The problem is management and short-term stock-holder interest. If some spreadsheet cowboy convinces some C-level suit that this is the way to go, and it works now, not in 6 months time, IT and development will be made to bear the brunt. Same with AI. The most ardent supporters of its use seem to be the higher-ups, $$$ in their eyes. Convinced of their superior decision skills, they can wreck the place, or in their view, rightsize the help desk/IT/dev departments. Then they get a bonus for delivering cost reductions, and move to another job before being held accountable.

I've already seen (second hand, through my wife) a complete cycle of this:

- LLMs make writers (for the kind of formulaic crap we ghost-write) unnecessary. We're firing 75% of our writing + editing staff, mostly the writers. Editors will now use LLMs to do the whole thing.

- What do you mean even our best editor and best LLM-user is still taking 90% as long as the total writing + editing process before, and their parallel-work capabilities are down, so throughput is down to a trickle and also every remaining worker is pissed off about how intensely frustrating working with LLMs is so the whole team's grumbling about leaving? Of fuck, we committed (without asking you, naturally, and ignoring a ton of explicit warnings that this was a growing problem) to deadlines!

- Hires back nearly all the writers as contractors

Exactly! This is what I always say when people claim "AI won't replace jobs because jobs still need expertise !" While the cause statement is absolutely true, the people with the power/money don't believe it to be true (or, in some cases, don't care if it's true) and can get a quick win for the shareholders.

I wonder if there's gonna be a big reckoning of these "AI-first" companies suddenly people to fix their shitty vibe coded stuff. Ooh, new job title: AI fixer, minimum salary, $1m/yr, with RSU.

We have an actual department that just supports spreadsheets and power bi reports for the c suite. That's all the poor bastards do.