[murphomatic]

Get ready for this to become a common theme. Boardrooms are still engaged in the fever-dream promise that AI will solve all their problems, particularly those involving pesky humans. The simple lesson of "AI is another tool" will be a hard-learned one. Some industries, such as software, will take more time to mop themselves into a corner before they discover that velocity should never be a first-class concern. Speed should only come as a side-effect of quality.

[xantronix]

You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again.

[plaguuuuuu]

AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world.

At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.

[tudelo]

It is extremely easy to burn tokens if that is required. Explore this codebase. Team x wants y feature, research and generate a full plan. What does feature x in codebase y actually mean? Analyze code coverage in x. Map out code flow and find concurrency bugs in y and on and on...

Oh and my favorite: Use 5 independent subagents to review code change and summarize the findings, and for any finding determine if they are real concerns

[groundzeros2015]

Why would you assume that?

[xantronix]

The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point.

[Retric]

Companies ultimately don’t have a choice here.

They can do what works, or they can fail. Large enough companies with enough inertia can do really dumb things for a while, but even giants fall.

[wiether]

I'm confused by your answer because I can't tell which way you're going.

Are you saying companies have to mandate AI everywhere?

Or are you saying the exact opposite, as your second sentence suggests?

I haven't heard of AI mandates in small companies, only in big ones.

[tonyhart7]

or they just need really capable AI that are better than 99% human

[lazide]

That just means he’s not a middle manager or exec, not that he isn’t cashing the check from someone who is clearly a short sighted idiot.

[xantronix]

It wasn't meant to be a literal statement, more just a reflection that the situation is so bleak that I cannot imagine a better future; anybody expressing even a little bit of it seems to me like a somebody who has not been crushed into compliance through force.

Quoting the host of the recurring Quiz Broadcast sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look: "Books mention 'hope'. What was 'hope'?"

[pjmlp]

As we have seem with offshoring, any company whose main business isn't producing software, isn't coming back in-house, even if the quality for engineering team themselves sucks.

[rebuilder]

To the boardroom class, employees are tools as well.

[mpyne]

No doubt, but the issue I think they keep running into is they don't understand how useful those "human tools" are, so they keep trying to replace the functions humans provide with AI, without realizing all the other functions that the humans also provided.

[delusional]

Marx had a way to think about that. He would distinguish between labour as in generalized socially necessafy labour, and specific skilled labour.

Value is measure in generalized labour, since that the universal measure of human effort. The genealized amount of time a human being must spend to produce something from its parts. Generalized labour is also what's bought from labourers. You don't pay them to do something specific, you pay them to labour in general.

This contrasts against specific labour, which is whats actually required in the moment. Generalized labour power must be the right kind of specific labour to actually produce anything of value.

The AI leaders have been told that AI is labour. To the extent that it currently is, which I believe is only the case because the market hasn't adjusted, it's not the right specific labour to male anything valuable.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Nah, that’s the future executives problem, the current executive gets to brag about how their AI integrations cut costs while maintaining an acceptable yet enshittified quality