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by Lerc 12 days ago
If they cannot mention it how do you know that they have not taken up the offer?

I agree that people will rationalise being in a losing situation as a winning situation. That does not change the fact that winning situations can exist.
1 comments
moron4hire 12 days ago
They can't talk about it during the code review. Basically, "no excuses." We talk about what we're doing otherwise.
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Lerc 12 days ago
That's still gambling, you've just made yourself the house.

Developers have to gamble on whether they will be better with AI or without.

The no excuses criteria means if they choose AI and it performs well, you both win, if it performs poorly they lose.

If they don't choose AI but colleagues do and it performs well, they lose relative to their colleagues.

The sensible solution would be solidarity and all reject the offer. Don't play the house.

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moron4hire 12 days ago
I very much doubt they are thinking that deep. I think you're bending over backwards to give the AI an out based off of an incomplete picture. You can't have a complete picture because you haven't been here in this project.

Back two years ago, a lot of them were playing with AI code gen. They also have some explicit tasking for using agentic AI tooling to evaluate for use in an analytics product we're building, so it's not like they don't even have access or permission or time to try. We're just not religious converts who think AI would one day replace humanity and we should be working to help it.

Through the lens of "don't ask don't tell", throughout all of this, I've not seen any significant change in work output. The folks that have used AI for the specific research tasks they had did not produce solutions faster than without it. They spent huge amounts of time on things like getting the AI to produce results that have any meaning beyond what was trivially reportable in the data already, reliably reproduce the same results, even reliably operate over the full dataset. It's not been the go-fast button everyone has said it would be. I think folks are optimizing for reducing their cognitive workload: it's easier to understand, modify, and live with code you wrote yourself.

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Lerc 12 days ago
>I very much doubt they are thinking that deep. I think you're bending over backwards to give the AI an out based off of an incomplete picture. You can't have a complete picture because you haven't been here in this project.

This is a principle that could apply to any property that may be beneficial but also might be detrimental. That is why the gambling analogy applies.

This is about who carrys the risk for choices, regardless of if it is about using AI or something else.

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