Ask HN: What skills are future proof in an AI driven job market?
17 pointsby sunny6785 hours ago18 comments
  • austin-cheney18 minutes ago
    * superior written communication

    * leadership

    * data structures

    * task/project management

    * performance/measurements

    * data transmission techniques

    Honestly, if you really have to ask the question then none of this matters because it sounds like you are already delegating your career to AI which would make this list unapproachable.

  • kimhjo2 hours ago
    Judgment and domain expertise. AI can write the code, but it can't tell you what's worth building or why the architecture will hurt you in two years.
  • Areena_284 hours ago
    Judgment in ambiguous situations is the one thing that's held up consistently. AI is good at defined tasks, bad at knowing when the task definition itself is wrong.

    Also, deep domain knowledge is the other one..... knowing what good output looks like in your field is something models can't fake convincingly at the edges.

  • fiftyacorn3 hours ago
    Communication and networking - i think we'll see devs expected to bridge to the BA role and deliver based on that. So being able to communicate will become more important
    • sunny6783 hours ago
      Yeah! Soft skills is a key skill to learn these days.
  • 10keanean hour ago
    management and critical thinking.

    management - it occured to me that giving instructions to agent is very similar to giving instructions to human employees - even the best of them make mistakes.

    i learnt that asking claude code to "investigate for 3 potential root causes" is more effective than "investigate the root cause" in bug fix. this blows my mind as i realize that agent can be lazy, can be careless, and we can give better instruction to prevent that.

    another reason why i said this is that giving enough context and defining blast boundary is more efficient than hand-holding/micromanaging and checking every tool call for agents. the management skill for human employees also works here.

    critical thinking - you just need to have your judgement on the seemingly solid but actually halluncinated agent bs.

  • Ashbt4 hours ago
    Meta skills: https://share.google/aimode/Fhd3GapqYWJ5vBBXo
    • sunny6783 hours ago
      Seems interesting. Thanks for sharing
  • phillc735 hours ago
    Paramedicine and nursing. These roles will adapt and use AI, but because they're still so hands-on, and there's already a shortage of staff in those roles in general, I don't see job cuts there.
  • alegd3 hours ago
    knowing how to give AI good context. Thats the skill nobody talks about. I use Claude Code daily and the difference between a lazy prompt and a well structured doc is massive.

    also just understanding how the models work. I'm doing an AI masters right now and once you know whats happening under the hood the anxiety disappears.

    bottom line: learn it and embrace it.

  • cal_dent4 hours ago
    Social skills. Same as it ever was. That beats talents/smarts every time in a corporate environment
    • benj1113 hours ago
      Don't you mean sociopathy? Or it that just my autistic side talking?
      • nicbou2 hours ago
        Empathy, getting along with people, seeking mutual benefit are also valuable skills.
        • hackable_sand2 hours ago
          If someone is "learning" those to keep their job then yeah I'd say that's a huge red flag
          • nicbou2 hours ago
            That was not the question being asked
  • bayarearefugee4 hours ago
    If LLMs have roughly peaked, then everything is safe except for things that are already being eaten away like translation and call center work.

    If they haven't and we have hit the exponential growth mark, nothing is safe and even the temporarily "safe jobs" will also suffer greatly from being crunched on both the supply and demand sides (there will be more labor supply for those jobs as the displaced try to flee to safe jobs, there will be less demand for the output of those jobs because the displaced will no longer have income to pay for those goods or services). And LLMs and robots will eventually come for many of those jobs too, likely at a rate that exceeds people's ability to retrain.

    Better hope that either things have peaked, or that we can somehow manage to stop treating all forms of socialism as evil or we're going to see the violent unmaking of modern society in our lifetimes.

    • Krssst40 minutes ago
      Robots require material resources and are quite difficult to produce. I wouldn't be surprised if we go through a period of time were intellectual work is outdated and most people are back to exhausting manual work. Basically, no middle class anymore, just some elites and many manual workers doing what the AI asks. I guess, to those future elites, humans would just be self-reproducing robots. (well robots like those we have now would definitely see use, but I am not sure about the timeline for general-purpose robots that can do many things including assemble themselves).

      I don't have a strong belief this will happen however, and I hope it does not.

  • KetoManx645 hours ago
    Plumbing and electrical work
  • ensocode4 hours ago
    small scale farming to get your kids fed
  • zhouzhao4 hours ago
    Critical thinking.
    • benj1113 hours ago
      Unfortunately that's a skill that makes you less employable.
  • mykowebhn5 hours ago
    Restaurant work
  • SilentM684 hours ago
    Psychology, psychiatry, medical, construction, auto repair, at least in the short term. The jury is still out on the long-term view which is a bit hazy at the moment :(
    • cantrevealname4 hours ago
      I agree with construction and auto repair, but why psychology and psychiatry? If there's anything that's perfect for LLMs, it self-diagnosis and self-treatment by chatting with them. Other than prescribing drugs, an AI system could do everything a psychologist or psychiatrist does.

      The only significant barrier is that it's not condoned by the medical establishment and by law (which I imagine will indeed take a few years to work around).

  • fabulousman5 hours ago
    Maths
    • bartvk3 hours ago
      It depends on the level, though. You can easily ask AI to "Calculate intersection with X-axis for sin(2πx)" and I found many and I mean MANY errors in my textbook.
  • sebakubisz2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • num425 hours ago
    Metrology, mechanical and materials science engineering, manufacturing and tool engineering, precision engineering, and electrical and electronics engineering, combined with being a generalist and having one specialization in physical or hardware engineering along with computation.

    As people often say, matter, energy, and information are the fundamentals of everything. I think we need mathematics, analytic philosophy, the arts and humanities, and physics too. Sorry we need every skill. /s