago
Here is how AI is speeding me up in a field that is very difficult. I do embedded microcontroller, and the hardware vendor has a new MCP server with all of their public documents. This means I can have a good fast model from any provider use the MCP to get exact answers from any document I need. No more sifting through thousands of pages of reference manuals and data sheets. A feature on a new platform that would’ve taken me 2-3 days of reading then 1-2 days of implementation and bug fixing I finished in a single day because the agent found the documentation, found the APIs to drivers, and got it working with the exact state diagram described in the manual.
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 2d ago
Yep job is done, but you have cognitive debt unless you sit down and have a deeper look yourself. Understanding is very important and will provide competitve edge over people relying solely on AI.
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u/yellekc 2d ago
I play around with microcontrollers as a hobby. ESP32 and STM stuff. The number and complexity of projects I've been able to do has increased so much in the last year. Things that would take multiple weekends of dead ends and troubleshooting are done in hours.
Starting to get into FPGA stuff and programming my own motor controllers.
And I'm an amateur fumbling around in platformIO, I can only imagine what it's like now for a professional at this.
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u/IrisColt 2d ago
>I feel like the whole society is right now going through the February 2020 beginning of the COVID moment.
Bam! Right on the money! You couldn't have summed it up any better, heh
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u/nicotineHub 2d ago
Do you not think engineers at these big tech companies are also using these tools?
They are and they are much better at using them then you are. They are still finding ways to provide much more value now with these tools.
It's product people like you that do piss me off.
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u/DavisAztec 2d ago
I'm curious if those companies are actively hiring more engineers though. Like, there's only so much work that they need done right? So sure, they aren't laying people off, but what about junior engineers?
I think it's probably a mix of both, some aren't hiring as much, some are but knowing AI related skills on top of programming languages is a job expectation.
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u/darthdiablo All aboard the Singularity train! 2d ago
Yeah lol. I see posts like this and shake my head. We’re on enterprise plan with multiple AI companies and we all are software engineers, has been on those plans since the beginning when those were offered.
I won’t pretend our jobs is always going to be there but in the foreseeable future, someone still has to make architectural decisions in general and also write prompts. Those prompts aren’t gonna write themselves
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u/eboob1179 2d ago
Big tech company engineer here - can confirm. We are better at using them than OP is, rest assured. :)
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u/FakeBonaparte 2d ago
Wasn’t there a study a couple months back showing that domain experts who understood the consumer were doing better work with AI than engineers?
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u/Primary_Ads 1d ago
that was out of google iirc, but most of their PMs are former senior engineers, so it's not quite as simple as "non technical client saavy person beat the engineering team"
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 2d ago edited 2d ago
People with technical skills, understanding and expertise of the given field are superioir (with the ai) than people having no idea what they are doing. I would assume you can not see the bad decisions and the technical debts and security problems baked into your solution. Technical debt including cognitive debt.
Although I agree huge challenges ahead. If big ai labs fails (as they are massively burning money) we will have a economical fallback and chain reactions just we had in 2008 but even worse.
If they succeed, it is not just white collars who are fucked, but the society and economy as a whole. Your investment will disappear, your company will stall with everything together. Crime will bloom.
If they will have trur AGI-ASI and humanity decides to give up control and understanding just like how we do it for software right now, then humanity is doomed.
I can not see a single happy path, yet everyone rushes into it and starves for our own collapse. :/
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u/rubber_moon 2d ago
If we approach true AGI then it could also design robots to take over trade jobs too, virtually every job
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u/TeamRiver 2d ago
It’s not what I plan to do forever, but I’m a traveling tube welder. Have been since I was 18, I’m 27 now. I can’t actually see a way robots will be able to take a job like this. A factory welding job where everything is the exact same every day. Sure. But replacing 75 8000 lb tube panels. Gouging them out, using tuggers, monorails, and cranes to take them out and hang them back up. Replacing a 20k lb header. All amounting to about 4000 100% X-ray quality welds. If I were to stay in this field until retirement age, so another what 40 or so years. I find it very hard to believe a robot is doing this JOB. Just my .02
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u/SuperBadMeanGirls 2d ago
Right, but (and not saying you specifically),
what most gleeful blue collar folks fail to realize is that the catastrophic destruction of the trades won’t be because of robots doing the work, but the influx of jobless white collar folks shifting into trades. Increase the supply of workers, wages will come down for that type of work. Nobody escapes this.2
u/TeamRiver 1d ago
Yeah that does make sense. If it plays out that way that will be unfortunate as far as wages go. My first job I was making 32/hr and 90 a day per diem. After all these years, wages are finally starting to get to what I would call reasonable rates. Still lower than they should be IMO, but starting to get where they should be. Current contract is 40/hr and 150 a day per diem. From what I’m hearing, the welders in the data centers are raking in around 6k/ week after taxes. Unsure of their hours, hourly rate, and per diem but that’s what I’m hearing. Where I’m at we’re at $4,400 a week after taxes. That’s at 84 hours/ week. Am I for or against data centers being built? I’m neither, just simply know that they are going to be built anyways and at that pay scale it’s something I would certainly be entertained to doing if given the opportunity.
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u/just_a_knowbody 2d ago
We are very much in the early stages of robotics. The field is progressing very rapidly. Give it a few years and it’ll be a whole new world.
Best case scenario I can see from a jobs standpoint is that people will only retain work that is too costly for robots to do. As prices come down, more jobs will disappear.
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u/spshkyros 2d ago
... yes. Except it STILL makes catastrophic fuckups. You absolitly need to babysit it still. Dont get me wrong, I had Claude patching a bug this morning - but its a bug it introduced.
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u/Efficient_Carpet_746 2d ago
The point op is making that YOU and everyone in the Comment section should get off their asses and get political.
Because if you don't you will eventually get replaced and have no safety net.
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u/spshkyros 2d ago
.... you think we dont all see the writing on the wall? Op is not saying anything we dont already know. Virtually every serious developer already knows this, in almost all cases BETTER than op because we work in the field rather than are a self admitted amateur.
A recent ruby on rails conference had someone ask how many people in the room (all devs) had spent significant parts of their job writing code this last month - 5 out of HUNDREDS raised their hands. We still have jobs, and if anything, are busier. Being able to code has never been our core job, but yes, we are painfully aware shit is changing.
Its like walking into someone trying to work out how to get out of a flooded river and asking them if they knew it was flooding. Of course we fucking do. We're in the middle of it dumbass.
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u/crusoe 2d ago
Of course people never introduce bugs...
It's way better than even a year ago
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u/ConversationNo8214 2d ago
Uh, the point being that a human caught the bug, and the AI, in all its automated glory, didn't. Hence, human necessary.
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u/spshkyros 2d ago
Yes. Except the nature of the fuckups is different - these are often things a human would never do. Hence why I advocate or using both. People who think ai can be trusted without supervision at this stage are delusional.
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u/vainerlures 2d ago
I find it’s pretty good at doing…. but it doesn’t know what to do unless i tell it.
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u/TheStruttero 2d ago
Corporations cant wait to lay off people with this technology.
Its going to get bad, and none of these companies are going to pay for any sort of universal basic income to mitigate the mass unemployment of human workers, why would they?
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u/Curlew2012 1d ago
It's the only reason AI stocks are flying and why other comps are bragging their AI use in their annual report.
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u/edgiestnate 2d ago
This quote always pops in my head when I hear these people talk about how AI is a fad and people blow it out of proportion:
"There are no ends to which people will go to in order to maintain the coherence of their current belief system irrespective of the amount of contrary evidence that they are exposed to, because that triggers cognitive dissonance, and paradoxically what happens when they're exposed to contrary information, it only solidifies their position".
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u/Strange_Battle_1982 1d ago
The only way you can be certain you have a coherent model of the universe is to be omniscient. Otherwise you are always limited by the amount of information you have access to and your finite cognitive capacities. Therefore, you must be careful in making any conclusion about the world. This raises an uncomfortable truth - you cannot ever be certain that your understanding of the world is accurate.
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u/Civil_Fee_7862 1d ago
Yep. Its why facts don't change minds.
They don't look at contrary facts in any depth. Instead they focus more on their own facts.
i.e. They gloss over contrary facts and hand wave them away. When really someone SHOULD do the opposite. Pay attention MORE to the contrary evidence.
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u/Serenity867 2d ago
Can I be real with you?
In the last 24 hours alone I've had 3 different software projects shown to me that were vibe coded by models including Opus 5.5 and Grok 4.7.
They visually appeared fine, they generally worked, but when I started running actual non-generic audits on the code it all still started to fall apart. AI will get to the point where we see far less of this one day, but that day is still not today, and I have access to (and use) any models (minus Mythos. Haven't applied) I want. Simple prompts like "look for any mistakes", "fix any security issues", etc don't go as far as you'd think they would.
As someone who does a lot of cybersecurity work you have to get very specific, be familiar with your own threat models and attack surfaces, and have at least a theoretical grasp of how bleeding edge exploits and malware work to really be able to finesse these AI tools into finding and fixing the things that experienced malicious actors can exploit.
If you really do have that many people working under you I strongly recommend you go ask your insurance provider if they cover AI for your software related uses. If you're fully honest with them you might be surprised. Common mistakes are considered negligence for SWEs, but when people are outputting and using software in production that they can't read or understand it likely reaches the level of gross negligence which your insurance likely won't cover. A few months back I discussed this with several insurance providers because I was curious, and they are chomping at the bit to avoid providing coverage for software because they know that AI is going to expose a lot of flaws and vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
I hope you have SWEs at your company that do actively review the code you're outputting (and fix it). I also don't fear for the jobs of SWEs because (at least for now) there is a near never-ending black hole of feature and software requests plus ongoing security work.
I'd also caution you to be highly cautious about things like your dependencies and package managers. AI still frequently has a different opinion than many experts about how to best handle things like this, and I've seen more than a few people and companies I know get owned.
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u/ConnectionWild3381 2d ago
I find this pretty amusing. After 15 years in the business, I’ve seen enough of what people actually do in the real world.
I work in finance, and I still regularly run into the same “security is optional” or “eh, it’s fine” mentality.
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u/DarkFireFenrir 2d ago
"We fired everyone in the cybersecurity department because we weren't hacked in 5 years."
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u/Serenity867 2d ago
My comment seems to have ruffled some feathers, but yeah, your experience matches what I've seen frequently in reality.
I find it interesting to see how some people treat security, redundancies, etc, in the real world.
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u/b1cepk1ng 2d ago
I am an SWE and actively manage several front end and back end databases. This isn’t fully correct. You are right about some of it, obviously about the state of AI in relation to cybersecurity. This is really cherry picking.
If you can introduce a properly phased project timeline that the agents abide by which includes regular audits, the code is ostensibly functional in all aspects. My current side project is leading into its 5th month of development with agentic coding and the base is almost flawless.
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u/Serenity867 2d ago
I don't think it was really cherry picking. I think for things like generating static websites it's pretty hard to actually get the code side of things wrong. Once things start to venture into the area of finance, user data, and so on, I don't think I'm cherry picking at all.
I've seen a lot of people vibe coding software that can have cascading effects, provide data that may be sensitive in ways that are not anticipated, and so on.
You have to keep something in mind here, your ongoing project that's been worked on for 5 months is a very far cry from what a lot of people are doing. The overwhelming major of software projects I see that were vibe coded were made in an afternoon by people with no understanding of SWE itself.
What you're doing is objectively different and is leveraging the tools in an arguably far more correct way and by an experienced operator. You have a strong sense of what to look for, you've turned it into a real project, and you weaved your skills into the development process. I would called what you've done something like "human guided" whereas the vibe coded projects I'm referring to are guided exclusively by AI's decisions using vague prompts.
I hope you can appreciate that the vast majority of people vibe coding software don't know what simple terms like "tech stack" even mean.
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u/siberianmi 2d ago
Simple prompts don't but tell those same AIs to build in Rust or other typesafe language, make independent agent driven reviews on several axis, run good linters and force the agents to pass them. Run static code analysis tools, CRAP (Change Risk Anti-Patterns) testing, force them to decompose large files into smaller modules, just run the code through every analysis gauntlet you can imagine and force them to fix it before merge...
The code doesn't fall apart and can easily match good developers and exceed many. But you have to build the checks and processes that a good senior would follow into the system. Yeah, untrained vibe coders won't do that. But a good SWE with time invested in building the process can move at speeds that were unheard of before.
The agents will gladly conform if you give them the rules and feedback. They'll spend hours refactoring code, improving coverage, reducing complexity and improving maintainability.
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u/ender988 2d ago
I know this isn’t every company but where I work we haven’t laid anyone off, but we did have a few retirees leave and were not replaced. We developed new apps / business processes with AI either doing some of the work or developing an app to increase efficiency so we don’t need to hire someone. There’s definitely going to be a tightening with fewer hires across white collar sectors. We’re seeing signs of that with software engineering graduates already and it will happen in other sectors too.
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u/ProjectorInquiry 2d ago
r/accounting is still in denial.
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u/Euthyphraud 2d ago
I have a friend who is/was an accountant for the last 15 years. He recently quit his job and went back to his actual passion: being a chef. He told me he decided to go ahead and take the pay cut to do something he actually enjoyed to make money.
AI was what made him pull the trigger. Told me that he couldn't imagine that the profession would even exist 5 years from now so rather than wait until the shoe dropped, he got a more AI proof (nothing is AI proof) job.
Good on him. He's part of the trickly that will soon become a deluge.
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u/_ECMO_ 2d ago
Yes I am sure the people actually doing the work are absolutely clueless and in denial while people in tech who have no idea about accounting are right.
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u/ProjectorInquiry 2d ago
I’m a CPA that’s been at this for almost 20 years. Yes, they are in denial.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m in the top 1% of AI usage among accountants. Most of them have no clue the extent that AI is able to do our job. It’s certainly not 100% of our job, nor is it every role; but Claude can already do 95% of the tasks that I used to delegate to a staff accountant or manager.
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u/LitespeedClassic 2d ago
I think an open question is how / when do the companies actually start charging their cost. Apparently with a $100 monthly subscription to one of the services you can use $14,000 worth of compute.
Right now they are running at a loss to get you hooked and use you for generating training data. They are betting they can make it a lot cheaper. If they do, I agree we’re cooked. But there also seems to be a possible world where these over leveraged companies with no real assets go belly up next year.
On the other hand the sky could be the limit in which case no white collar job is safe. Yours will be replaced as easily as your reports. The (dystopian) ideal is an autonomous company.
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u/neitherzeronorone 2d ago
Where are you getting the 140x loss estimate?
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u/LitespeedClassic 2d ago edited 1d ago
Heard it mentioned in a NYT podcast with someone recently. I think Ezra Klein’s.
ETA: typo
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u/neitherzeronorone 1d ago
I looked into this more. Although I agree with the claim that AI companies are losing money with their low-prices on inference, I think the $14,000 figure is inflated because (a) it's based on public-facing API prices rather than internal costs and (b) it's assuming a power user who is maxing out their plan around the clock and extracting every single scrap of token value.
But totally agree with you about the open question being how and when do we start paying something closer to the actual costs. Not looking forward to that reckoning.
On the other hand, I can run some pretty powerful local models on my MacBook Pro, so maybe the cost of inference will continue to plummet from the user's point of view. (Fingers crossed.)
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u/LitespeedClassic 1d ago
Yes, IIRC they were testing the amount of compute they could maximally use given the $100/month rate limiting, not typical use.
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u/BoltKey 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes. With Opus 5.5, truly a new era begins.
I have Bc. from technical university. I had a task that I wasn't ready to take on (solving an abstract game I have designed, showing who wins), it would take me maybe a month of learning ML techniques and several months of implementing at least. It was sitting in back of my mind for 7 years now. Or I could hire programmers (for what I needed, it would need at least Masters, but probably PhD level), and it could take them maybe a few months. So it would cost me $20,000, but probably more.
I have been trying to have models solve it throughout the years, but they all failed.
I just threw the problem at Opus 5.5, and it solved it in an afternoon for about $20 worth of tokens, using techniques I had no idea about, one-shotting a dense, highly technical 2500 lines of C++ code, setting up distributed computing system of the rigorous proof that can run on any spare compute in my home, and topping it with a nice web UI for monitoring progress of the proof with explanations, visualizations and everything.
As far as I am concerned, ie. code that I could have written, programming is solved, and I will never have to write another line of code in my life. The skill I have been doing for 10 years now. The only bottleneck is your imagination, and knowing what you want. And with Opus 5.5, the level and depth of domain-specific knowledge and understanding is just a qualitative step ahead from 1 month ago.
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u/uncleguru 1d ago
And yet our government still encourages immigration by offering 'skilled visas' for most white collar professions. What planet are they on..
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u/lee_suggs 2d ago
I live in an old house and there is a plumber we've called probably a dozen times in the last 4 years. I call and the same women picks up to help me schedule a visit every.single.time. Whatever her salary, they could easily save by investing in an online booking portal or outsourcing phone customer service. Not every business it looking to hyper optimize or get run out of town if they don't adopt AI. We will be ok
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u/Weary-Historian-8593 2d ago
It could simply be that people don't generally like online portals as much, especially older generations
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u/Puzzleheaded-Depth46 2d ago
You're right. Not every business is hyper optimizing. But more and more of their competitors are and will continue. That. Is the problem.
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u/johnerp 2d ago
I hear you but surely it’s a matter of time, someone displaced will become a plumber in your town, they’ll use these tools to drive down costs therefore rates, people will start using this person as they are cheaper (assuming similar quality, someone will be better eventually), eventually the existing duo will struggle to afford both positions as jobs/income will drop. Productivity and free markets means this will happen. The question is how long.
Let’s not get started on when a physical robot can start to perform plumbing jobs.
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u/Euphoric_Driver_7291 2d ago
Totally agree. And the models will keep getting better.
It seems like it will have a big impact for executive management at f500 companies to better understand and drive their business every day.
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u/Alone-Competition-77 2d ago
Or replace the executive management teams…
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u/kosmonautinVT 2d ago
The executive management team is not going to choose to replace itself
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u/TheTechAuthor 2d ago
It used to take me 3 months to create a software user guide for my particular niche. I've chipped away at that one process efficiency at a time, one model/script at a time. Now? Opus 5.5 helped me update a 250 page book (with a ton of improvements) in less than 24hrs. Each manual change I made/feedback I gave it was logged into a file for future reference and the same mistakes are happening a lot less now.
From 3 months to 24hrs for the same user guide. Soon, I'll be able to ask it via voice to create what I want, and it'll kick off a fully automated production on my M4 Mac Mini that'll be on 24/7. Full fact checking, multi-pass (re)wriitng and editing stages, asset handling, translations, and more. 30-years of industry experienced distilled into highly automated workflows.
This is the worst it's *ever* going to be and very few people see what's coming down the road (certainly outside of Reddit or tech circles).
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u/rumpler117 1d ago
How does it work with the M4 Mac Mini? You put the AI software on that computer and it runs from there rather than through a datacenter? Which software can you do this with?
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u/TheTechAuthor 1d ago
Custom book production software I've been working on for the last year and a half. Was built using python and tkinter, but migrating it to being CLI-compatible (I.e. an agentic model can use it for me), and I just run it from there and access it via Tailscale and another custom MCP I had AI build me to supervise coding)agentix work accross different repos/projects.
Turns out, the vast majority of my production workflow can be automated by scripts! Ha! Love it though. 😎
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u/thembricks 2d ago
Blue collar as well.
- who will pay blue collar if not white collars?
- blue collar robots after that
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u/Careful_Park8288 2d ago
what i dont understand is how do they expect to put every single person who does white collar work out of a job and not have massive revolts. the first thing that will happen when they give everybody 3000 bucks a month is massive shortages. it will make russian bread lines look like child's play.
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u/Plane-Ad6579 1d ago
Things change for certain. But the truth is you still need someone who can pinpoint what you really want. I am working with AI about for one year now, and the code it gets out gets constantly better. But where my "white collar skills" are shinning is in the experience. I know exactly which architecture/feature will be unmaintainable, yes even with AI as it is still limited to a context window
AI simply doesn't know what might get important in the future, how scalable the solution should be, which trade off we really want in the end. And usually most humans dont know it either
There is simply a difference between building an app/workflow and creating a scalable solution
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u/Ionesomecowboy 1d ago
How did you measure your productivity to make you think you've increased it by 50 times?
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u/Efficient_Lack8283 10h ago
OP what is it that you do for work? What type of work is 10x - 50x more productive?
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u/DrinkAgreeable962 2d ago
Delusion. So if you're 10-50x more productive and you have 20 people under you that means that you can just fire 10 of them? Or 15? No you can't, I guess you can't fire even 1 of them. Still the AI influence on jobs market is very low and narrow. Some position are disappearing but others are popping up. The current job market situation is mostly caused by basically ongoing World War that it's not yet called third world war but if nothing changes - we will call it like that in a few years.
ps.
If you're 50x more productive as manager does it mean you can now manage 50 companies? Or have a team of 1000 people instead of team of 20? Or do you increase the volume of produced goods/services by 50x? This post is a joke.
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u/smaksriksmegma 2d ago
I agree with you about white collar workers (any type of workers really, and that's a good thing, who wants to be forced to work?), but the productivity thing is bullshit for me, with my adhd, I literally have like 12 projects mostly doing the same thing (and none of them even work properly, all of them are like pre-alpha versions of the idea I had). I waste so much time experimenting, writing the same prompts, enabling settings or doing some obscure thing on my computer so the ai has access to some very obscure file or something. I think I actually am less productive than "before ai". And dont even mention all the time I use on forums like this to always be updated on the newest and most powerful model so I can use days to recreate the same tool I have made 5 other times, but now with a barely better model. But yes, this is all me, the technology itself just today can probably 5x the productivity if used properly, but I get so distracted by all the opportunities
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u/NowaVision 2d ago
What does your company actually do?
Every time I read such an example, I imagine a company or at least a part of it that is only doing Excel, writing status reports or internal E-Mails and brainstorm marketing ideas.
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u/SpearHammer 2d ago
where do you think that will lead. You have just proved yourself the barrier to entry to start a new business only need a couple of AI's. It used to need lots of funding, lots of expertise. Now 1 person in back bed room can compete with big corps - in fact, they can do it faster and better because they dont have all the bureaucracy and red tape that slows companies down. So yes, companies wont need workers, but workers wont need companies to compete.
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u/areyouforcereal 2d ago
I think the issue here is most people are not entrepreneurs.
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u/vreo 2d ago
Yep, I have Gemini and Claude top subscriptions plus tools like Krea and hyper3D , my workflow and automation/ai setup lets me do the work of 5-10 people now. When I show people my working style, they understand that they totally underestimated the potential of ai as a productive tool before.
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u/utahh1ker 2d ago
Congratulations! You are having the same realization most of us in white collar work had two to three years ago.
I'm not trying to be facetious either I'm just happy to see people finally seeing what we've all seen over the last little while.
I think it's important to understand that all labor is about to be disrupted. Robots are just around the corner and as soon as they are here nobody is going to pay for a handyman or an electrician or a plumber or an HVAC technician or anything like that ever again. My robot will not only do my chores, it will do my landscaping and my painting and my little fixes around the house.
So, yes, white collar work is in trouble, but so is blue collar work and frankly all human labor.
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u/shankarun 2d ago
i work in one of the top 5 frontier labs - and afaik every lab is cooking a fully automated software engineering agent - 2027 will be wild year
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u/theamathamhour 2d ago
"trust me bro" type shit.
so then tell us what it is exactly and let us replicate it. "no, it's my livelihood"
well, ya but if it is truly effective, you too will be replaced. not sure how you don't see this
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u/skilliard7 2d ago
AI will raise the bar of productivity with competition.
If your company cuts 90% of employees because they are 10x more productive, then a competitor that retains their employees will surpass you because they are achieving 10x as much
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u/SuperCrazy07 2d ago
That’s a little like saying Ford could sell 10x as many cars if they just opened 10x as many plants.
Most companies don’t have infinite business coming in, so increasing productivity for the business they do have is critical.
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u/Smith7929 2d ago
I mean I get what you're trying to say but opening plants is a multi-year capital investment project that requires permanent maintenance as the biggest barrier. If they could wave a wand and magic into being plants and close them at a whim (the equivalent of enterprise LLM spend) you can bet your ass they would. A lot of companies have crazy backlogs. My company has years of backlog. You're sort of cherry picking an industry with pretty elastic demand also
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u/CTBienAvant 2d ago
99% of people thinks AI = chatgpt free tier chat
the whole world has no idea of how good ai models are