| ▲ | murphomatic 6 hours ago |
| Get ready for this to become a common theme. Boardrooms are still engaged in the fever-dream promise that AI will solve all their problems, particularly those involving pesky humans. The simple lesson of "AI is another tool" will be a hard-learned one. Some industries, such as software, will take more time to mop themselves into a corner before they discover that velocity should never be a first-class concern. Speed should only come as a side-effect of quality. |
|
| ▲ | xantronix 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again. |
| |
| ▲ | plaguuuuuu 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world. At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review. | | |
| ▲ | tudelo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It is extremely easy to burn tokens if that is required.
Explore this codebase.
Team x wants y feature, research and generate a full plan.
What does feature x in codebase y actually mean?
Analyze code coverage in x.
Map out code flow and find concurrency bugs in y
and on and on... Oh and my favorite: Use 5 independent subagents to review code change and summarize the findings, and for any finding determine if they are real concerns | | |
| ▲ | cevn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The other day claude spun up 100 agents and took an hour to type 30k token document to tell me something was impossible to do. I googled it, found a pr on the 3rd link that showed it was possible. "You're absolutely right!!" | | |
| ▲ | lostglass 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | "You can't use reflection if the classes aren't in the class loader" "I see why you would think that however this should work, let's test it." -Claude, burning my company's money. | | |
| ▲ | mikae1 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Claude, burning my company's money. And the planet... While I experience some schadenfreude when reading these comments from programmers, I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end. |
|
| |
| ▲ | ffsm8 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is value in doing all that too, though. Admittedly with strong diminishing returns, but it's there. Eg by doing that I was able to develop non-essential features which increased our quality of life for devs last month without going through our PO who'd need to price it - because that does let's you create changes in an incredibly hands off manner with miniscule amount of time investment if you already know what you want to achieve, and how the end result should be... Admittedly, that's a pretty narrow usecase which is rarely the case- but if it is... | |
| ▲ | parasti an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Just ask it to "use a workflow" and it'll spin un dozens of agents burning your token allowance in parallel. | |
| ▲ | flowerthoughts 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And the more uselessly amusing thing is that the manager who requests higher tokens usage probably also doesn't care whether it's producing slop or not. Metric goes up; managers happy until CFO is reported income hasn't gone up as quickly as costs, and that makes the CEO optimistically concerned. Never expect underlying thought from a messenger. It's interesting that LLM barely had any vetting period or experimentation phase. Suddenly everyone was supposed to test it in production, it seems. | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Afterwards, give me 5 separate documents with 10 plans each for how to implement this. Triple check your work, make no mistakes. Then give me 3 distinct executive summaries emphasizing different areas. |
| |
| ▲ | EmanuelB 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn Get ready for that promotion! | | |
| ▲ | HiPhish a minute ago | parent [-] | | I love how the images are an AI-generated fever dream. Normally I hate those things, but in this case it's a perfect match for the AI clown world. |
| |
| ▲ | tgv 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's corporate eco-terrorism. How did we sink so low? | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Stock prices have always been more important than a habitable environment. The really stupid thing is that shareholders are also rewarding useless burns of their money. It's capitalist Stakhanovism. | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If your manager is asking you why you aren’t hammering 500 nails a day with your company hammer under threat of replacement, you’re going stop worrying about the surfaces your driving nails in to and simply start swinging. | | |
| ▲ | tgv 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 1. It is not comparable. Idk the environmental toll of 500 nails, but tokenmaxxing definitely has one. Especially when it doesn't have any provable and substantial benefit. 2. Your responsibility doesn't end because your manager says so. 3. It's not just about the employee who actually burns the tokens, but also about the rest of it: the idiocy up to the top, and the irresponsibility of the companies offering the service. |
| |
| ▲ | oblio 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's even worse/better. It's corporate financial malpractice. At some point they will wake up after the AI psychosis dies down. That might take 1-2 more years. After that most companies will realize that AI is a tool, as OP said, and adjust budgets accordingly. | | |
| ▲ | delusional 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Importantly, "adjusting budgets" here is for most companies, you know the ones you have to fight to even get an IDE license, a euphemism for zeroing the budget. | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | rwmj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's also the easiest way to determine if your management has AI psychosis or not, and make corresponding decisions about whether to stay with the company. | | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | No one is leaving their job because their manager is too obsessed with AI. Especially not in this economy/job market. |
| |
| ▲ | KronisLV 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'd unironically like my workplace to cover AI spend for me. There's so, so much mechanically simple but time consuming refactoring that should be done but nobody ever does that because there's never enough free time. Or even various utility scripts and at least finding out of date docs (or writing very basic ones where none exist, though it'd be hard to get them not to feel like slop writing). Or figuring out what additional custom linter rules would be useful, how to improve the CI pipelines and so on. If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription, I could make a large part of the technical backlog disappear (relatively safely). | | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription Most of the tasks you have listed you could do with Haiku, GPT mini, or DeepSeek Flash. An Anthropic Max 20x subscription is considerable overkill for this sort of task. |
|
| |
| ▲ | lordkrandel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Get out of thay world ASAP. There are still companies actually doing work instead of burning investors money | |
| ▲ | groundzeros2015 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why would you assume that? | | |
| ▲ | xantronix 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point. | | |
| ▲ | Retric 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Companies ultimately don’t have a choice here. They can do what works, or they can fail. Large enough companies with enough inertia can do really dumb things for a while, but even giants fall. | | |
| ▲ | lordkrandel 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | If it works. Where is this 100x software output? I just see more AI tools to check it does not derail, but where is the actual software revolution, where all developers are fired? I'm still closing AI PR slop here | |
| ▲ | wiether 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm confused by your answer because I can't tell which way you're going. Are you saying companies have to mandate AI everywhere? Or are you saying the exact opposite, as your second sentence suggests? I haven't heard of AI mandates in small companies, only in big ones. | | |
| ▲ | delusional 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | He's just making a general "efficient markets" argument. He's arguing that whatever happens in a couple of years will be the right thing, no matter what is happening now. That is essentially not an argument in any direction. | | |
| |
| ▲ | tonyhart7 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | or they just need really capable AI that are better than 99% human |
| |
| ▲ | lazide 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That just means he’s not a middle manager or exec, not that he isn’t cashing the check from someone who is clearly a short sighted idiot. | | |
| ▲ | xantronix 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It wasn't meant to be a literal statement, more just a reflection that the situation is so bleak that I cannot imagine a better future; anybody expressing even a little bit of it seems to me like a somebody who has not been crushed into compliance through force. Quoting the host of the recurring Quiz Broadcast sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look: "Books mention 'hope'. What was 'hope'?" |
|
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | Grimblewald 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Velocity implies direction, AI is just speed sans direction, AI only workflows are just really fast brownian motion centred on training corpus mean for a task. Humans can give it direction, how good that direction is depends on human expertise. We still need the humans, there are no cases for novel useful work I can think of, or have seen, where humans are no longer required. |
| |
|
| ▲ | pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As we have seem with offshoring, any company whose main business isn't producing software, isn't coming back in-house, even if the quality for engineering team themselves sucks. |
|
| ▲ | Rexxar an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > velocity should never be a first-class concern Some people have not learned that velocity at small scale without global synchronisation is just thermal agitation. |
| |
|
| ▲ | rebuilder 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| To the boardroom class, employees are tools as well. |
| |
| ▲ | FridgeSeal 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I wish I could work somewhere where I’m _marginally_ less subject to the whims of the Boardroom class. I’m sure they’re having a great time, and getting filthy rich doing it, but I don’t enjoy having my livelihood attached to the consequences of their repeatedly-stupid-behaviour. | |
| ▲ | mpyne 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No doubt, but the issue I think they keep running into is they don't understand how useful those "human tools" are, so they keep trying to replace the functions humans provide with AI, without realizing all the other functions that the humans also provided. | | |
| ▲ | VBprogrammer an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | My partner had booked a table for lunch for us and our friends. Six adults and six children. One of the couples had forgotten a party earlier that morning, so we tried to move the booking a couple of hours later. Unfortunately the only phone line was answered by an AI bot who stubbornly refused to move the booking, simply telling us there was no availability within an hour of our booking. Fortunately my partner was passing so was able to go in and speak to someone is person who was happy to move our booking back 2 hours. Lunch and drinks for our party must have come to several hundred pounds. I'd estimate our party was between a third or maybe half of all the customers there. Had we chosen to book elsewhere I bet someone would still be patting themselves on the back about how clever they were to save a few minutes a day on actually answering the phone to actual customers. | |
| ▲ | delusional 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Marx had a way to think about that. He would distinguish between labour as in generalized socially necessafy labour, and specific skilled labour. Value is measure in generalized labour, since that the universal measure of human effort. The genealized amount of time a human being must spend to produce something from its parts. Generalized labour is also what's bought from labourers. You don't pay them to do something specific, you pay them to labour in general. This contrasts against specific labour, which is whats actually required in the moment. Generalized labour power must be the right kind of specific labour to actually produce anything of value. The AI leaders have been told that AI is labour. To the extent that it currently is, which I believe is only the case because the market hasn't adjusted, it's not the right specific labour to male anything valuable. | | |
|
|
|
| ▲ | BoingBoomTschak 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The word "lesson" implies that there'll be some learning involved in the process. I got your joke, right? |
|
| ▲ | hsbauauvhabzb 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nah, that’s the future executives problem, the current executive gets to brag about how their AI integrations cut costs while maintaining an acceptable yet enshittified quality |
| |
| ▲ | number6 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh, it solves two problem at once: overpaying wages and overdelivery of quality. You just have to get the input coefficient right. The least amount of acceptable quality with the least amount of costs is the sweet spot. /s | | |
|
|
| ▲ | crimsonalucard 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [dead] |
