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Based on what I've been seeing/reading online the past ~6 months or so, I think there's a self-fulfilling prophecy going on here. Developers are concerned about jobs going away, but how often are they pushing back in their orgs about how AI works? In response to "are you using AI to move faster," how many are responding with "yes, but there are some things you should know..."? If there's no pushback and just pure acceptance of stuff like tokenmaxxing, then what does anybody expect when the broader narrative around AI is that it can help a novice to grind out miracles (i.e., "holy crap, if this is what a novice can do, what can an expert do?!")? Of course leadership is confused because (it seems) few are asserting expertise, saying "no," and stating a clear case as to why they're doing that. The default excuse is "I don't want to lose my job" (which is a fair reaction to all of this, especially these days), but it's worth considering when/how that choice is actually just shooting future you in the foot later. It seems there's a broader trend toward compliance more than there is "you hired me to do this job properly, did you not?" |
However with AI, it feels different. I have seen both technical and non-technical managers tell engineers something to the effect of "you aren't prompting correctly" if they aren't able to get the task done within some preferred time frame.
We are seeing the industry revive metrics like lines of code, number of tickets closed, bug's found (looking at you Mythos), and now even "tokenmaxxing". It's exhausting to push back on. These are all things that we know will be gamed. But the individual that brings this up might be viewed as "anti-ai" or something.
If you're an IC, I do think the best thing to do is just go along with it. Sooner or later we will see more shocked-pikachu-faced executives when they realize that engineers are spending tokens just for the sake of it.