In many (most perhaps, but hard to know personally) companies, most people don't really understand the market they are in, the competition, their own products, the customers etc well enough to actually make good decisions. They also aren't likely to be around (or held responsible) for decisions as they play out over years. So what has historically happened is that people use proxies for good decisions and understanding - which are clever sounding documents and presentations.

This is a long winded way of saying "people made up clever/sensible sounding stuff". Now it's easier to do it with AI so the problem is worse. However, I'm not sure what you were looking for was ever really there - the "inscrutable machines" and "inscrutable incentives" were always quite inscrutable.

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Supermancho 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> most people don't really understand the market they are in, the competition, their own products, the customers etc well enough to actually make good decisions

"Product" studies this data and tells engineers what features they want. I am rarely instructed to A/B anything...excepting when it's defensive, to ensure the first rule of "don't interrupt the flow of money" is upheld, if at all. Most of the features are obvious improvements anyway (determined from plain conceptual planning, manual testing, and personal usage).

ofc I don't understand the customer or market or anything else. I'm paid with the expectation that I'm not going to share an opinion about it, especially since am never exposed to the raw data and inner circle decisioning except during a quarterly meeting...maybe. This is part of why AI is so successful. Humans in large organizations are specialized with little creative input and lots of mechanical process. Coding is largely a mechanical black box (turing machine) from the outside looking in. It works seamlessly because I don't need to know about the things product wants, so the AI doesn't know and everyone carries on faster than we were before.

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ryaniscool 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, people can be bad at their jobs. Yes, they can work in an industry and not know anything about the market but I refuse to believe that most people in most companies are just stumbling around faking it. I've never worked in a place like that. People like this exist but there are only a handful of people like this at every job.

The hyperbole feels like it's been contrived to fit into the classic AI counterpoint: But humans do this too!

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danielmarkbruce 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's more nuanced than that - I never said faking it, people usually believe what they write in those documents/ppts. And they do actually sound clever. Next time you see a decision of any magnitude, especially something which sounds "strategic" - trace the decision back as far as you can, consider the question from several angles, and really question it. You will see gaping holes, decisions made using "frameworks", anecdotes, hopes and dreams.

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TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not counterpoint, it's a fact. Can you say with your hand on your heart that the typical user experience was acceptable before AI arrived?

The reply was always "It's hard, and there are always going to be bugs."

But it's not just about bugs. It's about systems that are hard to use, poorly designed, and opaque. And sometimes the opacity is deliberate. There are dark patterns, outright lies about what happens to data, and more or less obvious grifts.

Was any of this truly great before AI arrived?

Is it an accident that you can't kill an MS365 subscription if you have more than X amount of GB on OneDrive, but the actual usage includes all your spam and email attachments, and it doesn't show up unless you know where to find it, and the location is very non-obvious, and so is the cleanup and deletion process?

Or that the eBay fee structure for international sales is utterly incomprehensible without automated help?

Or that if you select Subscribe and Save on Amazon your cancellation date is something like two weeks before the next delivery?

Or that if you sign up to Discord you need a mobile and an email for activation, but the site doesn't tell you this, and nor do tech support, who insist that a mobile is optional?

And software quality - services down, records lost, records stolen, photos and documents deleted - is a whole other layer on top of that.

AI is a moderately good solution to the first set of problems, because it can search and assemble information far more quickly than you can. So IME it's pretty damn good at tech support - not perfect, but better than DIY in many cases.

Software quality? We'll see what happens. If tech stacks collapse over the next couple of years we'll know AI was terrible thing.

I'm in the 'Too early to tell' camp. There's a fair chance they might. But if so it will be because of poor testing and design, not because of code review or lack of hand-rolled code. And it's not completely clear that quality levels wouldn't have dropped anyway.

	▲	skydhash an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Can you say with your hand on your heart that the typical user experience was acceptable before AI arrived? I remember using Windows XP (SP3) and Windows 7, Photoshop 7 and CS3, Office 2007, Blender, Winamp, Linuxmint and my computer was a joy to use (with HDD and slow ram) The internet was mostly a repository of knowledge and communication. I was online maybe 30 minutes every few days. This was around 2010.