[elktown]

I thinking that it’s quite a different experience going all Jackson Pollock with AI in your own studio on your own terms, compared to the sorry state of affairs of having 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota.

[ycombiredd]

> 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota

I wish I had written that.

[leptons]

I can't think of a single case of any AI content, be it prose or code, where I thought "I wish I had written that". With AI code, it's more like I wish I hadn't let the AI write that.

[simonh]

We’re using Copilot at work to build reporting and automation tools. Nothing ground breaking, but very useful and tailored to our needs.

Frankly without AI assistance many of these tools just wouldn’t exist at all. We can build stuff in 6 weeks part time as a side project that would have taken at least 3 months full time, and therefore would not have been feasible. Then we can iterate on it at least 2-4 times faster than with hand coding.

So I’d love to have an extra few developers to just work on that stuff full time, but I don’t.

Whether that means our organisation spend on AI overall is a positive, I really can’t say. Quite possibly not, but my team are getting real benefits.

[vishnugupta]

I’m building reporting for my company and what you said mirrors my experience nearly 100%.

I’m a backend developer so I know what it takes to build a half decent reporting system. Writing all those queries, slice and dice charts and what not takes real time and effort. All that has been outsourced to Claude Code. I now focus on ensuring that the system is sound architecturally and that useful reports are being surfaced.

[NateEag]

How are you dealing with the problem of making sure the reporting queries are correct?

My experience so far is that it's harder and slower for me to understand the genAI code than to write it myself.

Skipping thorough comprehension seems to be the popular choice in my workplace, but it's not one I can justify.

[vishnugupta]

I make sure to understand the query to the fullest extent. I run explain plan to make sure no nasty things like full table scans are happening.

I guess just like any algorithm it’s easier to verify a solution than come up with one.

[leptons]

Nothing you wrote is connected in any way to the comment I wrote.

Have you read the code the AI produced? Do you understand all of it? Is it bloated? Would you be proud to say you wrote it?

I don't care how fast you created something. You didn't create it, the AI did, and you have no control over it, the AI does.

[johnnyanmac]

An engineer doesn't care about how fast something is made (at least, not as a primary metric engineering). A salesman cares about how fast they can push to market.

It's clear HN is a bastion of salesmen who happen to have "engineer" in their work title. But the mentality towards actual engineering makes it clear they are primarily salesmen.

[simonh]

> An engineer doesn't care about how fast something is made

That is absurd, these are tools only my own team use. Why would I not care whether I had them in a month or two, or fur many of these tools quite possibly never because we don’t have the spare capacity for how long it would take without AI?

[lossyalgo]

Just wait until AI companies stop subsidizing everything and you get the ac

[bahmboo]

I run local models. They are very good now (roughly 30 billion parameters).

[icepush]

Here's a quote from a recent chat with gpt-5.2 that I wish I had come up with: "Anyone can chase a chicken. Leaders create systems."

[outside1234]

What AI gives us is the ability to write code that we wish we didn't have to write. It is the killer one-off tool builder, prototyper, dep upgrader

[Daishiman]

How many ways are there of sending a context dictionary to a template where you can say that there are radically superior ways?

[zipy124]

Quite the visualisation

[Sharlin]

Replace "paint" with "shit" and the visual image becomes even more fitting.

[rjknight]

But then you lose the Jackson Pollock joke, which is what makes it compelling and memorable!

[mathfailure]

...or is it?

[andai]

Earlier today:

>Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148337

[CoderKatrina]

It's the new "counting lines of code". I think many companies are so terrified of falling behind that they're irrationally floundering, trying to appear like they're "with it".

[xp84]

Yup. My friend said his boss has told them basically that they HAVE TO (do all the AI things) because now ‘our competitors will use AI’ and surpass their product.

In my humble opinion good ideas (what to build) are a big part of the bottleneck and those aren’t substantially in greater supply with AI.

[sgc]

> good ideas ... aren’t substantially in greater supply

Which is sad because they should be. People should be freed up to think and create better things, instead these companies seem to be doing the equivalent of locking their employees in stalls like they do on some animal farms, so they can churn out 'results' ever faster.

[Sharlin]

> People should be freed up to think and create better things,

Good ideas will never ever be prioritized in the vast majority of companies because good ideas cannot be quantified and turned into performance metrics. At least not without invoking Goodhart's law (see: the academia).

[34df]

Good ideas also take resources like time, free-space to think etc... many firms dont understand this. Moreover many firms believe the C-Suite are the almighty with the gods gift of great ideas.

[jmalicki]

There is a degree to which quick experimentation helps you find the good ideas, at least for the incremental ones.

[Sharlin]

Counting lines of code starts to look incredibly sane compared to this, where you’re not just counting lines of code, you’re paying for another company for every line produced. There’s exactly one winner here and it’s not any of the companies using AI.

[zelphirkalt]

Actually, it's even more than that, right? Economically, it is pumping up/inflating the bubble some more in a perverted way, where it is not the people themselves believing some horseradish, but their employer forcing them to pump it up more. Quite insane.

[efitz]

Claude, please crease a routine and run it in a loop continuously. The task in the routine is “create the most complex code possible, in a random programming language, that produces the exact output “My senior leaders are pinheads,”

[warumdarum]

Feels like a worldwide goldrush, but not everyone has gold in those hills.

[hunterpayne]

I find that odd given that another division in Amazon is no longer using AI coding tools at all. Its a big company so who knows if this is company wide or just in this one division. I expect its just in one division though.

[drzaiusx11]

Those who burn the most money "win", I guess?

[drzaiusx11]

This is the best characterization of the collective corporate madness I've seen yet. Bravo

[chr15m]

Never mind the Pollocks.

[zelphirkalt]

Can we combine this with the infinite monkey theorem? If we have an infinite number of Pollocks throwing paint at an infinitely large canvas surely they are going to create any piece of art we can imagine...

[sebastiennight]

This does exist, it's the Library of Babel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel#Philosoph...

There's also an online version of the Library of Babel, I just found out that full pages of my own books are in it[0], https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?379:17

[andybak]

I very much like this metaphor.

[3dsnano]

size of org has a lot to do with the entropy

compare 100 pollocks vs 2-3

[selectedambient]

lmao this analogy

[kc-chris]

Oh bollocks.