[proofofcontempt]

What is described here closely resembles my experience too.

My company is full of managers who haven't written code in years. They hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything. To the senior devs it was obvious - everything was massively over engineered, yet because he used all the proper terminology he sounded more competent to upper management than the other senior managers who didn't. When called out, he would result to personal attacks.

After about 6 months, several people left and the ones who stayed went all in on AI. They've been building agentic workflows for the past 12 months in an effort to plug the gap from the competent members of staff leaving.

The result, nothing of value has been released in the past 18 months. The business is cutting costs after wasting massive amounts on cloud compute on poorly designed solutions, making up for it by freezing hiring.

[switchbak]

I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for.

When you change the economics to such a degree, you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. If the leaders of the org don't see the potential downsides and risks of that, they're in for a world of hurt.

I think we're going to see a real surge of companies just like this - crash and burn even though this tech was sold as being a universal improvement. The ones that survive will spread their knowledge about how to tame this wild horse, and ideally we'll learn a thing or two in the future.

But the wave of naivety has surprised me, and I think there's an endless onrush of people that are overly excited about their new ability to vibe-code things into existence. I think we've got our own endless September event going on for the foreseeable future.

[funimpoded]

I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing work”. Meanwhile, none of this is actually productive. It’s goddamn peacock feathers.

It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.

[LinuxAmbulance]

AI has made my work about 5-8x quicker, just because I'm able to have it cover a lot of the grunt work (update 42 if statements in 32 different files) that took time, but no particular skill.

I think the use cases where AI makes an economic improvement to the status quo for a business are rare, but they do exist, and they can be a significant improvement.

It's like the early days of the dotcom boom and bust - people thought the internet was good for every use case under the sun, including shipping people a single candy bar at a loss. After the dotcom bust, a lot of that went by the wayside, but there was a tremendous economic advantage to the businesses that were more useful when available on the internet.

[zbentley]

Without getting into AI-for-work good or bad,

> update 42 if statements in 32 different files

is a silly behavior for a programmer or an AI to have to do more than twice. We have tools that very effectively remove the need for things like that: programming languages that allow modular and reusable code, good design, etc.

[Pannoniae]

Ideally. But that requires the correct abstraction, requires keeping it up to date.... that's basically an unachievable ideal. You either have overabstraction/overengineering (most codebases) or you have repetition. Repetition is actually more preferable in the LLM-world because you have to keep less stuff in your head. And the LLM's head too.

Even if something does look copypasted, it might actually be semantically distinct enough that if you couple them, you'll create a brittle mess.

Additionally, there's always going to be global changes (update the code style, document things, refactor into a new pattern, add new functionality to callers, etc.). The question isn't whether you use your lanuage's tools or you do it by hand, the question is whether you use an LLM or do it by hand :P

[zbentley]

Totally fair, but 42 if-statements across 32 files isn't something you need to fix with like ... a grand refactor or hexagonal architecture or event sourcing or whatever the overengineering pattern du jour is. You can fix that with a utility function or three, and a file/class/module/whatever that owns the code relating to some of those conditions.

I'm not some DRY zealot, but I've been in the "this system needs really similar changes to a ton of geographically distant code for simple changes" salt mines a lot. The people who say that kind of spaghetti is unavoidable are just as wrong as the ones who say it can only be fixed with a grand rearchitecture by a rockstar.

[Degorath]

I just want to mention that in my personal anecdotal experience, every codebase I have ever worked on, except 1, was underengineered and not overengineered. The last one was just "engineered".

[jimbokun]

LLMs are great at replacing repetition with an abstraction.

[jimbokun]

The AI needs to update the 42 statements to all use the same function so it can be updated in just one place going forward.

[bertylicious]

Could you please show us an example of the change made to one of these if statements? I'm curious, because it seems absolutely wild to me to end up in such a situation (where that many changes are required and the usual refactoring tools of modern IDEs are insufficient) in the first place.

[missingdays]

> the usual refactoring tools of modern IDEs are insufficient

Cursor doesn't have refactorings, so

[tardedmeme]

Does your work primarily consist of updating 42 if statements in 32 different files? We all do that occasionally, but if you're doing it constantly, is it possible that a different system design would make your work much easier?

[LtWorf]

If you are 8x quicker by having the AI do these for you, I think you are a junior intern or something? It must mean most of your time is spent doing these things.

[pmg101]

I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree?

I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out the noise and build things.

[funimpoded]

> I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree?

That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)

[wartywhoa23]

Counter-question: if quite a lot of things have also been like this before to a lesser degree, should we not oppose efforts to make everything like this to a greater degree?

[pmg101]

Yes!

[grvdrm]

I often think that executive level work is about changing the executive team and writing memos about changing the executive team. Then there’s a different team with different members and they begin the cycle again. Repeat over and over again.

The number of times I’ve seen a HTML memo sent from the assistant of the executive that says “from the desk of…” with babble about new leadership.

[jimbokun]

The rest of the work is inventing new ways to increase their compensation.

[eproxus]

Things have probably always been like that, agree. I often try to see AI as a catalyst, that accelerates what already is.

In a good culture, with high competence and trust this can yield increased output (to some degree at least) and in a bad culture it will accelerate and expedite the dominating traits instead.

[jappgar]

Yes but now it gives slackers a way to imitate and inundate the builders.

[jimbokun]

Yes and this is why small startups can often beat them .

[pmg101]

I really used to think this. Those old incumbents, I used to think. Such slow old dinosaurs! A crack team of just me and a few friends could eat their lunch for sure, and soon they'll be gone.

And yet, here we are.

Of course, some things get disrupted, sometimes. But I'd hardly say all the bloat has been competed out, would you?

[jiggawatts]

It does have real benefits, but also, of course, all of the downsides you mentioned.

The best analogy is the outsourcing / offshoring fad of the last decade.

Managers hated that senior developers were getting highly compensated (often higher than the management class!) and pounced on every opportunity to replace expensive people with (much!) cheaper options, quality be damned.

For the few companies that paid attention to the quality, this worked out swimmingly. Apple is probably the best example, they've outsourced almost all of their manufacturing to China and other similar countries.

So yes, my mental picture is that every manager is drooling right now because they think they can replace someone getting paid six figures with an AI that costs six dollars a day, if that. A virtual employee that doesn't talk back, doesn't argue, doesn't question, doesn't go off on "unproductive tangents" like refactoring (whatever that's even supposed to mean), and just pumps out code 24/7 like a good little slav... employee.

The very rare smart managers out there are looking at this more like the transition that happened to architect firms when CAD became available. They used to have a dozen draftsmen for every architect. Now there are virtually none, I haven't even heard that job title being used in decades! We still have architects, and if anything, they're paid even more.

[vannucci]

I'm wondering what this could mean to the future of software work and AI use, care to weight in? I don't have a good mental model for this period of time (I do agree with your sense of things).

[jiggawatts]

A lot of people have already noticed that it's becoming cheaper to create bespoke software, as an alternative to paying a SaaS or purchasing off-the-shelf.

An example is that instead of buying a cookie-cutter "MacMansion" like in the last century even individuals can afford a unique house designed by a professional architect. It may not be an award winning artistic design, but it won't be the same copy-paste design as every neighbour up and down the street.

I'm seeing more comments online that developers are now expected to do more in the sense that what used to be a CLI script may now be a semi-vibe-coded application with a Web UI, a dashboard, and Open Telemetry integration because... why not?

As an example, I got a bunch of boxes of random Lego for my kid and I wanted to figure out what sets the pieces came from. I got Codex to vibe-code a full SPA web UI and a matching API app that pulls Rebrickable database CSVs, parses them, puts them into SQLite, and then runs a fairly complex integer optimisation solution on top of that collected data to figure out the best match. I did that in an hour while sitting in on an online meeting!

There is no way I'd have the mental energy to do a project like that otherwise. I'm too busy with housework, actual work, etc... Maybe when I was younger I could blow a few weeks of effort on something like this, but now? No way.

That cost-benefit arithmetic has dramatically shifted thanks to AI developer agents. Suddenly, many fiddly tasks are no longer fiddly, or even trivial, so there's no excuse not to do them any more.

Going back to the architect or mechanical engineering example: Significant corrections to designs used to be expensive because all the blueprints (on paper!) had to be redrawn and distributed. Now, a change to CAD design in 3D can be converted to arbitrary 2D views, cross-sections, or whatever in seconds. The software just projects whatever view you want out of the master design file. Creating the paper blueprints similarly takes a minute or two at most on an industrial large-format printer. It just spits it out.

[jimbokun]

> I did that in an hour while sitting in on an online meeting!

And they say meetings aren’t productive!

[tanvach]

This is very apt

[bonesss]

I’m an LLM enjoyer who also thinks that ‘er ‘jerbs are safe and, taken to their logical conclusion, most LLM-stroking online around coding reduces to an argument that we should be speaking Haskell to LLMs and also in specs and documentation (just kidding, OCaml is prettier). But also, I do a little business.

You’ve hit the real issue, IT management is D-tier and lacks self awareness. “Agile” is effed up as a rule, while also being the simplest business process ever.

That juniors and fakers are whole hog on LLMs is understandable to me. Hype, fashion, and BS are always potent. The part I still cannot understand, as an Executive in spirit: when there is a production issue, and one of these vibes monkeys you are paying has to fix it, how could you watch them copy and paste logs into a service you’re top dollar paying for, over and over, with no idea of what they’re doing, and also not be on your way to jail for highly defensible manslaughter?

We don’t pay mechanics to Google “how to fix car”.

[smileysteve]

This is definitely ¾ of what you pay a mechanic to do; 1 publisher writes a maintenance manual for a car; mechanics all around the globe can use that to work on that specific car.

It's the mechanics that don't reference Google or the Haynes manual that are more likely to get it incorrect.

As a kicker, mechanics also have a pricing book for the task, they know how many hours a task will take on a certain car (rounded up for the most part).

[voxl]

You are not responding faithfully to the comment. A mechanic looking up the schematics in a manual understands them. Just because they haven't memorized the material does not make it the same. This is more analogous to looking up a function in the documentation that you forgot about.

This is clearly not what the post was referring to, which is instead like googling how to fix a pipe in your home when you've never done any plumbing before in your life. Can it work out? Sure, depends on the issue, can you cause your pipes to freeze, your house to flood, or sediment build up to completely block a pipe? Yes.

[franktankbank]

> mechanics also have a pricing book for the task, they know how many hours a task will take on a certain car

I do want to point out that this is used to suppress mechanic salary. Certain jobs are absolutely fucked how its time calibrated. Doesn't matter to business owner they can charge $$$ how they want.

[jcgrillo]

Speaking not as a professional mechanic, but as someone who maintains a car, two trucks, a tractor, a couple boats, and has googled quite a lot of torque specs in my time... If you're googling torque specs in 2026 you're gonna have a bad time. They're frequently just flat out wrong, especially the AI summaries ;). Use the authoritative source of truth--the shop manual published by the equipment manufacturer. Accept no substitutes.

[mountain_peak]

Absolutely - factory repair guides/apps are the only source of truth for official specs, although 3rd-party manuals are very good as well. That being said, I've often turned 3-hour estimated repairs into 15-minute jobs through clever shortcuts. For example, rotating an alternator to replace the run clutch through the gap in in the intake manifold as opposed to removing the complete intake manifold. I think that's where using experienced (and resourceful) developers pays off.

Also, for sale: BMW E60/61 Bentley 2-volume set. Barely used.

[jcgrillo]

Yeah Bentley (and in some cases Haynes) make good aftermarket manuals too. And you can find good information on some forums. But you can also find a lot of bad information. Reliably sifting the good from bad only comes with experience--much like in software.

[IAmBroom]

With you up until the last sentence.

When I get my car fixed, I could not care less if they googled, used a service manual, or did it by "these old 2023's always had this problem right here...". I care if it is fixed.

And as I'm currently trying to fix something on my own, for financial reasons, I assure you a mechanic with training AND google can do a better job in 1/4th the time. Because I don't have the training.

Nor do the worst people using LLMs.

[switchbak]

But do you expect to pay top dollar to have someone pretend they know how to fix a car? That's the point here.

Granted, the trades is a bad example because it's chock full of fakers too.

[20after4]

> We don’t pay mechanics to Google “how to fix car”.

No, instead of google they just look it up on alldata.

[tyyyy3]

The more difficult it is to trace one’s labour to output.. expect more theatrics ;)

[vkou]

> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for.

Absolutely. Giving a traditional company AI is like giving an unlimited supply of crystal-blue methamphetamine to a deadbeat pill addict.

It enables and supercharges all their worst impulses. Making a broken system more 'productive' doesn't do shit to make the users better off.

The work output everyone produces doubles, but the ratio of productive to net-negative work plummets.

[atomicnumber3]

Honestly, the most impactful thing I've seen AI do for any workplace is serve as the ultimate excuse for whatever pet thing someone's wanted to do, that can't stand on its own merits, and what they really need is a solid excuse.

Rewrite that old crunchy system that has had 0 incidents in the last year and is also largely "done" (not a lot of new requirements coming in, pretty settled code/architecture)? It's actually one of our most stable systems. But someone who doesn't even write code here thinks the code is yucky! But that doesn't convince the engineers who are on-call for it to replace it for almost no reason. Well guess what. We can do it now, _because AI!!!_ (cue exactly what you think happens next happening next)

Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI.

Need to convince your workers to go faster, but EMs tell you you can't just crack the whip? AI mandates / token spend mandates!

Didn't like code reviews and people nitpicking your designs? Sorry, code reviews are canceled, because of AI.

Don't like meetings or working in a team? Well now everyone is a team of 1, because of AI. Better set up some "teams" full of teams of 1, call them "AI-first" teams, and wait what do you mean they're on vacation and the service is down?

Etc. And they don't even care that these things result in the exact negative outcomes that are why you didn't do them before you had the excuse. You're happy that YOUR thing finally got done despite all the whiners and detractors. And of course, it turns out that businesses can withstand an absurd amount of dysfunction without really feeling it. So it just happens. Maybe some people leave. You hire people who just left their last place for doing the thing you just did and now maybe they spend a bit of time here. And the game of musical chairs, petty monarchies, and degenerate capitalism continues a bit longer.

Big props to the people who managed to invent and sell an excuse machine though. Turns out that's what everyone actually wanted.

[LinuxAmbulance]

> Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI.

I think we're seeing a ton of that right now, and it's not slowing down any time soon it seems.

[darth_avocado]

> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for.

From the article:

> because the competence the work reflects is not the novice’s competence at all

The core of the problem is that AI allows engineers who were previously inexperienced or downright mediocre, pretend that they are talented, and a lot of management isn’t equipped to evaluate that. It’s like tourists looking at a grocery store in North Korea from their tour bus. It looks like a fully functioning grocery store from the outside, but it is mostly cutouts and plastic fruit.

[Terr_]

you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system.

Adding to the grab-bag of useful flow-dysfunction concepts and metaphors: Braess's paradox. [0]

Sometimes adding a new route makes congestion strictly worse! Not (just) because of practical issues like intersections, but because it changes the core game-theory between competing drivers choosing routes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

[cmrdporcupine]

100% agree on this. Big log jam coming, with volume of code piling up behind the requirements and planning and "meaning" of the work aspects.

In particular, I think the agentic tools as written today are particularly corrosive on code review culture. We spent years having mainline companies migrating from free for all commit privileges (everywhere I worked was like this prior to about 2010 or so) to variants of code review / "PR" code reviewing culture, only to have it all disintegrate in the last 6 months as "reviews" have ended up consisting of people tossing agentic code over the fence and then people having other agents review it, and then again agents respond to comments, etc. etc.

It's a bit of code review theatre that pretends there's still eyes on things, when there's not.

Similarly the whole edifice of "agile" planning in SCRUM etc form makes no sense when pumping out code isn't the time blocker. All the backlog refinement meetings and burn down charts and points tracking are pointless ceremony when what people really need is intense clarity on what needs to be done and why and intensive review of what's already been built and where the holes are.

All of this is just going to create a giant logjam in the higher level "executive function" aspects of a company. Getting people talking to each other has always been something most management at most companies I've worked at have failed at. Now they're going to really suffer for it.

[2ndorderthought]

I saw something really similar happen at my last few jobs. 2 jobs ago vibe coding wasn't even viable but some of the people went so hard on making everything so much more bloated with LLMs it was so hard to get yes or no answers for anything. 1 line slack, 20second question would get a response that was 2 pages of wishy washy blog posts with no answer. Follow ups generated more hours wasted.

My last job we watched a PM slowly become a vibe manager of vibe coders. He started inserting himself into technical discussions and using ai to dictate our direction at every step. We would reply but it got so laborious fighting against a human translating ai about topics they didn't understand people left. We weren't allowed to push back anymore either or our jobs would get threatened due to AI. Then they started mandating everyone vibe coded and the amount of vibe coding as being monitored. The pm got so disorganized being a pm and an engineer and an architect(their choice no one wanted this)that they would make multiple tickets for the same task with wildly different requirements. One team member would then vibe code it one way and another would another way.

It was so hard to watch a profitable team of 20 people bringing in almost 100million of profit a year go into nonutility and the most pointless work. I then left. I am trying my best to not be jaded by all of these changes to the software industry but it's a real struggle.

[towers]

The forcing of competent engineers to vibe code is something I’ll never understand. Also, I’ve heard rewriting people’s vibe coded efforts being a substantial issue, everything that engineers do nowadays seems to be code review.

[2ndorderthought]

It would be horrible to rewrite. Not the first commit or whatever. But after a few weeks of people not reading the code it looks more like a write only code base. I refused to go full vibe/agentic coding. So I got to see what was happening. This was only over a short period of time mind you.

There was a lot of duplicate and triplicate methods. A lot of the classes were is-a related without inheritance, not the biggest deal but it was becoming a mess.

Code I used to know well was more or less gone. It was rewritten in a way that wasn't the same approach and had lost lessons learned. Some of it had real battle wounds baked into it. Things qa passed the week before were broken in places no one thought they touched. A good deal of tests were useless or didn't mean anything for production.

Code review is more or less impossible for me. I can read maybe a 1k line change. 20-30k changes all the time? You end up saying "sure buddy lgtm". We had someone put a 200kloc change for a new feature using a 3rd party tool no one had used before. No clue, but it was not my business apparently because we needed to be more individuals now that we were using AI

[LPisGood]

How can you read a 1k lone change?

What are you doing where 200kloc is even remotely acceptable? That’s like half a percent of linux.

[2ndorderthought]

How do I do that? It takes a while.

Don't ask me. It wasnt 200k it was like 170 something. I can't say too much but it was some big weird ETL pipeline using some weird database. Tons of weird algorithms for displaying data, by storing it all in memory? I don't know man I wasn't allowed to talk to whoever had swarms of agents create it. From what I understand of it it was a complete hazard

Linux kernel has I think tens of millions of lines of code for reference.

[spaniard89277]

Guys just go and ride it.

It's their money. They decided to do this. They think you guys are stupid.

Suck. Them. Dry.

Or say goodbay, which is what I did on my previous role when the BS started to get obvious.

Now I do LLM-assisted coding on my own terms. I decide what to do, review output and push back agains overengineered BS.

But I'm a lucky one, as far as I can see.

---

NO-ONE is going to be able to understand the the amount of slop created by unchecked LLMs.

The path we're going forward is very clear, given how rapidly top-tier software has been degrading when they decided to pressure devs into this stupidity.

[2ndorderthought]

I couldn't do it. It made me feel crazy. Looking back though, now I don't have a job and that stinks. Oh well at least I don't get nightmares about debugging the next production issue on call.

[tardedmeme]

Can't you just tell Claude to fix it and if Claude can't fix it, it must be impossible to fix so oh well?

[pavel_lishin]

It's a pretty valid option, to be fair - but the downside is stagnating technically, and also emotionally. If you're that checked out at work, it's going to be hard to turn yourself back on again at another job.

[franktankbank]

You will lose every time. The bar is being lowered to the ground so far that any human can do better, guess where thats cheap as fuck?

Tech in America can't implode soon enough.

[Ancalagon]

totally agree. let them eat their own cake.

[wartywhoa23]

>It was so hard to watch a profitable team of 20 people bringing in almost 100million of profit a year go into nonutility and the most pointless work.

Good riddance, the ocean floor will soon be littered with Titanics like this.

[krptos]

I've personally witnessed this:

1. My own manager now gives "expert advice and suggestions" using Claude based on his/her incomplete understanding of the domain.

2. Multiple non-technical people within the company are developing internal software tools to be deployed org wide. Hoping such demos will get them their recognition and incentives that they deserve. Management as expected are impressed and approving such POCs.

3. Hyperactive colleagues showcasing expert looking demos that leadership buys. All the while has zero understanding of what's happening underneath.

I didn't know how to articulate this problem well, but this article does a great job!

[a_victorp]

Same, the other day my manager sent a python script to create a jira ticket from some data to a team slack channel... as if no one else could figure that out or ask some LLM (sorry, I needed to vent)

[LPisGood]

My boss told me enforcing code quality wasn’t important because in 6 months we won’t even read code anymore.

[urbandw311er]

There is perhaps _some_ truth to this, long term. But I think it’s way too early to remove all the QA.

[a34729t]

We don't need AI for not producing anything of value in a large company, though it certainly helps us produce even less!

[Traubenfuchs]

My company hired a lead architect and he stayed with us for less than a year. He introduced some overengineered shit we are still recovering from. How those people get to where they are and get hired for that kind of position is beyond me.

[about3fitty]

I think this may be a consequence of hiring for a position with the word “architect” in it. It implies the need for complexity vs. Getting a gaggle of senior devs together and letting them sort out CI/CD and patterns as they are needed. In a lot of cases, an architect is not needed but must justify themselves.

[e40]

> When called out, he would result to personal attacks.

Oh, that's bad. Sounds like a terribly toxic environment.

[AIorNot]

Yes I get your frustration, the same thing is happening across orgs these days as claude and co-work has become widespread.

Wisdom is a thing, so is competence. Humans have it or they don't but machines do not (yet), but the massive capabilities of the tools are also something that can't be ignored.

We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's going to take some cycles of learning the ropes with this technology for humans to understand it better.

I would push back -why couldn't the senior devs communicate these issues to senior management? It sounds like a broken human system not a broken tool or technology. All AI did was shine a light on the human issues on that org.

[saganus]

From past experiences (and I'm sure I'm not alone here), I can almost guarantee that the senior devs did communicate the problems, but they were ignored or brushed aside.

Very seldomly does middle/upper management truly listens to engineers, unless there's buy-in from the CTO/VP to champion the ideas and complaints.

[hn_acc1]

Over time, as devs get more experience, they have seen countless fads come and go. Some worked, some screwed things up, etc. - NONE were the silver bullet / savior that they were touted to be by adherents. So they learn a default "no" or "slowly" response to "we need to do this <buzzword> ASAP" from management who only see $$$. I mean AI companies are telling management that devs will resist AI because "it's so good it will let you replace them", so management is getting their views reinforced by devs saying it's a bad idea.

[bonesss]

Yeah, the developers who will argue and teeth-gnash about using an ORM for weeks on the hope it will save a few hours perceived as boring or obvious are, simultaneously, annoyed and upset at being told to save time with super tools that save time and effort…

Pay no attention to the software output or quality or competitive displacement of the people selling you tools. LLMs, like cheesy sales strategies, are something so lucrative the only thing you can really do is sell them first come first serve to other people. Makes so much sense. Why make infinite money when you can sell a course/tool to naive and less fortunate companies? So logical.

[proofofcontempt]

The CTO got fired last month, presumably for poor performance. And the director that has taken is place is now all in on AI because he's desperate to turn things around but has no idea how.

[2ndorderthought]

He doesn't care. When c suite gets fired they get like half a million in severance and go rinse and repeat somewhere else

[dormento]

And it was the AI's fault. So convenient.

[htrp]

Was the CTO advocating a more measured approached to ai adoption?

[LtWorf]

I have a feeling that I have witnessed it, although I was told the CTO decided to move on to other challenges.

[yfw]

Have you not seen the principals and seniors being offered the door or buyouts?

[tyyyy3]

Exactly what I expected to read after reading the first part of your post lol.

I’m starting to realise, many people and the management themselves don’t really understand why the firm exists, and what they do. Funny to watch tbh

[ryandrake]

I'm sure they're even more all-in on AI every month. "We will surely succeed if only we AI even harder!" This is how self-reinforcing delusions work. "AI will close the gap" is the fixed belief, and any evidence that comes in is interpreted such that it strengthens that belief.

[proofofcontempt]

Pretty much this. It's like a cult mentality. Those who critique the approach or push back get sidelined. There are demos every week of essentially Claude loops and MCP integrations and those of us not reaffirming the ideas stopped getting invited.

Heard some wild statements in the past few months. A couple that come to mind:

- "we don't need to review the output closely, it's designed to correct itself" - "it comes up with the requirements, writes the tickets, and prioritises what to work on. We only need to give it a two or three line prompt"

The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet.

[ryandrake]

> The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet.

"We just need a swarm of many agents, all independently operating open-loop, creating and resolving tickets continuously. We will surely ship to production soon after implementing that!"

[boron1006]

I can’t tell if we’re in identical situations or we work in the same place…

[gregrata]

"hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything"

Huh? 18 months ago? I've been using it that long - it wasn't able to do that back then....

[2ndorderthought]

I had a similar situation 2 years ago. Correct these tools could not do those things, but people still used them for it. As well as diagnosing their dogs with cancer and whatever else.

[dolebirchwood]

> it wasn't able to do that back then

It was, if you accept that it did so poorly.

[tomwojcik]

Agreed. Cursor has been released in 2023, but Claude Code and Sonnet in Feb 2025, right?