Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
I appreciate your wholesome message, but I feel a bit is overlooked.
Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
>> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
Comparing programmers to farriers is definitely strange on the surface. However I think it's quite unfair to reject the authors premise due to the ephemeral nature of some software. And I think it's downright arrogant to assume moving from horses to cars wasn't seriously challenging for his ancestor. But yeah, I would love to chat with the old man about what that transition looked like.
Also, AI adoption might look like it's moving fast for individuals, however I see many companies struggling to actually utilise it effectively. Business processes are slow moving political machines. Sure a large part of the software industry is ephemeral, indirectly providing capital value. However many jobs are still very tangible; embedded, backend web systems, networking etc etc. Instability in these systems absolutely results in tangible loss of value.
It will absolutely take decades before we figure out 'correct' AI usage at an industry scale. Heck, even frontier labs are still undecided about best practices.
> Comparing programmers to farriers is definitely strange on the surface.
Just for another datapoint: two of my great-great-grandfathers in two family branches, in the same small village in France, were respectively farrier and black-smith, while I'm a software engineer. One son of the black-smith continued the trade as a side activity of being a plumber. So I had to think about how my career choice (and those of my siblings, uncles, cousins) relates to theirs.
My own perspective on those trades is that transforming metal was the top engineering scale in the countryside in their era. In those times (XIXth century, early XXth), learning the job required to go work with different masters around France ("tour de France" had another meaning before cycling). While it was still manual work, it was highly skilled job which required both technical skills and creativity, which are also key skills for software engineering.
> In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
ChatGPT was released in 2023 and we're still not out of the job for the most part. It doesn't feel slow but we might have these five to ten years.
The total market addressed by current-shaped LLMs is not "software development" - it's approximately all of white-collar jobs. And with recent advancements in robotics, blue-collar work isn't really much safer. Hardware is getting better, and the one thing that was stopping robotics from entering our own workplaces and living spaces, the ability to make decisions on the fly in heterogenous, unpredictable environment - the judgement - is literally what LLMs themselves are embodying.
So I agree, we all likely still have 3-5 years to figure this out - but also no indication where to go, or if there even exists a direction to go in.
art and music for some, but personally I'm most interested in seeing where science goes. Reproducibility of experiments is gonna be first. How many experiments don't reproduce, or have unwritten biases in the papers. Room temperature semiconductors. Fusion seems actually a decade away, finally. Research into better treatments for diseases, how to help people be smarter, live their best life. There's plenty more to do now that making CRUD apps is so much easier. Maybe AI will become creative enough to not need humans for that, but it'll still need someone to drive it and choose which direction it goes.
Art and music? Ok for live performance. But recorded performance is directly in competion with genAI for revenue streams, with content used without permission for more genAI training.
It can't though. You still need to run real trials on living humans, living their lives and taking experimental drugs/procedures/interventions and running statistics on them.
AI can do everything you described except the "living out a human life" - but it can iterate on ever better simulations of that, or worse, it may reward-hack and... well, I'd rather not be the human in that story.
Do you really think humans are going to be the users? Sure for tomorrow and next month, but the clock is ticking. I got mad at our internal CS peeps the other day. They were demanding an internal tool. I was like we went through hell this summer replacing the front end so it's agent usable, just get Claude to do that. They were like oh...
Another thing is that, unlike AI, automobiles were (somewhat kinda) going to "replace horses".
The AI situation is similar to someone saying "see, we're gonna keep the horses exactly as they are, but replace farriers, trainers, grooms, stable hands, saddlers, vets, and coachmen with absolutely nobody other than some manager type".
The AI industry can't really say they're gonna replace SaaS, because SaaS is the lifeline of their business.
So they just claim they're gonna replace several classes of professionals.
megalomanu · · focus · HN ↗
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
adamredwoods · · focus · HN ↗
Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
Interesting historical read:
<a href="https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-created-automobile/" rel="nofollow">https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-cr...
>> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
j4k0bfr · · focus · HN ↗
Also, AI adoption might look like it's moving fast for individuals, however I see many companies struggling to actually utilise it effectively. Business processes are slow moving political machines. Sure a large part of the software industry is ephemeral, indirectly providing capital value. However many jobs are still very tangible; embedded, backend web systems, networking etc etc. Instability in these systems absolutely results in tangible loss of value.
It will absolutely take decades before we figure out 'correct' AI usage at an industry scale. Heck, even frontier labs are still undecided about best practices.
P.S. ty for the article link, will read!
dolmen · · focus · HN ↗
Just for another datapoint: two of my great-great-grandfathers in two family branches, in the same small village in France, were respectively farrier and black-smith, while I'm a software engineer. One son of the black-smith continued the trade as a side activity of being a plumber. So I had to think about how my career choice (and those of my siblings, uncles, cousins) relates to theirs.
My own perspective on those trades is that transforming metal was the top engineering scale in the countryside in their era. In those times (XIXth century, early XXth), learning the job required to go work with different masters around France ("tour de France" had another meaning before cycling). While it was still manual work, it was highly skilled job which required both technical skills and creativity, which are also key skills for software engineering.
Miraltar · · focus · HN ↗
ChatGPT was released in 2023 and we're still not out of the job for the most part. It doesn't feel slow but we might have these five to ten years.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
The total market addressed by current-shaped LLMs is not "software development" - it's approximately all of white-collar jobs. And with recent advancements in robotics, blue-collar work isn't really much safer. Hardware is getting better, and the one thing that was stopping robotics from entering our own workplaces and living spaces, the ability to make decisions on the fly in heterogenous, unpredictable environment - the judgement - is literally what LLMs themselves are embodying.
So I agree, we all likely still have 3-5 years to figure this out - but also no indication where to go, or if there even exists a direction to go in.
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
dolmen · · focus · HN ↗
fifilura · · focus · HN ↗
Throwback to HN anno 2021 everyone was complaining about their bread and butter was creating CRUD apps.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
swader999 · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
swader999 · · focus · HN ↗
arcanemachiner · · focus · HN ↗
andai · · focus · HN ↗
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden (December 2025)
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199723">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199723
whstl · · focus · HN ↗
The AI situation is similar to someone saying "see, we're gonna keep the horses exactly as they are, but replace farriers, trainers, grooms, stable hands, saddlers, vets, and coachmen with absolutely nobody other than some manager type".
The AI industry can't really say they're gonna replace SaaS, because SaaS is the lifeline of their business.
So they just claim they're gonna replace several classes of professionals.