[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.

[Pannoniae]

Sure but even wiring that utility function in is work :D If you have even just a 2-3-million LoC codebase, not even something truly enormous - making global changes does require typing, and a whole lot of it...

[cess11]

Such repetitions can regularly be deterministically automated, like find -exec sed and similar medium level tools.

If you spend a lot of time performing monotonic tasks, then your organisation needs to delete and refactor for a while until change in 'hot' areas of the code base are easy to make. Reaching for some code synthesis SaaS to paper it over will worsen the problem and should result in excommunication from the guild.

[reverius42]

If you have a codebase that big, can you even fit enough of it into a context window for the LLM to make correct and meaningful changes across all of it? Admittedly I've only used LLM-based coding for smaller projects.

[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