I think you can combine 'Incanters' and 'Process Engineers' into one - 'Users'. Jobs that encompass a role that requires accountability will be directing, providing context, and verifying the output of agents, almost like how millions of workers know basic computer skills and Microsoft Office.
In my opinion, how at-risk a job is in the LLM era comes down to:
1: How easy is it to construct RL loops to hillclimb on performance?
2: How easy is it to construct a LLM harness to perform the tasks?
3: How much of the job is a structured set of tasks vs. taking accountability? What's the consequence of a mistake? How much of it comes down to human relationships?
Hence why I've been quite bullish on software engineering (but not coding). You can easy set up 1) and 2) on contrived or sandboxed coding tasks but then 3) expands and dominates the rest of the role.
On Model Trainers -- I'm not so convinced that RLHF puts the professional experts out of work, for a few reasons. Firstly, nearly all human data companies produce data that is somewhat contrived, by definition of having people grade outputs on a contracting platform; plus there's a seemingly unlimited bound on how much data we can harvest in the world. Secondly, as I mentioned before, the bottleneck is both accountability and the ability for the model to find fresh context without error.
I wanted to talk about this more but couldn't quite figure out how to phrase it, so I cut a fair bit: with "incanters" I'm trying to point at a sort of ... intuitive, more informal practitioner knowledge / metis, and contrast it with a more statistically rigorous approach in "statistical/process engineers". I expect a lot of people will fuse the two, but I'm trying to stake out some tentpoles here. Users integrate a continuum of approaches, including individual intuition, folklore, formal and informal texts, scientific papers, and rigorously designed harnesses & in-house experiments. Like farming--there's deep, intuitive knowledge of local climate and landraces, but also big industrial practice, and also research plots, and those different approaches inform (and override) each other in complex ways.
Why can't LLMs and agents progress further to do this software engineering job better than an actual software engineer? I've never seen anyone give a satisfactory answer to this. Especially the part about making mistakes. A lot of the defense of LLM shortcomings (i.e., generating crappy code) comes down to "well humans write bad code too." OK? Well, humans make mistakes too. Theoretically, an LLM software engineer will make far fewer than a human. So why should I prefer keeping you in the loop?
It's why I just can't understand the mindset of software engineers who are giddy about the direction things are going. There really is nothing special about your expertise that an LLM can't achieve, theoretically.
We're always so enamored by new and exciting technology that we fail to realize the people in charge are more than happy to completely bury us with it.
"Software engineer" as a job title has included a lot of people who write near-zero-code, at least at the higher levels of the career ladder, for years prior to LLMs. People assuming the only, or even primary, function of the job is outputting code reveal a profound lack of understanding of the industry in my opinion. Beyond the first year or two it has been commonly accepted that the code is the easy part of the job.
This is something that I would have thought HN readers were pretty familiar with. LLMs can make my code work faster or more prolific, but with 30yoe I spend a fairly significant chunk of my work time doing anything but code.
Because a machine can never take accountability. If a software engineer throughout the entire year has been directing AI with prompts that created weaker systems then that person is on the chopping block, not the AI. Compared to another software engineer who directed prompts to expand the system and generate extra revenue streams.
A business leader can though.
> Compared to another software engineer who directed prompts to expand the system and generate extra revenue streams.
I think you're missing the point. Why can't an LLM advance sufficiently to be a REAL senior software engineer that a business person/product manager is prompting instead of YOU, a software engineer? Why are YOU specifically needed if an LLM can do a better job of it than you? I can't believe people are so naive to not see what the endgame is: getting rid of those primadonna software engineers that the C-suite and managers have nothing but contempt for.
The lines between a software engineer / business person / product / design and everything else will blur, because AI increases the individual person's leverage. I posit that there will be more 'software engineers' in this new world, but also more product people, more business people, more companies in general.
They’re stupid or they’re already set up for success. The general ideas seems to be generalists are screwed, domain experts will be fine.
But I don't see how this holds up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny. We're literally training LLMs to BE domain experts.
If we think of the digitization tech revolution... the changes it made to the economy are hard to describe well, even now.
In the early days, it was going to turn banks from billion dollar businesses to million dollar ones. Universities would be able to eliminate most of their admin. Accounting and finances would be trivialized. Etc.
Earlier tech revolution s were unpredictable too... But at lest retrospectively they made sense.
It's not that clear what the core activities of our economy even are. It's clear at micro level, but as you zoom out it gets blurry.
Why is accountability needed? It's clearly needed in its context... but it's hard to understand how it aggregates.
I said this in response to the example above, that humans are needed where accountability is a concern. This is pretty distant from the macro.
If we think of the 19th century economy... it was mostly about food, household products and suchlike. Now the economy is a lot harder to reason about and it's easy to miss the forrest for the trees... when talking about how technology will affect it.
Accountability is required to work with your payment processor, which works with visa and mastercard, that also have requirements, etc. Depending on where (of anywhere) paradigm shifts occur... we may or may not even need these functions.
That's why it's so hard to reason our way to predictions about upcoming Ai-mediated changes.
This is dependent on having a court system uncaptured by corruption. We're already seeing that large corporations in the "too big to fail" categories fall outside of government control. And in countries with bribing/lobbying legalized or ignored they have the funds to capture the courts.
"oh I'm sorry your hospital burned down mr plantiff but the electrician was following his professional rules so his liability is capped at <small number> you'll just have to eat this one"
I would wager that a solid half if not more of the economy exists under some sort of arrangement like that.
More accurately, how many jobs are probabilistically mechanical. That is, how many jobs are really the execution of a serious Bayesian decisions with a strong prior. LLMs are really great at displacing such jobs.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/13/meta-ai-m...
Everything from "unpaid bills are handled this way" through "the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal" to "we need to report our earnings biweekly in Indonesia, and we need to retry the form several times before it works".
This is not fundamentally doable by LLMs because the higher ups wouldn't know what to ask for, and if they did it would not be feasible to keep everything in single persons head, no matter how AI-assisted.
So that alone I think guarantees a good amount of unreplaced jobs.
>"the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal"
For example, why modern certificates are being dropped down to very short times. The push to automate everything.
>"unpaid bills are handled this way"
Any company that has things like this will start changing their process.
You have this idea (and maybe the AI company CEOs do too) that this will be like a container drop in. No, instead these things will be part of a gradual process change and human parts will eventually disappear.
>So that alone I think guarantees a good amount of unreplaced jobs.
What percent. This is what matters at the end of the day. Once unemployment reaches high rates over all age groups in a society that is used to low unemployment things go bad. It can take longer to go bad where you have social safety nets and jobs programs, but in places like the US that is communism, so expect the haves to shoot at the have nots.
Knowing nothing about how these things work, I wonder if the board will see it the same way? Even today I could see the following play out:
CEO says X. Board member puts a bunch of strategic info into ChatGPT on the spot which argues Y more convincingly than X.
In that moment, the CEO will find themselves arguing against a chatbot, which can gish gallop with plausible bs faster than you can say the word “transformative”.
Maybe they win the argument today, but eventually the CEO will be functionally replaced, and eventually actually replaced or watered down.
"Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though
What I had considered is that in the case of self-driving cars, nobody is criminally accountable, even though the rest of us may be criminally negligent should we make some horrific error. Philosophically, there is some kind of reason that criminal acts require punishment beyond mere financial liability (e.g., prison time) and self-driving cars are exempted from this. Currently, self-driving cars are also exempt from the actual laws of the road because the police are dis-empowered to enforce anything on the self-driving car.
Whether the tool is too powerful or ethical to use is an orthogonal discussion, in my opinion. Taken to the extreme, nuclear weapons still need someone fire or drop them. (We should still have discussions on safety and ethics always!)
Why though? I imagine things could also go the "google way" as well. The automated system makes the decision; and you just.. deal with the consequences if that decision is bad. We could just have an extended version of this dynamic as well: 3-4 entities with enough compute owning everything with no responsibilities; and when something goes bad, oh well. It's not like you can go to their competition, who also works the same way.
I think we saw many times that after a certain scale (after becoming, say, too big to fail), there is no bad decision you can't afford.
We're literally trying to build an intelligence to replace us.
“We” as a species certainly aren’t making it happen.
The biggest failure of imagination, I think, is the assumption we'd use humans for most (or *any) of these jobs--for example, the work of the haruspex is better left to an LLM that can process the myriad of internal states (this is the mechanical interpretation field).
What do you mean exactly by this?
My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an implementation and it then exist - As long as I thought about the structure/input/output/testability and logic flow correctly and made sure I included all that information, it just works, nicely, with tests.
Unix philosophy works well with LLM too - you can have software that does one thing well and only one thing well, that fit in their context and do not lead to haphazard behavior.
Now my day essentially revolves around delivering/improving on delivering concentrated engineering thinking, which in my opinion is the pure part about engineer profession itself. I like it quite a lot.
Though something I half-miss is using my own software as I build it to get a visceral feel for the abstractions so far. I've found that testability is a good enough proxy for "nice to use" since I think "nice to use" tends to mean that a subsystem is decoupled enough to cover unexpected usage patterns, and that's an incidental side-effect of testability.
One concern I have is that it's getting harder to demonstrate ability.
e.g. Github profiles were a good signal though one that nobody cared about unless the hiring person was an engineer who could evaluate it. But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems.
Github code itself maybe irrelevant, but is the product KISS/UNIX? Or is it an demonstration of complete lack of discipline about what "feature" should be added. If you see something that have multiple weakly or completely irrelevant feature strung together, it's saying something. Additionally, AI would often create speghetti structures, and require human shepherding to ensure the structure remain sound.
Same with communication. I have AI smell, I know if something is AI slop. In my current job, docs sent with expectation for others to read always prefaced with -- this section typed 100% by aperocky -- and I dispensed with grammar and spelling checks for added authenticity. I'll then add -- following section is AI generated -- to mark the end of my personal writing.
I think that is the way to go in the future. I pass intentional thinking into AI, not the other way around. There are knowledge flowing back for sure, but only humans possess intention, at least for now.
Yup. I've spotted former coworkers who I know for a fact can barely write in their native language, let alone in English, working for AWS and writing English-language technical blog posts in full AI-ese. Full of the usual "it's not X, it's Y", full of AI-slop. Most of the text is filler, with a few tidbits of real content here and there.
I don't know before, but now blog posts have become more noise than signal.
How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited?
Everyone thinks it won't be them, it will be others that will be impacted. We all think what we do is somehow unique and cannot be automated away by AI, and that our jobs are safe for the time being.
The exciting part of the job is, and always has been, listening to idle chitchat where you pick up on the subtle cues of where one is finding difficulty in their life and then solving those problems. I think AI could already largely handle that today just fine, except:
You have to convince, especially non-technical, people to have idle chitchat with machines instead of humans
-or-
Convince them of and into having a machine always listening in to their idle conversations with humans
Neither of those are all that palatable in the current social landscape. If anything, people seem to be growing more weary of letting technology into their thoughts. Maybe there is never a future where humans become accepting of machines being always there trying to figure out what is wrong with them.
The trouble with AI replacing jobs is that a lot of jobs exist only because people want to have other people to talk to and are willing to pay for the company.
Yeah, no one ever thinks beyond "whoa, how cool, I cloned Slack in 15 minutes!"
Personally, the thing I find more depressing is turning a career that was primarily about solving interesting puzzles in elegant ways into managing a swarm of idiot savant chatbots with "OK, that looks good" or "no, do it better" commands.
That’s what the management class thinks of software development process anyway, LLMs are just more idiotic and more savant than swes
1. if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure.
2. LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build.
As such, I'm the limit of the numbers of concurrent agents working fo rme, because there is still a limit to my output of engineering judgement. I do get better, both at generating and delivering this judgement. Exceeding this limit, the output becomes garbage.
At this current year and date, the AI does not automate me in anyway, I have something that they just flat out don't have.
> if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure.
That's a current technical limitation. Are you so sure it won't be overcome in the near/mid future?
> LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build
But work is being done to even remove or automate this layer, right? It can be hyperbole (in fact, it is) but aren't Anthropic et al predicting this? Why wouldn't your boss, or your boss' boss, do this instead of you? If they lack the judgment currently, are you so sure they cannot gain it, if they don't have to waste time learning how to code? If not now, what about soon-ish?
> At this current year and date, the AI does not automate me in anyway
Not now, granted. But what about soon? In other words, shouldn't you be worried as well as excited?
I remember those days fondly and often wish I could return to them. These days it's not uncommon to go a couple days without writing a meaningful amount of code. The cost of becoming too senior I suppose.
They can take their 20+ years of experience and use it to build working systems in the gaps between meetings now. Previously they would have to carve out at least half a day of uninterrupted time to get something meaningful done.
Agreed, I've actually done this. Sitting in a meeting where someone was asking about what tooling we could build, what it might be capable of, what their options were. So while we were chatting I was having Claude build a working demo.
In the end it still needs to be turned into an enterprise app with all the annoying accoutrements that go with that, but for demo work it was phenomenal.
Yes I'm much more productive than before, and I'm convinced we can't get rid of engineers altogether... But how long until my team of 5 gets replaced by a single engineer? Am I going to be the one to keep my job or one of the 4 to be let go?
It never did.
Managers realized they could trim their teams down after we were done and did in fact, layoff people by the hundreds. Doing the same work with less people was beneficial to them because now they got bigger bonuses and salary increases for adding to the bottom line of the company. Many managers who did nothing more than layoff half their team were promoted faster up the ranks.
So yes, be scared, be VERY scared and have a Plan B and a Plan C going forward. The people who created this have rose colored glasses on how its going to revolutionize business. The actual businesses owners and CEO's just a see another new way to reduce human capital in order to increase profits.
The ability to know what to build and what not to build is going to be as important as knowing how to build it. I still think engineers have an edge here. All my childhood dreams of what I should be able to do or build are coming to a reality and the only thing that is blocking me is lack of time. I want to go faster still
IMO a small blog website is not going to get pulled-up for this - it's about the author making a point. They're entitled to do so of course.
Well, maybe not the typical engineering blog but I think if you're a puritan some posts/texts from Aphyr probably reaches borderline "adult content", so I'm not that surprised Aphyr rather play it safe and also make a point at the same time.
>... mandates removing illegal content, restricting access to harmful material, and implementing age verification, with Ofcom enforcing compliance. Violations can result in massive fines of up to 10% of global turnover or £18 million.
I guess some people either figure it's easier to block the UK or do so on principle as a protest against the thing.
Spoilers for "How I Met Your Mother" ... but there's a character who has that kind of job, as a legal meat-shield. Now, ~10 years after airing, this funny clip feels like it would only need slight adjustments.
Anyway: The new job types might seem overspecialized now but history shows us this is indeed what happens as new industries open up. I think these predictions look quite solid.
If you go fast, you are bound to come across AI bugs later. Then you ultimately slow down to fix them. Which takes more time.
That black box will keep evolving. The AI interpreter will have to keep catching up with it.
Which means clarity of purpose, and then articulating it to LLM is the skill. English + critical thinking.
Isn't this addressed explicitly in TFA, in section "meat shields"?
As for the rest, if you predict even the jobs described in TFA will be obsoleted by future LLMs+tools, then the future is even more dire than predicted by Aphyr, right? Fewer jobs for humans to do.
Now this guy was charging 1 drachma and 6 obols (apparently ~$100-150) per oracle. So that was his 'token rate'. And his clients the "fat-heads" (Lucian's phrasing not mine /g) were so taken by the scam that this guy earned up to 80,000 drachma per year! That's over 10 million bucks. For spewing b.s.
As to why all this is remotely related to OP's article, his mention of lawyers getting into trouble because of using LLM output instead of their brains ...
"By way of impressing the people still more, he announced that he would induce the God to speak, and give his responses without an intermediary ... These oracles were called autophones, and were not vouchsafed casually to any one, but reserved for officials, the rich, and the lavish.
"It was an autophone which was given to Severiann [4] regarding the invasion of Armenia. He encouraged him with these lines:
'Armenia, Parthia, cowed by thy fierce spear, To Rome, and Tiber's shining waves, thou com'st, Thy brow with leaves and radiant gold encircled!'
"Then when the foolish Gaul took his advice and invaded, to the total destruction of himself and his army by Othryades, the adviser expunged that oracle from his archives [!!!] and substituted the following:
"'Vex not th' Armenian land; it shall not thrive; One in soft raiment clad shall from his bow Launch death, and cut thee off from life and light.'"
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_of_Abonoteichus
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_of_Samosata
[3]: https://topostext.org/work/337
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Sedatius_Severianus
"Specialization is for insects." (Or for someone pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.)
A company like Amazon doesn't treat its warehouse workers as human beings. Workers are seen as disposable: forced to piss in bottles, forced to work around the corpses of their collapsed coworkers, paid the absolute minimum possible, and replaced the second they don't operate like a perfect unfailing machine. You aren't viewed like a human, you are a tool. Cattle. A piece of meat they are forced to retain because a robot isn't quite capable of doing your task yet.
The article's use of "meat shields" isn't any different. Humans are going to be hired for the sole reason of taking accountability for actions dictated by AI. They are there only because the company can't put blame on a machine and will be sued to oblivion if there's nobody to blame at all. Your existence as a person is irrelevant, they are just interested in someone with a heartbeat they can blame when stuff inevitably goes wrong.
if said person can be blamed (and take on the liability), but cannot stop the action or audit the action, take preventative measures (which costs money) etc, then they cannot take responsibility for real and thus whether the blame falls on them on paper is irrelevant - if there's real punishment (like jail time), but no real power to enforce anything, then who would be stupid enough to take on this job? If there's no real punishment, then what does it matter that the blame on paper is there?
Edit: Further, the only times "meat" appears is in the phrase "meat shield", which is an analogy that is very apt relative to the crux of the article.
Edit 2: "People" appears 13 times!
Someone noting it is unavailable in the UK.
Someone posting an archive.is link.
Someone asking why the above posted an archive link to a static site.
An answer that it is because the content is otherwise unavailable in the UK.
Do we really need to see this every single time?
I realize I am also not adding to the real discussion now as well, but Jesus Christ, this is irritating. Can we get a new rule that an author posting their own content, knowing it is unavailable in the UK, has to post their own archive link and explain why they're doing so as part of the submission?
[Author blocks link to avoid being potentially in violation of the law]
You ask author to willingly provide link to again potentially be in violation of the law
You do not see the irony in your question
Does the UK government have the legal right to do an international criminal investigation against any website that is potentially violating their laws by having visitors from the UK accessing the site?
Answer yes or no, this is an easy binary question, and not one that requires any probabilistic thinking.
And obviously a way to filter in/out those flags.
Relax, not everyone sees every article everyday
