How many of you have lost work because of AI?
Now that we have some distance from the initial AI boom, can you say whether AI took your job or improved it?
I definitely felt the impact in the first half of 2024.
I was working as a copywriter when a client told me I should either produce more articles for the same amount of money using AI, or lower my price per article.
As you can probably guess, I lost that client.
Paradoxically, I knew about AI roughly 6 months before it became widely known in my home country (I discovered AI through Product Hunt, btw).
And just two weeks ago, a programmer friend, who has been coding for 15 years, told me that he used to have 5 different income streams.
Since AI became mainstream, he has lost 4 of them.
Personally, I think that in this era, creating your own product with the help of AI can be an important safety net.
Have you experienced AI taking away a type of work you used to do (and did it make you less employable)?
Replies
Honestly, I haven’t lost work to AI but I’ve definitely seen parts of dev work get automated faster than I expected The bigger shift for me is how much more important it is to actually understand what the code is doing
@busmark_w_nika the part about losing a client despite learning about ai early is a tough one. knowing the tool exists doesn’t always mean you get to benefit from it.
do you think building your own product is becoming a real safety net, or just another thing people have to learn to survive?
Softorino 💻📲
Your client asking for more articles at the same price is the tell. What got cheaper is the drafting, and drafting was never the expensive part. Deciding what a page should claim still needs someone who watched people misread the last version, and no tool has sat in that room.
Ah, I think I was lucky. My current contract started right when the Claude boom was getting prepped. It only helped boost my role and make me more useful. None of the devs in the company have had any problems because of AI. Nobody has complained about wanting more productivity now that everyone has their own agent at work. I think as long as the people working are smart and can use AI tools, they will be employable and will have what to do. Maybe start-ups will cut down the number of devs, because one smart employee can vibe code all the features needed by a start-up, but once the company is a big bigger, they will actually need more employees because they will be able to build more faster.