It's using a bad tool to try to aim at something reasonable-ish: Developers not taking advantage of the tools in places where it's very easy to get use out of them. I have coworkers like that: One spent 3 days researching a bug that Claude found in 10 minutes by pointing it at the logs in the time window and the codebase. And he didn't even find the bug, when Claude nailed it in one.

But is this something that is best done top to bottom, with a big report, counting tokens? Hell no. This is something that is better found, and tackled at the team level. But execs in many places like easy, visible metrics, whether they are actually helping or not. And that's how you find people playing JIRA games and such. My worse example was a VP has decided that looking at the burndown charts from each team under them, and using their shape as a reasonable metric is a good idea.

It's all natural signs of a total lack of trust, and thinking you can solve all of this from the top.

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sarchertech 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The thing is we’ve always had people who spend more time on their tooling or learn different tools and perform better.

I’ve seen people use notepad and I’ve seen people who are so good at vim that they look like they’re on editing code directly with their mind.

Your particular example is extreme and my guess is the coworker is just not great at debugging. I use Claude all the time for finding bugs, but it fails fairly frequently though. I think there’s probably advantage to having some people who don’t use it that often, so you have someone to turn to when it fails.

I’m definitely not exercising my debugging skills as much as I used to and I’m fairly confident they’ve atrophied.

	▲	toraway 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That, and an objective comparison measuring time saving should include all time that went into learning, configuring, maintaining the tool. And ideally a sample large enough to capture any wasted time from dead ends in other tasks where the tool may actually fail to solve the problem. I’ve definitely lost a couple hours here and there from when it felt like I was right on the verge of CC fixing something but never actually got there and finally had to just do it myself anyway.

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johnnyanmac 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But execs in many places like easy, visible metrics, whether they are actually helping or not.

Most execs didn't get where they were by being truly helpful and adding value to the company. They played the game long enough to know that politics trumps accomplishments. The rest from there is the ability to weave a good story (be it slightly or completely exaggerated).

It's not even about trust. It's about incentives in a structure that is dog-eat-dog. Rugged individualism in a corporate structure is a self defeating prophecy. But it's inevitable when executives extract from the company instead of rising the tides for all ships. And shareholders reward it.

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patrick451 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There are countless other stories about the AI's spouting complete bullshit. This easily wastes as much time as they save.