[skepticATX]

Yes, I am exhausted. Most of my company is obsessed with agents, because everyone wants to be seen as AI first. There is little thought going into usage. No care for long term maintainability and quality. Our product is actively worse by many metrics, but no one cares because we marketing can say “agents”.

The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs sure seem to encourage this).

I want to leave the industry as soon as I can.

[piva00]

Same here, I think the tool is fantastic, it has helped me in lots of way professionally and for hobby projects involving skills I'm not experienced with but I'm absolutely exhausted.

The worst part is that I'm not exhausted from my work, I've been through a heavy burnout before and had to adapt my ways of working to not fall into that kind of exhaustion again. This is different, it's not a pressure to deliver anything specifically, no stupid deadlines, it's so much more vague than any other kind of work pressure I've been through in the past 20+ years that it makes it much harder to find ways to keep my head straight.

It's exhausting to be reviewing boatloads of PRs of very varied quality. I have relegated myself to block merges at the first sign of a bad/weird design instead of trying to understand why it might have needed a compromise in the design, many times people couldn't even explain to me why something was written the way it was... After many "it was Claude that decided this way" it became so tiring that I don't even ask anymore, I just leave a comment on the first blocker I find and reject the PR. If people are not putting any effort to review it before throwing it at me I will just return the favour.

[akomtu]

Reviewing AI slop is data labelling and it isn't very different from what people in 3rd world do labeling various images. Constant context switching is what causes the exhaustion. It's the equivalent of the 6pm stop and go traffic. You used to be an F1 driver. Now you're an instructor for bad drivers.

[Imustaskforhelp]

This too shall pass.

The journey was as important as the destination if not more because it gave confidence in oneself, it made us grow. I mean to suggest, coding for the sake of coding

"I wish to code for myself, nothing else": (I had written this somewhere else on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609962

If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it? I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.

It is my opinion that there's more hidden power in engineers that even we fail to realize and instead some of us like you are wanting to leave the industry, what a sad tail of tragic events, when the tech behind AI is good and could be helpful but oh holy, we are butchering it up so badly in some/so many regards perhaps even under the influence of AI companies and their messaging surrounding it.

[piva00]

> If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it?

We've tried it where I work at. People put effort to compile studies, to collect testimonials, catalog and organise the strengths and weaknesses based on engineers' experiences with the tooling.

The result was the person driving this effort getting asked by HR, their manager, and their skip manager to stop with the anti-AI rhetoric, that AI is the future of the industry and if not rolled out in this way we will be left behind.

> I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.

The C-level doesn't seem to care, they believe to be in an existential risk where any price paid to rollout these tools as wide and broadly as possible across the whole org is small compared to being left behind.

It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Was the effort just directed be a single developer though. I have written elsewhere on HN[0] about something I have witnessed but I have seen that if only a single developer is actively against AI, the management actively believes that it is only that single person who is the bottleneck/issue as nobody else is complaining so it must all be right.

Although I get the overall statement more now as well.

> It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.

This perhaps seems to be the greatest reason and I imagine that because all growth within economy is shown to be floating within AI related sector, they want piece of that pie. Do note that most of the issues with it is that the frothy evaluations and how much actual growth is happening downstream rather than just money shaking hands and the bubble nature of things.

but theoretically one can see that there is no winner in all of this no matter how deep one can fall down in layers of. Perhaps something at the layer of DRAM and chip production seem to be the one actually the most profitable at the moment and even they are just witnessing some temporary growth as nobody expects the prices to stay at this ceiling including said companies and yet they have incredibly floaty (but comparatively less so) valuations as compared to other AI things.

On one hand, I expect money to be rational yet on the other hand I am actively witnessing money to be irrational. Yet the whole industry is so muddled up now with so many people wanting the piece of cake of that investor's dollar that I imagine the market somewhat saturated.

Could something rationally not happen because if so, it seems that the thing might be that the burst of the bubble might make the only rational sense of adding realism in the market, but I imagine that it might spook the investors too much too and it might cost too much blood-shed in the markets.

Am I able to explain myself and do any of you believe that there is a rational course of action which can be taken to help stabilize the economy in some aspects?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630281

[foolserrandboy]

Inertia is on our side