I noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :)

I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.

munificent 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No surprise. People like being more productive when they reap some of the benefits of that increased productivity. If you're expected to be 10x more productive but don't get a raise, all you're doing is stuffing money in some executive's pocket while your job security goes down.

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zmmmmm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm being heavily consulted to advise management on culture change towards AI. And my number one message is this: make the number one, first and potentially only beneficiary of AI use the individual staff members themselves. If they have more time now, DO NOT start filling that with more work for them to do. If they do more all by themselves accept it as a bonus (experience says this is overwhelming what will happen anyway). Whichever way it goes, let them experience directly the benefit, and let the culture change happen organically downstream from that.

I think all these companies front-loading staff reductions are actively sabotaging themselves in the worst possible way in this regard.

	▲	uzername 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would love to hear more about your advice and the coaching you are giving to management. We also have a strong push to prove evidence of climbing productivity with clearly state future staffing goals. I would like to advocate for this, at even partially, enhancement and quality of life improvement for IC folks.

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dzhiurgis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This.

I’m in a dreadful situation right now. Everyone in team got a claude account, but I’m a contractor so not for me (the only dev in team of 25 consultants). Someone in the team assigned me a task to review claude skill that opens up tickets for me. I’m not even using claude and official policy is no AI use for development…

Otherwise it’s been mixed bag. Pace definitely picked up and things that I actually enjoyed doing (UI) it does very well. Things that are actually hard (backend logic) it sucks and painted me in corner too many times.

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Aurornis 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Meta is on the extreme other end of this. The article opens with how they're now using AI to monitor how everyone uses their computers.

It's still insane to me that Meta thought this would be a good idea, or that employees would be comfortable with it even though they claim it's only used for anonymous AI training.

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loeg 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> using AI to monitor how everyone uses their computers

It's the other way around -- they're monitoring the computers to train AI.

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stasomatic 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Could this be a vector to poison the AI? I am not one for sabotage, just bad karma all in all, but not all are like that, and if one knows their days at ACME are numbered, the sirens start singing.

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sterlind 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

probably both, to be fair.

Meta may know that their employees will put up with it, given how depressing the job market is right now, but unhappy, cynical, resentful employees do not produce good software and innovations.

there's a real financial cost to treating devs like cage-raised livestock.

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loeg 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It's unclear how you would use LLMs to monitor clicks. Unless you just mean they're authoring the monitoring software with LLM assistance (which is probably right).

	▲	saratogacx 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		LLM generates context based on what's on the screen and associates it with the action taken by the user. It is less "point of time" but more "charting the flow" For example. page content of a PR with open comments, next action is to focus on the first comment. when a new PR with no open comments is shown the approve/push button is the next action. That starts a re-enforcement loop.

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jimbokun an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If they were competently evil they would have just done it quietly.

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abalashov 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I work by myself and feel no joy in using AI.

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stavros 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I work by myself an feel great joy. Today I talked to the AI about a feature I want to add to this week's project (https://www.writelucid.cc) and it had some good feedback. Later I refactored a big part of the code to simplify it (though I had to explain to Claude why this was possible), and it came out great.

I've never been happier, I can now build everything I've been wanting to build, really fast, with very few bugs.

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echelon 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I work for myself and I absolutely love AI.

I'm able to get 3x the work done. Greenfield stuff appears almost immediately.

My job is providing value to customers, not worshipping at the cathedral of software that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever.

Start treating software as ephemeral. It'll click.

This doesn't mean write low quality, unmaintainable software. It just means focus on getting stuff to your customer.

Writing in super typesafe languages with the highest level of strictness helps a lot. My AI stack is Rust and Typescript.

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saltyoldman 6 hours ago | parent [-]

This is the right way to look at things now. It might not always have the right track record, but AI built coding is more likely to have all the right permissions in place by default, most likely to copy existing patterns in your codebase, most likely to use the highest performance patterns and on top of all that, the spec will match what was asked of it.

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codemog 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What magical AI are you using? That’s not my experience at all.

	▲	loeg 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Claude with the 4.7 model is getting pretty good.
	▲	sterlind 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		there is a significant learning curve to using AI well. learning to stay skeptical and keep your brain on, developing an intuition of how much free reign to give it, writing ironclad specs and design docs and keeping them updated, making work easy to inspect, the tone you use talking to it, using one agent to critique another's work, etc. basically, AI will produce slop if left unattended. but it's not really its fault.. it's a process failing, like not supervising the interns. using AI the Right Way(tm) is a mental workout, quite a bit slower, but extremely rewarding (ime.)

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crooked-v 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can't even get LLMs to reliably use tool calls instead of bash, let alone follow existing patterns in a codebase.

	▲	echelon 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What do your prompts look like? Mine are pretty robust and articulate. I tend to write very lengthy instructions and include snippets of code, file paths, struct names, etc.

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jimbokun an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What’s your ROI for that $1000?

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6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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j-bos 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Been feeling that energy too, trying so hard to stay at my current big co job for the health insurance. But the draw is pulling me hard.

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foota 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I've generally assumed that AI would make developers get lower compensation because of the lowered quantity of developers required for the same output, but this raises the possibility of it actually increasing if more developers end up doing their own things instead of entering the broader labor market :)

	▲	loeg 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It could increase compensation by growing the economy. (E.g., perhaps counterintuitively, skilled immigration has this effect.)
	▲	bdangubic 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		the problem is that very few to none SWEs “doing their own thing” will ever make a penny out if it. whatever they do, if it actually makes a little traction, will be cloned and copied in a week by someone else. this whole idea that “we’ll see a 1-person billion dollar startup” is as silly as it gets

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amelius 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just wait until Big AI copies those businesses.