I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it.
Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has.
Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.
Same here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI.
I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist.
Like you said, there has been other tech that has changed my job over time more than AI has. The move to the cloud, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, etc. have all had far more of an impact on my job. I see literally zero change in the output of others, both internally and externally.
So either this is a massively overblown bubble, or I'm just missing something.
Humans are funny. But most cant seem to understand that the tool is a mirage and they are putting false expectations on it. E.g. management of firms cutting back on hiring under the expectation that LLMs will do magic - with many cheering 'this is the worst itll be bro!!".
I just hope more people realise before Anthropic and OAI can IPO. I would wager they are in the process of cleaning up their financials for it.
The dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.
Most of these are new features, but then they have to integrate with the existing software so it's not really greenfield. (Not to mention that our clients aren't getting any faster at approving new features, either.)
Did you train a self-hosted/open source LLM on your existing software and documentation? That should make it far more useful. It's not claude code, but some of those models are 80% there. In 6 months they'll be today's claude code.
Its this kind of thinking that tells me people cant be trusted with their comments on here re. "Omg I can produce code faster and it'll do this and that".
No simply 'producing a feature' aint it bud. That's one piece of the puzzle.
I've taken to calling LLMs processors. A "Hello World" in assembly is about 20 lines and on par with most unskilled prompting. It took a while to get from there to Rust, or Firefox, or 1T parameter transformers running on powerful vector processors. We're a notch past Hello World with this processor.
The specific way it applies to your specific situation, if it exists, either hasn't been found or hasn't made its way to you. It really is early days.
From my experience as a software engineer, doubling my productivity hasn’t reduced my workload. My output per hour has gone up, but expectations and requirements have gone up just as fast. Software development is effectively endless work, and AI has mostly compressed timelines rather than reduced total demand.
This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
This is already happening. Fewer people are getting hired. Companies are quietly (sometimes not, like Block) letting people go. At a personal level all the leaders in my company are sounding the “catch up or you’ll be left behind” alarm. People are going to be let go at an accelerated pace in the future (1-3 years).
I don’t think that addresses my point. I understand a lot of companies are firing under the guise of AI, but it’s unclear to me whether AI is actually driving this - especially when the article we are both responding to says:
> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022
That's not necessarily a result of AI, you also have to consider the broader economic environment. I mean, it was also difficult to get a job as a graduate in 2008, whereas it's typically been easier to get a job when credit is cheap.
Erm its been fucked for many years across many professions, it was just less so for software engineering in particular. Now entry into the S-E profession is taking a hit.
Also dont forget theres only so many viable revenue-generating and cost-saving projects to take. And said above - overhiring in COVID.
There's definitely tone deaf statements from managers/leaders like "AI will allow us to do more with less headcount!" As if the end worker is supposed to be excited about that, knuckleheads, lol.
In a bear market in a bloated company, maybe. We’re still actively hiring at my startup, even with going all-in on AI across the company. My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year.
When you work long enough you'll find it. Places where changing software is risky you can end up waiting for approvals. Places where another company purchased yours or you are getting shutdown soon and there is no new work. Sometimes you end up on a system that they want to replace but they never get around to it.
Being overworked is sometimes better than being underworked. Sometimes the reserve is better. They both have challenges.
That’s the economy in general. Labor saving innovations increase productivity but do not usually reduce work very much, though they can shift it around pretty dramatically. There are game theoretic reasons for this, as well as phenomena like the hedonic treadmill.
Ideal state for every company is to have minimum input costs with maximum output costs. Labor always gets cut out of the loop because it’s one of the most expensive input costs.
I don't think there's been much of an impact, really. Those who know how to use AI just got tangentially more productive (because why would you reveal your fake 10x productivity boost so your boss hands you 10x more tasks to finish?), and those w/o AI knowledge stayed the way they were.
The real impact is for indie-devs or freelancers but that usually doesn't account for much of the GDP.
You should look into the concepts of skepticism, materialism, and cynicism. Maybe don't trust the leadership of where you work, the leadership that sees you as a number and not a human.
One of the more interesting takes I heard from a colleague, who’s in the marketing department, is that he uses the corporate approved LLM (Gemini) for “pretend work” or very basic tasks. At the same time he uses Claude on his personal account to seriously augment his job.
His rationale is he won’t let the company log his prompts and responses so they can’t build an agentic replacement for him. Corporate rules about shadow it be damned.
My day to day is even busier now with agents all over the place making code changes. The Security landscape is even more complex now overnight. The only negative impact I see is that there’s not much need for junior devs right now. The agent fills that role in a way. But we’ll have to backfill some way or another.
Shipping speed never/is was the issue. Most companies are terrible at figuring out what exactly they should be allocating resources behind.
Speeding up does not solve the problem that most humans who are at the top of the hierarchy are poor thinkers. In fact it compounds it. More noise, nice.
Or worse. I’ve heard stories from friends where leadership expects huge boosts in productivity due to LLMs, and perceive anything but an order of magnitude boost as incompetence or a refusal to adapt.
A possible outcome of AI: domestic technical employment goes up because the economics of outsourcing change. Domestic technical workers working with AI tools can replace outsourcing shops, eliminating time-shift issues, etc at similar or lower costs.
The problem with using unemployment as a metric is hiring is driving by perception. You're making an educated guess as to how many people you need in the future.
Between 2004 and 2008 I did many things in computing as a company that offered my services, one of these was information gathering automation. It almost never immediately lead to decreases in employment. The systems had a to be in place for a while, people had to get used to them, people had to stop making common mistakes with them.
Then the 2008 crash happened and those people were gone in a blink of an eye and never replaced. The companies grew in staff after that, but it was in things like sales and marketing.
> There's suggestive evidence that hiring of young workers (ages 22–25) into exposed occupations has slowed — roughly a 14% drop in the job-finding rate
There goes my excuse of not finding a job in this market.
The TL;DR is that there is little measurable impact (and I'd personally add "yet").
To quote:
"We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations"
My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle.
I have doubts that this impact is measurable yet - there is a lag between hiring intention and impact on jobs, and outside Silicon Valley large scale hiring decisions are rarely made in a 3 month timeframe.
The most interesting part is the radar plot showing the lack of usage of AI in many industries where the capability is there!
I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it.
Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has.
Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.
Same here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI.
I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist.
Like you said, there has been other tech that has changed my job over time more than AI has. The move to the cloud, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, etc. have all had far more of an impact on my job. I see literally zero change in the output of others, both internally and externally.
So either this is a massively overblown bubble, or I'm just missing something.
Youre not missing anything.
Humans are funny. But most cant seem to understand that the tool is a mirage and they are putting false expectations on it. E.g. management of firms cutting back on hiring under the expectation that LLMs will do magic - with many cheering 'this is the worst itll be bro!!".
I just hope more people realise before Anthropic and OAI can IPO. I would wager they are in the process of cleaning up their financials for it.
I will personally say right now... its not gonna change lol.
People who actually know how to think can see it a mile away.
The dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.
In my experience it is now twice the amount of merge requests as a follow-up appears to correct any bugs no one reviewed in the first merge request.
Build a new feature. If you aren't bogged down in bureaucracy it will happen much faster.
Most of these are new features, but then they have to integrate with the existing software so it's not really greenfield. (Not to mention that our clients aren't getting any faster at approving new features, either.)
Did you train a self-hosted/open source LLM on your existing software and documentation? That should make it far more useful. It's not claude code, but some of those models are 80% there. In 6 months they'll be today's claude code.
Its this kind of thinking that tells me people cant be trusted with their comments on here re. "Omg I can produce code faster and it'll do this and that".
No simply 'producing a feature' aint it bud. That's one piece of the puzzle.
I've taken to calling LLMs processors. A "Hello World" in assembly is about 20 lines and on par with most unskilled prompting. It took a while to get from there to Rust, or Firefox, or 1T parameter transformers running on powerful vector processors. We're a notch past Hello World with this processor.
The specific way it applies to your specific situation, if it exists, either hasn't been found or hasn't made its way to you. It really is early days.
From my experience as a software engineer, doubling my productivity hasn’t reduced my workload. My output per hour has gone up, but expectations and requirements have gone up just as fast. Software development is effectively endless work, and AI has mostly compressed timelines rather than reduced total demand.
It is not going to reduce your workload. It is going to remove one of your co-workers.
This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
> This seems unlikely
This is already happening. Fewer people are getting hired. Companies are quietly (sometimes not, like Block) letting people go. At a personal level all the leaders in my company are sounding the “catch up or you’ll be left behind” alarm. People are going to be let go at an accelerated pace in the future (1-3 years).
I don’t think that addresses my point. I understand a lot of companies are firing under the guise of AI, but it’s unclear to me whether AI is actually driving this - especially when the article we are both responding to says:
> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022
> This seems unlikely.
It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.
That's not necessarily a result of AI, you also have to consider the broader economic environment. I mean, it was also difficult to get a job as a graduate in 2008, whereas it's typically been easier to get a job when credit is cheap.
It sure was, but as far as I'm aware, 2026 isn't in the middle of a generation-scale economic collapse.
(And if it is, what is the cause?)
Because of overhiring during the post-COVID free money glitch, not because of AI.
Aren't we both responding to an article which says:
> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022
It was fucked before AI became "mainstream" too. Companies overhired during and after covid.
Erm its been fucked for many years across many professions, it was just less so for software engineering in particular. Now entry into the S-E profession is taking a hit.
Also dont forget theres only so many viable revenue-generating and cost-saving projects to take. And said above - overhiring in COVID.
There's definitely tone deaf statements from managers/leaders like "AI will allow us to do more with less headcount!" As if the end worker is supposed to be excited about that, knuckleheads, lol.
In a bear market in a bloated company, maybe. We’re still actively hiring at my startup, even with going all-in on AI across the company. My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year.
Or just make time for more Very Important Meetings.
This - I can't think of any place I've ever worked where development ever outpaced backlog and tech debt.
When you work long enough you'll find it. Places where changing software is risky you can end up waiting for approvals. Places where another company purchased yours or you are getting shutdown soon and there is no new work. Sometimes you end up on a system that they want to replace but they never get around to it.
Being overworked is sometimes better than being underworked. Sometimes the reserve is better. They both have challenges.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Worst time to be an employee, as you are expected to work faster and faster. (The approach is very much quantity over quality.)
Best time to be a solo founder in underserved markets :)
The goal has always and will always be to complete as much as possible in the time allotted.
That’s the economy in general. Labor saving innovations increase productivity but do not usually reduce work very much, though they can shift it around pretty dramatically. There are game theoretic reasons for this, as well as phenomena like the hedonic treadmill.
Ideal state for every company is to have minimum input costs with maximum output costs. Labor always gets cut out of the loop because it’s one of the most expensive input costs.
I don't think there's been much of an impact, really. Those who know how to use AI just got tangentially more productive (because why would you reveal your fake 10x productivity boost so your boss hands you 10x more tasks to finish?), and those w/o AI knowledge stayed the way they were.
The real impact is for indie-devs or freelancers but that usually doesn't account for much of the GDP.
Work is freezing hiring and upping spending on tokens for everyone.
Don't know if this is effective and I don't think management knows either, but it's what they're doing
> Work is freezing hiring and upping spending on tokens for everyone.
Doesn't mean the two are related.
Is AI just the excuse? We've got tariffs, war, uncertainty and other drama non stop.
It's what they're telling us
You should look into the concepts of skepticism, materialism, and cynicism. Maybe don't trust the leadership of where you work, the leadership that sees you as a number and not a human.
Which story sends a more positive signal to shareholders?
"We've frozen hiring because our growth potential is tapped out."
"We've frozen hiring because AI can replace employees."
I'd be curious to see the shift in numbers since December, 2025.
One of the more interesting takes I heard from a colleague, who’s in the marketing department, is that he uses the corporate approved LLM (Gemini) for “pretend work” or very basic tasks. At the same time he uses Claude on his personal account to seriously augment his job.
His rationale is he won’t let the company log his prompts and responses so they can’t build an agentic replacement for him. Corporate rules about shadow it be damned.
Only the paranoid survive I guess
I am not going to trust a single word from a company whose business is selling you AI products.
... and eyeing an IPO.
My day to day is even busier now with agents all over the place making code changes. The Security landscape is even more complex now overnight. The only negative impact I see is that there’s not much need for junior devs right now. The agent fills that role in a way. But we’ll have to backfill some way or another.
My speed shipping software increased but so did the demands of features by my company.
I don't really get this TBH.
Shipping speed never/is was the issue. Most companies are terrible at figuring out what exactly they should be allocating resources behind.
Speeding up does not solve the problem that most humans who are at the top of the hierarchy are poor thinkers. In fact it compounds it. More noise, nice.
Or worse. I’ve heard stories from friends where leadership expects huge boosts in productivity due to LLMs, and perceive anything but an order of magnitude boost as incompetence or a refusal to adapt.
PMs can now also ship their half-baked requirements documents even faster thanks to the help of AI.
A possible outcome of AI: domestic technical employment goes up because the economics of outsourcing change. Domestic technical workers working with AI tools can replace outsourcing shops, eliminating time-shift issues, etc at similar or lower costs.
The problem with using unemployment as a metric is hiring is driving by perception. You're making an educated guess as to how many people you need in the future.
Anthropic can cause layoffs through pure marketing. People were crediting an Anthropic statement in causing a drop in IBM's stock value, which may genuinely lead to layoffs: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-stock-plunges-ai-threat-1...
We'll probably have to wait for the hype to wear off to get a better idea, but that might take a long while.
Between 2004 and 2008 I did many things in computing as a company that offered my services, one of these was information gathering automation. It almost never immediately lead to decreases in employment. The systems had a to be in place for a while, people had to get used to them, people had to stop making common mistakes with them.
Then the 2008 crash happened and those people were gone in a blink of an eye and never replaced. The companies grew in staff after that, but it was in things like sales and marketing.
I'm afraid I can't find the connection between this and what I wrote.
> There's suggestive evidence that hiring of young workers (ages 22–25) into exposed occupations has slowed — roughly a 14% drop in the job-finding rate
There goes my excuse of not finding a job in this market.
How is Anthropic getting this data? Are they running science experiments on people's chat history? (In the app, API or both?)
This is a pretty interesting report.
The TL;DR is that there is little measurable impact (and I'd personally add "yet").
To quote:
"We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations"
My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle.
I have doubts that this impact is measurable yet - there is a lag between hiring intention and impact on jobs, and outside Silicon Valley large scale hiring decisions are rarely made in a 3 month timeframe.
The most interesting part is the radar plot showing the lack of usage of AI in many industries where the capability is there!
You know you're having a real impact when you have to self-report on the impact you're having.
cigarettes don't cause cancer! -cigarette companies