Why can AI replace entry level software engineers, lawyers and financial analysts. But why do people think it’s so difficult to replace people trades with AI and robotics?

This Reddit thread surfaces a genuinely important technical distinction practitioners should internalize. Current LLMs excel at token-prediction over structured symbolic domains like code, legal text, and financial models, achieving near-human performance on bar exams and coding benchmarks like HumanEval at 90-plus percent. Physical trades require real-time sensorimotor integration, unstructured 3D environment perception, and sub-millimeter force feedback that today's robotic systems handle poorly outside tightly controlled factory settings. Boston Dynamics and Figure robots remain expensive, brittle, and narrow compared to a journeyman HVAC technician diagnosing a novel system configuration. The economic and technical gap between manipulating tokens and manipulating physical reality remains enormous and underappreciated by software-centric AI commentators.