[_pdp_]

You can apply the same philosophy to employees and if you dare to do so you will quickly find out that it does not work. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure - Goodhart's law. I cannot see why AI agents should be treated differently when it comes to fuzzy measurements of performance.

[wagwang]

Bcuz the performance is usually not fuzzy and also the law only applies to certain jobs -- you would not apply the law to salesmen or customer support agents.

[hyperpape]

Salesmen making bad deals that boost their numbers and then don't make money in the long-term is one of the first things you learn when you work in an org that sells in the enterprise market.

[wagwang]

Ur in a software bubble, there are millions of sales jobs where you sell a simple product and the only thing that matters is sale volume and maybe "dont be a dick". The really strategic sales process we employ in tech is the exception.

[Ekaros]

Salesmen are absolutely perfect example. They quite often have even greater incentives as they can directly financially benefit. So selling products that are not needed, that are over priced or entirely misrepresented is extremely common.

[_pdp_]

ok... how do you measure the performance of a coding assistant? Counting the lines of code written, bugs closed, PRs reviewed, some fuzzy measurement of quality or something else?

[wagwang]

I think this article is moreso referring to support and other rote processing-like agents.