this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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I still have yet to see it adequately replace any human labor
I don't use it but my wife uses it for spreadsheet equations. She has to verifiy and test every answer but then so would anything written by an intern.
So yeah, AI is killing jobs, not in an individual sense, but in aggregate like spreadsheet software did 50 years ago when before that all work was done by hand.
That's just making one person do the job of more than one. I call bs.
Capitalism has been doing that long before LLM'S.
How do you call bs on one person doing the work that used to take two? It was one person and an intern.
Every company had a secretary pool 60 years ago before word processors allowed people to type by themselves without an extra support person.
aka 'Productivity increase'
Productivity has increased for decades without much of it going to wage increases. Instead, it's gone to the companies/shareholders
People could have always learned to type, that part didn’t change much with the switch to computers. I think they just liked having secretaries around back in the day and were willing to pay for it.
Typing quickly on a mechanical typewriter is a skill not easily mastered. It's not just the typing, it is the extreme accuracy needed. There's no backspace and no cut and paste. A letter covered in white out isn't acceptable.
I have a few mechanical typewriters I got into as a hobby, it’s not that hard. This is where I’m just like, skill issue. People didn’t want to type, they just liked having secretaries around and were willing to pay for it. Back in the 70’s and earlier they literally thought typing was “women’s work” like sewing because it required high levels of manual dexterity that big tough men were obviously incapable of.
Well that's everything. If you are an expert you can do it quickly and accurately. Everyone else needs to take more time and will make mistakes. Word Processing software means a single typo doesn't ruin ten minutes of typing. It enabled regular people without skill to type well enough to do the work themselves.
I have seen it taken a serious hit at call centers.
"Adequately" I still stand by my assertion
Does your understanding of adequately matter to ex call center employees?
And what about the artists who had their jobs absorbed by AI?
As someone who has attempted to communicate with an AI call center, that tech seems pretty far from prime time
Level 1 support was never a satisfactory experience, the employees there never were allowed to say anything beyond some things that fit into a LLM context.
"It hasn't affected me so that means it's the same for everyone else" idiocy level thinking.
We've started to lean into it at work and I am not exaggerating when I say that I'm probably doing three people's job right now by utilizing it.
It's terrifying and amazing and I'm just not sure how far this is going to go.
Now these jobs were not scheduled for anybody. It's not like jobs were lost. But they are jobs that are never going to be taken by new people. Because those openings don't exist anymore.
Sad as it is.
Good luck debugging when something goes bad down the line.
I mean that seriously, I wish you luck.
Honestly, this whole "AI software development will make code less maintainable" stance is not an AI problem, it's a human problem. When you use agents to generate code, you still need to review it, test it and so on. Granted, some devs let their agents manage every step in the pipeline without supervision, but this is as dumb as letting a team of 4 juniors work without supervision. If you have real experience in software development, you will take the time required to validate the code created by your agents and still be able to deploy 5-10 times faster.
Also it’s not like all pre-ai codebases were masterpieces, easily maintainable with no tech debt.
AI doesn’t have a monopoly on slop, humans are perfectly capable of that. AI can just write more of it, quicker
But your job hasn't been replaced