Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by HDThoreaun 1 hour ago
The logic of trusting employees who are worried that power tools will replace them to utilize power tools effectively is completely backwards in any sane world. People don’t like change, sometimes it needs to be forced on them.
2 comments
agentultra 1 hour ago
Doubt. People brought in all kinds of web applications in the early Web 2.0 era because corporate IT was being too stingy (for a lot of reasons). People will find efficiencies on their job on their own. No need to denigrate them.
link
HDThoreaun 1 hour ago
I don’t know, at my company at least tons of devs were holding out on ai usage until the token maxing stuff really started. It was beyond clear by that point that coding agents were a productivity multiplier.
link
agentultra 53 minutes ago
A lot of people believe that. Not a lot of evidence on the table for it (it’s not agent developers’ fault; empirical studies are expensive and rarely live up to scrutiny). Not sure it’s worth forcing people unless you like malicious compliance.
link
HDThoreaun 29 minutes ago
Well here’s where you can level valid complaints against management I think. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t line up super well with “wait for empirical studies to back up your suspicions”
link
agentultra just now
For sure. Just because the studies are incomplete or difficult doesn’t mean they’re useless. We still do unit testing and type systems continue to get more sophisticated and spread further because we believe they have an effect on quality and productivity regardless of the lack of evidence.

However it takes some taste in engineering and perhaps some mathematical sophistication to figure these things out. “Just use AI,” is not a very convincing argument either.

It’ll take time to sort out, I wager.

link
dijksterhuis 1 hour ago
> who are worried that power tools will replace them

maybe, just maybe, it would have been a better idea to engage with employees first rather than posting on linkedin about how everyone is going to lose their jobs.

cos it's the kinds of people trying to force this stuff on employees that are the ones who have been shouting about that from the rooftops.

link