[SecretDreams]

I would be looking for another job.

I'm fine with using LLMs as coding tools. But I find it deeply offensive when someone is very explicitly using them to communicate with me.

Communication is such a deeply human experience. It lets people feel each other out, and learn things beyond just the words being said. To have that filtered out by an LLM is just disgraceful.

[ge96]

I was talking to managers and they were talking about how they'd use AI to write reviews about their employees to which I said I would not like a non-genuine review/not personal.

Their rational is coming off more professional

[sumeno]

Good luck finding a company that doesn't have these people if LLMs are used

[misterflibble]

Yes true! It's everywhere now!

[misterflibble]

Yes exactly and I am actively applying for jobs. But I feel like the next job will also have this nonsense behaviour

[lamasery]

I think you're gonna struggle to find companies that aren't infested with this kind of thing.

Observing the effect of LLMs on the "business side" of things, I'm increasingly thinking of these as a kind of infection against which the MBA set and their acolytes have no immune response, and I think it's going to eat a large proportion of the benefit of LLMs to most businesses (possibly overwhelming it and actually harming productivity, will depend on how much better these tools get).

LLMs are awesome at bloating your slide decks while making them really slick and complete-looking. They're great at suggesting an entire set of features on a ticket you've just barely started writing ...but did you actually want all those? You end up with redundant or in-context-gibberish features that leave the person actually doing the work tracking down WTF actually matters. They are adding overhead to communication, so far, not just by puffing up and padding language (which isn't great either) but by adding noise "content" that can't be stripped out without talking to the person who created it and making sure that was actually just AI bullshit and not something they actually needed; that is, you can't just do the "LLM, summarize this" trick, because the author used an LLM to plan it, too, not just to pad-out and gussy-up something they actually thought through and wrote.

LLMs are letting people present very convincingly as having a more-complete understanding of what's going on than they really do in ways that are messing up productive work, I'm not sure business-folks are going to be generally capable of tamping this down because it is so in-line with the way they already operate (but on speed), and helps them so very much to look good to one another while saving tons of time. This isn't just the MBA set I accuse above, either, I'm noticing that this improbably-complete deck communication upward is becoming necessary to look competent (and to ladder-climb) as an IC.

Like, I'm only starting to think this through and really observing what's going on through this lens as I've only noticed it in the last few weeks, but the more I see the more alarming this is. I think this is going to be a little like the largely-wasteful "legibility" obsession of upper management, something enabled by computerization that they find irresistible and are pretty bad at employing judiciously and effectively, but probably a lot worse in terms of harm-to-productivity, and directly affecting and changing the behavior of far more layers of an organization. They never (businesses as a whole, to anthropomorphize a bit) gained wisdom with their new powers to burn resources chasing legibility, and this is starting to look like another thing they just will not be able to use (internally! I don't even mean for actually producing external-facing results!) with restraint and taste.

[misterflibble]

I reckon you've hit the nail on the head and if you haven't done already, you should write your thoughts into a blog post. It is great to read someone's ponderings about the state of the industry and corporate uptake of LLMs