We also don't know how this approach will pan out and the extent of its final functionality. Some people think it'll just get better, but nothing in the world scales linearly forever, why would this?
We will likely construct a general solution machine one day and help us create resource abundance, and with that lead to a world where we can work on a completely new foundation of a human philosophy and social structure to live in, but there's no guarantee we're on that path with this garbage, and it's a moral failure to just accept that we are and deem ourselves replaced prematurely.
"on that path with this garbage"
You mean with this the negative things you attribute LLMs? Limited understanding, function and risk, etc.?
Because what LLMs did is freeing the genie from the bottle. It showed what scaling and ML and Compute can do. It doesn't matter much if LLMs will be Frontier for one year or the next 10 years because VC to alternatives like World Models are available now thanks to LLMs.
The compute required and data required for any further progress through ML is also unblocked by LLM.
The economy is solving the memory wall issue today just because of AI.
I had so many issues with our build system because not a lot of people cared about scaling stateful workloads which need a lot of data shared between, now tx to AI y problems got solved.
But LLMs dont prevent you from doing this? If it does it probably is an organisational issue.
It’s not hard to swap “LLM” speak and make it sound like arguments made about ever higher-level language.
We are all operating at a couple of layers up the stack and 99% of us would be lost at N-1 let alone N-2/N-3 but we don’t bemoan that. I really don’t see how LLMs are different.
Output from compilers is already verified - after all they have an extensive suite of tests.
With LLMs you're getting into the role of someone who keeps validating the compiler over and over, because its output is not deterministic.
Few people are thrown into a codebase that they understand because they wrote it. Not every developer is issued their own greenfield project and said go have fun.
In the end, my immediate productivity with LLM is a lot lower than before. But I assume that quality is a bit higher, at least in the long run, because issues fixed early saves a lot of time later.
I guess I don't use LLMs like a lot of other people. In fact I continue to write most code myself and I just use LLM to aid me or to generate something that's very similar to existing entity and just requires careful copy&paste&replace. My only fear is that this approach to work is not very popular and I might be asked one day to switch to wipe code, which I don't enjoy at all.
You may caveat what type of software you are talking about, like complex or out-of-the-ordinary, and say that llms are still bad at that. Fine. But LLMs are actively being used for developing thousands of websites all the time - you can see several examples of them on hackernews every week.
Amount of lines is irrelevant when talking about a landing page or a huge number of internal tools that people are building at the moment. At least until a certain point.
Any programmer should be able to hack one up. LLMs are good at _programming_, but I haven't seen evidence they are good at engineering yet. But then again, many people with the title "software engineer" are not great at it either.
The right also organizes humans into us-vs-them: the natives versus the immigrants, the faithful versus the infidels, and so on. Whether those make sense depends only on the values, way of living or material conditions you want to protect and whether the other group is a menace to them.
100 years from now, your birth date and death date, and the life lived in between, will be no different than any other human, lines on a headstone or rows in a database. Maybe you’ll have a Wikipedia page, for the historical ledger, but if not, nothing changes.
But I have to argue with you about one thing: Everyone is special.
There is a vast darkness, eons of empty space around us, and no other known life in the universe.
Every lizard is special. Every crab and spider and snail is special. Every person is especially special.
Your attitude about that is, let's say, demented as a result of hating your own species and your inability to love yourself or the people around you, or even the people you hate.
Surely there can be no counterargument to your final analysis of the pointlessness, the end of life.
I'd posit something different that you might sleep on: That your existence is worthwhile and, in fact, unique once and only once in all the history of the universe. That your ability to observe phenomena actually solidifies and collapses indeterminate waveforms. That you're living in the one and only terrarium that we know of, and belong to the most intelligent species that we know of, and that you therefore:
Have an obligation to the universe be worth more than what you're saying you believe in the prior statement. Of course, you can be whatever you want to be, and if that's merely believing that the smartest-sounding thing to say in a chat forum is that we're all meaningless and that the earth will be swallowed by the sun in a few billion years, then have at it; you're no doubt still a credit to your species for realizing things like that. Dogs, for instance, have no idea. But still, it's very disappointing. I mean, you have a vast number of upvotes on HN. Surely you must have something more interesting to impart about Life, the Universe and Everything? Even if it's just about fish?
You just proved we are all special.
Whichever totalitarian country your little troll army represents, it would be fun if you let your own citizens comment on here without fear of penalty. I suspect they wouldn't mind being labeled white collar or blue collar, if they had an opportunity to speak freely. Or for that matter, why not open up your own country's social media so they can speak without fear of reprisal! Let's get going with that project, I can't wait to see the results!
>> Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them
First of all, is that a profound left-wing critique of capitalism?
Secondly, I've read Orwell extensively. I don't think he would have had much truck with a troll posting Animal Farm style slogans.
>> @mgol94 Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them
>> @nkmnz Communists always want to de-individualize humans into a single group with a coherent identity so it's easier to ideologize and agitate them.
And I don't disagree with either of them per se, on the merits, but I see in both of them a major flaw in the way the point is argued.
I am also not from a totalitarian country =)
I think it’s very obvious that the powers that be are keen to keep people divided and focused on anything but them. Ex: trans issues, trans people have been around for ever, but didn’t start dominating media and politics until about 10 years ago (not long after the global Wall Street protests.) Just mentioning this will send both sides of the issue into a rage (either I’m a genocidal maniac or I support litter boxes in schools, depending on your interpretation.)
Not sure what to make of your note about transgenderism... I think that gender, sexuality, race, religion, ethnicity, borders, abortion, and inequality have all been deployed as boogeymen by parties on both the right and left to scare people into voting one way or another.
You helped me clarify my thinking in one way, though: "Divide and conquer", which has been a theme in this thread, implies that both left and right parties are working together simply to confuse the populace. Or to put it more plainly, "divide and rule" implies that there must be a conspiracy in which the people doing the ruling don't give a damn either way; they only use social and economic issues to keep people divided to prevent an uprising.
I don't really think that's how it works, and to tell you the truth, I think that believing in that sort of thing is not just juvenile and historically illiterate, it's actually harmful to a well-functioning society. And I'm seeing it all over the place, even just implicitly in half the comments in this thread. That's not how the world works. Fascists and socialists and centrists don't actually get together with industrialists and arms manufacturers and oil producers to think up things like "how can we distract the genpop with transgender stuff while we pump the atmosphere full of more carbon." The world is a much more complicated and subtle place; many actors are on the stage, each with their own agenda, and no one is pulling all the strings behind the curtain. In fact, that's what's even more terrifying than a cabal of sociopaths: No one is in control, no one at all. The train has no brakes; the ship is burning, but there is no captain; sixteen people are fighting for control in the cockpit of the plane. That's why I don't like those kinds of reductive assessments.
> It's always the new accounts like yours with 47 votes who write the most depressing, hopeless, despairing and anti-capitalist slogans around here. Day after day. Why is that?
It's probably time for you to let the scales fall from your eyes, and realize that you're a worker and the the shareholders aren't looking out for your well-being. They want you to be paid as little as possible, so they can keep more for themselves.
> Whichever totalitarian country your little troll army represents, it would be fun if you let your own citizens comment on here without fear of penalty. I suspect they wouldn't mind being labeled white collar or blue collar, if they had an opportunity to speak freely. Or for that matter, why not open up your own country's social media so they can speak without fear of reprisal! Let's get going with that project, I can't wait to see the results!
Where did that come from? Do you think the GP is a Soviet apparatchik time-warped into the present-day? I wouldn't be totally surprised, given a lot of libertarian tracts were written during the cold war, and would pound on the Soviet Union to tar far more reasonable and moderate ideas.
Clearly there is a useful distinction to make here, as clearly some jobs are disportionately robust to technological innovation. Clearly doctors and lawyers have not expected the same amount of replacement as software engineer. Maybe blue or white collar does quite capture it but captial and labour framing provides no explanation for any heterogeneous effects on different trades within the labour force.
Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).
The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.
Is it because women through out the 1960s-2000s had a seat at the table, which men didn't?
Obviously not, they often faced workplace discrimination and their choice of job was limited to what was socially acceptable for a woman to work in and often those were jobs men weren't interested in the 1940-1960s, but they were working in what we now call the service industry and they didn't experience the displacement which came with global trade at the same rate men did.
> Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).
This just is not an informative framing here for why software engineers are more impacted than doctors
> The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.
This simply isn't informative, the blog post is clearly focusing on a definite industry and your fixating on a general class (which the impacts are not being felt equally across).
I think that's post-hoc. A few years ago, you could have reasonably written "clearly software engineers have not expected the same amount of replacement as factory workers."
The only distinction that matters is worker vs. capitalist. And the jobs that seem "disproportionately robust to technological innovation," only haven't been subjected to it yet. And it's not even that hard to see: the AI companies are gunning for doctor and lawyer work. The main difference between those professions and software engineers, is that they have some level or worker-organization and regulatory protection.
Software engineers as a whole, were really, really dumb not embrace unionization before 2022, when we had a lot of economic power. Instead we got confused by our high salaries, and embraced libertarian propaganda like we were temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
But AI is coming for capital allocators as well, too, so we are seeing more and more white collar people getting “blue collarized”.
As AI marches through various institutions, fundamentally shorting their utility, and as these crumble and morph (including law-enforcement & military), I suspect many people will be surprised how little they actually "own".
That includes much of the "capital ownership" class.
Good luck with your squirrelled bank accounts and brokerage accounts!
In which case, yes, owning a plumbing business is closer to capital than working at one, which is in turn closer than doing unskilled manual labour on a job site. And on the other end, maybe owning an Airbnb which you clean yourself is closer to labour than owning a portfolio of ETFs.
Something I always intend to do and regularly find myself falling short of! Thank you, your interpretation makes sense (as most interpretations seeking nuance do)
However, as we have seen, even high paying jobs like software engineering where I and most of my colleagues long assumed we don't need to organize can get exploited almost over night.
There's three types of people
1) You rely on a paycheck to live
2) Your passive income is enough to live
3) You are so wealthy you can influence the world
Someone working for a 40k a year payslip, or even a 200k a year payslip, is likely in group 1. Someone with 5 million net worth is comfortably in group 2 - even at 3% in a savings account gives them an income way above people earning from labor. Both of those groups are so divorced from those whose wealth increases 5 million a year, or 5 million a month that they're basically the same.
At some point it ceases to be about money and being able to afford the things you want, and becomes power to control others.
This is level -1 of class consciousness and that's exactly how the top 0.x% keeps us down.
The eventual conclusion was that the interests of the upper middle class did not align with those of the working class. Anyone with substantial non-labor income, such as a small business owner with permanent employees or a professional with enough wealth to have a rental property or other investments of similar value, would not want to have their wealth taken away. That made them class enemies of the working class.
It can be instructive to read what happened to kulaks (wealthy independent peasants) in the early USSR.
You don't have to be marxists or revolutionist to notice that you're getting the short end and that a smaller and smaller part of the population is profiting more and more. Wealth inequalities weren't anywhere as bad between the 1930s and 1990s for example, it was still capitalism, still largely the same societal organization, etc.
We're asking that we perhaps should consider doing something about the 0.1%... and people like you are misrepresenting it as "they want to literally kill anyone owning anything". Nobody gives a shit about the local baker, farmer or ice cream shop.
"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." as it was eloquently posited by Paulo Freire.
A million seconds is a couple of weeks, a billion seconds three decades. Comparing a worker at any salary to that singular concentration of socioeconomic power just doesn't make any sense to me, the key distinction of the rentier is that he can avoid the domination non-rentiers must suffer almost by definition when rentiers exist - they are subject to the arbitrary whim of someone who cannot be voted out of power through democratic efforts. In my view liberty is the freedom from domination, and any private individual with the power to dominate in their own right is inherently hazardous to a democratic society. It is in the interests of both workers that the billionaire is prevented from gaining a position of political influence.
Is this some cultural aspect I'm missing here? Eg lower social cohesion between income levels in the US?
Or maybe it's just a life stage thing. I'm still in my 20s, and none of my friends or myself have children. As time passes and savings mount and people start having families maybe the problems emerge...
If you have enough excess income that you can build wealth in assets/investments until you become financially independent and no longer dependent on selling your labour, you're white collar.
If you don't, so you're condemned to work forever (apart from state support), you're blue collar.
It has never been about how much money you make.
The overwhelming majority of self employed professionals I know (electricians, mechanics, plumbers) make way more than the average white collar worker (southern Europe).
Just to make it clearer: my SO, which works in governance of a major italian bank, makes way less than her brother painting walls.
Seems a bit lopsided though; I wonder if they are only considering selected stock markets or something.
[0] https://hellosafe.ca/en/investing/broker/stock-ownership
Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.
Really? How would that happen? Maybe with a small loan of a million dollars...
Says the labourer wage cuck working as a CRUD developer
Is that ever a useful distinction?
A bakery/bodega owner is a "capital owner"
A top NBA player is a worker
But I know who gets more money, has a good retirement margin and sleeps better at night
In communist terms, these are part of the petit burgeois. They are technically capital owners but are as vulnerable as workers. Crucially, they don't own any relevant means of production.
> A top NBA player is a worker
Yes, and if he fails to turn his income into capital, thus becoming a capital owner, he'll be as vulnerable as all other workers or more since his working age is much more limited.
I cannot feel for the graduates. What are they thinking? I remember a phase in my life finals in my school(2014), teachers were advising against joining computer science because of 2007 job losses because of Great Recession.
Fast farward to now I feel it's going to be same here as most IT jobs are all replaced, if not changed. And people will pickup different industry. But what about the entry level people who are trying to get a job now? [entry level software jobs are already going at a slower pace](https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Artificial_Intelligence...), in this new job market they might need to have different kind of exposure and knowledge.
And that isn’t meant to denigrate the oil change person. There are millions of that person to every one person working for an F1 team, and it’s important work. But, obviously very different things.
Back in the day, blue-collar literally referred to workers whose clothes get dirty due to their work- construction work etc. Everyone else is white-collar. That doesn't mean a blue collar work is much harder than white collar, this it was assumed. I saw workers simply sleeping on mine floor that is full of coal dust, mud and dirty water around. They just had their lunch, shared some jokes and having a nap. While the supervisor was running around in panic to ensure the target output.
Software Engineering is in this weird limbo where a whole subsection of the industry thinks it can be a blue-collar "I just code" type of contributor... those types are going to slowly be eliminated.
But for the majority of us, the job always was more involved than just code. And that's white-collar work, through and through.
Civil engineers never could scale to pouring concrete themselves, thus the blue/white collar split. Software doesn't have that problem.
everything else? if anything we're just getting started :D
Maybe this is true for FAANG engineers in America. In my country over here in Europe, salaries for software devs have never been that different from other STEM / business fields requiring similar education level.
https://waymo.com/intl/zh-cn/blog/2025/06/scaling-laws-in-au...
Painting, building sheds, drilling, repairs. I never encountered a situation in which I thought my awesome Logos was needed to engage productively with the environment. If a situation is cognitively challenging, say with electronics or motor parts or whatever, then that's not a robotics problem but a cognitive one and as we from dev that is actually the easy part now.
I have a suspicion we underestimate robots by a lot. It's slow going but once they get going it will be a madhouse.
Workers will be babysitting robots like we babysit AIs. They'll just walk alongside it and mentor it, guide it, smack it, like we do. The first few years they'll be stupid and rough and everyone will say it's hopeless but soon after people will start mentioning they only have to lightly monitor them..
Er, no. That's the thing about general intelligence, it's general.
Im speaking specifically of pre AGI general intelligence, little g general if you will.
There is a real and big difference between an Electrician and an Electrical Engineer. I have an EE degree yet I am not legally allowed to install wires or electrical equipment in the field. Electricians are not allowed to do some engineering tasks. Even an engineer requires additional license (Professional Engineer) in order to sign off building designs.
This is a strict division between white-collar and blue-collar work. Same logic applies to other engineering disciplines.
I remember people argued the same logic should apply to SW as well, in as late as early 2000s. They wanted to make a distinction between a SW Architect and a programmer/coder. The industry preferred to go another way. This was mainly because designing and manufacturing was the same thing for SW. You wouldn’t do much without writing the code yourself.
Now this is kind of haunting us back. There is no law saying licensed SW Engineers have to inspect and sign off every SW system. Doctors, lawyers and other engineers are legally protected from AI doing their jobs more efficiently. We’re not.
Ultimately all jobs are subject to supply and demand driven and SWE's world is getting rocked by 3 sharp turning points at once - a trillion bootcamp "just learn to code" people entered the market leading to oversupply, ZIRP ended cutting demand and AI turns out to be good at code creating a substitution effect.
That's one hell of a storm that inevitably is going to lead to some shipwrecks
Uh, what? This hypothetical is literally an example of an entire crew of manual carpenters being fired and replaced by robots, leaving only the manager. That sure doesn't sound like successfully riding the waves of technological change.
> It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations.
Citation needed. This is not the prevailing wisdom I have heard, and certainly not the experience of e.g. longshoremen replaced by shipping container technology in the 1960s and 1970s.
The other issue I’ve been mulling over is two part. What in the hell have all these SWEs been actually doing? (As in, what software were the vast majority contributing to?) By extension, were many of these projects critical to the bottom line?
I guess what I’m getting at is if you can have a robot do a sloppy job of what you were doing before, and have that still be ok for the organization, maybe what you were doing in the first place wasn’t critical.
I’m not saying it’s not short sighted (I think many orgs are subjugating themselves to external entities, and are going to be violently bit in the ass when suddenly no one left in the firm has any comprehension of how all of their systems work), but, and I don’t say this lightly, maybe the SWE “profession” has a bit of bloat it can afford to shed?
It’s something like a cargo cult. We have this system because of course we need this system and it “insists upon itself”.
The further development is removed from the final “product” of the company the more this crap piles up.
So, I agree that in some instances it’s intentionally obfuscated, but there are others where the bloat simply cannot be calculated.
James Gosling, 1997:
> The feel of Java
> Java is a blue collar language. It’s not PhD thesis material but a language for a job. Java feels very familiar to many different programmers because we preferred tried-and-tested things.
This type of work has long been the white collar work.
I mean, I guess I always knew the code I wrote was pretty derivative - a little Googling here, a little Stack Overflow there; but for it to only take 18 months or so for the machines to take 90% of my job was a real eye opener.
Blue collar vs. White collar is mostly a useless distinction since both are working class and have shared interests against the owning class, or to put it another way, those who (have to) work for a living vs. those who merely own for a living.
Also:
"Blue-collar workers, in general, have successfully ridden the waves of technological change. If you can manage a crew of manual carpenters, you can also manage a warehouse full of woodworking robots. It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations."
WHAT! This author has apparently never visited a rust belt city nor ever worked in manufacturing anywhere in north america. Absolutely insane statement to make.
The rust belt cities are not victims of technical change. They are victims of political whim. It was decided decades ago that a steel mill in the far east is superior to one a few miles outside of Cincinnati.
Yeah this is two different things
The blue collar workers are the manual carpenters, not the dude managing them
That seems like a very poor take. If it feels like white-collar workers are most disrupted in recent times, its because the labouring workforce in the western worlds has been absolutely gutted by technological innovations (and the economics of globalisation).
Factory workers seem less affected because there's hardly any factory workers left!
If that's blue collar, then so is every other white collar profession and no distinction can exist. I do not agree.
Yeah its similar
We're all just cogs in a massive economic machine. The only people that aren't blue collar are the wealthy who do not need a salary to survive.
> We are the seamstresses lamenting the introduction of the loom. We are the lumberjacks worrying about chainsaws. We’re the accountants panicking about being replaced by Excel
Accountants absolutely loved Excel. They couldn’t hand over the money fast enough.
Bad take.
Now that the days in the ivory tower are over I'm rather disappointed with the lack of effort people made changing the status quo. If anything they made things dramatically worse. Software can be incredibly liberating and empowering but in stead we got portable prisons that seemingly primarily exist so that the man can keep an eye on everyone. We did get some cool stuff of course but things like amazon, linkedin, twitter, facebook, whatsapp and even youtube should simply have been protocols.
What will software engineers do? What will mathematicians do? What will artists do?
Why are we pretending that the LLMs aren't coming for every job?
What are the humans going to do?
The current evidence of spiralling by the community indicates they are not as graceful as this article implies.
Nothing about code is not blue collar if you actually code for a living. Unless you have visions of grandeur. And the truth is, no founder actually codes for very long. They never did. The managers and the business school graduates don't, either. Their job is to fool people into giving them money, and tell other people what to do; not to know how to make anything. They're white collar; they're parasites.
Three decades of those dumb fucks have gone by, plus the wave of idiots trading NFTs, plus the wave of idiots using AI. Craft code, use your brain, make it right, and it will be a representation of your thought process. In the service of a business. And it is a good job, and it is a blue collar job. Because to the business you're working for? If you're doing your job right, you're a plumber, or a general contractor.
TL;DR, coding has always been a blue collar job, to those who code as mechanics to make and fix things. But long live us: We make things, and the business class is basically helpless without us. LLMs or not; they're pathetically incapable of doing anything technical for themselves.
Is this even a question?
We're not the capitalists, who own the companies.
We're not professionals, like the real engineers, who belong to professional organizations and adhere to a code of practice.
What does that leave?
We are no different than bank tellers or ultrasound technicians. We work indoors and make the machines do what our bosses need them to do.
2. The Bourgeois or capital-owning class. Also called billionaires and the ultra-wealthy. These are people who derive their income from owning things, from capital; and
1. The Proletariat. Also called the working class or workers. This is everybody else. The working class derive their income from their labor. You stop working and you die, basically.
As little as 4-5 years ago you had many software engineers and other people in tech showing a distinct lack of empathy from people whose jobs were automated away or people who just couldn't survive on their incomes. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) view was "well, you should've gotten better jobs" or even "you should've got a CS degree".
That was never a serious argument because, well, not everybody can be a software engineer. There simply isn't the demand for it. Also, some people need to be teachers, care for the sick, work at the airport, work in agriculture, collect the trash and so on. Society, at least for now, can't survive without them.
I, for one, saw the writing on the wall with the opportunistic rise of permanent layoff culture with the pandemic as employers sought to claw back all the compensation gains of the 2010s. AI is just the golden bullet for wage suppression through labor displacement.
So what's happening now is that a handful of people will in the short term make a ton of money riding the AI wave until they too are expended. Many of the rest are discovering that they have more in common with the guy who picks up their trash than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. More importantly, they will never be Bezos or Musk. Well, that's the beginning of class consciousness.
I sure hope it's not too late for society to figure that out before the entire thing unravels, which is rapidly occurring.