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

14 points johnwheeler | 1 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 People are in denial, and all of these claims that the AI can't write code without making mistakes are no longer valid once an AI is released potentially overnight, that writes flawless code.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.
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uberman ◴[20 Dec 25 21:29 UTC] No.46339809[source]▶
I use Claude 4.5 almost every day. It makes mistakes every day. The worst mistakes are the ones that are not obvious and only by careful review do you see the flaws. At the moment, even the best AI cant be reliable event to make modest refactoring. What AI does at the moment is make senior developers worth more and junior developers worth less. I am not at all worried about my own job.
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johnwheeler ◴[20 Dec 25 21:48 UTC] No.46339949[source]▶
Thank you for your response. This is exactly the type of commentary I'm talking about. The key phrase is "at the moment." It's not that developers will be replaced, but there will be far less need for developers, is what I think.

I think the flaws are going to be solved for, and if that happens, what do you think? I do believe there needs to be a human in the loop, but I don't think there needs to be humans, plural. Eventually.

I believe this is denial. The statement that the best AI can't be reliable enough to do a modest refactoring is not correct. Yes, it can. What it currently cannot do is write a full app from start to finish, but they're working on longer task execution. And this is before any of the big data centers have even been built. What happens then? You get the naysayers that say, "Well, the scaling laws don't apply," but there's a lot of people who think they do apply.

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1. uberman ◴[21 Dec 25 01:47 UTC] No.46341497[source]▶
The best AI (and I do believe that Claude is one of the best) is able to hold a conversation, maintain context, and respond to simple requests. The key is understanding that not every dev know what questions to ask or when the answers are bad. Call it delusional if you like, but I don't see that changing any time soon if ever.