[jerf]

If you're in a particularly fiesty mood you can lean into that. "If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?"

While most of us actually commenting are obviously firmly on the "don't do this" side, for any lurkers who may have done this in the recent past or are considering doing it in the future, I would advise you to consider this point for your own actions. If all you are is an AI proxy, you are volunteering to step to the front of the firing line. For all that companies are just starting to recoil from the costs of AI, AI is still much cheaper than you are.

[hectdev]

I'll give the counter example:

I'm currently leading the adoption of AI at my company and given my extensive use of it both at work and in my personal life, my value at the company has risen as someone that knows how to get the most out of the tool. The whispers are towards needing to get more people to move as fast as I can with the subtle implication that not using AI is seen as less productive or at least slower.

Not saying I know for a fact where all this lands in the future but both view points are at play right now but I would push back that people are just being proxy for AI, they are learning how to get the most out of every interaction to get to the next step of decision making which, for now, is still a very human intervention.

[jerf]

If you are taking AI output and interactively working with it to come to some particular solution, that process of working with it is the value you are adding. The "AI proxy" is specifically about the case where you send a question to someone and literally all they do is paste it to the AI, then send back what the AI said without further work. Literally all they did was proxy your question to the AI.

[hectdev]

Yea, but that's just a straw man argument mixed with a little No-True Scotsman. How do you know those people aren't just learning how to use AI and will change over time to be early adopters adapt and using the tool to get work done faster.

[nitwit005]

If you go back to the article being discussed, the core issue is people not even reading the output. You can't learn from blind copy pasting.

[hectdev]

I'm aware of the article. My point is it may be catching a slice of the person's full journey with AI. When I started using it, I blind copied and pasted all the time. Heck, I had a job interview that allowed me to use AI to build an app and I just flat prompted "build out this" and never refined. If you judged me only from that period, you'd miss out that now I am able to iterate, refine, to build a robust program and can spin off tasks with the knowledge that I need to understand what I'm letting it implement before just accepting it.

[engeljohnb]

Do you find talking to an AI with your colleagues as a middleman faster than talking to your colleagues?

[hectdev]

Sometimes, yes. Some coworkers ramble and give too much information, some leave out information. Sometimes there's a bit of a language barrier. If I can get to the nugget of what needs to be communicated and understood, it can be faster. But also, sometimes just having a conversation/meeting and having a transcript to break things down via AI is convenient and fast.

[engeljohnb]

Fair enough, though my experience is that AI is much more prone to rambling than my colleagues are.

[tardedmeme]

Organizations will become even less about adding real value and more about making the boss feel good about you.

[andai]

So the oldest strategy becomes the newest strategy...

[batshit_beaver]

Always has been tbh

[woah]

"If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?"

Prompt Engineering

[dogwalker5000]

Prompt engineering is such a weird thing. Isn’t interacting with AI using natural language one of its main selling point? You don’t have to learn an artificial query / programming language.