- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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CEO Tobias Lütke… told employees last year that using AI is “a baseline expectation,” and they should first prove they “cannot get what they want done using AI” before asking for more resources.
Isn’t this an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?
It looks like an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Just playing uhm angels advocate? Not sure how to call it, the naive optimist perhaps!
Not necessarily: the statement (in isolation) is a call to learn and become capable to explain limitations. The criticized effect is basically “people not being able to explain the limits”.
I suspect that “finding limits” wasn’t incentived though (and I mean things like positive feedback, not money). And then you get shit-in-shit-out factories.
Or to rephrase your statement: If you want to play a game then stick to the rules you’ve set up - otherwise everyone’s allowed to cheat.
Ok, sure
However
In this case everyone that had a connection to reality told him that’s not a reasonable baseline.
You can force everyone to use it, but then you are working against that
Not exactly setting up your workforce for a win
I would love to find anything that had a more positive outlook … but alas perhaps I should ask OpenGrok because my creativity is not enough.
Fuck em.
A hammer makes a poor substitute for a knife & fork.
Literally a meeting at work today.
Director: “Why was this requirement missed?”
PM: “Well, my understanding is that AI was used to write the requirements and that AI was also used to generate the code and perform code reviews. …So there were no actual people who understood the requirements involved in the process. Also, this seems to be becoming more and more of a problem.”
Director: “Oh. Uh… Ok. Maybe don’t bring up “AI” whenever you discuss this with senior management because I’m not sure how well that will go over. Just say, ‘the requirements were missed.’”
PM: …
We need to stop replacing software devs with LLMs and instead replace managment with LLMs!
Couldn’t be any worse
No one read the PRD in detail! Shocking
Edit: This is what meetings should actually be used for. Going through line by line and reading the document aloud to sanity check and discuss potential misses imo
This is what meetings should actually be used for. Going through line by line and reading the document aloud to sanity check and discuss potential misses imo
That would actually make meetings a valuable use of our time which is exactly why it won’t happen.
Yeah, you shouldn’t blame AI. You should directly blame the person who implemented the LLM system used.
“AI didn’t realise meeting requirements was important”
“John implemented a system which routinely misses requirements and has wasted 50 hours of work which could have been easily avoided with the previous system”
Is the AI is being used what’s the Project Manager for?
Dude donated a shit ton of money to slop Linux (omarchy). What did he expect?
Maybe you shouldn’t have insisted your employees use it then, in the hopes that you’d be able to fire most of them.
The hope is to fire all of them. The plan is to fire most of them.
Then after the company crashes they’ll pull their golden parachute and take a position at the next doomed company.
I spent half my day dealing with a slop grenade.
Someone came in and dropped a (bunch of) AI generated PRs. Said person knows nothing about my world, but they want cost optimization and Fable runs through logs and gives them code. Second Fable review agent tries the code, it doesn’t work. Gives suggestions to first. New commit comes in with workaround, I decline this because it’s a shit and had another unnoticed critical integration bug. This goes on a few more times.
It comes back a fifth or so time with something that is now technically correct, but fucking horrifying. Great, now I don’t know what to do, because I’m getting told it’ll fix the billing issue and this is a huge problem, but the code is insane.
This is a cost optimization PR, advertising massive savings, but the numbers seemed way off. It turns out it looked at one day with a runaway process that racked up insane billing (90% of year-to-date total project cost) and “annualized” it, and that was the savings. But further, it calculated all the costs using the wrong billing system, so all the numbers were wrong.
When I recalculated and corrected it, the whole thing saves us $6/month, because we don’t have runaway outages very often.
This is on top of every ticket I get is Claude generated, they never just state the fucking issue, and 100% of tickets in 2 weeks plus today I’ve received were inaccurate and wrong.
I hate the slop. I hate the non technical users throwing the slop on me without knowing how it works.
Take whatever prompt you put in the AI and write exactly that for the ticket content, then spend 30 seconds summarizing it into a title. I don’t care if it’s “customer wants a button that shows a cat”, just write that.
I cannot take another “client has a load bearing contract dispute with sales. Genuinely the verdict here will secure the shape of the contract. Critically in foo.py function get_foo_blorp there is no reference to felis catus to satisfy hard customer requirement. Acceptance requirement: return felis catus when module controller clicked and client is logged in and client’s birthday is in same month, otherwise return error codes 412 404 526” word salad ticket that doesn’t just state the problem.
I think a good way around this is that any project submissions using AI must include draft material to show how much data was used vs generated. We will never get away from AI at this stage but we need to get to a trust but verify stage. Even if they built the whole thing with AI they should be able to show the amount of tokens used in the entire to generate it (more generally means they have spent time refining whatever it is)
We need to get away from AI=Bad and rather use AI as tools and don’t help it replace us by showing 100% generated work as your own. Me using AI to make something is going to be much more polished and refined vs your general office worker. We need proper AI classes to help show people how to use it responsibly and collaboratively so we can cut down on the amount of duplicate work being generated as if we can cut down processing power it also cuts down the pollution generated.
Lmao I am living this right now at work 🥲
Yep. We have a guy on the team who generates document after document for us to review and it’s all slop that he has no understanding of (not that anyone could understand the mostly nonsense)
Did you not get to reject all of that yet?
I wish. Our company is still at the “you must adopt and use AI” phase. I’m looking forward to the “Holy fuck that’s expensive! Be careful of your usage” phase
My org saw AI as a threat and immediately banned it (blocking websites and restricting features in apps) until our IT folks could evaluate it and implement safeguards. Incidentally, they missed the window when vendors were more or less offering it for free. Now any AI solution doesn’t just have to be vetted against our security and privacy needs, but most likely requires a darn good business case, RFP’s, quotes, and contracts.
It never became a part of the culture here, much to our benefit.
We passed the “Holy fuck that’s expensive!” phase a few months ago and have moved on to the “Use AI for everything but don’t actually do that just use it for some things why [didn’t/did] you use AI for that we can’t afford the [additional time/Azure bill] hahahahahahahaha.” phase. Swap the values in brackets at random on any given day.
This is also what I don’t get. At worst people start ignoring the documents or requests for review (or code changes) because they have better things to do than review generated text.
At best you push back.
Well, yeah, the problem with LLMs in a professional context is exactly that the second order effects of using them are so bad that they wipe out the direct effect gains (the time saving in creating the text).
It’s fine for entertainment if all you want is to be distracted for a while with some somewhat bland chewing-gum for the brain.
They are hyping themselves. So is Fortune.
We all told you it was vaporware and you wanted to ride that bubble. Don’t pretend any of this was a surprise.
You shouldn’t expect AI to generate a finished work product yet. If you’re forcing employees to use it, teach them to used it as a starting point and then put their own personal touch on it.
If you’re making a deck, have AI generate the bones, you add the details, then polish it up with AI if you want it to look fancy. If you expect it to turn a bunch of docs into a presentation only using prompts, you’re going to have a bad time.
Or, or - now hear me out - ban the use of AI to do a job that requires a human thought process.
Name something that doesn’t
Yeah bc that worked for the Amish Empire.
Weird comment considering the Amish are still around and, if anything, get proven right every day (except for the sexism and racism)
Get proven right about what? Plenty of Amish sects explicitly use technology if it’s in the course of their work or business. They use power tools for furniture making, have computers to handle payments, cell phones, trucks, etc.
They just don’t use it in their personal lives.
Correct, glad you agree.
Aw, now kith
Dude you’re getting paid to not have to use your brain. I finish my work in an hour and spend the rest of the day doing a bunch of corporate culture BS that gives you visibility to the bosses that actually decide your pay. Put effort where you get the most return. Hang out with your friends in the cafeteria and talk about WoW. Tell your boss you are in a mentor circle and slap that on your quarterly review.
Now I think I’m the problem. Great.
Other than chatting with friends, that sounds like a nightmare. I’d rather be just doing the job that I enjoy and doing it well.
The problem in my experience isn’t as much the work forcing it, it is the people who are very enthusiastic because they didn’t know what to do and now they think the AI does it for them, but they still have bad ideas.
Think of the person who has this “great app idea” but just needs a developer to write it. Well now these messes are having GenAI churn out… something. They don’t know if it works or not, but now all they need is someone to help finish off the “essentially done” work, or to accept the pull request the AI generated for your project.
Similar story for the creative content like videos and text. These people were limited by not having enough care to bother to learn or invest the time, but they thought they had amazing ideas. Now we see their uninspired slop bright to life in painful time killing form. The ones that might use it as just an accelerator but care about the output are drowned out by the “prompt and it’s done” folks that just don’t care.
The same thing has been happening in music production for the last few decades.
Its gotten easier and easier to make music, so the market is flooded and the average quality is lower.
But at the same time I would say there is also more music in the good tiers than there used to be. Certainly the variety has exploded.
What id say is that in neither case is it really a problem if its in an ecosystem that already has some form of rating system.
Shit apps existed before AI, and they fell into oblivion with 1 star ratings. The same will continue to apply moving forward.
Yeah, good employees state their grievance, but if management insists, they just go into bot mode and do what has been commanded until they switch jobs. And bad employees are happy to blame AI.
So if management demands use of AI rather than just offering AI as yet another tool that may or may not be used at the discretion of the employee, output quality will either stay the same or degrade because AI can’t do the actually important job - quality assurance.The moral of the story: if you aren’t actually experienced doing the job yourself, do not tell your workers how to do the job. Trust your senior workers to do that.
This is actually an argument I was having about two hours ago with my managers. They want to replace a bunch of low level workers with AI, and have the remaining low level workers use the AI to do the job of the lost workers. Their justification for this is that the engineers have been using AI for over a year now and performance has improved, (I don’t actually know if performance has improved, but they say it has).
And what you said was basically my point, sure performance improves when engineers use AI because the people using the AI, are engineers, they can tell when the AI has given them something worth working with, and they can tell when it hasn’t. The low level workers can’t do that, I had an argument with one of them this morning because they kept insisting that the computer tower was a CPU, and kept calling it that. How is someone like that going to be able to tell if the AI has given them good output or not?
I think it’s more likely the engineers are made to spend a bunch of time writing meaningless fluff emails nobody reads and now they use AI to generate emails that the manager summarises with AI and pretends to read.
You asked for it, you got it.
“SHIP MORE CODE!!! NO NOT LIKE THAT!!!” - CEOs
More lines = better
max-line-width: 20gotta get them klocs boiiiiii
Wasn’t Shopify one of the first companies to go all in on an AI infrastructure? I seemed to recall reading that about a year or two ago.
Yep. Same guy said managers will ask why they can’t use AI for that job. It seems that he has answered that hypothetical question here.
how else is ai slop going to be monetized? more slop more hallucinations more bubble.
Ok then why did you give money to your friend DHH for Omarchy? it’s literally a slop vibe coded “distro”.
Because of the complete vibe coding of Omarchy it takes longer the configure it than any other distro with a WM. I mean hell the AI cut the Hyperland config up into 6 damn LUA files AND THEN you have to unbind everything and rebind it as opposed to ONE file that you can literally just swap out binds. And yet you gave the guy a couple million for it.
So I’m so sorry Tobias but you did this to yourself. you were one of the first to embrace AI completely and use it completely wrong and now you’re whining about it and you continue to fund it. you can’t have it both ways bud.
