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Ask HN: What would happen if your company stopped using all AI tomorrow?
This is something I’ve been turning over in my head lately. I’m not denying AI is being used everywhere, but I don’t know if it’s actually helping businesses overall. If we shut it all down it seems that businesses would be fine (and maybe even better since there’d be no token burning budgets).
- _menelaus 17d agoWe're an app dev agency so we would inflate our costs and timelines by 5x and we'd never win another bid.
- vdfs 16d agoOn which platform do you submit bids?
- OJFord 17d ago'all AI', or just all LLMs/coding assistants? It would be hugely disruptive to the world if no businesses could do any machine learning any more.
- jurschreuder 16d agoI would instantly be bored. Why have so many people turned conservative because of AI. It's the people to lazy to use their own brain and learn a new skill that don't like AI thinking for them.
- sdevonoes 15d agoI think things would take longer to get done (and that’s fine for me tbh). The main usage of AI for me is to do discovery: if I am working on service A that has a dozen other services as dependencies, then I clone all the repos, point the agent at them, and start to ask questions. I double check ofc. But without the agent I would be back to manual grep code and git logs, asking around, etc… that takes longer and you may miss things
- tmpsvc2695f5 15d ago[dead]
- KhanBotFun 15d ago[flagged]
- ipaddr 15d agoNo much added and nothing lost. Even my AI side project would fall back to software that works without AI enhancements.
- sshussain270 14d agoIts like the agricultural revolution, once we're in, we can't go back.
- DhruvGohil100 14d agowe would go back to building software which takes months and several engineers and ci/cd pipelines.
- terranivium 14d agoI have thought about this a lot. It might make us more considerate of what we're building, i think the speed at which we can mvp has made us less critical of what we output.
- NikhilRathourAI 14d ago[flagged]
- roland35 14d agoI feel like ai essentially reduces the effort to both produce and parse through text. Right now most of my day is spent thinking about what to build next. If ai is gone, a large chunk will go back to reading and writing code again! So pretty much the same path but much slower
- markus_zhang 14d agoDefinitely going to impact our productivity, considering the top rank developers delivered as many as 20k loc in a day sometimes. For me it’s OK because I deliberately reduces AI usage even for boilerplate stuffs. My daily loc is around a few hundred.
- tbrntbqm 14d agoToday Claude's uptime was suffering, so did our work. Most of the early-stage startups rely on AI a lot, especially on coding agents.
- pmujuzi19 17d ago[flagged]
- conmod278 17d agoIn support, we chuck in the logs and get detailed analysis of possible problems and causes. AI based support request handling has been literally Godsend.
- wax66 17d agoPretty much nothing. We'd remove the AI integrations, the UI elements, then back to where we were. Luckily, we have no load bearing AI. But if everyone else got to keep their AI, we'd lose customers very quickly.
- joshuamoyers 17d agoso ironic to see “load bearing” in a comment about removing AI. certain phrases have been ruined by fable/opus 5 for all time.
- anslopic 17d ago[flagged]
- sixothree 17d agoDid you create this account simply to disparage a single company?
- anslopic 17d ago[flagged]
- CookieCrisp 17d agoSure sure sure
- sixothree 17d agoI had this conversation recently. Not only are search engines and comment threads getting filled with AI responses, but people are increasingly sounding like AI themselves. This makes it even harder to distinguish. Related to code quality, I've noticed developers picking up tricks from AI. Like using feature/xxxxx as the branch name. Last year exactly zero developers used this convention. If any used paths in their branches, it was almost certainly their name. Now everyone uses this convention. Though, they do use correct capitalization instead of lowercase freaking _everything_ that AI does.
- vips7L 17d agoI’d have to stop interacting with meat proxies and wouldn’t have to read copy pasted LLM text.
- chrisra 17d agoI have the same feeling but don't really know why. Why do I dislike reading LLM text so much? Weird
- vips7L 17d agoIMO it’s because LLM text doesn’t really say anything. It’s 600% more text and paragraphs for things that could be said in 1 sentence.
- glawre 17d agoIt uses 50 words when 10 would do.
- croon 16d agoI don't hate it if it's text I asked for, in which case it's also easier to glance through looking for the points relevant to the topic. I hate it if the assumption is that I'm communicating with a human, and I then get hit with a wall of text that I have to decipher the context behind. I'd rather read the prompt then.
- temp_praneshp 17d agoIf it were just my company and not the whole industry for some newly discovered reason/vulnerability, I would quit because leadership has gone retarded.
- chuckgreenman 17d agoI would guess that AI has given me a 30% improvement in pace? I don't know, it would feel like riding a bike on level ground instead of downhill
- oldsklgdfth 17d agoI generally agree that the business does not see increased productivity and revenue from AI, if it does it is small enough to be within error. That said, if everyone (not just devs) came in and there was no AI, the org would come to a halt. AI is load-bearing in my company. Everything from dev, code reviews, planning, doc writing, ops heavily uses AI. I mean heavily, there are dev that would not know where to start triaging an alarm without the robots. Same with customer service. So much of the human capital has leaked out of peoples' brains that is fair to compare it to brain drain. Realistically, it would be painful for 1-3 months. People would go to teams with AI. A year from now, leadership is gonna have a hard time justifying keeping the lights out. It is akin to asking "what would happen if your company stopped using the internet(to look things up)".
- idopmstuff 17d agoOne-man show here - I own a dozen small e-commerce brands. I'll assume you're just taking away AI, but not the tools I've built with AI. I've got all kinds of useful tools that do helpful things, like check to make sure Amazon hasn't lost a bunch of my inventory or suddenly deindexed my product from search. These sorts of things happen without warning from time to time and are trivially fixable if you catch them, but you have to be constantly monitoring 10 different things to catch anything that could go wrong in a timely fashion. I've similarly got an inventory/cashflow management system that's deterministic that would be fine, but some of my other tools, like one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/Whatsapp/Gmail supplier convos to keep my order status board updated, is finicky. I wouldn't be able to repair that once it broke. For some tasks, I'd have to go back to freelancers. At this point, when I take over a new brand and want to refresh images or want to A/B test new ones with an existing brand, I can do that entirely with image gen. No AI would just send me back to Upwork. For other tasks, I'd just have to do them myself. Right now when I acquire a brand, I have a Claude skill that runs through all of the Amazon search and ads reports to find the key search terms, analyzes the text of the listing and proposes updates to make sure we're hitting the ones that matter. I used to do that myself, but it takes somewhere between 2-10 hours depending how many products we're talking about. The biggest loss would be the inability to expand. I started out just buying Amazon-only brands because Amazon provides a crazy amount of infrastructure that enables me to run a lot of them by myself. My most recent acquisition came with a Shopify site that had minimal sales plus a Meta ad account the guy who sold me the brand had done a little experimentation with. A year ago, I would've just discarded those, since my time is the biggest bottleneck. It takes a lot of time to run your own site and Meta ads, so it makes more sense for me not to bother and instead just make more Amazon-only acquisitions. But now I'm having a great time really pushing Claude and ChatGPT to do most of the work. I redesigned the site more or less by just having ChatGPT do research on competitors and best practices, then having Claude run with that. That took maybe eight total hours of work. I'm spinning up an enormous amount of creative to test on Meta, and I had ChatGPT research and spec all of the kinds of landing pages that are worth trying. Claude implemented them and set up the ads using Meta's ads APIs. I got all of that done yesterday. So yeah, basically if I couldn't use AI any more, I'd get back to the original thesis of my business, which is buying small brands at reasonable prices and operating them as leanly as possible. It still works, but it'd be a lot less fun and profitable.
- anonzzzies 17d agoMy new business would instantly die, my old business (30+ years) would barely notice; those clients ain’t going nowhere.
- gottagocode 17d agoHotfixes would go down by probably 50 to 60%. On a bi-weekly release rotation it was not abnormal to see 4 to 5 hot fix versions. In the past year, however, it is not uncommon to do 15 hotfix builds per release.
- cactacea 17d agoTotal collapse, idiot managers already fired everyone that knew how anything worked and now they're completely fucked. Frankly I have no idea how I've managed to hang on this long but likely to be gone myself in a few weeks as well.
- pixel_popping 17d agoJust curious, chaos and morality aside, the company finances are doing better or worse?
- hobonation 17d ago[dead]
- xxwink 17d ago[dead]
- VariousPrograms 17d agoThe effort required to do most jobs has gone down and so has the output quality. Rather than doing the same quality work with less effort, some people use LLMs to produce minimum-quality work at minimum effort. LLMs are a cool tool but we’re over-encouraging use in every domain, even tasks they’re not good at. Every tech company in the world seems to be getting rich though how can I possibly say things would be better without it?
- gtirloni 17d agoIs that what's happening in _your_ company?
- deterministic 17d ago> and so has the output quality Not my experience at all. The quality has gone up dramatically. Because we also use LLMs to make large scale refactorings that cleans up the code and use it to find lots of bugs that would otherwise have exploded in production at some point in time.
- croon 16d agoI just used Fable to thoroughly review a PR, and it came up with 5 "Findings that block approval". I went through each one through the code path (a couple were already considered during implementation), and while all 5 were theoretically accurate, 0 of them were actually reachable. I wrote them back to Claude point by point and got this back: "I checked all five claims against the code. Your list is correct on all five. I downgrade my verdict: none of the five findings blocks approval. Details and one subtlety below." This is a usual experience with SOTA models for me and others in my team. Don't get me wrong, I use it daily; sometimes as a crutch, other times as an accelerator, mostly as a validator/peace of mind. I however don't think that neither velocity or quality is meaningfully changed. But I do spend much more time arguing with a machine.
- deterministic 11d agoThat is interesting. I use Opus 5 as my daily driver, and it pretty much just works. For example, a few weeks ago I asked it to analyse my code and find duplicated code that could be extracted into reusable libraries. It found several good examples and did the refactoring. I reviewed the result, and it was 100% how I would have coded it myself. I do almost no manual coding these days. Opus 5 just works for me. So it is strange for me to read comments like yours saying that it doesn't work. It would be interesting to find out what makes the difference?
- wolrah 17d agoThe only thing we use large models (they are not fucking AI, never will be, and calling them that only supports the hype nonsense) for in actual production is voicing generic IVR messages and such. If we lost that we'd go back to having to record them ourselves. Whoopdeedoo. Other than that, interacting with my boss would become less stupid (or at least be his own variety of it instead of ChatGPT's variety of stupid) and nothing meaningful would change. Everyone who's saying that they wouldn't get anything done at all, you're already doomed and I can't wait to watch the collapse after this crap has ruined so much.
- dosisking 17d agoCode quality would definitely go up.
- chrisjj 17d agoThere'd be a huge problem training enough replacement humans to do the work to the low standard of the retired bots. We might have to settle for a rise in the quality of work. /i
- p_l 17d agoHonestly? I could theoretically maintain my output, yes. Practically nope, not because I can't do the work without AI, as much as because of burnout - both from technical (Ansible, Python - neither are a thing I like using) and social (dealing with corpospeak) reasons.
- jpgvm 17d agoWe would probably be fine, but much slower. However if everyone else stopped using AI we would be broke, so please don't do that.
- vbwml 17d agoProductivity would go up and most people apart from 5% addicts would rejoice.
- purple_wow 17d agoAll our devs would lose it. They will be lost
- leros 17d agoNothing in our product runs on AI but productivity would slow down for sure.
- pixel_popping 17d agoPersonally I would be lost, because we've implemented everything around AI, more than a year ago with the assumption that models will keep getting better so the importance of building the tooling around it is capital and we've made the right choice, now close to ALL issues and features and customer requests are automatically solved. The main issue I see is that currently managing 70 repos would just be physically impossible without re-hiring people versus like now with 8 monitors in grid and averaging 32 threads (4 per monitor) and being a bot for 10 hours a day, saturating about 20 subscriptions (mix Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Xiaomi, Minimax...) in total currently using our own tools, about $100K equivalent in token a month. While I loved the era of before, I would genuinely be instantly depressed to go back to it knowing that the problematics have completely shifted, this isn't a 20% improvement or something, it's straight 10x increase (at least lately) and I'm quite conservative when I say 10x, people that have focused on their tooling and not use the general harnesses will understand what I mean. I use AI daily as well to build tools for my daughter, toddler video-games, daily books... and so-on, it would be so frustrating to lose this.
- segfaltnh 17d agoI love the "IYKYK" as a kind of in joke among AI psychosis enjoyers.
- nitwit005 17d agoI'm fairly confident our management has managed to spend more on failed or pointless AI efforts than AI could produce in benefits. If you tell every manager they need to show some sort of success with AI, you get a lot of projects that don't make sense, which then quietly die, and the process repeats.
- Jeremy1026 17d agoI'd have to do more manual work, but nothing major would happen. We don't use AI in our product at all.
- al_borland 17d agoWe’d save a lot of time not sitting on calls while managers show us the results of their brainstorming sessions with Claude. Instead we could focus on making the products better again.
- Arya_xiaofan 17d agoTo be fair, if the managers are hands-on, those conversations with Claude might actually be useful.
- al_borland 17d agoSo far, they’ve largely been a distraction. They don’t have enough domain knowledge for it to be useful, so it’s full of a bunch of stuff we don’t have and won’t buy. It also has a tendency to balloon the scope.
- deterministic 17d agoI would cry a lot. I love my Claude Code :) But other than that nothing really.
- SipitenoMK 16d agoIt’s impossible now, I would need to hire more homosapiens and there is a shortage of them. I use local models, so AI is equal to human time, human brain. It’s new reality for us
- plur9 16d agoWe'd probably do a career change, writing blogs and aspiring to become influencers on Tiktok or something. :)
- metchio 16d ago- Code quality would go up - Code quantity would go down - Discussions online will feel normal again - Email threads will become burdersome again
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- RadixIO 16d agoIt would result in higher quality and lesser quantity which would be better for good
- BroCoder 16d agoI would stop coming up with sk many ideas that AI isn't great at helping me finish.
- DerArzt 16d agoSeveral people would have their incompetence more visible.
- trueno 16d agothis and i think a lot of "leaders" would go back to being quiet. they're quite emboldened to be in everyone's business these days seems like they're smoking a ton of "you're absolutely right to challenge engineering/architect teams here..."
- kypro 16d agoGod yes. I'm finding there is now a 5 minute delay whenever I'm chatting with someone who doesn't know what the f** they are talking about thanks to AI. Then when you get the reply at a surface level it appears very insightful to others who don't know what the f** we're talking about either – 99% of management. But obviously it's just AI slop which sounds over confident without good reason. I'm personally trying to be more deliberate about not doing that, but I suspect the AI-induced self-confidence is actually a better way to communicate if you want people to think you're smart. There is ultimately a reason behind why LLMs get reinforced in that direction, and we all know over confident people tend to portray an unreasonable level of trust. It's annoying though because those people previously would have shut up because and moved out of the way because they wouldn't want to make themselves look like morons. Now I have to debate with them and try to explain that they don't know what they're talking about which ultimately makes me look unreasonable – especially when I refuse to communicate in a similar overly confident way back.
- mbielski 16d agoWe'd just go back to business as usual: Slow change on a stupidly old tech stack that we keep getting blocked from actually moving away from due to higher-ups getting a bee in their bonnet about the latest great idea they have. As long as my check cashes I DGAF, but having the AI has made it nice.