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We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact o
by msy 5mo ago
We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time.
Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.
- Jagerbizzle 5mo agoI'm sorry to hear that you have people abusing their new superpowers. I run a team and am spending my time/tokens on serious pain points.
- casey2 5mo agoSuch as?
- nathancahill 5mo agoCreating stakeholder value
- natpalmer1776 5mo agoPromoting synergy
- Jagerbizzle 5mo agoI answered this in a different comment below, but a lot of the friction is around the amount of time it takes to test/review/submit etc, and a lot of this is centered around tooling that no one has had the time to improve, perf problems in clunky processes that have been around longer than anyone individual, and other things of this nature. Addressing these issues is now approachable and doable in one's "spare time".
- casey2 5mo agoThe point of that friction is to keep the human in the loop wrt code quality, it's not meant to be meaningless busywork. It's difficult to believe that you sustain the benefit of those systems. Anthropic and Microsoft publicly failed to keep up code quality. They would probably be in a better spot currently if they used neither, no friction, no AI. But that friction exists for a reason and AI doesn't have the "context length" to benefit from it. This the the difference between intentional and incidental friction, if your CI/CD pipeline is bad it should be improved not sidestepped. The first step in large projects is paving over the lower layer so that all that incidental friction, the kind AI can help with, is removed. If you are constantly going outside that paved area, sure AI will help, but not with the success of the project which is more contingent on the fact that you've failed to lay the groundwork correctly.
- serf 5mo ago>Such as? it's crazy that the experiences are still so wildly varying that we get people that use this strategy as a 'valid' gotcha. AI works for the vast majority of nowhere-near-the-edge CS work -- you know, all the stuff the majority of people have to do every day. I don't touch any kind of SQL manually anymore. I don't touch iptables or UFW. I don't touch polkit, dbus, or any other human-hostile IPC anymore. I don't write cron jobs, or system unit files. I query for documentation rather than slogging through a stupid web wiki or equivalent. a decent LLM model does it all with fairly easy 5-10 word prompts. ever do real work with a mic and speech-to-text? It's 50x'd by LLM support. Gone are the days of saying "H T T P COLON FORWARD SLASH FORWARD SLASH W W W". this isn't some untested frontier land anymore. People that embrace it find it really empowering except on the edges, and even those state-of-the-art edge people are using it to do the crap work. This whole "Yeah, well let me see the proof!" ostrich-head-in-the-sand thing works about as long as it takes for everyone to make you eat their dust.
- leptons 5mo agoThat's all well and good, but what happens when the price to run these AIs goes up 10x or even 100x. It's the same model as Uber, and I can't afford Uber most of the time anymore. It's become cost prohibitive just to take a short ride, but it used to cost like $7. It's all fun and games until someone has to pay the bill, and these companies are losing many billions of dollars with no end in sight for the losses. I doubt the tech and costs for the tech will improve fast enough to stop the flood of money going out, and I doubt people are going to want to pay what it really costs. That $200/month plan might not look so good when it's $2000/month, or more.
- Jach 5mo agoIt's an important concern for those footing the bill, but I expect companies really in the face of being impacted by it to be able to do a cost-benefit calculation and use a mix of models. For the sorts of things GP described (iptables whatever, recalling how to scan open ports on the network, the sorts of things you usually could answer for yourself with 10-600 seconds in a manpage / help text / google search / stack overflow thread), local/open-weight models are already good enough and fast enough on a lot of commodity hardware to suffice. Whereas now companies might say just offload such queries to the frontier $200/mo plan because why not, tokens are plentiful and it's already being paid for, if in the future it goes to $2000/mo with more limited tokens, you might save them for the actual important or latency-sensitive work and use lower-cost local models for simpler stuff. That lower-cost might involve a $2000 GPU to be really usable, but it pays for itself shortly by comparison. To use your Uber analogy, people might have used it to get to downtown and the airport, but now it's way more expensive, so they'll take a bus or walk or drive downtown instead -- but the airport trip, even though it's more expensive than it used to be, is still attractive in the face of competing alternatives like taxis/long term parking.
- girvo 5mo agoFor me/my team, I use it to fix DevProd pain points that I would otherwise never get the investment to go solve. Just removed Webpack for Rspack, for example. Could easily do it myself, which is why I can prompt it correctly and review the output properly, but I can let it run while I’m in meetings over more important product or architectural decisions
- tonyarkles 5mo agoI'll throw this out as something where it has saved literally weeks of work: debugging pathological behaviour in third-party code. Prompt example: "Today, when I did U, V, and W. I ended up with X happening. I fixed it by doing Y. The second time I tried, Z happened instead (which was the expected behaviour). Can you work out a plausible explanation for why X happened the first time and why Y fixed it? Please keep track of the specific lines of code where the behaviour difference shows up." This is in a real-time stateful system, not a system where I'd necessarily expect the exact same thing to happen every time. I just wanted to understand why it behaved differently because there wasn't any obvious reason, to me, why it would. The explanation it came back with was pretty wild. It essentially boiled down to a module not being adequately initialized before it was used the first time and then it maintained its state from then on out. The narrative touched a lot of code, and the source references it provided did an excellent job of walking me through the narrative. I independently validated the explanation using some telemetry data that the LLM didn't have access to. It was correct. This would have taken me a very long time to work out by hand. Edit: I have done this multiple times and have been blown away each time.
- jeppebemad 5mo agoThis seems to be a common denominator for what LLMs actually do well: Finding bugs and explaining code. Anything about producing code is still a success to be seen.
- zahlman 5mo ago> Prompt example: "Today, when I did U, V, and W. I ended up with X happening. I fixed it by doing Y. The second time I tried, Z happened instead (which was the expected behaviour). Can you work out a plausible explanation for why X happened the first time and why Y fixed it? Please keep track of the specific lines of code where the behaviour difference shows up." > The explanation it came back with was pretty wild. It essentially boiled down to a module not being adequately initialized before it was used the first time and then it maintained its state from then on out. Even without knowing any of the variable values, that explanation doesn't sound wild at all to me. It sounds in fact entirely plausible, and very much like what I'd expect the right answer to sound like.
- er2d 5mo agoIm convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money. I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or management who takes the fall) lmao.
- dpark 5mo agoDo you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved? You could argue that all the spending is wasted (doubtless some is), but insisting that the decision is being made in complete ignorance of financial concerns reeks of that “everyone’s dumb but me” energy.
- casey2 5mo agoMore that there is a poor incentive structure. Just like how PE can make money by leveraged buyouts and running businesses into the ground. Many of the financial instruments that make both that and the current AI bubble possible were legal then made illegal within the lifetimes of the last 16 presidents. Round-tripping used to be regulated. SPVs used to be regulated. If you need a loan you used to have to go to something called a bank, now it comes from ???? who knows drug cartels, child traffickers, blackstone, russians & chinese oligarchs. Even assuming it doesn't collapse tommorow why should they make double digit returns on AI datacenters built on the backs of Americans?
- dpark 5mo agoMy issue was not with criticism of the money being spent or how it’s being obtained. I was specifically commenting on this statement: > “Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money.” This isn’t meaningful criticism. This is a vacuous “those guys are so dumb”.
- temp8830 5mo ago
- kranke155 5mo agoWithout good management AI is just a new way to make terrible work in unprecedented quantities. With good management you will get great work faster. The distinguishing feature between organisations competing in the AI era is process. AI can automate a lot of the work but the human side owns process. If it’s no good everything collapses. Functional companies become hyper functional while dysfunctional companies will collapse. Bad ideas used to be warded off by workers who in some shape or form of malicious compliance just would slow down and redirect the work while advocating for better solutions. That can’t happen as much anymore as your manager or CEO can vibe code stuff and throw it down the pipeline for the workers to fix. If you have bad processes your company will die, or shrivel or stagnate at best. Companies with good process will beat you.
- briansm 5mo ago[flagged]
- hdndjsbbs 5mo agoMy team has also adopted this - it's much easier to add another layer than to refine or simplify what exists. We have AI skills to help us debug microservices that call microservices that have circular dependencies. This was possible before but someone would maybe notice the insane spaghetti. Now it's just "we'll fix it with another layer of noodles".
- mancerayder 5mo agoUnfortunately I saw this pre-AI with microservices, where while empowering developers with their beloved microservices, we create intense complexity and deployment headaches. AI will fix the slop with an obscuring layer of complexity on top.
- layoric 5mo agoAre you concerned this will just lead to coupling everywhere like microservices tend to do?
- hdndjsbbs 5mo agoOh the "micro services" are all coupled. To test anything you have to deploy a constellation of interdependent services with redundant DBs, each generating new IDs for the same underlying resource.
- vineyardmike 5mo agoThat's so interesting because where I work, the push was to "add one more API" to existing services, turning them into near monoliths for the sake of deployment and access. Still a mess of util and helper functions recursively calling each other, but at least it's one binary in one container.
- qingcharles 5mo agoMy main use of vibecoding is creating dozens of internal tools that have sped up tasks, or made tasks possible that were previously not. These tools would have taken weeks of time to build manually and would have been hard to justify, rather than just struggling with manual processes every now and again. AI has been life-changing in creating these kinda janky tools with janky UI that do everything they're supposed to perfectly, but are ugly as hell.
- Jach 5mo agoAre you able to describe any of those internal tools in more detail? How important are they on average? (For example, at a prior job I spent a bit of time creating a slackbot command "/wtf acronym" which would query our company's giant glossary of acronyms and return the definition. It wasn't very popular (read: not very useful/important) but it saved myself some time at least looking things up (saving more time than it took to create I'm sure). I'd expect modern LLMs to be able to recreate it within a few minutes as a one-shot task.)
- shimman 5mo agoIt's almost always a CRUD app or dashboard that no one uses while being extremely overkill for their use case. edit: LOL called it, a bunch of useless garbage that no one really cares about but used to justify corporate jobs programs.
- girvo 5mo agoAh but it looks cool and I can put it on my stack ranking perf eval
- Daishiman 5mo agoIf it's useless that's a you problem. I've been building CRUDs that would have taken me a month to get perfectly right in the span of 4-5 days which save an enormous number of human tech support hours.
- 5mo ago
- trhway 5mo ago>Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial. well, isn't that what AI can be used effectively for - to generate [auto]response to the AI generated content.
- cobolcomesback 5mo agoWe’re seeing the exact same where I work. Our main Slack channels have become inundated with “new tool announcements!”, multiple per day, often solving duplicate problems or problems that don’t exist. We’ve had to stop using those channels for any real conversation because most people are muting them due to the slop noise. And what’s worse is that when someone does build a decent tool, you can’t help but be skeptical because of all the absolute slop that has come out. And everyone thinks their slop doesn’t stink, so you can’t take them at their word when they say it doesn’t. Even in this thread, how are you to know who is talking about building something useful vs something they think is useful? A lot of people that have always wanted to be developers but didn’t have the skills are now empowered to go and build… things. But AI hasn’t equipped them with the skill of understanding if it actually makes sense to build a thing, or how to maintain it, or how to evolve it, or how to integrate it with other tools. And then they get upset when you tell them their tool isn’t the best thing since sliced bread. It’s exhausting, and I think we’ve yet to see the true consequences of the slop firehose.
- jeremyjh 5mo agoI'm sorry to hear you have such poor leadership.
- fc417fc802 5mo agoSounds like a workplace wide DDoS.
- Gigachad 5mo agoWe had a coworker vibecode an internal tool, do a bunch of marketing to the company at how incredible it is. Then got hired somewhere else. I just went and deleted it because it's completely broken at every edge case and half of the happy paths too.
- komali2 5mo ago> but sure do seem to help come promo time. I personally noticed this. The speed at which development was happening at one gig I had was impossible to keep up with without agentic development, and serious review wasn't really possibile because there wasn't really even time to learn the codebase. Had a huge stack of rules and MCPs to leverage that kinda kept things on the rails and apps were coming out but like, for why? It was like we were all just abandoning the idea of good code and caring about the user and just trying to close tickets and keep management/the client happy, I'm not sure if anyone anywhere on the line was measuring real world outcomes. Apparently the client was thrilled. It felt like... You know that story where two economists pass each other fifty bucks back and forth and in doing so skyrocket the local GDP? Felt like that.
- _zoltan_ 5mo agoThat's not on Claude, that's on the authors. Claude is a tool. It can be abused, or used in a sloppy way. But it can also be used rigorously. I've been beating my team to be more papercut-free in the tooling they develop and it's been rough mostly because of the velocity. But overall it's a huge net positive.