Ask HN: What skills are future proof in an AI driven job market? | Hacker News

Ask HN: What skills are future proof in an AI driven job market?

46 points by sunny678 50 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 77 comments For developers and non-developers alike: What's worth learning today to stay relevant in an AI first world

| austin-cheney 50 days ago | next [–] * superior written communication leadership data structures task/project management performance/measurements* data transmission techniquesHonestly, if you really have to ask the question then none of this matters because it sounds like you are already delegating your career to AI which would make this list unapproachable.

| jf22 49 days ago | parent | next [–] I'm interested to know why you think data structures are important. AI is pretty good at reasoning out data structures problems.

| qsera 48 days ago | root | parent | next [–] LLM does not "reason".This should be clear by the fact that it can solve complex math problems without understanding how to count.

| mattmanser 49 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Yeah, even 2 years ago you could tell it to make a service with minimal instructions and it would usually guess the right data structure.Often better than many developers I've worked with come up with.

| austin-cheney 49 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Forget what AI can and cannot do. What can you do?If you are only doing data entry into an LLM without understanding how any of this actually works then what do I need you for? I can just promote the janitor at half the cost to do your job.

| kimhjo 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Judgment and domain expertise. AI can write the code, but it can't tell you what's worth building or why the architecture will hurt you in two years.

| cal_dent 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Social skills. Same as it ever was. That beats talents/smarts every time in a corporate environment

| benj111 50 days ago | parent | next [–] Don't you mean sociopathy? Or it that just my autistic side talking?

| nicbou 50 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Empathy, getting along with people, seeking mutual benefit are also valuable skills.

| benj111 49 days ago | root | parent | next [–] You see I've never found those are the social skills that get rewarded. More arse licking the boss, or not pointing out that bad idea is a bad idea, or taking credit for someone else's work.So yeah maybe getting along with the right people... And mutual benefit with the right people.

| ipaddr 48 days ago | root | parent | next [–] It's all part of getting along. If feedback that ideas are bad is not welcome why would you want to give it?Being nice to everyone including your boss elimates a lot of problems.Taking credit for someone elses work gives you additional power over that person and them additional responsibility when things go wrong.Your boss will take credit for the departments work, his boss will do the same, her boss will do the same the vp will do the same. Their job is to get everyone under them to meet someone goal set by above. Everyone is taking credit for everyone elses work all the way up the chain. We do this as parents my child made the honor roll you might tell a friend knowing it reflects on you.

| benj111 48 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Yes but you're recasting my complaints as good things.Many elements of an abusive relationship can be good, but it's the degrees that make them bad. Would you tell someone they weren't in an abusive relationship because the things they told you about could be good? Or would you accept their feelings on the matter?

| nicbou 50 days ago | root | parent | next [–] That was not the question being asked

| fiftyacorn 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Communication and networking - i think we'll see devs expected to bridge to the BA role and deliver based on that. So being able to communicate will become more important

| sunny678 50 days ago | parent | next [–] Yeah! Soft skills is a key skill to learn these days.

| comicink 49 days ago | prev | next [–] Ability to think like a human who will use your product. It's the small details like looking at a web page and understanding if it "makes sense" and "looks good" and what improvement would make usability better. AI can write the code and follow best practices, but the ability to think like a real human user and be a true Product Manager is something that would always be needed IMHO

| yodsanklai 49 days ago | parent | next [–]

Ability to think like a human who will use your product.In my team, we need to redesign our products because the main user is AI rather than humans.

| whattheheckheck 49 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Who do the ai serve? Politically?

| KetoManx64 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Plumbing and electrical work

| Areena_28 50 days ago | parent | next [–] damm true haha

| sunny678 50 days ago | root | parent | next [–] True! Still, there are a few things that AI can't do.

| cammasmith 49 days ago | prev | next [–] Trade school seems to be looking more and more valuable these days. I feel bad for young people who are going to a 4 year university and gaining debt for a career that might not exist in 5 years. Being a plumber might not seem glamorous, but we're a long way off from AI learning to fix your toilet.

| Jamesbeam 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Killing/rescuing people with your brain instead of bullets and/or creating/exploding structures.Join the Army. Become a Combat Engineer Sergeant.Enjoy getting told by your superiors that they are afraid of sitting in the same room with you, because your thinking cap gaze looks like you are always plotting to kill them in the most sophisticated and fun way imaginable. Never say a word, just give them a big friendly smile in return.Leave with a treasure trove of abilities useful for the rest of your life, or to simply troll your neighbors, and give lifelong work to a local psychotherapist.Big friendly smile. Two thumbs up.

| guzfip 50 days ago | parent | next [–]

Join the Army. Become a Combat Engineer Sergeant.I guess the enlistment age has been raised to 42 so this may actually be a realistic option for more people on this site lol.Of course I was born just in time to be loaded up on psych meds as a child, so the military didn’t want me.

| Jamesbeam 49 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Their loss, guz.Have seen some smart comments from you. I am sure you’re doing fine.Maybe try again, at least you were on psych meds.You can become commander-in-chief these days by being off your meds. We live in interesting times.

| phillc73 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Paramedicine and nursing. These roles will adapt and use AI, but because they're still so hands-on, and there's already a shortage of staff in those roles in general, I don't see job cuts there.

| gnz11 50 days ago | parent | next [–] Job cuts no, but your next nurse might just be a "gig nurse" that bid the lowest for the job. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/21/healthcare-n...

| insane_dreamer 50 days ago | root | parent | next [–] PE is highly destructive to good healthcare

| OccamsMirror 48 days ago | root | parent | next [–] PE is highly destructive to anything it touches.

| sunny678 50 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] Agree, but can't learn it now- I am in a tech space.

| phillc73 50 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Plenty of tech happening in that space too.As examples, check out:Cosinuss: https://www.cosinuss.com/en/Medictool: https://www.medic-tool.com/LifesaverSim: https://www.lifesaversim.com/

| sminchev 47 days ago | prev | next [–] Communication skills. IF you can't express yourself, the AI won't be able to understand you. I see in the morning subway, people don't talk, they watch their devices. A whole generation prefer to scroll in social media, instead of talking between each other. I am interested to see how they will use the prompts for express themselves in an understandable way, for professional purposes.

| iExploder 48 days ago | prev | next [–] Soft / social skills. Any skill requiring engaging with the physical world (robots will take that over eventually but not just yet), digital world is already lost.Anyway why do you want skills? If it's for economic purposes we are nearing cut off period after which no amount of skill will enable social mobility. Either u managed to lock in capital by now or ur done kind of situation...

| markus_zhang 47 days ago | prev | next [–] Trade (protected by physical work + unions), especially those that are less repetitive;Military (still need humans in loop most of the time I guess, even for drones);Lawyers, accountants, some government jobs and anything that needs to send a human to the prison if something is messed up;Daycare/primary school/middle school teachers. Looks like parents still want their children to interact with humans after all;

| late_night_fix 50 days ago | prev | next [–] I's argue no specific tool is future proof.The real skill is getting comfortable learning new tools fast and discarding old ones without attachment.

| preetigagarwal 47 days ago | prev | next [–] Security skills are becoming more valuable not less. As AI writes more code, the attack surface grows faster than ever. Someone still needs to find and fix the vulnerabilities that AI introduces. Knowing how to think like an attacker — not just a builder — will always have value.

| aldanor 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Efficiently communicating with other human beings

| Areena_28 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Judgment in ambiguous situations is the one thing that's held up consistently. AI is good at defined tasks, bad at knowing when the task definition itself is wrong.Also, deep domain knowledge is the other one..... knowing what good output looks like in your field is something models can't fake convincingly at the edges.

| mathaic 40 days ago | prev | next [–] Philosophy and anything to do with animals.

| keiferski 48 days ago | prev | next [–] Not sure if this counts as a skill, but: having a wide base of knowledge that helps you know what to ask in the first place.AI is only as useful as the questions you bring to it. At least in its current form.

| bayarearefugee 50 days ago | prev | next [–] If LLMs have roughly peaked, then everything is safe except for things that are already being eaten away like translation and call center work.If they haven't and we have hit the exponential growth mark, nothing is safe and even the temporarily "safe jobs" will also suffer greatly from being crunched on both the supply and demand sides (there will be more labor supply for those jobs as the displaced try to flee to safe jobs, there will be less demand for the output of those jobs because the displaced will no longer have income to pay for those goods or services). And LLMs and robots will eventually come for many of those jobs too, likely at a rate that exceeds people's ability to retrain.Better hope that either things have peaked, or that we can somehow manage to stop treating all forms of socialism as evil or we're going to see the violent unmaking of modern society in our lifetimes.

| Krssst 50 days ago | parent | next [–] Robots require material resources and are quite difficult to produce. I wouldn't be surprised if we go through a period of time were intellectual work is outdated and most people are back to exhausting manual work. Basically, no middle class anymore, just some elites and many manual workers doing what the AI asks. I guess, to those future elites, humans would just be self-reproducing robots. (well robots like those we have now would definitely see use, but I am not sure about the timeline for general-purpose robots that can do many things including assemble themselves).I don't have a strong belief this will happen however, and I hope it does not.

| Ashbt 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Meta skills: https://share.google/aimode/Fhd3GapqYWJ5vBBXo

| sunny678 50 days ago | parent | next [–] Seems interesting. Thanks for sharing

| SilentM68 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Psychology, psychiatry, medical, construction, auto repair, at least in the short term. The jury is still out on the long-term view which is a bit hazy at the moment :(

| cantrevealname 50 days ago | parent | next [–] I agree with construction and auto repair, but why psychology and psychiatry? If there's anything that's perfect for LLMs, it self-diagnosis and self-treatment by chatting with them. Other than prescribing drugs, an AI system could do everything a psychologist or psychiatrist does.The only significant barrier is that it's not condoned by the medical establishment and by law (which I imagine will indeed take a few years to work around).

| SilentM68 49 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Those are good points, and true to be sure. But I specified that in the short term they are future proof. Long term, no one can predict.I, just feel like LLMs are not currently at the point where the medical profession can trust them with most things medical, including a psychological diagnosis since they are habitually hallucinating. This is why some of the medical professions, including those mentioned above, are safe in the short term, more or less. By the way, you can see the disclaimers by all these chat agents that they are not medical professionals. It's more of legal-protection clause than caring advice, obviouslyOne wrong diagnosis or comment, and the patient could either do self-harm or harm others, given the lack of real care available and the amount of people suffering from mental illnesses, due to societal pressures.Honestly, given the pace of all things AI, I don't see any profession to be AI-proof.

| pacovook 48 days ago | prev | next [–] Fine artist, like painting and sculpture? Don't think people will $50k from a gallery for an AI painting

| arjunthazhath 48 days ago | prev | next [–] HARDWARE is gonna see a renaissance.

| akashwadhwani35 48 days ago | parent | next [–] so true

| harambae 49 days ago | prev | next [–] The body of the question is different from the title IMOBut for the title question I’d say building houses.

| tughvn 46 days ago | prev | next [–] Efficiently communication skills, as many have pointed out

| rawgabbit 48 days ago | prev | next [–] 1. Domain knowledge.2. Writing and structured thinking.3. Data sense and judgment.4. Leadership and negotiation.

| 0xCE0 50 days ago | prev | next [–] The answer is of course obvious, and applies to any business domain over time and hypes: how to sell, that is, being a real old-fashioned salesman, who has ability to make deals, who can bring money in.

| zhouzhao 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Critical thinking.

| benj111 50 days ago | parent | next [–] Unfortunately that's a skill that makes you less employable.

| 10keane 50 days ago | prev | next [–] management and critical thinking.management - it occured to me that giving instructions to agent is very similar to giving instructions to human employees - even the best of them make mistakes.i learnt that asking claude code to "investigate for 3 potential root causes" is more effective than "investigate the root cause" in bug fix. this blows my mind as i realize that agent can be lazy, can be careless, and we can give better instruction to prevent that.another reason why i said this is that giving enough context and defining blast boundary is more efficient than hand-holding/micromanaging and checking every tool call for agents. the management skill for human employees also works here.critical thinking - you just need to have your judgement on the seemingly solid but actually halluncinated agent bs.

| aldielshala 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Communication, with both human and AI.

| sunny678 49 days ago | parent | next [–] You mean prompting and soft skills

| aldielshala 49 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Yes, maybe context engineering (prompting is just one part of it) and soft skills.

| insane_dreamer 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Barbers, plumbers.

| m8ven 46 days ago | prev | next [–] eating. sleeping. that's it

| naveen99 49 days ago | prev | next [–] Learn from cats.

| omertt27 50 days ago | prev | next [–] adaptability will be always important i think

| seydor 47 days ago | prev | next [–] Politicians

| mykowebhn 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Restaurant work

| ensocode 50 days ago | prev | next [–] small scale farming to get your kids fed

| fabulousman 50 days ago | prev | next [–] Maths

| bartvk 50 days ago | parent | next [–] It depends on the level, though. You can easily ask AI to "Calculate intersection with X-axis for sin(2πx)" and I found many and I mean MANY errors in my textbook.

| pbkompasz 50 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Could you share some?

| throwaw12 50 days ago | prev | next [–] networking - to find gigsbootlicking - to get promoted after you find your giggood communication/leadership - to keep yourself in that high position

| iExploder 47 days ago | parent | next [–] Every hour spent on acquiring hard skills is an hour wasted that could be otherwise better spent on licking someone elses boot!

| | crawlwright 49 days ago | prev | next [2 more] [flagged]

| OccamsMirror 48 days ago | parent | next [–] I believe the technical term is "meat shields".

| | alegd 50 days ago | prev | next [2 more] [flagged]

| qsera 48 days ago | parent | next [–]

knowing how to give AI good context.It is really ironic that humans are now trying to find patterns in the behavior of a program that works by finding patterns in human behavior.

| num42 50 days ago | prev [–] Metrology, mechanical and materials science engineering, manufacturing and tool engineering, precision engineering, and electrical and electronics engineering, combined with being a generalist and having one specialization in physical or hardware engineering along with computation.As people often say, matter, energy, and information are the fundamentals of everything. I think we need mathematics, analytic philosophy, the arts and humanities, and physics too. Sorry we need every skill. /s

| guzfip 50 days ago | parent [–]

Metrology, mechanical and materials science engineering, manufacturing and tool engineering, precision engineering, and electrical and electronics engineering, combined with being a generalist and having one specialization in physical or hardware engineering along with computation.Now how does one get that if they aren’t an 18 year old in college with years and gorillions of dollars in government money to blow on an EE/CE program.

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