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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 i

• hsbauauvhabzb 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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
    • rowyourboat 3mo ago
      You're being sarcastic, but...
• xantronix 3mo ago
  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.
  • groundzeros2015 3mo ago
    Why would you assume that?
    • xantronix 3mo ago
      The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point.
      • Retric 3mo ago
        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.
        • tonyhart7 3mo ago
          or they just need really capable AI that are better than 99% human
          • TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
            If that ever happens the limiting factor will be management. Perhaps that's where it gets interesting.
        • wiether 3mo ago
          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 3mo ago
            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.
            • geon 3mo ago
  • plaguuuuuu 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
      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 3mo ago
        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 3mo ago
          "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 3mo ago
            > 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.
            • 3mo ago
  • lordkrandel 3mo ago
    Get out of thay world ASAP. There are still companies actually doing work instead of burning investors money
  • cultofmetatron 3mo ago
    as a CTO, its been crazy pushing back against these AI mandates. Almost always from VCs and non technical contributors. I'm pretty liberal about using AI but it has its limits. I think of them like swim fins. you can dive much deeper with them but if you didn't earn that ability, you can find yourself too deep to get your next breath of air. likewise, its important to never let the ai do work more than one ring outside of your knowledge base lest it do things you dont' understand and therefore can't audit.
    • hibikir 3mo ago
      It's not unreasonable to mandate that one should try it for some of its safer uses, or to spend time teaching people what the good uses are, which keep growing... but mandating a significant part of the day-to-day is telling employees they have no agency in how they achieve objectives. For people that aren't technical, it shows they aren't good at the social either.
    • surgical_fire 3mo ago
      The company I work for, thankfully, is a bit like that. The AI initiative there is a lot more in "let's try to find ways that this can be useful" instead of "let's use this to the maximum extent". So far it has been a mostly positive experience. We could figure out ways where it saves time instead of burning money in a token pit. The only downside is that code reviews are becoming the bottleneck. Every PR still needs a human reviewer, and that is not changing. The influx of PRs increased slightly, the rate of reviews not as much.
  • murphomatic 3mo ago
    Our AI mandate is coming. I'm trying hard to be a voice of reason, but it's bows and arrows against the lightning, I'm afraid.
• rebuilder 3mo ago
  To the boardroom class, employees are tools as well.
  • mpyne 3mo ago
    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.
    • delusional 3mo ago
      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.
      • deleted 3mo ago
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      • synecdoche 3mo ago
        I find this comment, on it's face, very hard to understand. An apparent abundance of qualifiers without definition. Is this an example of circular reasoning? It seems to me that the text is saying that generalised labour produces value, but then only specific labour produces actual value. What is the difference between actual value and value in general? Is some value somehow more valuable that other? Are we even speaking the same language? Is this just making shit up as you go along and hope nobody notices because the general idea is appealing?
• pjmlp 3mo ago
  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.
• BoingBoomTschak 3mo ago
  The word "lesson" implies that there'll be some learning involved in the process. I got your joke, right?
• crimsonalucard 3mo ago
  [dead]
• Grimblewald 3mo ago
  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.
  • vickychijwani 3mo ago
    I like the analogy with brownian motion, thanks for sharing that
  • ozgung 3mo ago
    Good analogy but Brownian motion is not the only type of motion in the nature. Constraints give the direction in a physical system, not humans. Evolution is the best example. I think objections to the Theory of Evolution and some objections to the feasibility of Artificial Intelligence have many similarities. Most people (because of their world view) assume an “intelligent” Designer is mandatory for organisms to evolve and for nature to work. They assume the nature is “random” and directionless by itself. Only a higher (supernatural) intelligence (God) can give it a “direction”. So “intelligence” is basically an external, supernatural and unexplainable (since its above our nature we don’t have access to it) phenomenon. The exact same argument applies to AI. But instead of atoms and DNA we have bits and activations. AI is random and directionless. Only a superior intelligence (a human) can give it a direction. Like nature, a computer can’t have intelligence by itself. Intelligence is external, supernatural/supercomputational and unexplainable. You can’t compute it, you can’t understand it, you can’t replicate it. This is because human intelligence, like God’s intelligence, lives in a supernatural realm. Some people even believe that it’s the same thing as (or a copy of) the divine intelligence. Some others don’t believe that but still have trouble accepting their human intelligence is not a unique phenomenon and not something above this mundane world. There, I said it. I think without this warning most of the debate and “philosophical” arguments against AI are useless. They are more like wishful thinking, shaped with the world view of the person. It’s about belief and not technical feasibility. From the technical perspective, most of these rehired Ford folks will be replaced again in a few years. This was about overestimating the short-term effects of the automation. But in the longer term Ford will indeed have much less humans. BTW, this new trend of “extracting the knowledge of skilled senior workers to replace them” deserves its own name. This is not a good thing for humanity, but this is exactly what they are doing.
• Rexxar 3mo ago
  > 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.
  • a_sewer_rat 3mo ago
    Someone should tell this to Bungie’s Justin Truman
• peter_retief 3mo ago
  who would have thought :)
• moneytide1 3mo ago
  > Speed should only come as a side-effect of quality. "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." - US Navy SEALs
• deleted 3mo ago
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