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At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise. They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read
by ffsm8 2mo ago
At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise.
They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him
Complete brainrot
Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
- prymitive 2mo agoI think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day. Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
- surgical_fire 1mo agoMaybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
- bonoboTP 1mo agoThe ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is. Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.
- nmeagent 1mo agoI would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.
- bonoboTP 1mo agoMweh, I'm not a native English speaker. It's a definitely existing archetype, though, just like "Spießbürger" points at a thing in German.
- Jensson 1mo agoPeople who uses the word "obnoxious" are also obnoxious. There are many unpleasant words, you have to use some of them and people don't like any of them.
- nmeagent 1mo agoWould you refer to someone as a midwit in a typical office environment and expect your professional reputation to remain intact? If you were to do this on an ongoing basis for whatever reason, how long before you're asked to have a little chat with the folks in HR? Would you then attempt to explain it away as one of those unpleasant words that you just had to use? I want to be there for that conversation.
- bonoboTP 1mo agoDifferent context, different politeness rules. I bet you're fun at parties. An online forum is a relaxed space, like a town pub. HR isn't breathing down our necks here. Personal attacks are a different sort of thing. Using a word to describe in a comment some abstract situations and kinds of characters you see at the office is not a personal attack. There is not one single discourse norm to rule them all and calling out every little thing as too offensive is just annoying. Yeah, yeah there are no midwits, everyone is a unique little genius flower, yeah.
- q3k 1mo agoI do believe there's a tiny subset of people who are more productive with AI, in the same way that Erdős was more productive with amphetamine. But most who keep on going about their 10x productivity gain are indistinguishable from that one obnoxious guy at a party who won't shut up about his Ayahuasca retreat last spring. And they think they're Erdős.
- ratelimitsteve 1mo agothis is a great metaphor precisely because (outside those with paradoxical stimulant response) everyone thinks they're more productive on amphetamines and there's some naive evidence to that effect. the number of things you've actually done is significantly higher. the change in value created, as measured by the decrease in distance between where you are and the the goal you're shooting for, is unpredictable at best and slowly degrades as reliance increases. AI is like having a junior dev with an adderall addiction and an encyclopedic knowledge of coding syntax at your beck and call.
- kooi 1mo agoInfinitely, that's a stretch. Over the past year maybe 1.5x to 2.0x for me. As in: I can work on two projects at the same time with reduced amount of context switch. But that's it for me. Maybe I don't have the brains for 1000x terminal agent coding, but 2 parallel projects seems like my saturation point.
- aquariusDue 1mo ago[dead]
- xyproto 1mo agoIt's also very easy to dismiss everyone falling into the "AI trap" as being mediocre in the first place, though. But one just can't know this without having seen their work pre-AI.
- embedding-shape 1mo agoI think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too. Maybe this «spearheading AI person» just sucks at AI related stuff, as clearly that approach is bananas, but they could still be a OK developer.
- skydhash 1mo ago> Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too. If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them. I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow. No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools. Because they are great levers that lets you create more with less effort.
- vehemenz 1mo agoMany developers have narrow job descriptions, and the creative, productive uses of AI aren’t really obvious. Where it shines is glueing systems together or building one-off automations that would take days, or weeks, to figure out. It’s for things you don’t have time to figure out or didn’t think were possible.
- yoz-y 1mo ago
- ungreased0675 1mo agoI’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.
- jvanderbot 1mo agoSure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10? I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.
- derrida 1mo agowhile 0: x=ctrl-c("output error report") eval(ctrl-v(x)) sleep(10) user("Input...") something like this?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kooi 1mo agoAny competent developer knows there are limits to prompting. Personally I've found LLM's suck at multi-threaded applications. (Because I've been tempted by the ~agentic loop~ and been burned. Then I hand code the core logic and all is well). Woe to the developer who tries to prompt their way through this.
- wuliwong 1mo agoI hit a wall with creating a browser based video editor. Up until then, over the last year, I have been taking my hands off the wheel more and more and really have just become more and more productive. This video editor experience has forced me to get more into the code again.
- 1mo ago
- randusername 1mo agoAll paradigm shifts and regime changes happen because of a coalition of people that have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the current system. But I think we should decouple mediocrity from laziness. I haven't seen any team invest in the mentorship required to develop juniors in years, for example.
- strix_varius 1mo agoThe incentives for developing juniors have become misaligned as the expected stay in a company dwindled from decades to years to maybe year. It would make sense to develop juniors if most of their comp was a four year vest but that doesn't happen until later. And in your first year or two you're usually a net negative... This is even more true with AI.
- lelanthran 2mo ago> Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point So... back to a currency backed by gold?
- richrichardsson 2mo agoAren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold! Actual Intelligence could grasp this was a simple keytranspose typo...
- kruffalon 2mo agoI disagree... Actual intelligence might be[0] to know what typos (of any kind) are fun to riff off. Maybe this didn't hit the mark for you, but it got a chuckle out of me (especially considering the last hype before AI was crypto). ----- [0] I don't even try to figure that out anymore, in a few years I'll pick the definition that I think best captures my thoughts
- dwedge 2mo ago> ... See that way too often in comments like this. Anyway, it was pretty likely they knew it was a typo, it was just a funny response.
- richrichardsson 2mo agoMy mistake, I was under the impression Reddit was the place for facetious "funny" comments.
- dwedge 1mo agoLinkedIn is the place for mid-intellectual condescension with an ellipsis at the end.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- pringk02 2mo ago
- gjvc 2mo ago>Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea yes you are
- chii 1mo agoHe's basically asking other people to do his job for him, because he knows that the AI doesn't truly do it well enough. I would say to him that if he wants me to do his job, he needs to pay me his salary.
- datakan 1mo agoMy VP boss calls me 6 times a day to help him understand his copilot responses and asks why we aren't doing what copilot says we should do. I then have to spend multiple hours explaining why. His peers call him to understand their copilot responses which he then copilots and calls me to help interpret. On and on and on
- 72deluxe 1mo agoThis sounds like true hell. I am very sorry.
- snickerer 1mo agoNo, that's not hell yet. The boss in this case knows their own limitations and asks the technical person to help. True hell is when the boss thinks AI most be more knowing than the human. 'But Claude said it, do it!'
- brlewis 1mo agoHave you tried putting those explanations into your repo?
- natsucks 1mo agowow. what a nightmare.
- hoppp 1mo agoSounds to me like developer jobs are not going away after all. Somebody needs to understand what the AI communicates. Sounds more like job security to me.
- ForHackernews 1mo agoOn the contrary, I kind of love this as form of malicious compliance. I'd wager money that the PO/BAs have been demanding "comprehensive documentation" for a very long time, and now they are getting what they've asked for good and hard.
- yourapostasy 1mo agoWhen some people call this "Verification Debt" or something similar, that is setting the Overton Window upon this phenomena adversely upon the verifiers. I call it an application of Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."" Until you put in at least the same amount of energy required to verify the AI output as you are asking others to put in to verify it, the AI output you are wielding must be considered bullshit. Really, it should be based upon the verification requestor's historical trust score and how many human verifiers are looped in. A Verification Tax, so to speak: The energy the creator must spend (Ec) is determined by a function of the number of reviewers requested (N) and the historical trust score of that creator's AI outputs (T). Ec = N * (1 - T)
- joquarky 1mo agoFrom the other side, Brandolini's Law is also useful for exhausting control freaks.
- meowface 1mo agoEveryone I know, including myself, is simultaneously extremely pro-AI and anti-AI for this reason. I always put myself in the shoes of the reader when relaying Claudeslop. I either use it as a reference and write it by hand or make Claude edit it 10+ times until it's conveying only the needed information, and in simple, clear words, and without annoying Claudeisms.
- trueno 1mo agowe've been calling it meatware at work. i just like dont read peoples md files they send me from claude anymore
- RA_Fisher 1mo agoAI be used to make reviewing it easy, eh?
- javcasas 1mo agoI am that person on the blast radius. The most effective response I have found is dumping the documents into the AI, and asking it to review them, then posting back the AI response. Any resistance to this is met with a "But I'm also using AI as the board demands!"
- shimman 1mo agoIt's okay, when enough terrible decisions impact a company they tend to do really poorly thought out layoffs so you'll be in the blast radius sooner or later. Too bad there's no real accountability.
- lukeschlather 1mo agoHow correct is the documentation? You seem to be coming from the same standpoint as a lot of people in this thread which is "don't make me read AI output, I can prompt the model myself" but what this person is doing sounds much more sane - have highly skilled subject matter experts prompt the AI once, generate all the answers you might want, and review them carefully for correctness using all available context. That sounds far preferable to individuals independently asking questions that are not covered by the documentation and independently reviewing a bunch of potentially hallucinated slop that no one else will ever read.
- DenisM 1mo agoI kinda dislike where your comment leads, but I can’t argue with the logic either. Time for self-reflection I suppose. Maybe a better way of doing this is to ask the experts to do the work? But then again, someone who does not understand the subject could ask better or at least different and more approachable questions. I guess one reason I object to this is asymmetry - it takes someone a minute to take an hour of my life with no back pressure mechanism. Previously asking a question required effort and signified commitment.
- bentobean 1mo agoOh man, this resonates. I feel like I’m starting to drown in an endless sea of overly verbose documentation that the originators themselves never read. If you ever have a question, they’ll just point you to the docs “they wrote.”