The U.S. economy actually grew by nearly a million fewer jobs than previously thought, and ‘AI is automating away tech jobs,’ economist says | Fortune

Wonder how all these tech bros are going to make their money when nobody has a job or money to spend. Extremely short sighted is what AI is.

I don’t know why anyone would choose to believe what an economist has to say about what’s happening in a skilled profession, that economists know nothing about, like the IT industry, over the people actually working in that industry.

In reality, no, AI is not “automating away tech jobs”. That’s absolute crap. In reality, economists have the worst understanding of what’s happening with AI right now. That’s not me saying that, that’s an actual study saying that. A study which asked developers, experts and economists to predict what the impact on the length of time to complete tasks with AI.

Spoilers, the study concluded three things, the first was that everyone including developers overestimated how large the benefit would be, the second was that the developers were the closest in their estimation (-20%) and economists were the most wrong (-40%), and the third conclusion was that there was no benefit at all: developers using AI tools for real coding tasks were nearly 20% slower.

Source: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/

There is no AI solution available on the market that can reliably replace a developer, AI coding agents have been producing disastrous results.

But even if you are crazy enough to think an LLM can handle 100% of all coding duties of a developer (I don’t know a single experienced developer who believes that, the developers I talk to all use LLMs and all agree they are at best a fancy auto complete), there are many other aspects to a developer’s job, and not hiring developers would be a mistake.

If you’re still not convinced, to quote the AWS CEO:

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard”

Source: https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-dumbest-thing-ive-ever-heard-aws-ceo-slams-plans-for-ai-to-replace-junior-human-workers

> Consequentially, Garman advocated for the continued hiring of graduates to teach them core software and problem-solving skills to futureproof against future workplace challenges, like today’s skills shortages.
>
> He still encourages the use of AI tools, but to assist rather than replace junior talent.

There have been layoffs in the industry and less hiring, and companies claiming it was due to AI.. but it should be noted in most cases that has been happening, it was by companies with AI related products that they are pitching as replacements for human employees, companies like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, etc, or companies trying to spin layoffs as a positive to investors.

But the trend of layoffs in the tech industry very clearly started way before LLM based coding assist tools were even reliably able to produce a basic HTML web page, or even AI based auto complete tools were commonly being used for code editors.

The tech industry isn’t replacing tech jobs with AI, companies are just shrinking back to their pre Covid19 levels of hiring.

This is the third wave of AI hype since the 1940s and I can’t wait for it to end once everyone realises that we didn’t create some kind of super intelligence, all we did was pour all the copyrighted works of the world into a dataset and created a really really good next word prediction LLM.

Cool? Extremely.

Useful? Can be.

Fully replaces a person and is capable of human level intelligence? No and if you say you believe that I will laugh at you until you leave the room out of sheer embarrassment.