if one works at a place like ryandrake for sure so much this :) also ask it to ultrathink and be super comprehensive, you’ll be promoted in no time

Brilliant!

I was that manager. I dunno about your senior leader but with me it was coming from a healthy place. After a few months of ra-ra from the C suite about how we were now an AI-first company (we're a tech consultancy building one-off stuff for customers) and should be using it in all our customer projects, I asked the question, quite reasonably I thought, "so am I going to offer lower prices to my clients, or am I going to see much higher achieved margins on projects I sell?"

And, crickets. In practice I haven't seen any efficiencies despite my teams using AI in their work. I am not seeing delivery coming in under estimates, work costs what it always cost, we're not doing more stuff or better stuff, and my margins are the same. The only difference I can see is that I've had to negotiate a crapton of contractual amendments to allow my teams to use AI in their work.

I still think it's only good for demos and getting a prototype up and running which is like 5% of any project. Most technical work in enterprise isn't going from zero to something, it's maintaining something, or extending a big, old thing. AI stinks at that (today). You startup people with clean slates may have a different perspective.

This is absolutely dead-on.

What do you mean by this? My understanding is that Stakhanovism is kind of the opposite of US work culture in that it lionizes the worker and social contributions

The President is a Soviet planted saboteur, it's not that surprising, it's coming from the top down. I assume this is the US manufacturing revolution he has in mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

>In 1988, the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda stated that the widely propagandized personal achievements of Stakhanov actually were puffery. The paper insisted that Stakhanov had used a number of helpers on support work, while the output was tallied for him alone.

It's social contagion. "Management", as a class, is actually fairly vulnerable to this; this is only the latest of a long, long line of magical things which will make everything more productive. Remember Six Sigma (as a white-collar cult, rather than as a manufacturing methodology)?

Collective hysteria does not need to be planned. Sometimes things just fall into place, just like the conditions for a hurricane.

It seems to me like too many yearly bonuses are tied to AI implementation, due to FOMO amongst C-levels. The hype trickles down to developers afraid that they won't get hired in the new AI economy.

I don't think there's a conspiracy, just a storm front of perverse incentives.

Spending billions of dollars on marketing works.

There’s no conspiracy.

People making the decisions are 5%, they delegate to managers who delegate to their teams and all the way down.

Decision makers (not the guy who thinks corner radius should be 12 instead of 16, obviously) want higher ROI and they see AI working for them for high level stuff.

At low level things are never sane.

Before AI it was offshore. Now it’s offshore with AI.

Prepare for chaos, the machine priests have thrown open the warp gate. May the Emperor have mercy for us.

The problem is, the shit that's made up will be used to justify the decision as a success and ensure the methodology continues.

If the corporate directive was to share "if AI has helped and how" I would agree. But my company started that way and when I tested the new sql query analysis tool and reported (nicely and politely with positive feedback too) that it was making up whole tables to join to (assuming we had a simple "users" table with email/id columns which we did not have due to being a large company with purposefully segmented databases. The users data was only ever presented via api calls, never direct dB access).

My report was entirely unacknowledged along with other reports that had negative findings. The team in charge published a self-report about the success rate and claimed over 90% perfect results.

About a year later, upper management changed to this style of hard requiring LLM usage. To the point of associating LLM api calls from your intellij instance with the git branch you were on and requiring 50% llm usage on a per-pr basis otherwise you would be pip-ed.

This is abusive behavior aimed at generating a positive response the c suite can give to the board.

It's not a good-faith question to say "here's a new technology, write about how it made you more productive" and expect the answer to have a relationship with the truth. You're pre-ordaining the answer!

To leverage that hacker ethos for maximum synergy, you'll need to empower a holistic and agile mindset. This allows you to pivot toward a disruptive paradigm and monetize your scalable core competencies across the entire ecosystem.

Embody a slave mindset

AI criticism and pushback.

When you say "AI cannot do my job, [insert whatever reason you find compelling]" Execs only hear "I am trying to protect my job from automation".

The executives have convinced themselves that the AI productivity benefits are real, and generally refuse to listen to any argument to the contrary. Especially from their own employees.

This impedes their ability to evaluate productivity data; If a worker fails to show productivity, it can't be that AI is bad, because that'd mean the executives are wrong about something. It must be that the employee is sabotaging our AI efforts.

Front-line workers have a conflict of interest (AI making their jobs easier may lead to layoffs); they're incentivized to be productive, but not so productive that they or a peer they like ends up without a job. That conflict of interest becomes extremely strong when most companies around them are already conducting layoffs, they already know people personally who've been laid off, and hiring remains at a low level compared to the 2010s and early 2020s.

Executives don't care about any of that and just want to make the organization more efficient. They don't care at all if the net effect is reducing headcount. In fact, they want that -- smaller teams are easier to manage and cheaper to operate in nearly every way. From an executive's standpoint, they have nothing to lose: the absolute worst-case scenario is it ends up over-hyped and in the process of rolling it out they learned who's willing to attempt change and who's not. They'll then get rid of the latter people, as they won't want them on the team because of that personality trait, and if AI tooling is broadly useful they won't even bother backfilling.

Well AI advocates keep insisting that the only reason for someone to not benefit is if they're resistant to change and too lazy to learn.

I've come to appreciate that using AI tools are a skill on it's own. Anything beyond auto code completion takes quite a bit of conscious effort to experiment with and then learn how to delegate to in a workflow. They often end up being valuable, but it did take some work to get out of my productivity 'local maximum' that maybe not everyone would naturally take on.

Execs more or less always assume that workers are some combination of stupid and lazy

After all if they weren't stupid and lazy they would be important execs, not unimportant workers

I think if LLMs improved or our usages of them improved to the point we became design/code reviewers full time many of us would leave to do something less boring and so in some ways there is a negative incentive to investigate different AI driven workflows.

That adds to the dissonance for sure.

At one company I worked at the executives sent out constant emails to everyone. It was part of the culture. After some layoffs HR leadership sent out a THREE PART email about how they were working on a very important project and how it took many many hours and meetings and so on.

The project was renaming the HR department ...

After that I sent all executive emails to a folder and did not read them, my mood improved drastically by not reading those emails.

You misread. It's not the CEO's blog.

In the early aughts, I was so adept at navigating my town because I delivered pizza. I could draw a map from memory. My directional skills were A+.

Once GPS became ubiquitous, I started relying on it, and over about a decade, my navigational skills degraded to the point of embarrassment. I've lived in the same major city now for 5 years and I still need a GPS to go everywhere.

This is happening to many people now, where LLMs are replacing our thinking. My dad thinks he is writing his own memoirs. Yeah pop, weird how you and everyone else just started using the "X isn't Y, it's Z" trope liberally in your writing out of nowhere.

It's definitely scary. And it's definitely sinister. I maintain that this is intentional, and the system is working the way they want it to.

Who is "the nephew"?

More precisely, each ‘AI’ is just a statistical grouping of a large subset of other (generally randomly) selected humans.

You don’t even get the same ‘human’ with the same AI, as you can see with various prompting.

It’s like doing a lossy compression of an image, and then wondering why the color of a specific pixel isn’t quite right!

Understand the first 70%.

With the 70% you then pitch "I have this" and some Corp/VC will buyout the remaining 30%.

They then in return hire engineers who are willing to lap the 70% slop, and fix the rest with more AI slop.

Your brother dies happily achieving their dream of being a bazillionaire doing nothing more than typing a few sentences in a search bar.

I think you might’ve missed this part from the post:

> AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating

It’s his boss. The type of boss who happily generates AI slop is likely to be the type of person who wants things done their way. The employee doesn’t have the power to block the merge if the boss wants it, thus the conversation on why it shouldn’t be merged needs to be considerably longer (or they need to quit).

"You're absolutely right— This code works by [...]"

Sadly, I've seen multiple well-known developers here on HN argue that reading code in fact isn't hard and that it's easy to review AI-generated code. I think fundamentally what AI-generated code is doing is exposing the cracks in many, many engineers across the board that either don't care about code quality or are completely unable to step back and evaluate their own process to see if what they're doing is good or not. If it works it works and there's no need to understand why or how.

The best way I’ve found to use LLM’s for writing anything that matters is, after feeding it the right context, take its output and then retype it in your own words. Then the LLM has helped capture your brain dump and organize it but by forcing yourself to write it rather than copy and paste… you get to make it your own. This technique has worked quite well with domains I’m not the best at yet like marketing copy. I want my shit to have my own voice but I’m not sure what to cover… so let the LLM help me with what to cover and then I can rewrite its work.

> So it's likely to become an arms-race.

And this is my real fear with the current crop of AI. That rather than improving the system to require less junk, we just use AI to generate junk and AI to parse AI-generated junk that another AI summarises ad infinitum…

Like, instead of building a framework that reduces boilerplate code, we use an LLM to generate that boilerplate instead (in a more complex and confusing manner than using a traditional template would).

Or, when dealing with legal or quasi-legal matters (like certifications), 1. Generate AI slop to fill a template 2. Use AI to parse that template and say whether it’s done 3. Use another to write a response.

Lots of paperwork happening near instantly, mostly just burning energy and not adding to either the body of knowledge or getting to a solution.

I appreciate that . I do spend a lot of time trying to be illustrative

Programming is almost never an objective in itself, it's a stepping stone to some other task. It's nice it pays a good living, but I have a feeling that's going away eventually.

Whatever the training can't assimilate, yet can be transmitted by users as analytic statements.

maybe chatgpt can help us understand it better

It's their company; we just work at it. If we want to exert more control in the workplace, we obviously need more power in the workplace. In the meantime, if they want the equivalent of their company's prefrontal cortex to be burned out with a soldering iron, that's their prerogative.

Not sure if this comment was written by a language model, or by a human pretending to be a language model.

See mostly on the subject but just slightly veering off context texts like this is why it's irritating. Arguing something not entirely relevant yet short of complete strawman and debating the tangents that were never brought up while never adding anything of substance.