[augusto-moura]

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool.

It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.

[HolyLampshade]

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool

Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there.

This seems to come pretty frequently from visionless tech execs. They need to justify their existence to their boss, and thus try to show how innovative and/or cost cutting they can be.

[aquariusDue]

That and microservices in lieu of a monolith. Or how about being the odd one out a few years ago when suggesting a MPA instead of a SPA when it made sense. I like to think where at the point of everybody is rebuilding their portfolio website with Angular 1 but this time it's Claude Code and a SaaS instead.

[rurp]

I agree with you but man the absurdity of aggressively pushing cloud or AI adoption as a cost cutting move is off the charts.

[HolyLampshade]

Easier to justify monthly costs than big capital asks (even if your infra is depreciated at a normal rate) is where I think many saw (incorrectly) cost savings. It’s also a bit of these execs mortgaging the future, banking on either being out of their role when the real cost comes due or that people will have incredibly short memories (not a wild assumption).

[genthree]

I think this is the result of a c-suite that has never actually done the work of the businesses they're running. The MBAificiation of management. Of course they constantly do brain-dead shit, they literally don't have a clue how anything actually works in "their" own business.

[stackbutterflow]

They've been vibe-driving businesses long before we've started vibe-coding software.

[gopher_space]

There weren't really any failure states for the ZIRP "lifestyle CEO". If you remember old black and white movies about pigeons from psych 101 it's been that level of conditioning for how many years now?

If your CEO doesn't look like a taxi dispatcher he's just moving his wings around waiting for a food pellet.

[HolyLampshade]

I was trying to think of a way to word this exact argument. I think it’s especially easy when your business technology is not your primary means of revenue generation. Having these execs understand how things work is significantly less critical in these scenarios, so it becomes much easier to hire for alternative characteristics (golf game, pedigree, gender, whatever).

[bee_rider]

“Cloud” seems like a better comparison than stuff like cryptocurrency. AI seems totally over-hyped but with some obvious sensible use-cases.

[_doctor_love]

> Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there.

100% accurate - some of us are old enough to have lived through a few of the mini-revolutions in between the mega-revolutions of Internet/Web in the 1990s and now AI/LLM in the 2020s.

We are in the "stupid phase" of adoption still. C-level people have to follow the herd and they are being evaluated on keeping up with everyone else. Idiotic mandates are a way to cause things to happen short-term even though everyone knows long-term it will have to be re-done.

Consultants gonna make a looooooooot of money this coming decade.

[johnnyanmac]

I think the feel bad moment here is how impersonal everything got in 3 decades. During the dotcom bust you still had to meet and talk to people to get interviews started.

Now you can make a perfectly tailored resume, apply to 50 jobs in a day, and it's not unexpected to not get any response from those in 2 weeks. You don't know if it's your resume, the company, or the economy. And no one wants to admit the latter two are problems.

Not to mention the utter disrespect these days. There's no decorum in many of these "professional" settings, when normally you want your interview process to show off your best face.

[oro44]

"And no one wants to admit the latter two are problems."

Im working on building something to address this. That's all I'll say lol.

[hibikir]

It's using a bad tool to try to aim at something reasonable-ish: Developers not taking advantage of the tools in places where it's very easy to get use out of them. I have coworkers like that: One spent 3 days researching a bug that Claude found in 10 minutes by pointing it at the logs in the time window and the codebase. And he didn't even find the bug, when Claude nailed it in one.

But is this something that is best done top to bottom, with a big report, counting tokens? Hell no. This is something that is better found, and tackled at the team level. But execs in many places like easy, visible metrics, whether they are actually helping or not. And that's how you find people playing JIRA games and such. My worse example was a VP has decided that looking at the burndown charts from each team under them, and using their shape as a reasonable metric is a good idea.

It's all natural signs of a total lack of trust, and thinking you can solve all of this from the top.

[sarchertech]

The thing is we’ve always had people who spend more time on their tooling or learn different tools and perform better.

I’ve seen people use notepad and I’ve seen people who are so good at vim that they look like they’re on editing code directly with their mind.

Your particular example is extreme and my guess is the coworker is just not great at debugging. I use Claude all the time for finding bugs, but it fails fairly frequently though. I think there’s probably advantage to having some people who don’t use it that often, so you have someone to turn to when it fails.

I’m definitely not exercising my debugging skills as much as I used to and I’m fairly confident they’ve atrophied.

[toraway]

That, and an objective comparison measuring time saving should include all time that went into learning, configuring, maintaining the tool.

And ideally a sample large enough to capture any wasted time from dead ends in other tasks where the tool may actually fail to solve the problem.

I’ve definitely lost a couple hours here and there from when it felt like I was right on the verge of CC fixing something but never actually got there and finally had to just do it myself anyway.

[johnnyanmac]

> But execs in many places like easy, visible metrics, whether they are actually helping or not.

Most execs didn't get where they were by being truly helpful and adding value to the company. They played the game long enough to know that politics trumps accomplishments. The rest from there is the ability to weave a good story (be it slightly or completely exaggerated).

It's not even about trust. It's about incentives in a structure that is dog-eat-dog. Rugged individualism in a corporate structure is a self defeating prophecy. But it's inevitable when executives extract from the company instead of rising the tides for all ships. And shareholders reward it.

[patrick451]

There are countless other stories about the AI's spouting complete bullshit. This easily wastes as much time as they save.

[jacobsenscott]

> t just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.

This is exactly what's happening. The top 5 or 6 companies in the s&p 500 are running a very sophisticated marketing/pressure campaign to convince every c-suite down stream that they need to force AI on their entire organization or die. It's working great. CEOs don't get fired for following the herd.

[toomuchtodo]

~40-50% of the S&P500 rely on this continuing.

S&P 500 Concentration Approaching 50% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384002 - March 2026

> No of course there isn't enough capital for all of this. Having said that, there is enough capital to do this for a at least a little while longer. -- Gil Luria (Managing Director and Analyst at D.A. Davidson)

OpenAI Needs a Trillion Dollars in the Next Four Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45394071 - September 2025 (8 comments)

[karmakurtisaani]

Elon Musk is planning to put his AI company into the SpaceX IPO, and accelerate getting it into the major indices, effectively making pension funds, banks and individual investors his bag holders.

Patric Boyle has a video on this in case you care for the details.

[fuzzfactor]

I guess it's possible for the top companies to have spent so much already, that now the best move is to convince the next tier to do the same otherwise those competitiors may pull ahead without such a financial handicap.

[bondarchuk]

>I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool

If you broaden the comparison (only a little bit) it looks suspiciously like employees being forced to train their own replacement (be that other employees, or factory automation), a regular occurrence.

[somenameforme]

Yeah this is the thing I think many don't want to see. Imagine a bunch of farm laborers being trained to use a tractor/reaper early on its development. Certainly they'd think it's cool and convenient, because it is. But if it works out, then most of those farm laborers are now obsolete, and a handful of them can now replace the rest. And indeed this is why agricultural employment went from the majority of jobs to a footnote.

[PedroBatista]

Tech directors, CEOs, managers, etc tend to be people with a certain personality and ( learned behaviors/thinking ) just like "technical people".

Yes, they tend to be incredible gullible to certain things, over-simplistic and over-confident but also very "agile" when it comes to sweep their failures under the rug and move on to keep their own neck in one piece. At this point in time even the median CEO knows AI has been way overhyped and they over invested to a point of absolute financial insanity.

The first line of defense about the pressure to deliver is to mandate their minions to use it as much as possible.

We spent a fortune on this over-rated Michelin star reservation, and now you kids are going to absolutely enjoy it, like it or not goddammit!

[jimmyjazz14]

Yeah, I found this strange as well, if the tech is so amazing why do developers need to be forced to use it?

[dash2]

Maybe there's a positive externality: your individual learning percolates to others and benefits the firm as a whole.

[whoknowsidont]

What is there to learn? If anything developers are still the one's training and enhancing the models by giving them more feedback cycles and what works and what doesn't.

[debatem1]

I'm encouraging my folks to try it pretty hard because A) I've personally seen the productivity gains and B) using it is at first deeply weird/uncomfortable. Sometimes you've got to convince people to push through that kind of thing.

[toomuchtodo]

How you objectively measuring success?

93% of Developers Use AI Coding Tools. Productivity Hasn't Moved. - https://philippdubach.com/posts/93-of-developers-use-ai-codi... - March 4th, 2026

[nightski]

They measured 16 developers and called it a "study"? That is amusing. Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago, the tools have already changed dramatically.

[sarchertech]

Depending on the effect size a sample size of 16 can be plenty.

[archagon]

> Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago, the tools have already changed dramatically.

There is no point at which this argument will not be made. Therefore, it is a useless argument.

[tehjoker]

So just run a new study this year. I do think the tools have improved, but it should show up empirically. The only people for whom the urgency of "right now" is present is for the C-suite and investor class who are fighting to make sure they survive, but it might also be a crisis of their own making. Don't confuse your identity as a worker with the identity of the capitalist class.

[jmalicki]

You should be able to just develop software on your cellphone, right?

Do you have an empirical study to support that your employer should buy you a laptop and possibly a monitor or two to help your productivity?

If there's no study, why should we believe it?

It's like "A study found that parachutes were no more effective than empty backpacks at protecting jumpers from aircraft."

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/12/22/6790830...

[notlenin]

> Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago

false. The article is from 4th of March 2026, less than a month ago.

[mkl]

From the first sentence of the article proper: "A study published in July 2025".

[luisgvv]

I'm just using Copilot CLI for mindless stuff and set it to the premium models to meet the quota, as long as they can't see the prompts I think I should be fine

[butlike]

You're not going to get fired. Don't worry about it :)

[johnnyanmac]

Almost 3 years too late for that warning.

[johntash]

Not sure about copilot, but most enterprise plans do offer a way to export all prompts to a company siem.

[EdwardDiego]

Same, but with Opus 4.6.

[afpx]

It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.

[throwaway29130]

Brutal. But probably all too common. One of my clients has very suddenly gone all-in on agentic AI and they're in this crazy hurry. (Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.)

This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people who wanted an update on the progress I'd made with sanding off some of the rough edges of the very rough implementation that the managing partner had put in place (he bought a Mac Mini, put OpenClaw on it, then gave it admin access to a whole pile of stuff!) I said I needed a couple more days. "Okay," she said, "but I need this quickly, because we're firing people next week."

They have literally gone from no agentic AI, to discovering OpenClaw, to firing people, in a two-week time span.

When economists say that the predicted job losses as a result of AI have not yet shown up in the data, I'm genuinely befuddled. Either we don't have long to wait to start seeing them, or there's something wrong with the data, because you can't tell me what I just described above is an isolated phenomenon.

I also have to say: I've always enjoyed working with this client, but this experience has been a huge turnoff on a number of different levels.

[genthree]

For a non-tech case of this, my wife worked at a place that fired like 80% of their writers in anticipation of huge speed-ups they expected from LLMs, a couple years ago.

They had to hire a bunch of them back less than two months later. The speed-ups were approximately nil and making the editors edit AI slop all day long had them all close to quitting.

They didn't even wait to see if there were any actual benefits, they just blindly fired a bunch of people based on marketing lies. I can only assume they're the same sorts who fall for Nigerian Prince scams.

[justin66]

> Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.

I’d have guessed the most annoying part would be that you’re assisting them in a hare brained scheme to terminate some people’s employment.

[graemep]

Maybe what they really want her to do is get rid of 50% of her staff and the AI is just an excuse? In that case she should focus on "who can we do without?" rather than "how can we replace people with AI?"

[johnnyanmac]

I'm sure part of this mandatw implied "if you can't show us the numbers we want, you're part of the 50%". And the incentives are set.

[komali2]

> Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year

I bet we could replace nearly all the CEOs in the country with chatgpt controlling a [e-mail] email and nobody would notice.

[bikelang]

We’d probably get better outcomes too.

[plagiarist]

For society, yeah, since the AI training corpus is more normal people than sociopaths. Shareholders would be mad, I bet.

[theandrewbailey]

> Shareholders would be mad, I bet.

But think of how much profits will improve by not paying $tens of millions to employ a CEO!

[leftytak]

The assumption that those managers have is that it’s easy to replace tech guys because AI is advancing, and a crap like that nonsense.

Funny enough, I got laid off last month, yes I’m a tech guy, now they apparently regret it because they are now scrambling to find a replacement to do the tech tasks!

TBH, I’m happy I got laid off because I’m finally building something I wanted to use.

[PedroBatista]

They perks and dread of middle management...

[layer8]

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool.

It has often been the case for technologies though, like “now we’re doing everything in $language and $technology”. If you see LLM coding as a technology in that vein, it’s not a completely new phenomenon, although it does affect developers differently.

[augusto-moura]

Language and technology are normal, but we are talking about a metered code editor, nobody have asked me to "use X hours of IntellijIDEA" in the past, or "use git enough or be fired". Tools are never required to be used when they are not needed

[kjkjadksj]

Well the tech or the language had some feature to it that lead you to using it. By definition LLM coding doesn’t. It is like the job requirement turned into “ask jeff to write all your code and if you don’t we won’t hire you.”

[layer8]

Technologies were imposed by management whether it made sense or not. Like, “all data exchange formats now have to use XML”, or “all applications must be J2EE now”, because it was the new hot thing. “You” weren’t making that choice, management imposed it. That’s the parallel I’m drawing.

[sarchertech]

That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work.

One person hand coding and one person having Claude still results in the same output that is compatible with each other.

This is more like mandating that you use vim. I’ve never some something like that before in 20+ years.

[layer8]

> That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work.

Absolutely not, a lot was done just because it was pushed as the current fashion and advertised to be solving problems that either weren’t applicable to the concrete use case or that it didn’t actually solve.

[sarchertech]

You’re not understanding what I’m saying. If you as a company want to do OOP, having one guy writing everything in imperative style hinders everyone else because their code has to interact with his.

AI isn’t like this because the final output is the same as hand coding.

[khriss]

This is largely due to the age old fact that corporations rarely make decisions based on actual data, introspection, and good judgment. Usually the decision is made first and then the justifications are invented afterwards.

In this case, every executive is terrified of being "left out" in the AI race. As we saw with the mass layoffs across companies, most of CEO decision making is just adhering to herd behavior. So it is literally better for execs to have shoveled a shit ton of money into 'strategic' AI initiatives and have them fail than potentially deal with the potentially remote chance of some other exec or company succeeding with 'AI enabled transformation'.

What makes it even more fun is that nobody really has a good understanding of how to measure the ROI of AI. Hence we have people burning a lot of money due to FOMO and no easy way of measuring the outcome, which is usually how the foundations for good Ponzi schemes are laid.

This is unlikely to end well. However, as usual, it's us, the common plebs, who will suffer regardless of outcome.

[genthree]

We're doing that in my office, forced Cursor use. A good chunk of the "edited by AI" lines in my history were just auto-completing about the same as a traditional intellisense-alike would do (and actually Cursor doesn't seem to supply that, which is frequently annoying and wastes my time, in particular when I need to make sure it hasn't hallucinated a method or property on an object it should be able to "see" the definition of, which it does constantly; IDK maybe there's a setting somewhere, but I don't have to fiddle with settings in vanilla VSCode to get that...)

It's actually kinda useful in some cases, but the UI is terrible and it needs to integrate much better with existing tools that are superior to it for specific purposes, before I'll be happy using it. I'd say the productivity gains are a wash, for me, so far. Plus it's entirely too memory-hungry, I'd just come to accept that a text editor takes a couple GB now (SIGH), and here it comes taking way more than that.

[jfreds]

I am seeing this at my work right now. They are about to start using token consumption as _part_ of the performance review process. Obviously this is a coarse and problematic proxy for productivity.

OTOH, it’s an attempt to address a real problem. There are people who are in fact falling behind (I’m talking literally editing code in notepad), and we can either let them get PIPped eventually, or try to bring them along. There is a real “activation energy” required to learning new tools, and some people need an excuse/permission. Not saying that token count is a GOOD signal, but I haven’t heard many better ideas

[MichaelRo]

>> It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.

Exactly this: "Jensen Huang says he would be 'deeply alarmed' if his $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 of tokens" : https://www.businessinsider.com/jensen-huang-500k-engineers-...

[abkolan]

A certain YC company fired a few employees for not using AI, the CEO bragged about it on X and incidentally it was a crypto company.

[diehunde]

As an employee of a big tech company doing this, it's all fear mongering. We are being told that if everyone doesn't use these tools, our competitors will wipe the floor with us because they are using them and will ship features 10x faster. But many engineers are suspicious as well.

[sarchertech]

I’m at a big tech company top and essentially no one is a true believer more than 3 or 4 levels down from the top. We’re all just trying to keep our use metrics high enough to not get noticed.

But for those top layers, I’ve never seen so much FOMO in all my life. We’re a very slow moving company but they act like we’ve got 2 weeks to go “AI first” or we’re dead in the water. I’ve never seen such a successful hype cycle. I’m pretty sure it’s the bots that are accelerating it so far behind a normal hype cycle.

[AnimalMuppet]

Maybe AI is really good for vibe-coding bots that amplify FOMO?

[sarchertech]

It’s really good at spitting out prose that is frequently good enough to pass as human and bypass spam filters.

[zrail]

It's baffling, to be honest. I'm at a fintech that is currently pushing very hard at this, but in the same breath talking about how we're not a pure software play. I just don't understand where they're coming from.

[oro44]

irrational exuberance

[oro44]

Hook line and sinker..

Right so you are going to be left behind whilst the ground keeps shifting under you, given the models are non-deterministic and continuously changing?

There was a big rush of prompt engineers. Where are they now? Nobody even referse to 'prompt engineering' anymore.

The best thing to do is wait for steady-state. Whats going on is insane... a slow implosion of the code base.

[johnnyanmac]

Sadly, the quote on markets and solvency rings true here. Tech (among an increasing number of sector) is being hit hard by layoffs over this. Nothing is steady right now.

[whateveracct]

Yes it's very weird - why is my CEO being so nosy about my text editor all of a sudden? Stay in your lane, buddy.

[zephen]

I don't doubt you, but I'm out of the loop.

Who does this?

[forgetfulness]

My uncle leads IT support teams, the org is measuring AI use in writing reports and tickets. The org has very poorly structured and obsolete processes (he's trying to straighten them up as he goes), AI will probably amplify the lack of structure, by making it easier for the work to _look_ as if someone carefully reviewed the issues and followed procedure.

A friend is a team lead in an org that's mandating vibecoding via "Devin", a lesser known player an "architect" chose after shallow review. The company also has endemic process issues and simply can't do deployments reliably, it's behind the times in methodology in every other respect. Higher ups are placing their trust in a B-list agentic tool instead of fixing the problems.

Anyway, I wouldn't be caught dead working at either of those two shops even before the AI rollout, but this is what's going on in the IT underworld.

[genthree]

I hate the AI assistants for ticket-writing. The beneficial use there would be to prompt for possibly-useful information that's not present, or call out ambiguity and let the writer decide how to resolve any of that. Coaching, basically. Suggesting actual text to include, for people who aren't already excellent at ticket-writing, just leads to noisier tickets that take more work to understand ("did they really mean this, or did the LLM just prompt them to include it and they thought sure, I guess that's good?")

[EDIT] Oh and much of your post rings true for my org. They operate at a fraction the speed they could because of organizational dysfunction and failure to use what's already available to them as far as processes and tech, but are rushing toward LLMs, LOL. Yeah, guys, the slowness has nothing to do with how fast code is written, and I'm suuuuure you'll do a great job of integrating those tools effectively when you're failing at the basics....

[forgetfulness]

Lots of organizations don't want to accept that their velocity issues are quality issues. It's often a view held by an old guard that was there when the business experienced growth by adding features, while not having to bear any maintenance burden. The people who remain are either also oblivious to this, or simply have stopped caring.

LLM-generated code hits all the right notes, it's done fast, in great volumes, and it even features what the naysayers were asking for. Each PR has 20 pages of documentation and adds some bulk to the stuff in the tests folder, that can sit there looking pretty. How wonderful! Hell, you can even do now that "code review" that some nerd was always complaining about, just ask the bot to review it and hit that merge button.

Then you ask the bot to generate the commands again for the deploy (what CI pipeline?) and bam! New features customers will love. And maybe data corruption.

[oro44]

I dont get the craziness at all.

A firm that is led by people who can envision, very clearly, revenue-generating and cost-reduction projects - wins. Writing code by hand is absolutely irrelevant. Who fucking cares. The former is what matters.

Code generation acceleration only matters when those pre-requisites are met. How did Apple go from the verge of bankruptcy to where it is today?

All Im seeing is most people are not smart at all - no wonder they are so impressed by LLMs! They can't think straight. I only see this become even worse over-time. Perhaps this is the stated goal.

[dense_rep]

Ticket writing is one thing. Does anyone see automated IT ticket resolution?

Seems tool vendors are introducing AI for issue resolution. But my sense is that in practice they struggle too with the real-life shitshow. Anyone try any of these systems yet?

[fuzzfactor]

Well before offices were computerized at all some of the manual processes turned out to be more effective than after full computerization was completely accomplished. Which was sometimes decades later so nobody could tell which workflows it actually applied to, or wouldn't believe it anyway by the 21st century.

It was truly quite rare to have such well-honed manual processes though, the "average" place had a lot of elements that were far from perfect but still benefited after the computerization dust had settled. Then at the opposite end of the spectrum were companies where everything was an absolute shitshow, maybe since the beginning.

That's kind of where Conway's Law comes from, if you benchmark against a manual shitshow that has built up over the years, and replace it with a computerized version, you get a shitshow on steroids. The only other choice would have been to spend the appropriate number of years manually undoing the shitshow before making any really bold moves.

Now AI can really take things to a whole 'nother level, not just on steroids but possibly violating Conway's Law . . . squared.

[adelie]

my company (mid-size, publicly traded) is mandating [x] hours spent on AI per week. i have no idea how they're planning on measuring this, and as far as i can tell, neither does management.

suppose it's better than counting lines of code, though.

[mh-]

The only thing I've mandated for engineers is that folks give it a try occasionally, as models, best practices, and tooling improves.

I'm currently tracking exactly two numeric metrics: total MAUs (to track the aforementioned), and total DAUs (to gauge adoption and rightsize seat-licensed contracts.)

[jrjeksjd8d]

Why do you care so much? If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"?

If the benefit is there people will use it or get left behind, there's no sense having a mandate that people resentfully try the new tooling.

Imagine you had a developer who writes Java using vim. It sounds insane but they are just as productive as everyone else. Then you mandate they have to try IntelliJ every quarter, just to see if maybe they like it now. You're just going to piss them off and reduce their productivity by mandating their workflow.

FWIW in the face of these kind of mandates I have been using tokens but ignoring the output. So it's costing my employer money and they have a warped metric of whether the tool is actually useful.

[GetTheFacts]

>If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"?

"If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

[ianm218]

> Why do you care so much? If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"?

If AI makes an employee 10X more productive they get a slight pay raise maybe, but the company makes substantially more money or gets substantially more output. So there is a large difference in incentives.

[mh-]

This is true, though I believe savvy employees have leverage to ensure they participate in a larger share of that upside. As you can see from other comments, lots of people will just drag their heels and not give it a good-faith attempt, so it'll often average out in the way you predict.

[xantronix]

Are you budgeting time to allow people to properly evaluate LLMs and possibly struggle with them? This is not the sort of new tool whose utility is universally immediately obvious to all builders and craftsmen out there. Are you willing to pay down the likely debt of some individual contributors never clicking with this, or being outright resentful to towards the technology or the mandates? There is a LOT of self-selecting bias from LLM proponents assuming everybody else is willing or able to travel the same path as them.

[mh-]

> Are you budgeting time to allow people to properly evaluate LLMs and possibly struggle with them?

Great question. That is absolutely the goal. My take is that building with LLMs - at least with the current popular harnesses like Claude Code - is a skill on its own, and people need time to develop that skill and also to figure out where these tools might fit into their workflows.

> Are you willing to pay down the likely debt of some individual contributors never clicking with this or being outright resentful to towards the technology or the mandates?

I'll be honest as I have been elsewhere in the thread: A few years from now, I don't know what the state of the technology or its adoption will be, or what expectations of software engineers at large will be.

But for the foreseeable future, yes, absolutely, I'm willing to give engineers the time and space to develop familiarity and comfort with the tools, as long as they're engaging in good faith.

edit: oops, didn't mean to dodge the last part of your question (re: resentment): I genuinely don't know the answer to how I'll handle that, but I'm also sure it'll happen. Hopefully I'll still be in a position to speak publicly about how one can deal with those challenges.

edit 2: also, thank you for the thoughtful questions and dialogue.

[mh-]

> FWIW in the face of these kind of mandates I have been using tokens but ignoring the output. So it's costing my employer money and they have a warped metric of whether the tool is actually useful.

What you're actually doing here, from my POV, is incentivizing your employer to use more invasive metrics when they tried to stay hands-off and mandate the absolute bare minimum of "uh, give it a shot and see if you think it's useful right now."

The analytics that Claude Enterprise exposes are far more intrusive than I would want to be subjected to as an engineer, so I rolled out a compromise. I don't even track who the active users are, currently.

But maybe you're right, and there are enough people sabotaging the metrics out of spite, that there's a reason they provide the other data.

I hope that the engineers in my org are more mature than that, and would be willing to just say "I'm not currently using it", but thanks for giving me something to think about.

[ryandrake]

> mandate the absolute bare minimum of "uh, give it a shot and see if you think it's useful right now."

That’s not the bare minimum, though. The bare minimum is: “if you are meeting or exceeding your job expectations, great work, keep using the tools that are working for you.”

To a productive employee, merely saying “just try out AI, it might help” feels like the boss saying “just try out astrology or visit a psychic for a reading. You might find it interesting.”

[jrjeksjd8d]

When the CEO, CTO and Director are all saying "everyone has to use AI" I think it's pretty naive to think people will speak out openly. The bare minimum would be making the tools available and letting people do their jobs.

Go ahead and spend more time collecting more granular metrics spying on your employees. Apparently there aren't more valuable things for you to do than micromanaging individual developers.

[kaffekaka]

I think one side of the issues folks are having is that combined with the mandate to use these tools, there is also an expectation or assumption that the developers will instantly get X% more productive. Like, "you must use this tool and you will be twice as productive".

Where I work there as certainly been that kind of discussions, "we need to use AI for this, because no offense but you are simply not fast enough". And this from people who do not understand software development and has never worked with it. They have only read the online stuff about 20X speeds and FOMO. (And my workplace is generally quite laid back and reasonable. I am sure many other places are much more aggressively steered.)

[sarchertech]

>more invasive metrics

If you have accurate metrics to gauge developer productivity then use them.

But you don’t because if you did you’d be a billionaire.

What you have is metrics that can measure developer busyness. If you use those metrics all you’ll do is run your good devs off and keep the ones who can’t find new jobs.

So you’ll have to do what anyone who manages software teams has always done and trust your line managers to manage your devs.

When it comes to people wasting tokens, most people aren’t gonna to do it with the intent to fuck your metrics. But if you tell people you are measuring something they will find a way in increase that metric whether it results in anything productive or not.

[tjpnz]

Making the tools available is one thing, but saying you're mandating their use at any level sounds like micro management to me. How would you feel if one of your subordinates started telling you how to do your job? I'm sure you would be mightily pissed off about it.

[mh-]

I don't think telling people what their job is counts as micro management. Part of their job right now is staying abreast of technological developments and experimenting with new ways of working.

Re: some of them being upset about it- probably. Some people are also upset about being required to use Jira. I personally dislike using Okta.

[skydhash]

It is micromanagement. If the job are not being done, the best way is to investigate what current practices are blocking people from doing it (the answer is probably meetings and bad communication). The worst way is to present a tool as a silver bullet for tasks you’re not doing and not accountable for.

[mh-]

Where am I presenting the tool as a silver bullet? You seem to be confusing me with someone else in this thread, or making the mistake of turning this into a polarized conversation of "AI is a panacea" vs "AI is worthless".

I engaged in the thread in good faith, and am transparent about what I'm doing and why. I also clarified that part of the job in my org is experimenting with these tools.

[skydhash]

The complaint in the thread is that management is forcing AI tooling usage. If part of your job is to experiment with these tools, then like any experiment, the correct way is to share the findings with a report detailing the methodology and findings. But no one is doing that AFAIK. It’s all superlatives.

[sarchertech]

Have you ever monitored and encouraged the use of a particular text editor or IDE? If you had an employee whose manager thought was a high performer, but you noticed they used notepad would you encourage that they regularly give vim a try?

The reason we force people to use Jira is because it only works if everyone uses it.

AI doesn’t work like that. If it does enhance productivity 50% then use will spread and the expectations of your line managers will naturally go up and the holdouts won’t be able to keep up.

Or only the exceptional ones will. And in that case why do you care how they do it?

[johnnyanmac]

>Part of their job right now is staying abreast of technological developments and experimenting with new ways of working.

Not necessarily. A carpenter has a job to make things. Not to use specific tools and keep up with the latest tools used for repairs. It can be suggested, but telling a caprenter what tool to definitely falls under micromanagement.

>Some people are also upset about being required to use Jira

Jira's job is to report metrics to management. That implicit to the job. Telling people how to perform their tickets is micromanagement. The whole goal of a non-junior employee is to trust they can estimate and accomplish their task.

[Henchman21]

Whats your plan for when someone flatly refuses?

[mh-]

I'll cross that bridge when I get there. No one who works for me has refused to be paid to try out a new technology when I ensure the time is set aside for them to do so.

[1dontnkow_]

I was thinking about this but sometimes its hard to distinguish between what the marketing of OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies say and what actually all the companies are doing throughout the world. Any thoughts on that?

For example even the layoffs, nowadays seem to be because of AI or so they said but just a year or two ago there were quite some layoffs and people said "its because of the high demand in COVID and now its over, or Ukraine or inflation" but then that ignores that exactly during that time earlier were there many layofs but it was super easy "Oh COVID and supply chain!" and earlier maybe something else.

Surely there are also economic booms but when did the whole world jsut suddenly started seriously listening to public statements of companies (and that jsut a few with no real income, just money from VCs) and nobody shows us the real data of whats actually happening? E.g. the companies saying they fired 10K due to AI, how much did they actually now direct their budget to AI? How many products are actually being build? Is the productivity the same? Are the customers thinking that support is suddenly amazing or actually it has seriously dropepd in quality? Or no change at all? Is it a company like KFC, your local hardwore chain store, financial isntitutions, truck manufactures or anothet AI company with funding using another AIs company with other funding using now one more AIs company products up to the power suppliers?

For me it seems that its definitely impacting things and a cool technology to be more productive (for example it helps me a lot daily but its not like my life really changed) but the other things I haven't seen yet.

Another point each actual AI generated app is either something akin to a toilet game or not really working (like the C compiler). So where are the amazing enterprise complicated apps fully built via agents? In banks, in government, in apps that respect GDPR and actually are secure but proudly build only or mostly with agents? The only ones, not even secure, are other AI apps to do AI stuff but its whole value it says is to be more productive in the "real" economy but it still hasn't done it yet anywhere. People still struggle with Word or AWS infra or debugging why some specific user cant log in with their custom auth provider at some esoteric region with their laws and audits and GDPR variant.

So one side says its basically a tool from God and they never have created more stuff but on the other hand the other group analyzing blood work, delivering food, writing reports, etc uses it a bit or not at all but all the 95% of problems they had are there with some new ones. Also I'm afraid most of them just write now their email better or with more volume, but no real work is getting done.

So yeah maybe my confusion simply lies in that fact that I have a real job and nobody can keep up with all the slop and shit generated online anymore. I'm open to feedback or learn.

[jmalicki]

I've also never seen an optional tool become a step change like this

Even moving from assembly language to compiled languages was not as much of a step change.