Having spent a couple years rehabbing a 100 year old house, I’m convinced the trades will be the last thing to go. When the building you’re working on has been ship-of-Theseus’d by 3 generations of home owners, everything is out of distribution.
When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.
But the problem wont be the robots. Itll be the flood of new workers who will offer to rehab the place cheaper than you. And itll be that the white collar owners of the house wont have enough money to blow on a rehab bwcause their desk jobs are getting replaced by AI
Especially if you get into a specialized trade for people with money.
I’ve repaired a lot of my historic windows myself because of how expensive it is to get someone else to do it. (Quoted 8k for one leaded glass window) I think it’s become my new backup job if I really am replaced by a computer.
We really need automated roofing. Installing shingles is easy, except that it has to be done on top of buildings. There's an experimental roofing robot, but it's not good enough for production yet.[1]
Metal roofs seem nice and easier to install too, but at least where I had a house built (Ireland) the local planners (aka meddling old people with too much time) thought it wasn’t suitable for a “home” so you had to spend four times as much on a slate roof.
Eh, it's been cheaper and better for a long time to just demolish and rebuild rather than deal with neverending issues at major fixer uppers. Robots probably would be able to do uncomplicated cookie-cutter builds in a decade or two, there's just too much money in the construction sector that AI companies looking for the next big thing to disrupt can't ignore.
LLMs rarely if ever proactively identify cleanup refactors that reduce the complexity of a codebase. They do, however, still happily duplicate logic or large blocks of markup, defer imports rather than fixing dependency cycles, introduce new abstractions for minimal logic, and freely accumulate a plethora of little papercuts and speed bumps.
These same LLMs will then get lost in the intricacies of the maze they created on subsequent tasks, until they are unable to make forward progress without introducing regressions.
You can at this point ask the LLM to rewrite the rat’s nest, and it will likely produce new code that is slightly less horrible but introduces its own crop of new bugs.
All of this is avoidable, if you take the wheel and steer the thing a little. But all the evidence I’ve seen is that it’s not ready for full automation, unless your user base has a high tolerance for bugs.
I understand Anthropic builds Claude Code without looking at the code. And I encounter new bugs, some of them quite obvious and bad, every single day. A Claude process starts at 200MB of RAM and grows from there, for a CLI tool that is just a bundle of file tools glued to a wrapper around an API!
I think they have a rats nest over there, but they’re the only game in town so I have to live with this nonsense.
> - This is partly b/c it is good at things I'm not good at (e.g. front end design)
Everyone thinks LLMs are good at the things they are bad at. In many cases they are still just giving “plausible” code that you don’t have the experience to accurately judge.
I have a lot of frontend app dev experience. Even modern tools (Claude w/Opus 4.6 and a decent Claude.md) will slip in unmaintainable slop in frontend changes. I catch cases multiple times a day in code review.
Not contradicting your broader point. Indeed, I think if you’ve spent years working on any topic, you quickly realize Claude needs human guidance for production quality code in that domain.
Yes I’ve seen this at work where people are promoting the usage of LLMs for.. stuff other people do.
There’s also a big disconnect in terms of SDLC/workflow in some places.
If we take at face value that writing code is now 10x faster, what about the other parts of the SDLC? Is your testing/PR process ready for 10x the velocity or is it going to fall apart?
What % of your SDLC was actually writing code? Maybe time to market is now ~18% faster because coding was previously 20% of the duration.
I’ve been slow to invest in building flows around parallelizing agent work under the assumption that eventually inference will get fast enough that I will basically always be the bottleneck.
Excited to see glimpses of that future. Context switching sucks and I’d much rather work focused on one task while wielding my coding power tools.
It sounds like in this case there was some troll-fueled comeuppance.
> “We’re not a scam,” he continued. “We’re a married couple trying to do the right thing by people … We are legit, we are real people, we employ sales staff.”
> Australian Tours and Cruises told CNN Tuesday that “the online hate and damage to our business reputation has been absolutely soul-destroying.”
This might just be BS, but at face-value, this is a mom and pop shop that screwed up playing the SEO game and are getting raked over the internet coals.
Your broader point about blame-washing stands though.
That's the thing about scammers, they operate in plausibly deniable ways, like covering up malice with incompetence. They make taking things at face value increasingly costly for the aggrieved.
I use it in a Python/TS codebase (series D B2B SaaS with some AI agent features). It can usually “make it work” in one shot, but the code often requires cleanup.
I start every new feature w/Claude Code in plan mode. I give it the first step, point it to relevant source files, and tell it to generate a plan. I go catch up on my Slack messages.
I check back in and iterate on the plan until I’m happy, then tell it to implement.
I go to a team meeting.
I come back and review all the code. Anything I don’t 100% understand I ask Gemini to explain. I cross-check with primary sources if it’s important.
I tweak the generated code by hand (faster than talking with the agent), then switch back to plan mode and ask for specific tests. I almost always need to clean up the tests for doing way too much manual setup, despite a lot of Claude.md instructions to the contrary.
In the end, I probably get the work done in 30% less wall-clock time of Claude implementing (counting plan time), but I’m also doing other things while the agent crunches. Maybe 50% speed boost in total productivity? I also learn something new on about a third of features, which is way more than I did before.
Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations, too.
Even your CEO has a board to deal with.
I always think it's strange when people draw a mental dividing line between ICs and managers and think people on the other side are living in totally different experiences of the world.
A decent manager, especially a low level manager of ICs, will work hard to shield her charges from the full impact of the company's bureaucracy. And even a mediocre manager can't help but do some of that: they usually still have to approve time off requests and deal with the paperwork for performance evaluations etc.
Yeah, I sometimes miss the more simple IC life. Office politics is a more of a problem in management, but also dealing with humans all the time is just more messy.
I get that we’re all part of the same system, but I consider Office Space a nihilistic rejection of the entirety of that system. It’s not just “my boss is dumb,” it’s “this whole system is anti-human and dumb, and we’d all be happier working outside with our muscles.”
And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.
Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.
> but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.
Having been a manager: I bet your boss didn't want to be there any more than you did. They were forced to do corporate team-building and they recognized the absurdity of it all.
So they tried to come up with something entertaining that they could claim was passably work-related. They were trying to do their best by you within the constraints of what was mandated by their job.
This looks like a nice gesture. You are too occupied viewing your manager as "the other" to recognize when they were trying to bond and do something nice for the team within the constraints of their job.
You're lucky. At corporate team-building retreats I never got to watch any fun movies. One had us listen to lectures by a manager whose primary experience was as a little league coach and who thought leading his team was the same thing. The other involved the manager giving us a psychology test of his own creation and trying to lecture us about what he thought our learning styles and weaknesses were based on all the different self-help books he read.
Totally valid that my boss probably didn’t want to be there either, but for context this was circa 2008 Google where “offsite” meant “go spend company money to do something fun.”
Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?
Office Space has become a part of the corporate culture's shared language. You are out of the loop if you haven't seen it, and it wouldn't surprise me that a lot of people are introduced to it in a work-related environment (as I was).
Because your manager might have been dealing with something privately, and didn't feel like doing something fun, but had to because the Gods Of Corporate decreed it so.
And so, an act of rebellion against a shared reality that forces you to have fun on schedule when it's time for the quarterly offsite.
Don't worry, your use of its not X, it's Y did not trigger the LLM pattern match for me. I think the main reason is that your two clauses are of very disparate lengths. LLMs use its X not Y as a rhetorical device that relies on brevity and punchiness, while your longer quote has the authentic ring of clumsy, human phrasing.
>And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.
That just means they valued their actual sentiments more than keeping appearances. Doesn't sound weird: it sounds humane.
>Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?
To point at the elephant in the room, as opposed to just go on with the program and have another forced fun session.
I mean, your questions amount to "why couldn't she just be a good cog and pretend like the rest of us?"
It's like being surprised a coworker is a human on the inside.
> Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.
LLMs didn't come up with their quirks in a vacuum. Humans always influenced each other in their language use.
It used to be over sound waves mostly but they don't travel far, then came the printing press, later radio and TV. LLMs are just another language blender.
It seems to me that line managers straddle the line somewhat and above that is where it is a really different world. I have started a company and now back to being an IC so been on both sides of it. It's not totally different, but it is a lot.
I've been back and forth between manager and IC, too.
It is different. I won't deny that.
However, politics and corporate absurdist formalities aren't exclusive to management. A lot of the corporate politics and face-palm worthy office games I've dealt with came from ICs, either as my peers, reports, or as some other manager's reports.
We just tend to give a pass to ICs when they do it because they're not viewed as having as much power in the office.
Can confirm, as an EM this is very true. The best you can hope for is that we're transparent with you about the BS and don't BS you. That's what I try to do.
> my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.
Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.
I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.
Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.
> Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency.
I always thought Lumberg gets a somewhat un-derserved bad rap in that flick. He is characterized as the villain and of course is—from Peter’s perspective which is where the story is told. But within that universe and at a 10,000 foot POV was he? He seems to be the only one within the corporation that is actually functional, capable, motivated and excelling in his role. No doubt he is a dick, but that’s just part of his role and he’s good at it. He’s a cog, knows he’s a cog, but realizes the machine still needs to run. He recognizes that Peter has hit that competence/incompetence point. He also realizes the Bob’s are incompetent, but powerful. He really is the only one that seems to realize everything that is going on.
His communication deficit was too big to actually be a good manager, no?
(Well, maybe not. Maybe being soul-crushingly efficient is optimal if you know most people will fluctuate out soon anyway, so your lack of ability to actually build a rapport with them is not a material impediment to deliver results sustainably.)
Shit rolls downhill...and most people just try to keep an eye on where the next turd comes from without bothering to watch where it goes after it's past them.
I watched Office Space with a bunch of coworkers at a previous job. It's a funny movie that most people in startups view as a parody of big company office life. Our company didn't function like the movie.
You sound as though you worked for one of my managers, though he just gave everyone a copy of the DVD for Christmas one year. The thing is, he definitely got it, knew he was part of the system, and did his best to take care of the people working for him.
I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs and this was a sharp effect on its release.
Office Space was released in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. So, of course office jobs (particularly software jobs) would decrease when that bubble popped.
I specifically avoided making the claim because you really cannot prove either way
I remember when it was released, I graduated that year, and I remember the reactions at the time
it would still be anecdotal and it's hard to know how many people did in fact resign as a result of the impact from this film, and if it's something that would make any difference in the grand scheme of things
When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.
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