is that guy yawning
I think he’s waiting for someone to insert a penis into his mouth
Alright, I’ll do it…
No no no. Most companies already knew this. Most bosses just pretended it wasn’t happening so they could ride the bubble and bonus themselves… We all said this was what would happen, and it did happen, and only complete suckers would still have fallen for it. Of course some CEOs are suckers, but many of them are simply greedy.
You mean malicious compliance works for the mid management too? I believe it.
and this is why I’m retiring in two weeks. They don’t get it, they never will. my work as a contractor trying to code review their slop and telling them what they needed to change fell on deaf ears. they cut me a cheque, thanked me for my time, and it was onto the next company/startup to perform the same song and dance.
i’m done. I’m done with the tech industry. 25 years just poof, gone. I’m in my mid 40s, i’m single, i own my condo, i’m done. I’m going to sit on my ass all day, play videogames, and clear out my codeberg and delete everything. I’m not even going to work on FOSS stuff anymore, i’m not going to maintain anything, I’m not going to contribute. I’m done. I want nothing to do with this crap.
Congrats on your retirement!, I also just pulled the trigger myself. I think industry managers will need to see AI fail for a few years before they wake the eff up around where to use it. The problem is that AI makes very compelling demos. It lets you fill in the blanks with what looks like an instant, high functioning product. You dont initially see the long tail of mediocrity and imprecision. We are used to just assuming tech products are consistent, endlessly iterable, and user friendly.
It is useful, I’ll give it that. But… we are barely doing code reviews anymore though, which is terrifying. Exec says invest in extra scoping an extra testing, and ignore the software creation part, let AI do its thing and trust it. May work. May not. My replacement will find out, poor bastard. Good luck to them.
man i’m like a couple years behind ya. could you tell me the ballpark of what you’re retiring on so i can be envious :D
I “retired” (fancy way of saying “was laid off”) from programming seven years ago and I haven’t written a line of code since. I’m happy to have completely missed out on the AI experience, although since I spent the last few years of my career mostly managing a team of offshore developers, I feel like I got close enough. Now I own my own small house and I drive a school bus and I couldn’t be happier. At some point AI will be driving the school buses (so that the kids can still go to school and have AI do all their work for them) but hopefully I will have died a painless death by then.
Oh look, the thing we all knew was gonna happen is happening.
Just follow trumps stock trades. That will talk you all you need to know about where the market is headed.
Can’t wait to see this exact headline another 50 times but none of the companies in question facing any consequences for their actions, profit driven society is so fucking stupid.
The consequence is that they waste money and time. Which actually matters for businesses strapped for money or time. But most of the megacorps are swimming in money and in time. They waste those all the time even without the AI because the upper management accepts kickbacks to contract with the worst (but also the bribiest) contractors. And mid management, and everyone else, put their own personal interests ahead of the company’s. Now that the AI hype is here, they have a new tool to waste time and money with, but nothing has fundamentally changed. Big business is a lumbering inefficient bureaucracy by its nature.
I tried AI-everything (apart from code review of course). But it’s just too hard. Letting the AI do bigger things results in subtle, hard to find, but devastating design fails and errors. It’s fractal. No matter what layer I look at, it’s always sort-of working but also bugged in subtle and sometimes hard-to-fix ways.
So I don’t do that. Instead I use the AI as an assistant while I still do most of the actual work. I downgraded my account too because I never reached the limits for a while.I’m in a similar situation. My workplace has been heavily pushing implanting AI tools into our daily workload, but I’ve struggled to find a more meaningful use beyond a technical search engine: eg. How can I calculate x in the most resource efficient way?
My IDE told me that there is a new version of some library which fixes security bugs. I asked the AI what will break if I update. It actually found out that the new version requires a license key which has to be updated yearly even for the free use case. So I had it refactor the single use of that library to use another library instead. I then polished the refactored code myself a bit.
When I am done with something, I ask the AI what it thinks about the changes. It then tells me where I violated the style guide and sometimes it finds silly bugs I somehow missed. In rare cases it also finds serious stuff. the code definitely never got worse by having the AI look over it. Btw, looking at it doesn’t mean changing it. I had to tell it to save in its memory files that it should only change anything when explicitly asked to.
When I am not sure why something is like it is, I ask the AI. It then comes up with one or more potential explanations and often I then remember what was actually the reasoning if it’s my own code or the code becomes somewhat understandable when it’s written by someone else.
When some behavior looks like it should be impossible, I ask the AI how it’s possible, and it usually tells me the actual reason or gets close enough to make it much easier for me to find it.
When I’m unsure how to implement something, I discuss some options with the AI. It’s reasoning isn’t always sound. But sometimes the internal dialog is just not enough and chatting with AI works surprisingly well for me.
Just treat it like an extremely knowledgeable college with a serious psychedelics addiction. Can’t let it do stuff unattended. But when it isn’t hallucinating, it is pretty capable. Also, it doesn’t care how much you ask it. In general, every easy to explain task with easy to verify results and low damage on failure can be done by AI. But it is often faster to just do something yourself than explain it to the AI and polish the result.
Ding ding ding. It’s fucking GREAT for eliminating the menial bullshit like scaffolding, data cleanup, sifting through overly verbose documentation… Anything that requires abstract thought still needs to be done by a human.
It’s weird - competent management wouldn’t require employees to fly helicopters to work without flight training, but many managers somehow think, “Everybody use AI now,” makes sense.
Remember when chatgpt first went viral and everyone said that “prompt engineer will be the new career path”. So, how’s that going?
Now let’s be honest here, work slop is absolutely nothing new. I’ve had coworkers who will spend countless hours on a fucking useless “walking deck” which is the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard of. Its just a slideshow full of pretty pictures that morons like but says almost nothing useful. Just departmental marketing wank. At least slop is more democratic now, I can pull one of these turds together in 5 minutes, impress the dipshits that like pretty graphics that look good, but mean nothing.
At our company, 12 months ago they said everyone wasn’t using enough AI. They even made a leaderboard to see who was using the most tokens in the business and encouraged more and more.
A couple of months ago, everyone’s AI spend was restricted to $100/month without warning. Entire workflows broken overnight because people had built theirs around Claude skills that used stupid amounts of tokens.
Now they’re starting layoffs. Go figure.
This just in, Management are complete morons. Film at 11.
This. You’d almost think people are dumb enough to blame bad management decisions on software.
Trend chasing upper class idiots
they cut our copilot budget to 19€ per person (you can request more. but of course it’s a hassle)
they still insist AI the future and more AI is better. they are just now shifting the blame to employees: “you need to think more about how you use it”, “you cannot just throw tokens at a problem”, etc
two months ago I got an email from a manager asking me why my AI spending was so low.
But you better keep that output high. In hindsight this was so obviously gonna happen
Wait, we’re not tokenmaxing anymore? So when the AI salesman said to make a leaderboard of people spening the hardest, it was to line their own pockets with cash? Huh. Color me surprised.
So next, you’ll tell me that it costs more to have an LLM produce the same quality of code as a senior developer.
This article is literally the AI slop version of the original Guardian article.
Even the Guardian title and conclusion have more depth than the clickbait Futurism title and conclusion.
Just in time for the big tech AI companies’ bills to come due to their investors. Excellent… taps fingertips together
