[theideaofcoffee]

The problem with most corporate work that these managerial idiots want replaced with AI is that is all so utterly useless. Reports written that no one will ever read, presentations made for the sake of the busy-ness of "making a deck", notes and minutes of meetings that should never have taken place in the first place. Summaries written by AI of longer-form work that are then shoved into AI to make sense of the AI-written summary.

I like the quote in the middle of the article: "creating a mentally lazy, slow-thinking society that will become wholly dependant [sic] upon outside forces". I believe that orgs that fall back on the AI lie, who insist on schlepping slop from one side to the other, will be devoured by orgs that see through the noise.

It's like code. The most bug-free code are those lines that are never written. The most productive workplace is the one that never bothers with that BS in the first place. But, promotions and titles and egos are on the line so...

AI in its current form, like the swirling vortex of corporate bilge that people are forced to swim through day after day after day to, can't die fast enough.

[Terr_]

> Summaries written by AI of longer-form work that are then shoved into AI to make sense of the AI-written summary.

Also the problem where someone has bullet-points, they fluff them up in an LLM, send the prose, and then the receiver tries to use an LLM to summarize it back down to bullet-points.

I may be over-optimistic in predicting that eventually everyone involved will rage-flip the metaphorical table, and start demanding/sending the short version all the time, since there's no longer anything to be gained by prettying it up.

[didibus]

So many times you write a document for someone to review and question that it could be written better. Yet the reader will now just ask for bullet points from the AI. I was hoping people would go, right, let's just start writing bullet points from the get go and not bother with a full document.

Once you allow AI to replace the process, you kind of reveal that the process never mattered to you, if you want faster pace at the expense of other things, you don't need to pay for AI, just drop the unnecessary process.

I feel AI is now just a weird excuse, like you're pretending you have not lowered the quality and stopped writing proper documents, professional emails, full test suites, properly reviewed each other's code, no, you still do all this, just not you personally, it's "automated".

It's like cutting corners but being able to pretend like the corner isn't cut, because AI still fully takes the corner :p

[mavamaarten]

So true. We used to appoint someone in the group to take notes. These notes were always correct, to the point, short and easy to read. Now our manager(s) are heavily experimenting with recording all meetings and desperately trying to produce useful reports using all sorts of AI tools. The output is always lengthy and makes the manager super happy. Look, amazing reports! But on closer inspection they're consistently incomplete one way or another, sometimes confidently incorrect and full of happy corpo mumbo jumbo. More slop to wade through, when looking for factual information later on.

Our manager is so happy to report that he's using AI for everything. Even in cases where I think completeness and correctness is important. I honestly think it's scary how quickly that desire for correctness is gone and replaced with "haha this is cool tech".

Us devs are much more reluctant. We don't want to fall behind, but in the end when it comes to correctness and accountability, we're the ones responsible. So I won't brainlessly dump my work into an LLM and take its word for granted.

[ElevenLathe]

It's their company; we just work at it. If we want to exert more control in the workplace, we obviously need more power in the workplace. In the meantime, if they want the equivalent of their company's prefrontal cortex to be burned out with a soldering iron, that's their prerogative.

[alexashka]

The problem with corporate work is that it exists - that corporations exist.

You do have the option to spend your time elsewhere - if you can handle every NPC friend and family member thinking you've lost your mind when you quit that cushy corporate gig and go work a low status, low pay job in peace and quiet - something like a night time security guard.