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Ask HN: Are you afraid of AI making you unemployable within the next few years?

14 points johnwheeler | 2 comments | 20 Dec 25 21:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

On Hacker News and Twitter, the consensus view is that no one is afraid. People concede that junior engineers and grad students might be the most affected. But, they still seem to hold on to their situations as being sustainable. My question is, is this just a part of wishful thinking and human nature, trying to combat the inevitable? The reason I ask is because I seriously don't see a future where there's a bunch of programmers anymore. I see mass unemployment for programmers. People are in denial, and all of these claims that the AI can't write code without making mistakes are no longer valid once an AI is released potentially overnight, that writes flawless code. Claude 4.5 is a good example. I just really don't see any valid arguments that the technology is not going to get to a point where it makes the job irrelevant, not irrelevant, but completely changes the economics.
1. cjs_ac ◴[20 Dec 25 22:40 UTC] No.46340328[source]▶
The AI providers' operations remain heavily subsidised by venture capital. Eventually those investors will turn around and demand a return on their investment. The big question is, when that happens, whether LLMs will be useful enough to customers to justify paying the full cost of developing and operating them.

That said, in the meantime, I'm not confident that I'd be able to find another job if I lost my current one, because I not only have to compete against every other candidate, I also need to compete against the ethereal promise of what AI might bring in the near future.

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2. raw_anon_1111 ◴[21 Dec 25 01:17 UTC] No.46341335[source]▶
Google has one of the best models, its own hardware and doesn’t depend on venture capital. Between its own products and GCP, they will be fine. The same with Amazon and Microsoft.

I just don’t see OpenAI being long term viable