I feel like "Company ditches staff in favour of AI" stories currently fit into two categories 1) The CEO is actually ditching staff for other reasons like falling revenue, but "going AI first" sounds a lot better 2) The CEO is making a mistake.

This is going to happen more and more. AI is a tool that should make your employees more efficient not replace them outright. And if it doesn't make your employees better? I guess AI isn't applicable to your business then.

I can see a lot of companies coming to this realization over the coming months and years.

US software engineers need a union.

If I hadn't already landed a job somewhere else, I would only return with a 20% pay bump and an iron-clad contract.

This is excellent news. I'm glad some executives are starting to understand that AI will never replace an engineer with knowledge. AI is just a tool that needs guidance. If they put people without knowledge in charge of the machine gun, they will never be able to hit any target. Junior and mid-level engineers will never become super engineers by telling AI, "Just do this."

AI is a great revolutionary tool for work, but it is still a tool and needs humans to drive it. Obviously companies heard the promise of "Replace your large headcount expense with cheap tokens" and creamed their pants. Its funny to see them walk back, it will be at least a few years if not more before it replaces humans fully (and will need another breakthrough)

Over-hiring during the bygone era of free money is now seeing an overcorrection. AI is a true if small part of it, but mainly it’s an excuse that doubles as posturing to the investor hive-mind.

Yeah, but they are short-term re-hires. Once they "get encoded" it will be bye Felica: "Ford just wants to first seasoned engineers walked out before their decades of knowledge could be encoded into automated workflows." https://www.gadgetreview.com/ford-fired-its-best-engineers-l...

(shooting from the hip) What if the 350 engineers had built a company instead? Union-like efforts could focus on creating new companies (having the "union" is about ensuring a certain level of organizational knowledge, like YCombinator creates a structure around startups)

I think companies would more careful about how fast and lose they operate, if firing may mean having to contract with a 3rd party.

Problem with thinking you can replace your employees with AI, this is not the case. This is like thinking you could replace your NASA engineers with IBM computers in the 60s. The AI revolution changes drastically the way people work, and empower them, they multiply their productivity, but they never ever replace domain expertise, and business logic.

This is what we are finding a lot with the "AI normies". Because the AI responses are so confident new users of it think it must be correct.

AI is confidently wrong a lot. And so you can imagine a lot of execs thinking the AI can do a lot more than it really can.