>Today we’re announcing Mechanize, a startup focused on developing virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data that will enable the full automation of the economy.
>Compensation
>$200K – $475K • 1% – 2%
Just imagine for a moment you are a software engineer capable of doing what they say, rivaling the raw intellectual capabilities of every mathematician, economist, and physicist known to man, and you end up actually building something that directly leads to automating the entire fucking economy of the world.
And there's still someone who says to you: "best I can do is only 1% - 2%"
handfuloflight · 20h ago
Oh I thought the peak was going to be based on the forward looking claims, not the standard equity offer.
delusional · 20h ago
> And there's still someone who says to you: "best I can do is only 1% - 2%"
1% of the global economy seems fine to me. If you actually believe in their vision, money is going to be worthless anyway.
IX-103 · 20h ago
Isn't it the other way around? The productivity gains would increase overall wealth so you would get more for your money, meaning money would actually be worth more.
Or do you mean it in the sense that everyone would already have everything they could ever want so the net utility of additional money would be 0?
delusional · 13h ago
"Run the global economy" doesn't necessarily mean abundance. The current age of relative abundance and decent equality is actually pretty rare in human history. "Running the economy" could instead mean that nothing can happen without the central planning computer, which of course means it gets to set whatever prices it wants, take whatever cut it wants, distribute that surplus however it wants, including to its owners.
It is possible to increase productivity while also centralizing that profit. That's what communists would call "exploitation of labor"
hnthrow90348765 · 20h ago
"I automated the entire world and my boss named himself God Emperor of the Universe for having the idea. And he still hasn't changed my title from Product Software Engineer. He cancelled our daily standup for some reason too."
martin-t · 20h ago
One of the dumbest things a smart person can do is work for an AI company.
At best they don't believe actual AI will be created and they are helping a scam.
At worst, they are actively working to make their own job redundant and when they're fired, they will own nothing of what they built. All the money from their work will go to the owners who fired them.
dsjoerg · 20h ago
> At worst, they are actively working to make their own job redundant and when they're fired, they will own nothing of what they built. All the money from their work will go to the owners who fired them.
Except that's the case with literally every meaningful information-work job. Your goal is to obsolete yourself. If you do it well then your success becomes your calling card for your next job. Your career is a series of such jobs.
martin-t · 19h ago
1) You can and should program yourself out of a _task_, not a _job_. How many companies have a one.time need for a programmer?
2) Even if your claim was correct, then you'd amass experience on one job (task) that you could then leverage on the next job (task). If AI became reality, all that would become irrelevant. Your middle-class self would quickly realize you're only worth as much as your lower class neighbors who swing a shovel or flip burgers for a living, all the while your upper class bosses become richer thanks to your work.
IX-103 · 19h ago
You must live on some fascist oligarchy.
In a well functioning society improvements in economic efficiency and productivity improve the standard of living if everyone in that society. Thus if you innovate yourself out of a job you'd still benefit and would have access to any training needed for your next job.
martin-t · 18h ago
> You must live on some fascist oligarchy.
Sadly, I am becoming increasingly convinced I do. [1]
You're falling for one simple trap. Yes, even if things are (mostly) improving for everyone, they are improving massively faster for those already rich.
On top of that, I am not even sure they are improving. Some people are paying a third or even a half of their salary just to have a place to live. I even heard the situation in some cities is that people are struggling to feed their kids and keep the heating on.
I'm quite handy at what I do. You will not replace me with AI.
Today I set up a remote network with a couple of switches, a router and the rest. From the outside. The customer had already got the router to the internet (good skills) and a LAN. I had a router (pfSense) with six 2.5 GB connections.
I turned it into a 10 VLAN effort with access and trunks and so on, ports at layer 2, without disconnecting myself.
It's quite hard visualising a network, with VLANS and even harder working out how to pivot from the current setup to another. Anyone who has had to change the default VLAN across a site knows what I'm on about.
Just in case anyone here is in any doubt, networks are quite tricky. On a par with programming.
dsjoerg · 20h ago
> You will not replace me with AI
Ever? Forever is a long time. Or do you mean with today's AI, assuming no improvements are made?
gerdesj · 19h ago
Go on, have a go yourself doing a task like that.
gerdesj · 19h ago
I never said never.
Not now
sublinear · 22h ago
This "problem" is pathological and those selling solutions are misleading those who buy into it.
Software engineering often isn't just answering "how" to accomplish something, but also all the five other questions starting with 'w'. Software ate the world a very long time ago, so people being allergic to code while trying to run a business is only sounding more and more absurd as time marches on.
What are we really trying to solve for here? All that could be automated reasonably well has been already. In most cases you do not want a stochiastic result, but exact code to be reused. We use libraries in our code and we have reproducibility of results. The code that needs to be written for most applications is minimal and only grows large as the business refines what they want. This code is unique and virtually worthless to any other business. The code mirrors the organization. We already know all this for decades. It's very confusing to me to keep hearing about this insistence that we need to automate software engineering.
esseph · 22h ago
Maximum movement of capital to as few individuals as possible
sublinear · 21h ago
That's totally achievable now and in the recent past. Write the code yourself? Several billionaires have done this.
codr7 · 21h ago
I suspect several wannabe billionaires couldn't write code even if their life depended on it, which explains why they're so enthusiastic about AI. And why they have been so enthusiastic about every other broken promise about replacing developers that came before it.
MangoToupe · 21h ago
> Software ate the world a very long time ago, so people being allergic to code while trying to run a business is only sounding more and more absurd as time marches on.
I don't agree with this at all. Part of the pitch of code is packing really nasty semantics into a single interface. This inherently reflects in the services we provide to clients. This interface should naturally correspond to UI, if that's what you offer. If you can only express the interface for your service in code, you've failed.
Unless of course you primarily operate a code-centric product, like an sdk.
antithesizer · 20h ago
If your car can't be owned and operated by someone with zero knowledge of how cars work you've failed. And yet to this day every car owner is aware that their lack of any such knowledge would/does cost them dearly at the mechanic and at the dealership too. And of course mechanics and car salesmen love to see such clients coming their way.
MangoToupe · 16h ago
Yea, I mostly agree with this. Consumers tend to have some sort of understanding of the car market. If you can't cater to them, you've failed.
Correspondingly, it's very easy to imagine someone disgruntled for having to deal with code (i imagine hotwiring a car in the context you provided). People know their lane; you can't force them to change it.
sublinear · 6h ago
I think you might be missing the point. The barrier to entry has been and will continue to be the ability to operate that business or pay others to do so. Business is a competitive space, so why would it be easy? And when it is, what's the catch?
dasil003 · 21h ago
> The roadmap to success will most likely start with training or fine-tuning on data from human professionals performing the task, and proceed with reinforcement learning in custom environments designed to capture more of the complexity of what people do in their jobs.
> [...]
> We think this is essentially a data problem, not an algorithms problem.
This is extremely hand-wavy. How are you going to instrument the various thought processes and non-verbal communication that goes into building successful software? A huge part of it is intuition about what makes sense to other humans. It's related to the idea of common sense, but in the software world there's this layer of unforgiving determinism and rigidity that most humans don't want to deal with. I just don't see how AI crosses that chasm.
ege_erdil · 21h ago
how do you think humans cross that chasm?
AnimalMuppet · 20h ago
Pretty sure that however humans crossed it, it wasn't just "a data problem".
mattgreenrocks · 8h ago
OpenAI spent several years prior to ChatGPT getting AI to play Dota 2 well. They got some good results out of that, but it was a subset of the game: only a handful or two of characters. I’m not sure why they stopped; maybe that was when they pivoted to something more general?
Regardless, software dev I consider way more dimensional (eg nuanced) than Dota 2, even if a lot of patterns recur on a smaller scale in the code itself. If they weren’t able to crack Dota 2, why should I believe that software eng is just around the corner?
ctoth · 21h ago
> Once this occurs, many software engineers could perhaps transition into adjacent positions that rely on similar expertise but are significantly harder to automate, such as software engineering management, product management, or executive leadership within software companies.
> In these roles, their responsibilities would shift from writing code and debugging to higher-level oversight, decision-making, and strategic planning—until these responsibilities can be automated too.
When they spoke on Dwarkesh's podcast they seemed to think this would take 30 years. Not sure why we coders are so quick to be automated but the rest aren't.
That's...ridiculous. I'm a product manager, and AI is already chipping away at my job.
Two months ago I said to one of my devs, "Our dashboard here looks very bland. What if we had a more visual display of the pipeline statuses across the top of the screen?" He said he thought that was a good idea, and I went to lunch. I came back and started sketching up some ideas for how to lay out the statuses. I had barely gotten started with that when he called me over to show me what cursor had come up with when asked: it was better than what I was sketching, for sure.
We're (white collar work) going to be 90% automated in less than ten years, and I feel like I'm being conservative saying ten years.
Amekedl · 20h ago
You occasionally do glimpse behind the curtains; depending on what you actually develop it's feasible and quick to prompt it, but attempting to go further than that across multiple components collapses so drastically that I cannot help but feel that all ai stuff is entirely incapable of replicating the real thing at the moment.
gcanyon · 18h ago
> I cannot help but feel that all ai stuff is entirely incapable of replicating the real thing
But that's what they were saying about a simple paragraph of coherent writing five years ago. And what they were saying about structured output three years ago. And now I can ask for a coherent breakdown of the functionality that might be required for a ticket tracking system, with a list of use cases and screens to support them, and user personas, and expect that the result will be a little generic, but coherent. I can give Claude a picture of a UI and ask for suggestions for improvement, and half the ideas will be interesting.
rvz · 21h ago
We really have to STOP listening to these people and see that they ALL have a vested interest.
In the third paragraph of the podcast Dwarkesh already told you that he already invested.
>>> (disclosure - I’m an angel investor),
At that point the co-founders and Dwarkesh himself will agree on everything and they will say anything to get more VC money - Even if the timelines are unrealistic. (Because that is the scam).
gerdesj · 19h ago
"With every passing month, AI models get better at most tasks that a software engineer does in their job."
No they don't.
belZaah · 14h ago
Y’all need some Brooks in your lives. The No Silver Bullet essay explains very clearly, why the ability to string syntactically correct commands together does not equal the ability to write code.
jackb4040 · 8h ago
> The key question now is: what data do we need, exactly?
What if I told you that's not the key question, and the "more data" approach has obviously and publicly hit a wall that requires causal reasoning to move past?
nitwit005 · 20h ago
Never before have I seen someone list a market size in the tens of trillions, as they do on their main page:
> The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.
It's what you do when you fancy yourself in the leagues of Berkshire Hathaway.
rvz · 22h ago
Another thing to keep in mind is that it is also possible that many startups attempting to fully automate software engineering roles will die / bankrupt or shut down trying before it 'eventually' happens; whenever that is.
builder.ai was the first casualty claiming to use AI to replace software engineering teams to build products. Now bankrupt. [0]
It could cost a lot more money than initially estimated than other industries if (by their own admission) it is the last profession to be automated.
Let's see in the next 10 years if some of these 'startups' are still around on this 'mission' and whether if software engineering will be fully automated and dead for humans in the next decade which that is the narrative that they are all hyping for more VC money.
great, let's also record all of the daily interactions of the C-suite and see if we can replicate their job functions in simulation
satisfice · 16h ago
This guy has not even begun to talk about this in a serious way.
If you try to talk about automating SE and you aren’t clearly explaining how people who know nothing about engineering will directly interact with this automation to get what they need, then you aren’t saying anything.
Even with vibe coding there is a certain skillset involved.
jongjong · 20h ago
I think the conclusion about software engineering having the potential of being both the first and last job to be automated by AI makes sense. It is an extremely unequal profession. The skill difference between a junior with 1 year of experience and a senior with 20 years of both diverse and deep experience (of relentless striving) is massive. They have very different capabilities. The level of software sophistication/complexity they can attain is very different. The code produced looks very different.
This is not a profession where you've figured it all out after 5 years and can rest on your laurels. I think it takes literally 15+ years for most highly determined and intelligent people to even approach that state where they can manage complexity effectively. Most people never seem to get there.
Amekedl · 20h ago
Even then software constantly evolves, and rot is everywhere. And we're far from having the "best possible" software solution in literally every area (if that's even possible to measure), rather just endless room for improvement.
And I don't see it being improved with whatever any llm chugs out, at least not "in-depth".
martin-t · 20h ago
Almost 15 years in and I feel like I am still just scratching the surface.
But most of the lessons learned during that time go towards quality, not quantity or speed. The current trend with LLMs (and eventually maybe AI) seems to be doing what humans can do worse but significantly faster and cheaper. Unfortunately, not everyone needs or cares about safety, security or correctness.
I am afraid software will mirror the evolution of physical products from the industrial revolution to present day. It feels like the quality of consumer grade products is constantly decreasing.
aurizon · 21h ago
I can see AI used for permutational hacking, sort of like the fuzzing types of SW and HW hacking. Where they succeed can be a very good stress test. It can be done on human code as well as AI code and I expect this to be done. It is increasingly apparent that what an AI made and then hacked, still needs the abilities that only humans have - for now
>Today we’re announcing Mechanize, a startup focused on developing virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data that will enable the full automation of the economy.
>Compensation
>$200K – $475K • 1% – 2%
Just imagine for a moment you are a software engineer capable of doing what they say, rivaling the raw intellectual capabilities of every mathematician, economist, and physicist known to man, and you end up actually building something that directly leads to automating the entire fucking economy of the world.
And there's still someone who says to you: "best I can do is only 1% - 2%"
1% of the global economy seems fine to me. If you actually believe in their vision, money is going to be worthless anyway.
Or do you mean it in the sense that everyone would already have everything they could ever want so the net utility of additional money would be 0?
It is possible to increase productivity while also centralizing that profit. That's what communists would call "exploitation of labor"
At best they don't believe actual AI will be created and they are helping a scam.
At worst, they are actively working to make their own job redundant and when they're fired, they will own nothing of what they built. All the money from their work will go to the owners who fired them.
Except that's the case with literally every meaningful information-work job. Your goal is to obsolete yourself. If you do it well then your success becomes your calling card for your next job. Your career is a series of such jobs.
2) Even if your claim was correct, then you'd amass experience on one job (task) that you could then leverage on the next job (task). If AI became reality, all that would become irrelevant. Your middle-class self would quickly realize you're only worth as much as your lower class neighbors who swing a shovel or flip burgers for a living, all the while your upper class bosses become richer thanks to your work.
In a well functioning society improvements in economic efficiency and productivity improve the standard of living if everyone in that society. Thus if you innovate yourself out of a job you'd still benefit and would have access to any training needed for your next job.
Sadly, I am becoming increasingly convinced I do. [1]
You're falling for one simple trap. Yes, even if things are (mostly) improving for everyone, they are improving massively faster for those already rich.
On top of that, I am not even sure they are improving. Some people are paying a third or even a half of their salary just to have a place to live. I even heard the situation in some cities is that people are struggling to feed their kids and keep the heating on.
[1]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Today I set up a remote network with a couple of switches, a router and the rest. From the outside. The customer had already got the router to the internet (good skills) and a LAN. I had a router (pfSense) with six 2.5 GB connections.
I turned it into a 10 VLAN effort with access and trunks and so on, ports at layer 2, without disconnecting myself.
It's quite hard visualising a network, with VLANS and even harder working out how to pivot from the current setup to another. Anyone who has had to change the default VLAN across a site knows what I'm on about.
Just in case anyone here is in any doubt, networks are quite tricky. On a par with programming.
Ever? Forever is a long time. Or do you mean with today's AI, assuming no improvements are made?
Not now
Software engineering often isn't just answering "how" to accomplish something, but also all the five other questions starting with 'w'. Software ate the world a very long time ago, so people being allergic to code while trying to run a business is only sounding more and more absurd as time marches on.
What are we really trying to solve for here? All that could be automated reasonably well has been already. In most cases you do not want a stochiastic result, but exact code to be reused. We use libraries in our code and we have reproducibility of results. The code that needs to be written for most applications is minimal and only grows large as the business refines what they want. This code is unique and virtually worthless to any other business. The code mirrors the organization. We already know all this for decades. It's very confusing to me to keep hearing about this insistence that we need to automate software engineering.
I don't agree with this at all. Part of the pitch of code is packing really nasty semantics into a single interface. This inherently reflects in the services we provide to clients. This interface should naturally correspond to UI, if that's what you offer. If you can only express the interface for your service in code, you've failed.
Unless of course you primarily operate a code-centric product, like an sdk.
Correspondingly, it's very easy to imagine someone disgruntled for having to deal with code (i imagine hotwiring a car in the context you provided). People know their lane; you can't force them to change it.
> [...]
> We think this is essentially a data problem, not an algorithms problem.
This is extremely hand-wavy. How are you going to instrument the various thought processes and non-verbal communication that goes into building successful software? A huge part of it is intuition about what makes sense to other humans. It's related to the idea of common sense, but in the software world there's this layer of unforgiving determinism and rigidity that most humans don't want to deal with. I just don't see how AI crosses that chasm.
Regardless, software dev I consider way more dimensional (eg nuanced) than Dota 2, even if a lot of patterns recur on a smaller scale in the code itself. If they weren’t able to crack Dota 2, why should I believe that software eng is just around the corner?
> In these roles, their responsibilities would shift from writing code and debugging to higher-level oversight, decision-making, and strategic planning—until these responsibilities can be automated too.
When they spoke on Dwarkesh's podcast they seemed to think this would take 30 years. Not sure why we coders are so quick to be automated but the rest aren't.
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ege-tamay
That's...ridiculous. I'm a product manager, and AI is already chipping away at my job.
Two months ago I said to one of my devs, "Our dashboard here looks very bland. What if we had a more visual display of the pipeline statuses across the top of the screen?" He said he thought that was a good idea, and I went to lunch. I came back and started sketching up some ideas for how to lay out the statuses. I had barely gotten started with that when he called me over to show me what cursor had come up with when asked: it was better than what I was sketching, for sure.
We're (white collar work) going to be 90% automated in less than ten years, and I feel like I'm being conservative saying ten years.
But that's what they were saying about a simple paragraph of coherent writing five years ago. And what they were saying about structured output three years ago. And now I can ask for a coherent breakdown of the functionality that might be required for a ticket tracking system, with a list of use cases and screens to support them, and user personas, and expect that the result will be a little generic, but coherent. I can give Claude a picture of a UI and ask for suggestions for improvement, and half the ideas will be interesting.
In the third paragraph of the podcast Dwarkesh already told you that he already invested.
>>> (disclosure - I’m an angel investor),
At that point the co-founders and Dwarkesh himself will agree on everything and they will say anything to get more VC money - Even if the timelines are unrealistic. (Because that is the scam).
No they don't.
What if I told you that's not the key question, and the "more data" approach has obviously and publicly hit a wall that requires causal reasoning to move past?
> The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.
https://www.mechanize.work/
builder.ai was the first casualty claiming to use AI to replace software engineering teams to build products. Now bankrupt. [0]
It could cost a lot more money than initially estimated than other industries if (by their own admission) it is the last profession to be automated.
Let's see in the next 10 years if some of these 'startups' are still around on this 'mission' and whether if software engineering will be fully automated and dead for humans in the next decade which that is the narrative that they are all hyping for more VC money.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/builder-ais-shocking-450m-fal...
If you try to talk about automating SE and you aren’t clearly explaining how people who know nothing about engineering will directly interact with this automation to get what they need, then you aren’t saying anything.
Even with vibe coding there is a certain skillset involved.
This is not a profession where you've figured it all out after 5 years and can rest on your laurels. I think it takes literally 15+ years for most highly determined and intelligent people to even approach that state where they can manage complexity effectively. Most people never seem to get there.
And I don't see it being improved with whatever any llm chugs out, at least not "in-depth".
But most of the lessons learned during that time go towards quality, not quantity or speed. The current trend with LLMs (and eventually maybe AI) seems to be doing what humans can do worse but significantly faster and cheaper. Unfortunately, not everyone needs or cares about safety, security or correctness.
I am afraid software will mirror the evolution of physical products from the industrial revolution to present day. It feels like the quality of consumer grade products is constantly decreasing.