Its reasonable to dislike a bad product experience, but its strange to draw a conclusion of AI altogether based on a tool with limited usage (I've never heard of it).
That's like saying smart watches are useless based on trying out the smart watch made by will.i.am's tech company rather than Apple's.
As a California tech worker (where the article is focused), I have zero interest in joining a union and firmly believe that much of what has been possible as a tech employee (high paying, interesting career) is in part because we don't have unions, and instead employees own equity and get valuable skills.
Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind. I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
> Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind. I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
I agree, but that's actually one of the strongest arguments for why tech workers should unionize now. Wages are high because employees have leverage due to 10-15 years of demand for skilled workers being higher than supply. If you wait until that leverage is gone to form a union then you've lost a lot of the leverage to negotiate for better conditions as a union.
For the record, I've been in a union in another industry much earlier in my career, and I'm pretty on the fence about a tech workers union, but I think your argument is pretty short sighted.
Part of what made the "no union" deal work out for early tech employees was that supply was scarce and demand was exploding. Good pay and equity weren't really a function of not having a union, they were a function of being early in a market with more jobs than workers. We should keep that separated, before crediting the lack of a union for the result.
That's leverage you didn't build and don't control and it's already eroding as the market catches up. Which is why collective bargaining needs to exists, a way to hold onto ground when individual leverage isn't guaranteed.
BTW, it's not like unions had it easy. Even as they were legally recognized (organized labor was treated as a antitrust problem), the judiciary has in the US been dismantling the little foothold it has after it. The US needed 2 new laws to actually get something. And even then, it doesn't enjoy the same flexibilities that other forms of collective arraignment has, such as capital, in the way of "right-to-work" laws, at-will employment and strikes aren't protected as they should. Hell, legal existence and being on equal footing with the other side of the table have never been the same thing.
These topics are just so difficult to debate. They are filled with feelings and one person's perspective or anecdote, and it is difficult to drill down into what is true or what is not true.
You wrote "Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind".
How do you know?
And, for the sake of argument, let us say it is the best deal in the history of humankind, does that make it fair that the big tech companies did the following...
For these topics I don't think there is anything wrong with using your own experience. Yes it's one person's perspective and anecdote (mine), but that's what informs my opinion. I've worked at a couple of unionized places before, for me they're terrible. You can say those are bad unions, or unions in Europe etc are better. This may be true, but my own experience tells me to avoid them.
This is a good point about quality of life. I focused on money in my original comment, but I've heard a lot of people complain that unions have kept them working with their worst coworkers. That alone is a dealbreaker for me.
Look at other unions. It's a "union" of workers so they need to have some guidelines.
Teaching for instance you know exactly how much money you'll be making over the next 20 years. Add a masters (which may or may not contribute to you being a better teacher) get a bump.
Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric? What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric? It works in some places that are commoditized. A toll collector does the job, and maybe there is some merit to rewarding someone for loyalty. But programming is not that kind of job.
The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit. Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
>Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric?
Given my experience as someone who is looking for full time work over 3 years later because executives decided that data centers are better to pursue than quality products: yes, and yes.
>What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric?
People who need to worry about rent next month.
>The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit.
And we know from decades of knowledge this is never true. Two equally talented engineers can be paid differently based on where they live. They can end up with much different compensation based on one company lucking out with a deal and another missing a crucial deal and collapsing. Which isn't an engineering factor. We know negotiating gets you paid more, which is a skill orthogonal to engineering.
This illusion of meriocracy will be the collapse of the whole industry.
>Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
Because you think the job is building things. the 20 years employee understands the systems and how to keep things together. Life isn't all about moving fast and breaking things. Especially in fields like teaching the future generatrions.
> The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit.
It is well recognized that meritocracy is an illusion. A much better determinant of success is the birth lottery. If you're born into a rich family versus a blue-collar one, you have unequal starting points, access to education, better-than-average medical care, and more reliable, higher-quality food. Once you win the birth lottery, you have access to a network full of connections that will hire you based on who you know or who your parents are, rather than your ability (e.g., a Nepo baby). When you are a nepo baby, you are insulated from many of the inequalities built into our financial and education systems.
You'll frequently hear from successful people that they got where they are because they have sufficient morals or good standing in the world, and that if you didn't make it, you're clearly not a good person. This rationalization is mostly bullshit because there are many in the 1% class who are lousy human beings and, by their own justification, should be on the street.
When you buy into meritocracy, you are contributing to keeping the billionaires in place and supporting their destructive behavior, tearing at society.
These kinds of chains make it really clear that, despite the association and similar worker pool, the Games Industry is in fact not the Tech Industry. I see comments like "Tech is the best career deal in humankind" and I feel like I entered bizarro world as I see my entire network feed being laid off, shuffled around, and ground to literal break downs in real time. This was already a factor before the last few years, but it's only accelerated.
Thankfully: the Games Industry is in fact not the Tech Industry. Thus, game developers are a lot more receptive to unionizing than general tech. But it's still a bit absurd; I've always had the advice of "move out of games to a more stable tech job if you burn out". Well... those stable tech jobs sure became unstable quickly.
Well, if a European dev asked me how I could possibly know if they'd make more in a less regulated environment, I would point to American salaries.
Agree it's hard to know things and that antitrust arrangement was bad. If we're talking policy, we are implicitly accepting counterfactual reasoning (because otherwise why would we change policy).
Yep. We can go around and around. Like, does health care count for some of the discrepancy? Or the more generous time off that Europeans typically have?
I do recall some reports that concentrated on just workers that had unions in the United States versus workers in a similar field that did not have unions, and it concluded that unionized workers get paid more.
But, it was not the tech sector, so someone, maybe you, will argue it does not count.
Just very, very difficult to get to the bottom of what is the best way.
I am in the we should unionize camp. My stance is based on, the tech companies have way more leverage than you or I. They do not work in your interest. A union is imperfect but it is better than nothing to get "some" leverage back.
Most other engineers are also not union, and they don't experience our high salaries or supreme career mobility. I think it was always a factor of demand and the domain. Software makes money without making anything physical. It therefore scales infinitely, trivially. Yes it doesn't actually, but the marginal cost is so, so small that it effectively does, especially when compared to any physical good.
So, software has always been rated for extreme growth. Investors absolutely love software for that reason. They don't like bridges, or planes.
But none of this is set in stone. Software engineers are losing leverage by the day. It's possible our salaries, stability, mobility, and equity will all decline. That does happen to careers sometimes. We're just assuming things will continue as they are, but they're already not, so I don't think that's a safe assumption.
Unions are, ultimately, about balancing leverage. You have to understand that, as an individual worker, you have little to no leverage. As a software engineer you have, arguably, the most leverage of any individual workers, and even then it's incredibly lopsided. You are purely at the behest of the company and the market, for the most part. Your control is an illusion, carefully implanted in your brain through decades of propaganda. Unions do not suddenly give you perfect leverage, but they certainly give you more.
With the layoffs we've seen, how many engineers wanted that? And, what could they have done? Well... a lot of people are now realizing, nothing. They had no control. They are passengers.
Unionization succeeds first and foremost when workers have significant leverage. That leverage is irrespective of how much workers get paid but is based on how critical those workers are to a given type of work or given industry. What you are describing shows the immense amount of leverage tech workers have had for the last two decades or so and now with AI that leverage will only lessen. Unionization is fundamentally about maintaining control over your own labor (of which salary is a part but not the only concern). Unionizing 3-5 years ago would have been best but next best is now.
Not really. It is all about leverage. When you've got what they want, and they can't get it anywhere else, they pay the price.
Whatever leverage tech workers have, they would have even more if they unionized. Salaries are high? Maybe they could be even higher. These trillion dollar corporations can afford it.
> employees own equity
Why would this be mutually exclusive with unionization?
This golden egg has a funny smell. You are exclusively focusing on high paying as interesting is found in many careers. Lots of people don't trade rights for cash. Many prefer a comfortable lifestyle that protects their families and life style, whilst allowing them to just do a fair day's work in exchange for pay. It is far better if people don't feel they need to put in endless hours or always have to please someone to avoid getting fired.
Except they can’t and these AI labs know that very well, which is why their marketing push is always so overpoweringly annoying: they have to convince you because they know they are wrong and their product will not deliver what they are promising.
I've been laid off. It was fine because software is literally the most marketable skill in the world.
Edit: But also, this was a pre-profit VC-backed company. If those companies can't lay people off, it's not like you make good money with more job security. Either the company just has less runway (so I still lose my job, just later and with everyone else) or they adapt by hiring fewer people at lower salaries.
I was canned early last year. Looking for a new job was mostly fine. It wasn't insanely easy like 4 years ago and I had to network a bit, but there very much is still demand for qualified people.
Would suck to be in this market as an entry-level engineer, though.
My network has all experienced at least one layoff in the last 2 years. Every single person I talked with except maybe 1 or 2 people. And they don't feel good about their studio.
Most tech workers I have met with parent commenters opinion have been laid off at various times in their career.
I think it's important to note that unions aren't very good tools to avoid layoffs. If there is a company specific hardship, the union can't simply force the company to maintain headcount all the way into bankruptcy. On the other hand if there is a secular change across the industry, the unions can't prevent that change either. Easy example is how Big 3 automakers were 100% unionized in the 1970s and have since shed about 500,0000 American jobs despite producing more automobiles than ever.
Unions tend to be good at bargaining for better pay and benefits, but the current status quo is that most tech workers already have decent pay and benefits anyway.
A friend of mine at Amazon got laid off during their big stupid AI push last year and yeah, being paid like $150k a year sounds nice until you realize that only covers basic living expenses in, say, Manhattan. Now was Amazon right to fire so many people for basically no reason? No, but software on its own is no longer marketable. One person can generate a hundred times more code than before the advent of LLMs, so you only need one person to do the job of a hundred. Now, it takes some skill, that takes years to develop, to use LLMs effectively in the workplace, so Amazon was incredibly short sighted to believe it was just some magical box that fixed everything automatically. But that doesn’t mean companies won’t be making similar moves, in the aggregate, in 10 years, when leaner competitors come to rip a chunk out of their profits. Do you see the capex of major tech companies now? They are _scared_, they have every right to be. You have to be just as nearsighted as those Amazon bosses to believe that things will continue as they always have, that this is just a short dip in a long term regression to the mean.
That's the issue. 2/3 of my layoffs were not "financial hardships". One was just a medium sized studio who ran out of projects and didn't want me to continue. The other was a large global company who was about to make big purchases (and eventually, change leadership).
Maybe with job #1 I could have saved it, but I was underpaid and already looking out the door, so it wasn't surprising to me. Job #2 was 100% the kind of place a union would have saved my job from. (and if you care, Job #3 was just classic "startup funding pulled". They shut down a year later. It is what it is, but I guess you don't see the red flags when you get a nice pay boost and a shiny company on your resume).
>Easy example is how Big 3 automakers were 100% unionized in the 1970s and have since shed about 500,0000 American jobs despite producing more automobiles than ever.
yes, almost like they spent the last 50 years working with the federal government to break down union powers. Surely isn't a plethora of literature on that.
>Unions tend to be good at bargaining for better pay and benefits, but the current status quo is that most tech workers already have decent pay and benefits anyway.
You forget stability. Making big money one year and none another year just averages out to "okay".
The big 3 don't employ half a million fewer because they weakened unions. It's because manufacturing needs fewer people now. The UAW can't simply force them to retain half a million people sitting around doing nothing, and they can only do so much to ban the implementation of automated manufacturing systems.
> It's because manufacturing needs fewer people now.
It's because they outsourced most roles starting in the 90s. They don't need as many people due to efficiency gains, but not "hollow out entire cities" levels of efficiency. Human labor is still necessary, and human labor in other parts of the world will be cheaper than many automation gains for times to come.
And they all sell less cars than on the 70's too. But their profits still stay relatively high and revenue is steadily rising.
That doesn't tell me we got efficiency gains, they just shifted models on how and what to make. And where they make it. If we had true efficiency gains there'd be more cars sold, perhaps at cheaper prices.
But despite those margins, it's also an industry with a LOT of unprofitable businesses, unlike any other industry in history. From many people's perspective, if they already earn well, why rock the boat in a high effort high risk way so that the union can negotiate an 8% raise instead of a 4% raise. I don't need the money. And the bad to worst case outcomes could give me serious irreversible buyers remorse.
It's still not clear to me whether union protection is going to be worth the decrease in job creation. There's a reason Europe has way less IT positions with worse salaries.
Salary isn't even be all end all. In fact, higher salary might be worse, because in total you have to pay out of pocket for things your europeans counterparts. Therefore they should have more discretionary income compared to a US worker (I don't think I have to source this).
Every time someone says Europeans have it better, note that we are not seeing net migration of high-pay tech workers from the U.S. to Europe that we should if that were true. SWEs are not stupid. (If nothing else, there would be a barrage of submissions on Hacker News saying "Here's one neat trick for tech workers to increase their effective income!".) So, yes, you do "have to source this".
>note that we are not seeing net migration of high-pay tech workers from the U.S. to Europe that we should if that were true.
How many EU's are migrating to the US?
Most people's solutions in first world countries is not to go through the arduous process of finding work in another country and leaving behind their entire culture and network behind in hopes of a better life. That is not the same decision you make as if you're jumping to another state/province (which in itself is already a big life change).
Actually it is, because you can make money in the US and then retire in Europe or wherever else you want and live like a king, as many people I know have done.
No, the benefits Europeans get do not translate to any equivalence to the money an Average American makes. The per capita income is like 100k a year now.
Unions don't help with that as can be seen with Volkswagen or much of Detroit.
Or, from an IP-driven industry perspective, the offshoring of Hollywood following the SAG and WGA strikes in the early 2020s.
And if IATSE couldn't stop VFX from being offshored back in the 2000s and 2010s, then tech unions wouldn't be able to either.
Edit: can't reply
> Without film industry unions, might the offshoring have been undertaken even earlier?
Not really. VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s despite only starting as an industry in the 1990s.
> Yeah but this is a limited perspective. If the union was truly international (like they _used_ to be) VFX workers could push for high wages wherever they worked.
VFX workers in most countries are not unionized either, and much of the industry has already shifted to ASEAN, China, and India where there is no real unionization to begin with.
>Unions don't help with that as can be seen with Volkswagen or much of Detroit.
Yes, let's point to examples of intentional union decay as proof that unions do not work.
>VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s
And there's still VFXs jobs domestically. For the same reasons offshoring tech in the 2010's didn't work out
> much of the industry has already shifted to ASEAN, China, and India where there is no real unionization to begin with.
Most countries are not "at-will" like the US. those houses cannot just layoff people on whim.
That said, yes. VFX is very much a contractor-driven field. But there's a different between knowing the end of a contract, and waking up one day to realize your key fob doesn't work and you're locked out of your account. You get to plan around the instability.
VFX workers did try to unionize along with software engineers. Major tech companies colluded illegally and were caught doing this. This was way before the AI boom
Yeah but this is a limited perspective. If the union was truly international (like they _used_ to be) VFX workers could push for high wages wherever they worked.
Volkswagen is perhaps the greatest counter-example. The union in Germany converted every layoff initiative in whole or in part (more often in whole) into partial retirements, backfill stops, reduced working hours, compensation freezes.
>there is a real risk that what arises is labor immobility and blocking new entrants.
We're already doing that without uniuons. Older folk can't afford to retire and new grads cannot get a leg in to start their careers. we're talking something like a quarter of new grads who cannot get any job in their field out of college.
Wait a second, are you arguing that it’s better to just straight up fire people? In that case, the company is absorbing the lion’s share of the profits (or whatever profit is left) so you are effectively arguing in favor of shielding an entity over the livelihoods of the people who work within it.
To butcher a famous poem, it's better to have hired and lost than never to have hired at all. Restrictions on letting go of enployees mean that companies are afraid to hire. They double check and triple check, they reject everyone they feel even the tiniest bit suspicious of, they try to protect themselves with ultra long probation periods, etc.
I don't know about the US, but I spent 4.5 months trying to get a new job here in the EU as a senior dev. Everyone tells me that was quick.
The lack of union is exactly the reason why every software developer shut the fuck up and took money in exchange for building spyware, tracking software, ran psychological experiments on unknowing people and generally contributed to the destruction of society. "Engineers" would have the balls to stand up to it, and unions would be the backbone that helps it happen.
Instead, you got a nice paycheck, and made sure to make the world actively worse for everyone. Good job.
sure, you haven't needed the protections that unions provides so far (and tech companies have wisely provided tech workers with enough benefits so that they don't feel the need to unionize. that's going to change.
> I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
I don't count Europe to be honest, they don't have an engineering culture. Regardless 100k is still good, better than making a third that toiling in the fields or mines.
AI seems to struggle most when it has to make decisions with lots of trade-offs, especially where the context or implications of various decisions are nested, which is presumably why it struggles to write full software systems that are well-designed.
By comparison, financial advice is pretty simple, and there is a universally agreed-upon approach that most people should follow to maximize long-term financial health.
This is the common fallacy of “AI is terrible in my own field of which I have deep knowledge, but AI is totally fine in this other field of which I only have cursory knowledge.” Even ignoring all other aspects of financial advice and only focus on saving for retirement, there are so many topics involved like asset allocation glide paths, tax advantaged accounts, safe withdrawal rate, sequence of return risk, etc etc.
Financial advice is universally agreed upon, to the same extent that advice about software engineering is also universally agreed upon, you know, like write unit tests, write maintainable code, etc. But the devil is in the details.
You are comparing to the almighty, not to the kind of financial advisor most people would find while looking at random. Between those with very high AUM fees, those selling bad vehicles that they get kickbacks for and such, people are basically getting robbed already.
It's not that one cannot get very specific, technical advice that helps, but someone without much financial literacy cannot tell someone doing honest work for a reasonable price from easy to find scammers with a marketing budget. The AI isn't going to get everything right, and it's not going to be easy to send good, proding questions to double check things without sufficient financial literacy, but that boring baseline is miles ahead of what most people get, as it's not trying to deceive you professionally, at least for now.
> the kind of financial advisor most people would find while looking at random
Any regulated financial advisor will still go further and deeper than any LLM.
For example, most (all ?) LLMs won't even consider or ask you about applicable jurisdiction, which could easily end up as dangerous and costly advice.
Will an LLM do a proper client risk assessment ? Probably not.
Will an LLM deal correctly with vulnerable clients or PEPs ? Unlikely.
Will an LLM deal correctly with anything vaguely "complex" or contentious ? Definitely not.
And again, the financial advisor is regulated. Which means you have recourse through the regulator, and the advisor will also have liability insurance.
LLMs are mediocre for every topic that people talk about all the time.
When it's software development, it just happens that your mediocre code is incredibly bad. When it's financial advice or diet, it just happens that you mediocre advice is either the correct "do the hard thing, there is no magic" one or some crazy shit that will ruin your life.
> This is the common fallacy of “AI is terrible in my own field of which I have deep knowledge, but AI is totally fine in this other field of which I only have cursory knowledge.”
"By comparison, financial advice is pretty simple, and there is a universally agreed-upon approach that most people should follow to maximize long-term financial health."
yes, but...although the fundamentals are basically the same that doesn't mean it translates into an actual plan for a user. you're still leaving the hard part up to the user instead of helping them form an actual plan and stick to it.
There is a universally agreed-upon approach, but is it actually correct? Usually, investing in the thing that people have invested in for the last 20 years is a good way to buy at the top.
That’s why that’s not the standard advice. It’s index stocks hedged with bonds. If you manage to buy at the “top” of your entire country’s economy, you’ve got bigger problems at that point.
Buying after any previous crash, instead of before, gave you 10-20 years of extra retirement. If you waited 10 years in cash for a crash before going all-in, you came out ahead.
> By comparison, financial advice is pretty simple, and there is a universally agreed-upon approach that most people should follow to maximize long-term financial health.
What will AI do when those rules, which it's trained on their repetition so much, don't apply anymore? ~8% annual stock gains for the next 40 years may not hold and an 80/20 stock/bond ratio may not be as wise in upcoming decades
Stock/bond ratios are way too advanced for what's qualifying as good advice here:
> AI consistently advised people to save during their working years, draw down savings in retirement, invest heavily in diversified stock funds, and reduce stock exposure after age 45.
This is analogous to saying to an aspiring software developer, "You should write clean and testable code, have clearly defined API boundaries, and a repeatable build process." All very true, but also so general and basic that it's not helpful.
It's not helpful to the kind of person whose recreational weekend reading includes MIT Sloan analyses. Most Americans don't have what I suspect you'd consider a basic level of financial literacy (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/your-money/americans-fina...), and do need to be informed about things like the compounding effect of savings or the benefit of diversification.
Its also not helpful to the person who doesn't. How much to save, when to save, how to diversify, what rate of exposure to equities is too much, how much to with draw in retirement? And thats just questions on the answer it gave. But what about if I have a loan bearing interest? What about if I'm self employed? What if my appetite for risk is less, greater? What if I want to retire early?
It gave vague unspecified advice that isn't actionable and didn't provide any weight to tradeoffs.
Sometimes I wonder if some folks have even used AI. Maybe this is your chance: AI will easily take you down a rabbit hole of financial advice beyond your ability to understand it, including up to date research. Far beyond what 99% of people would find useful or interesting.
Why do you think it gave vague advice? The paper has a sample of provided advice in Table 1 that seems pretty specific. (I attempted to quote it, but it triggers the HN spam filters, presumably because it's a chunk of LLM generated text substantially larger than my actual comment.)
If you are even thinking about writing clean and testable code, having clearly defined API boundaries, and keeping a repeatable build process, you are probably already significantly above average.
If you are even trying to save, invest diversified, and manage risk as you age... you're probably doing better than like 80% of your peers financially
> Prompt: but I don't have enough money to save, I can barely make ends meet.
> AI: I see the problem now---If you don't have enough money to save, and reducing your expenses is not an option, then the answer is clear: make more money.
I don't know why you're being downvoted here. A huge amount of 'financial advice' boils down to 'stop being poor,' which is to say it's about what to do with your economic surplus rather than what to do if you don't have one and aren't long on avocado toast.
Because at a certain point, "spend below your means, save as much as you can" is the financial advice most people are unable to follow, yet determines 90% of the outcome.
I didn't downvote them, but I am genuinely curious to hear from people who "can't save money", and try to understand why that's the case. My assumption is that a large percent of them are spending way more than they need to, but that could easily be an incorrect stereotype.
Federal Reserve studies indicate that 10-15% of the US population can’t save money due to fundamental financial realities. That is, the necessary expenses of an ordinary lifestyle consumes all of their income. That is tens of millions of people.
There is another ~30% that expand their lifestyle to consume all available income. Not saving is a choice for this part of the population.
It's actually almost certainly true just on the basis of basic numbers. Many people who are really actually quite poor (making say under $35k CAD annually for a family of 5) manage to make ends meet and even save a little. So if you make more than this but can't save any it's because you're spending on things they are not and which are therefore nonessential.
Now maybe restaurant food, name brand groceries, driving two SUVs, vacations, etc etc whatever it is for a given person are seen as essential. That's how lifestyle works after all and we often can't imagine our lives without it. So I'm not saying it's a "simple" matter of just spend less because it's often not very simple feeling. But from a numbers PoV it is possible for most people who otherwise see themselves as struggling in theory.
Not at all! I would guess that a sizable minority of "can't save money" people are in that position due to chronic illness or supporting others.
I have no idea what it costs to support a family member with a disability; probably varies wildly but I would guess it's about the same annual cost as raising a child? Except that annual cost never goes away.
Models can be updated when foundations domain knowledge graphs are built on change. As of this comment, target date funds and pensions containing trillions of dollars adhere to the assumptions you mention (asset class allocation, growth rate and return assumptions, safe withdrawal rates ["Trinity study" aka ~4%/year], etc), and so consumers of AI provided guidance assuming these foundations could do much worse (as they already do today due to lack of information, knowledge, will, etc).
You literally just need to stick the Bogleheads forum into your AI assistant of choice for most folks, if they'll listen (which is the hardest part, imho, people want to gamble, not invest, in my experience). Prompt "What is your age?" respond "Optimal target date fund is 20XX fund based on your current age and retirement age, please confirm to set to default for investing." I suppose this will eventually make its way in some form into every banking, fintech, and brokerage mobile app chatbot in some capacity.
Context mangement is necessary to fully realize the power of AI financial advice. Memories, financial history, and decisions need to made with the AI. This translates into the epistemic record of every answer and its how we do it. This allows us to precisely repeat AI experiments with a given set of inputs and is necessary to ensure a high quality output.
The paper talked about how an AI informed the usr to build a financial emergency fund. but, when the user lost their job, the AI completely forget it existed. This proves our theory that context management is the key to unlocking the full potential of AI financial advice.
Investing and trading is a dynamic game. If everyone has the edge of certain portfolio to out perform the average, then no one has the edge.
Similarly AI is not going to solve that. Because everyone would end up with similar AI edge until no one has the edge.
People should start with simple universal rules: Stay invested. Buy low cost diversified etf fund. Favor long term investment instead of trading. Learn something from all weather portfolio composition to hedge the risks.
When everyone is crowding into one investment that investment tends to get irrationally over-saturated. With the current makeup of the S&P500 we can predict it will dramatically crash in real value in the next five years.
That’s why the classic investment advice is to hedge your exposure to the equities markets, do more so the closer you get to retirement and don’t put money you need in the next 7 years in equities.
The bigger concern with the classic advice is that bonds have become more correlated with equities and our backtesting was all done during a time period where the American liberal international economic system was dominant so we aren’t sure that it will hold up to the new partitioned order.
The issue I have with loops is that for truly complex work, where I care about building a generalized solution for a complex problem, the agents frequently reward hack and end up burning indefinitely without finishing until I step in.
Even with Claude Code and Opus I genuinely don't understand how people are actually doing productive things with these loops. Unmanaged by humans, these things go deep, deep into their own pits of internal domain language, depth-first development, and tail-chasing. The stuff that I've seen at work produced by people exploring these kinds of "meta loop" approaches typically have a high ratio of slop and fluff to useful code and documentation.
(I haven't tried Fable yet, but people have been writing about this stuff long before Fable came out so that shouldn't count.)
It makes sense for something like autoresearch because you're trying to exhaustively explore a space that would be impossible for a human to explore by hand. But for something like building the software to run a business, there's absolutely no way I would trust anything like this. It's ultimately just superpowered vibecoding, giving you the ability to churn out more slop faster, not build useful things faster.
Show me one example of a successful application developed using this kind of meta-meta-loop architecture. Supposedly Claude Code itself is entirely AI generated code, but it's not a `while` loop, it still has a team of designers and developers.
(Also this meta-loop stuff is different from the tactical-level Ralph Wiggum loop stuff. That's a strategy to make smaller/weaker LLMs perform like better LLMs, using say 5x more tokens but at 1/10 the cost per token so that the cost-benefit math works out.)
Telemetry tooling for local Claude/Codex usage so I can analyze old sessions and fill tooling gaps, make sure I'm using the right models for various tasks, update my processes, etc.
I've also replaced Linear with a local sqlite-backed tool, added tooling to speed up code nav, and am building "no-slop", a tool for enforcing architectural guidelines on vibe-coded projects.
It’s not easy to buy such a large tranche of shares at a fixed and fair price in a single transaction!
Both parties get something they want this transaction. Alphabet gets the Berkshire halo effect and a guaranteed buyer of $10 billion worth of equities, Berkshire gets a large tranche of equity at a price they believe is fair.
I think they view Alphabet as their next Apple, and a relatively safe place to ride out whatever happens with AI: Alphabet is fairly well positioned for the upturn or the downturn, especially now with this expanded warchest of cash.
They are buying 10B$ worth of shares for 10% discount from current valuation, and if their goal is to hold for 10-20 years, then it could be a good hedged buy in favour of AI.
Even if AI crashes 90% SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic are worth say 200B each post IPO. In 10-20 years with similar effects to Internet they might be the next Meta. Apple, Microsoft of the world.
But Google will likely still be the leader if it can make good on it's advantages.
The responses to this are wild. I have worked with and built smaller systems like this and it is an incredible speed up.
So much reflexive hate against a genuinely transformative tech. Yes AI has annoying people and grifters, but it is genuinely incredible at some things and finding out how to use it effectively within a company is the most fun I’ve had in my career.
The issue of it burning through tokens grepping around should be fixed with language server integration, but that’s broken in Claude Code and the MCP code nav tools seem to use more tokens than just a home-built code map in markdown files.
They got so many things right in the beginning but now seem to lose touch with their core fan base, the developers. It's the typical corporate grind, a million competing interests arise where it's not anymore about the user but about politics and whoops, that's when you know you're not anymore a startup.
That is not a good idea. To deal with LLMs one need to have knowledge about the topic of the query, case contrary one will not be able to detect the errors of their output-prompts. The test is easy, if after one or three queries one do not detect the errors, one is done, the person is reading the output-prompts in passive mode.
The self-learn path require also to cultivate a intuition that comes from searching and reading technical doc that a LLM will not give you, among other things.
Anyway, I observe how the warning of the other user about this got downvoted and critiqued. I expect the same, and leave this thread with peace of mind subscribing to such warning, as a message to the OP.
>OP wants to brush up on their skills, not have AI do it for them.
the two things aren't mutually exclusive.
if an AI tells you "solder A to B" you're going to learn some technique whether you want to or not. Extrapolated entirely into a robotics project.. there's a lot to gain just through sheer osmosis of instruction.
the barrier to entry for a lot of playing around is getting a working scaffold to be able to run all your testing from
id expect it could pick you out a breadboard, a micro, some actuators and sensors, along with get a code deploy and run harness going for you, so you can focus on doing the robotics, rather than anything else.
Some people learn by doing, or learn by example, and the faster they can get into doing an example, the faster they will learn.
I am one of those people, and I can't count how many textbooks I own, of which I've read the first few chapters, and lost interest because I wasn't doing anything, only reading.
When I can instead start doing something, as GP emphasized, I can learn the applicable concepts as they're applied, which works well for me. AI helps me do that, because it is like a textbook that follows along with me, rather than asking me to follow it. Also I ask a lot of questions.
Very true, and doing it this way lets me learn at midnight for no extra cost while I go from zero to one and keep my day job that lets me pursue such passions.
They're very varied, so not a clear path to a job there, and I'm not sure I would want to make a job out of all of them.
That's like saying smart watches are useless based on trying out the smart watch made by will.i.am's tech company rather than Apple's.